Life & Wisdom Quote by Susie Bright

Bright smuggles a political argument into the calm language of a lab report. “Human beings like variety, and they also like partnership” reads like a shrug at first, but it’s doing two jobs at once: normalizing desire’s messiness while refusing to frame it as chaos. Variety and partnership get paired like complementary nutrients, not opposing moral camps. The line is an answer to a long-running cultural script that treats novelty as suspect and commitment as virtue, as if adults must choose between appetite and attachment.

The phrase “scientific values we can point to” is the real provocation. Bright isn’t claiming science can dictate ethics; she’s deploying science as a shield against shame. In sex writing, especially post-AIDS and through the culture wars over marriage, monogamy, kink, and queer life, “science” becomes a courtroom exhibit: evidence that what people want isn’t a personal failure or a societal threat, just a human pattern. It’s a savvy rhetorical pivot from confession to credibility.

There’s subtext in the word “values,” too. Science doesn’t have values in the same way communities do, but Bright is arguing that observation itself can be emancipatory. If we can point to variety and partnership as recurring facts, we can stop pretending one is “natural” and the other is “temptation.” She’s making room for arrangements that hold both: open relationships, serial monogamy, long-term love with negotiated freedom. Not permission to do anything, but permission to tell the truth about what already is.