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EDITORS' NOTE: Marianne Hirsch suggests at the conclusion of her review essay that the phrase "lesbian continuum" may serve to liberate us from masculine theory and language into genuinely feminine speculation on the nature of women's sexuality and women's mothering. As it happens, the question of whether the phrase can in fact do so is at the center of the debate between Ann Ferguson, Jaquelyn N. Zita, and Kathryn Pyne Addelson. Philosophy, linguistics, sociology, and historical theory all become elements in the exchange.Adrienne Rich's paper "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" suggests two important theses for further development by feminist thinkers. First, she maintains that compulsory heterosexuality is the central social structure perpetuating male domination. Second, she suggests a reconstruction of the concept lesbian in terms of a cross-cultural, transhistorical lesbian continuum which can capture women's ongoing resistance to patriarchal domination. Rich's paper is an insightful and significant contribution to the development of a radical feminist approach to patriarchy, human nature, and sexual identity. Her synthetic and creative approach is a necessary first step to further work on the concept of compulsory heterosexuality. Nonetheless, her position contains serious flaws from a socialist-feminist perspective. In this paper I shall argue against her main theses while presenting a different, historically linked concept of lesbian identity.Rich develops her insight on the concept lesbian from de Beauvoir's classic treatment of lesbianism in The Second Sex where lesbianism is seen as a deliberate refusal to submit to the coercive force of heterosexual ideology, a refusal which acts as an underground feminist resistance to patriarchy. From this base Rich constructs a lesbian-feminist approach to lesbian history. As she writes elsewhere: "I feel that the search for lesbian history needs to be understood politically, not simply as the search for exceptional women who were lesbians, but as the search for power, for nascent undefined feminism, for the ways that women-loving women have been nay-sayers to male possession and control of women."To use such an approach as an aid to discover "nascent undefined feminism" in any historical period, the feminist historian has to know what she is looking for. We need, in other words, a clear understanding of what is involved in the concept lesbian so as to be able to identify such women. Rich introduces the concepts lesbian identity and lesbian continuum as substitutes for the limited and clinical sense of "lesbian" commonly used. Her new concepts imply that genital sexual relations or sexual attractions between women are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for someone to be thought a lesbian in the full sense of the term. If we were to present Rich's definition of lesbian identity it would therefore be somewhat as follows:Her concept of lesbian continuum describes a wide range of "woman-identified experience; not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman." Instead we should "expand it to embrace many more forms of primary intensity between and among women, including the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving of practical and political support; if we can also hear in it such associations as marriage resistance we begin to grasp breadths of female history and psychology which have lain out of reach as a consequence of limited, mostly clinical definitions of 'lesbianisim' " (pp. 648-49).Rich, in short, conceives of lesbian identity as a transhistorical phenomenon, while I maintain, to the contrary, that the development of a distinctive homosexual (and specifically lesbian) identity is a historical phenomenon, not applicable to all societies and all periods of history. Her idea that the degree to which a woman is sexually and emotionally independent of men while bonding with women measures resistance to patriarchy oversimplifies and romanticizes the notion of such resistance without really defining the conditions that make for successful resistance rather than mere victimization. Her model does not allow us to understand the collective and social nature of a lesbian identity as opposed to lesbian practices or behaviors. Although I agree with Rich's insight that some of the clinical definitions of lesbian tend to create ways of viewing women's lives in which "female friendships and comradeship have been set apart from the erotic: thus limiting the erotic itself," I think her view undervalues the important historical development of an explicit lesbian identity connected to genital sexuality. My own view is that the development of such an identity, and with it the development of a sexuality valued and accepted in a community of peers, extended women's life options and degree of independence from men. I argue that the concept of lesbian identity as distinct from lesbian practices arose in advanced capitalist countries in Western Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the conjunction of two forces. In part it was an ideological concept created by the sexologists who framed a changing patriarchal ideology of sexuality and the family; in part it was chosen by independent women and feminists who formed their own urban subcultures as an escape from the new, mystified form of patriarchal dominance that developed in the late 192Os: the companionate nuclear family.
Radicalesbians were the first lesbian-feminist theorists to suggest a reconstruction of the concept lesbian. Their goal was not merely to locate some central characteristic of lesbianism but also to find a way to eliminate the standard, pejorative connotations of the term. They wanted, that is, to rid the term of the heterosexist implications that lesbians are deviant, sick, unhealthy beings - a task important not merely as a defense of the lesbian community but of the feminist community and, indeed, of all women. 'I'he problem is that Radicalesbians as well as Rich do not clearly distinguish between three different goals of definitional strategy: first, valorizing the concept lesbian; second, giving a socio-political definition of the contemporary lesbian community; and finally, reconceptualizing history from a lesbian and feminist perspective. These goals are conceptually distinct and may riot be achievable by one concept, namely, the lesbian continuum.In the remainder of this section I will criticize the definitions of lesbian that have been offered in the literature and in common usage; I will argue that none succeeds completely in achieving any one of these tasks. (In fact, the truth may be that the first task cannot be accomplished at all in the opinion of those espousing values of the dominant culture.) In subsequent sections I will give my own suggestion for a socio-political definition of the contemporary lesbian community and some thoughts about transhistorical feminist concepts.What then are some proposed definitions of the concept lesbian? First, let us consider the meaning the concept might have in 1981 for an average lay person not deeply engaged in gay, lesbian, or feminist politics:One problem with the use of definition 2 as the instrument for delineating members of the contemporary lesbian community (the second goal) is that its meaning does not exclude practicing bisexual women. In fact, many commonsense usages of the term lesbian do not make the lesbian/bisexual distinction. Many women who have loved men and had sexual relationships with them come later to have sexual relationships with women and to think of themselves as lesbians without bothering to consider the metaphysical significance of the distinction between being a bisexual who loves a woman and a lesbian who loves a woman. What does this ambiguity in the application of the concept lesbian suggest about the usefulness of definition 2?One thing it suggests is that homosexual practices by themselves are not sufficient or definitive constituents of a homosexual identity. A certain kind of political context is required. Therefore, when considering sexual identity, we should be wary of attempts to make oversimplified cross-cultural parallels. Most known societies have had some form of legitimate, or at least expected, homosexual practices in spite of the widespread persistence of culturally enforced heterosexuality; but from this we cannot conclude that individuals within those societies had homosexual identities in our modern understanding of the concept. Thus, among the Mohave Indians, those of either sex who so wished could choose to become socially a member of the opposite sex. The "woman" male might simulate pregnancy and menstruation, and the "man" female play the father role to her chosen partner's child by a biological male. Nonetheless the society distinguished between the two partners in such a homosexual pair. The social but nonbiological male or female was deviant, while the social and biological males and females were unfortunate but normal members of society. This distinction is not present today in society's concept of homosexual identity that would equally stigmatize as deviant both partners in a sexual relationship between two people of the same sex.We could try to correct definition 2 while still seeking some ahistorical descriptive component of lesbian and say that:This definition certainly captures one important use of the concept lesbian in contemporary lesbian politics, in that it describes identified members of the lesbian subculture in such a way as to exclude women who engage in bisexual practices. But it also cuts from lesbian history many women like Sappho, Vita Sackville-West, and Eleanor Roosevelt, whom most lesbian feminists would like to include. Yet should a woman be accepted as a lesbian if she engaged in bisexual practices only if she is a historical personage and is not presently demanding to be included in the lesbian community? Surely, this is rather ad hoc!The problem is that a strict distinction between lesbian/homosexual and bisexual rules out many commonly accepted historical situations involving homosexual practices, for example, those of Greece and Lesbos, because the aristocratic men and women involved (including Sappho) had same-sex love relations but also formed economic and procreative marriages with the opposite sex.One further definitional strategy would eliminate genital sexual practices as relevant to the concept lesbian, thus at once avoiding the standard, pejorative connotations of the term and extending its meaning to include celibate women who are otherwise excluded by definition 3 from the lesbian sisterhood. It is the trivializing of lesbian relations through emphasis on genital practice, many feel, that continues to stigmatize lesbianism. Instead, we should substitute traits valued highly, at least by the intended audience of feminists, and thus cleanse the concept of its negative implications.This is the definitional strategy suggested by Blaiiche Weisen Cook from which Rich, Nancy Sahli, and other recent writers take their cues. The resulting definition is based on Cook's quoted words but with a clause added ont he possibility of sexual love between women as a challenge to people's negative feelings about such love:My main criticism of definition 4 is a political one. This extension and reconstruction of the term lesbian would seem to eliminate women like Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and so on - in fact, all women who were sexually attracted to women but who worked with men or in a circle of mixed male and female friends such as the Bloomsbury group. When juxtaposed to Rich's idea of a lesbian continuum as an indicator of resistance to patriarchy, this definition suggests that female couples like Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith or women like Lilian Wald whose community of friends were almost entirely feminist are more important role models for lesbian-feminists than women like Gertrude Stein or Bessie Smith.This approach also leaves out the historical context in which women live. At certain historical periods, when there is no large or visible oppositional women's culture, women who show that they can challenge the sexual division of labor - that is, who work with and perform as well as men - are just as important for questioning the patriarchal ideology of inevitable sex roles, including compulsory heterosexuality, as are the woman-identified women described by Cook. At certain periods even women who pass for men - such as those adventurers Dona Catalina De Erauso, Army Bonny, and Mary Read - are just as important as models of resistance to patriarchy as the celibate Emily Dickinson may have been in her time.For these reasons I reject the political implication of radical feminist theory that there is some universal way to understand "true" as opposed to "false" acts of resistance to patriarchy. Consider that implication as expressed in this quote from Rich's interview in Frontiers: "We need also to research and analyze the lives of women who have been lesbians in the most limited sense of genital sexual activity while otherwise bonding with men. Because lesbianism in that limited sense has confused and blocked resistance and survival." I wonder, for instance, whether it is not racist or classist to urge third world women to bond with white women in "Take Back the Night" marches, rather than with third world men in protest against repressive racial violence toward minority men suspected of violence against white women. On the other hand, Emily Dickinson may have bonded with other women, but it is not clear to me that her life is not the sad case of a victim, rather than a successful resister, of patriarchy. Feminists mindful of the different forms of patriarchal hierarchy, including discrimination based on class and race, ought to be very wary of positing universal formulas and strategies for ending it. Hence, I reject the notion of a lesbian continuum because it is too linear and ahistorical.My final objection to the reconstruction of the concept lesbian suggested in definition 4 is that the definition ignores the important sense in which the sexual revolution of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a positive advance for women. The ability to take one's own genital sexual needs seriously is a necessary component of an egalitarian love relation, whether it be with a man or a woman. Furthermore, I would argue that the possibility of a sexual relationship between women is an important challenge to patriarchy because it acts as an alternative to the patriarchal heterosexual couple, thus challenging the heterosexual ideology that women are dependent on men for romantic/sexual love and satisfaction. Therefore, any definitional strategy which seeks to drop the sexual component of "lesbian" in favor of an emotional commitment to, or preference for, women tends to lead feminists to downplay the historical importance of the movement for sexual liberation. The negative results of that movement - by which sexual objectification replaces material objectification, the nineteenth-century concept of woman as a "womb on legs" becoming the twentieth-century one of a "vagina on legs" - do not justify dismissal of the real advances that were made for women, not the least being the possibility of a lesbian identity in the sexual sense of the term.I conclude that none of the definitions given above succeeds in accomplishing the tasks which those interested in lesbian history have put forward: first, freeing the concept lesbian from narrow clinical uses and negative emotive connotations; second, aiding the development of feminist categories fro drawing clear lines among contemporary sexual identities; and finally, illuminating women's history by developing transhistorical categories that give us a better understanding of women's historical resistance to patriarchal domination.
The major problem with definitions 1 through 4 is that they are ahistorical; that is, they all implicitly assume some universal way to define lesbianism across cultures, classes, and races. But this approach, as I hope I have shown, is bankrupt. Nonetheless, I think we can offer a historically specific definition of lesbian for advanced industrial societies that will meet the second goal listed above. But first we need to consider the prior social conditions necessary for one to be conscious of sexual orientation as part of one's personal identity.Our contemporary sexual identities are predicated upon two conditions. First, and tautologically, a person cannot be said to have a sexual identity that is not self-conscious, that is, it is not meaningful to conjecture that someone is a lesbian who refuses to acknowledge herself as such. Taking on a lesbian identity is a self-conscious commitment or decision. Identity concepts are, thus, to be distinguished from social and biological categories which apply to persons simply because of their position in the social structure, for example, their economic class, their sex, or their racial classification. For this reason, labeling theorists make a distinction between primary and secondary deviance: One can engage in deviant acts (primary deviance) without labeling oneself a deviant, but acquiring a personal identity as a deviant (secondary deviance) requires a self-conscious acceptance of the label as applying to oneself.A second condition for a self-conscious lesbian identity is that one live in a culture where the concept has relevance. For example, a person cannot have a black identity unless the concept of blackness exists in the person's cultural environment. (Various shades of brown all get termed "black" in North American culture but not in Caribbean cultures, partly because of the greater racism in our culture.) Connected to this is the idea, borrowed from Sartre, that a person cannot be anything unless others can identify her or him as such. So, just as a person cannot be self-conscious about being black unless there is a potentially self-conscious community of others prepared to accept the label for themselves, so a person cannot be said to have a sexual identity unless there is in his or her historical period and cultural environment a community of others who think of themselves as having the sexual identity in question. Thus, in a period of human history where the distinctions between heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual identity are not present as cultural categories (namely, until the twentieth century), people cannot correctly be said to have been lesbian or bisexual, although they may be described as having been sexually deviant. This point is emphasized by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg in her classic treatment of the particularly passionate and emotionally consuming friendships of nineteenth-century middle-class women for other women.The definition of lesbian that I suggest, one that conforms to the two methodological considerations above, is the following:My definition is a socio-political one; that is, it attempts to include in the term lesbian the contemporary sense of lesbianism as connected with a subcultural community, many members of which are opposed to defining themselves as dependent on or subordinate to men. It defines both bisexual and celibate women as lesbians as long as they identify themselves as such and have their primary emotional identification with a community of self-defined lesbians. Furthermore, for reasons I will outline shortly, there was no lesbian community in which to ground a sense of self before the twentieth century, a fact which distinguishes the male homosexual community from the lesbian community. Finally, it is arguable that not until this particular stage in the second wave of the women's movement and in the lesbian-feminist movement has it been politically feasible to include self-defined lesbian bisexual women into the lesbian community.Many lesbian feminists may not agree with this inclusion. But it may be argued that to exclude lesbian bisexuals from the community on the grounds that "they give energy to men" is overly defensive at this point. After all, a strong women's community does not have to operate on a scarcity theory of nurturant energy! On feminist principles the criterion for membership in the community should be a woman's commitment to giving positive erotic-emotional energy to women. Whether women who give such energy to women can also give energy to individual men (friends, fathers, sons, lovers) is not the community's concern.
In considering some reasons why the cultural concept lesbian came to exist in the United States and Western Europe only in the early twentieth century, we must ask what particular preconditions underlay the development in the later nineteenth century of the concept of a homosexual type or personality. If we take a socialist-feminist perspective on preconditions for radical social change - the general assumption is (to paraphrase Marx) that people can change their personal/social identities but not under conditions of their own choosing - we can focus on three factors: material (economic), ideological, and motivational.In other papers I have developed the argument that the "material base" of patriarchy lies in male dominance in the family and extended kin networks. However brutal its economic exploitation, nineteenth-century industrial capitalism did have one positive aspect for women in that it eventually weakened the patriarchal power of fathers and sons and, thus, the life choices of women increased. This relative gain in freedom was not an instant effect of capitalism, of course; early wage labor for women gave most womnen too little money to survive on their own. Nonetheless, acquisition of an income gave women new options, for example, sharing boarding-house rooms with other women; and eventually some work done by women drew a sufficient wage to allow for economic independence. Then, too, commercial capital's growth spurred the growth of urban areas, which in turn gave feminist and deviant women the possibility of escaping the confines of rigidly traditional, patriarchal farm communities for an independent, if often impoverished, life in the cities.Yet as the patriarchal family's direct, personal control over women weakened, the less personal control of a growing class of male professionals (physicians, therapists, and social workers) over the physical and mental health of women grew in strength. At the same time, a growing percentage of women were being incorporated into sex-segregated wage labor for longer and longer periods. Ehrenreich and English argue that the shift from a patriarchal ideology based in the male-dominated family to a more diffuse masculinist ideology was in no sense a weakening of patriarchy, or male dominance, but simply represented a shift in power from fathers and husbands to male professionals and bosses.It is my view, on the contrary, that the weakening of the patriarchal family during this period created the material conditions needed for the growth of lesbianism as a self-conscious cultural choice for women - a choice that in turn helped to free them from an ideology that stressed their emotional and sexual dependence upon men. Accelerating the process were the studies in human sexuality made around the turn of the century by Freud, Ellis, Krafft-Ebing, and Hirschfield. The ideological shift in the understanding of human nature that their findings involved set the stage for a new permissiveness in sexual mores and the realization that both men and women have sexual drives. This change legitimated the demand of women to be equal sexual partners with men. It also suggested that women could add another dimension of joy to their already emotionally intense friendships with women. As it developed, the concept of a lesbian identity challenged the connection between women's sexuality and motherhood that had kept women's erotic energy either sublimated in love for children or frustrated because heterosexual privilege often kept women from giving priority to their relations with other women.Noting the ideological changes that made possible the development of a lesbian identity leaves the deeper motivational questions unanswered. First, what lies behind the creation of a new dominant ideology, creating, in turn, a new way of viewing legitimate and illegitimate sexual behavior and changing the previous distinction between "natural" and "unnatural" sexuality to that between "normal" as opposed to "deviant" sexuality and sexual identity? Second, what motivation leads women to accept a deviant label and adopt a lesbian identity?The answer to the first question is suggested by Michel Foucault's Introduction to the History of Sexuality. The rising bourgeois class gradually creates a new ideology for itself that shifts the emphasis from control of social process through marriage alliance to the control of sexuality as a way of maintaining class hegemony. Jacques Donzelot documents how the developing category of sexual health and its obverse, sexual sickness (eg., the hysterical woman, the psychotic child, the homosexual invert), allow for growing intervention in the family by therapists, social workers, and male professionals as mediators for the capitalist patriarchal welfare state. By providing a clear-cut, publicized line between permissible and illegitimate behavior, these categories enforce the social segregation of "deviants" from "normals", thus keeping the normals pure (and under control).One thing that Foucault and Donzelot as male leftists fail to emphasize is the way that the ideological reorganization they speak of serves not only the bourgeois class but also men reorganizing patriarchy. Christina Simons's important article documents the fact that self-styled progressive thinkers and humanists of the 1920s and 1930s who developed the ideal of the sexually equal "companionate marriage" did so in order to protect their newly mystified form of the patriarchal family (in which the male is instrumental breadwinner and the female is the expressive, nurturant, but sexy mom-housewife) by protecting young people from the lesbian/homosexual threat.Foucault also fails to emphasize popular resistance to the ideas and forces of social domination. As Rich points out, women have always resisted patriarchy, but why did women choose the particular avenue of lesbianism in the face of intense social stigma attached to it? A general answer is found in the sociology of normal/deviant categories. Once a particular deviation is identified in popular discourse, those dissatisfied with the conventional options have the conscious possibility of pursuing the deviant alternative. We could then expect that among participants in the first-wave women's movements a growing resentment of male domination in the family and the economy may have led some women to turn from sexual relations with men to sexual relations with women.There is some evidence that in both the United States and Western Europe the growth of lesbianism among middle- and upper-class women was as closely connected with the first wave of the women's movement as the growth of lesbian feminism is with the second wave of the movement. Marcus Hirschfield claimed that in Germany 10 percent of feminists were lesbian. In England, Stella Browne, the British pioneer in birth control and abortion rights, defended lesbianism publicly. Upper-class women like Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, and Natalie Barney involved themselves in lesbian relationships. The fact that the lesbian subculture did not develop extensively until the 1930s in most countries, however, indicates how difficult it still was for most single women to be economically independent of men. With the rise of somewhat better wage labor positions for women in the l920s, l930s, and onward, the gradual rise of an independent subculture of self-defined lesbians can be seen as a pocket of resistance to marriage. The second-wave women's movement in the 1960s and 1970s made possible a further extension of that subculture and a clearer definition of its counterpatriarchal, strongly feminist nature.
Rich makes two basic assumptions in her defense of the lesbian continuum as a construct for understanding female resistance to patriarchy. First, she assumes that the institution of compulsory heterosexuality is the key mechanism underlying and perpetuating male dominance. Second, she implies that all heterosexual relations are coercive or compulsory relations. No arguments are given to support these crucial assumptions, an omission which I take as a fundamental flaw. While I agree that lesbian and male-male attractions are indeed suppressed cross-culturally and that the resulting institution of heterosexuality is coercive, I do not think it plausible to assume such suppression is sufficient by itself to perpetuate male dominance. It may be one of the mechanisms, but it surely is not the single or sufficient one. Others, such as the control of female biological reproduction, male control of state and political power, and economic systems involving discrimination based on class and race, seem analytically distinct from coercive heterosexuality, yet are causes which support and perpetuate male dominance.Targeting heterosexuality as the key mechanism of male dominance romanticizes lesbianism and ignores the actual quality of individual lesbian or heterosexual women's lives. Calling women who resist patriarchy the lesbian continuum assumes, not only that all lesbians have resisted patriarchy, but that all true patriarchal resisters are lesbians or approach lesbianism. This ignores, on the one hand, the "old lesbian" subculture that contains many non-political, co-opted, and economically comfortable lesbians. It also ignores the existence of some heterosexual couples in which women who are feminists maintain an equal relationship with men. Such women would deny that their involvements are coercive, or even that they are forced to put second their own needs, their self-respect, or their relationships with women.Part of the problem is the concept of "compulsory heterosexuality." Sometimes Rich seems to imply that women who are essentially or naturally lesbians are coerced by the social mechanisms of the patriarchal family to "turn to the father," hence to men. But if a girl's original love for her mother is itself due to the social fact that women, and not men, mother, then neither lesbianism nor heterosexuality can be said to be women's natural (uncoerced) sexual preference. If humans are basically bisexual or transsexual at birth, it will not do to suggest that lesbianism is the more authentic sexual preference for feminists, and that heterosexual feminists who do not change their sexual preference are simply lying to themselves about their true sexuality.The notion that heterosexuality is central to women's oppression is plausible only if one assumes that it is women's emotional dependence on men as lovers in conjunction with other mechanisms of male dominance (e.g., marriage, motherhood, women's economic dependence on men) which allow men to control women's bodies as instruments for their own purposes. But single mothers, black women, and economically independent women, for example, may in their heterosexual relations with men escape or avoid these other mechanisms.Rich's emphasis on compulsory heterosexuality as the key mechanism of male domination implies that the quality of straight women's resistance must be questioned. But this ignores other equally important practices of resistance to male domination, for example, women's work networks and trade unions, and welfare mothers organizing against social service cutbacks. The (perhaps unintended) lesbian-separatist implications of her analysis are disturbing. If compulsory heterosexuality is the problem, why bother to make alliances with straight women from minority and working-class communities around issues relating to sex and race discrimination at the workplace, cutbacks in Medicaid abortions, the lack of day-care centers, cutbacks in food stamps, and questions about nuclear power and the arms race? Just stop sleeping with men, withdraw from heterosexual practices, and the whole system of male dominance will collapse on its own!A socialist-feminist analysis of male dominance sees the systems that oppress women as more complex and difficult to dislodge than does the utopian and idealist simplicity of lesbian separatism. They are at least dual systems, and more likely multiple systems, of dominance which at times support and at times contradict each other: capitalism, patriarchy, heterosexism, racism, imperialism. We need autonomous groups of resisters opposing each of these forms of dominance; but we also need alliances among ourselves. If feminism as a movement is truly revolutionary, it cannot give priority to one form of male domination (heterosexism) to the exclusion of others. One's sexual preference may indeed be a political act, but it is not necessarily the best, nor the paradigmatic, feminist political act. Naming the continuum of resistance to patriarchy the lesbian continuum has the political implication that it is.
To conclude, let me agree with Rich that some trans-historical concepts may be needed to stress the continuity of women's resistance to patriarchy. Nonetheless, the concepts we pick should not ignore either the political complexity of our present tasks as feminists nor our historically specific political consciousness as lesbians. Rich's argument, on the one hand that compulsory heterosexuality is the key mechanism of patriarchy, and on the other hand that the lesbian continuum is the key resistance to it, has both of these unfortunate consequences.