Saturday, May 14, 2016 11:00 PM UTC

American culture is beginning to experience the ethical turn in how it understands sexuality. It was only four years ago when Variety interview, American culture is beginning to experience the ethical turn in how it understands sexuality. It was only four years ago when Cynthia Nixon was lambasted for claiming her sexuality was a choice . Today, however, more people than ever—including countless young celebrities like Kristen Stewart, Miley Cyrus, St. Vincent , and Amandla Stenberg —are refusing to pick a label when it comes to their sexuality . Refusing a label is a choice. The progressive move away from identity categories negates the need for the normative, “born this way” narrative that has been used to socially validate them. As Stewart said in a recentVarietyinterview,

“You don’t have to immediately know how to define yourself. . . Me not defining it right now is the whole basis of what I’m about,” she added with idiosyncratic unflappability. “If you don’t get it, I don’t have time for you.”

Adults choose who to have sex with, how to have sex, where they have sex, and the frequency with which they have sex. Libidinal desires may exist beyond our control, but we do very much have control how we act upon those desires externally in the world with other people. To put it personally: “I just don’t fall into a vagina and stay there,” is how I jokingly explain my belief that sexuality is a choice. I am drawn to women and will happily talk about scissoring and other exquisite lesbian stereotypes, for sure, but there’s not an inescapable magnetism forcing me to leech onto women.

This position flies in the face of the accepted narrative within gay circles that have adopted the phrase “born this way” for social justice and moral justification, as well as for political expediency. (Although, according to the most recent This position flies in the face of the accepted narrative within gay circles that have adopted the phrase “born this way” for social justice and moral justification, as well as for political expediency. (Although, according to the most recent PEW Research data from 2013, I am one among the 42 percent who believe “being gay or lesbian is ‘just the way some choose to live,’” as opposed to 41 percent of those surveyed who subscribe to the “born this way” argument.) I am an atheist and harbor no religious ascetic values like shame or guilt about who I have sex with or how I have sex. In terms of American politics, because our rights and laws are predicated on socially sanctioned identities, sexuality has been conceived as an ontological trait or biological certainty. Take the relevant example of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). This federal law targeted a specific group of people. Consequently, we have had to work within America’s paradigm of identity politics to prove we are collectively oppressed in order to obtain equal rights.

Despite the necessity of identity politics in procuring equal rights, I understand sexuality to be a choice through feminism. With roots in materialist, ethical and existentialist philosophies, my feminism draws from Nietzsche, Kant, Sartre and Foucault; Beauvoir, Audre Lorde, and Barbara Johnson. For existentialists like Sartre and Beauvoir, humans are free through making choices and, more importantly, through taking responsibility for those choices. “There is no trace-out path to lead man to his salvation; he must constantly invent his own path,” Sartre said in an interview in 1945. “But, to invent it, he is free, responsible, without excuse, and every hope lies within him.”

Life demands making a series of choices—not among an infinite panoply of options, but among those options determined by our socio-economic conditions. Societal constraints on women’s “sexual vocation,” as Beauvoir refers to it in “The Second Sex,” challenge their freedom. Yet, she acknowledges women’s sexual vocation is possible if she “commit[s] herself with the same decisiveness” as men do in their sexual exploits.