The Problem of the Body

The Washington Post published an excellent op-ed the other day, by the gay African-American writer Brian Broome.  Broome objected to the slogan "Love Is Love," which is just one of several vacuous, tautological slogans that have been spreading like a radioactive virus across social media and public demonstrations.  When he first saw it, he says, he thought it was sweet and unanswerable.

But as I’ve gotten older and hopefully wiser, I’ve come to think that this message, in and of itself, occludes the real issue of what people are protesting when they object to the lives and freedoms of gay people. Love isn’t the problem. I don’t believe that homophobes object to whether same-sex couples love each other.

No, it’s not the love. It’s the sex.

I agree, and along with some other gay people I've been saying so for years.  For that matter, antigay bigots know this and have been rebutting the focus on love all along: Love is fine, they say, but why do you have to express it sexually?  One might ask them the same, and one has.  Heterosexual copulation isn't even necessary for reproduction anymore: artificial insemination enables humanity to carry on by bringing sperm and egg together in a scientific, sanitary manner instead of gross animalistic grunting and sweating.  As Yeats wrote, echoing ancient Catholic sages, "Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement."  I am so yuck, y'know?

Many heterosexuals try to forget the old in-out in-out too.  It's not so bad if you refuse to talk, and as much as possible, to think about it.  Because of this I don't feel singled out: heterosexuals would prohibit man-woman coitus too, if they could. As the gay Catholic scholar Mark D. Jordan wrote in The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago, 1997, p. 173):

Most Christian moralists have regarded celibacy as the higher calling, the fullness of Christian response to God. Marriage was permitted, though not recommended, for the continuation of the species and as a concession to human weakness in the present day. But no such concession needed to be made for same-sex love, so the entire force of condemnation – including the surplus of force left over from the concession to marriage – could be brought to bear on it. The irrational force of the Christian condemnation of Sodomy is the remainder of Christian theology’s failure to think through the problem of the erotic.

I want to stress that this squeamishness about the body is not caused by religion: religious teachings are caused by human squeamishness about the body.

It helps that "love" is such an ambiguous word, used for a wide range of relations between people, between people and other animals, and even the inanimate and the nonexistent.  This enables the squeamish to insist that love and sex are totally separate.  But if you look at how the word is actually used, what we now call "sex" was called "love," not only in English but in other languages as well.  I wonder if "love" first and primarily referred to copulation and the desire to do it, and generalized to non-erotic desires.  But the ambiguity is so old that it probably can't be resolved.

I part company with Broome in his conclusion, though.

Because of this, I believe that LGBTQ rights aren’t a matter of love. They’re a matter of bodily autonomy — the right to do what you want with your own body, as long as you’re not causing harm to others. The right to dress it how you want, present it how you want. The right to be sexually intimate with the consenting adult of your choice.

Love is love. Love is beautiful. And heaven knows there isn’t enough love in the world. But when it comes to slogans, “Love is love” is a bit misleading. I like “Your body is yours. Period.”

My conclusion is that we should all be wary of slogans.  Their simplicity is their selling point, but it's also their failing.  "Your body is yours. Period" has already been adopted by the right-wing anti-mask, anti-vaccination Right.  Any simplistic principle is going to run up against complexity.  Slogans are useful for organizing those who agree with you, but useless against your opponents.  Yes, your body is yours - but you live among other people and your sovereignty stops when it comes up against their safety.  Yes, love is love - but the people who love that slogan are quite sure that some loves are not love, and they want to have the power to disqualify loves that offend them.  

When there's a clash between competing autonomies and competing definitions of love, it's necessary to make judgments.  The judges must justify their judgments, which the gatekeepers of love and autonomy refuse to do.  It's all very well to wave around sloganeering placards, but if you can't also discuss and defend your position, you're not very different from the opponents you despise.  Not only will that make it harder to take on the Right, it will lead to confusion and division on your (our) own side.