As Easy as Stepping on a Rake

I'm a firm believer in the usefulness of debate.  One of its uses is to help figure out what the issues are.  It's easy to become so obsessed with the formulation of a question that you develop tunnel vision and forget that the question can be asked in different ways, and that there are more than two sides in an important disagreement.  This is why the audience of a debate is at least as important as the debaters themselves.  As I've often said, the purpose of a debate is not for one of the debaters to persuade the other that his or her position is wrong, but to inform the spectators, so that they can better evaluate the controversy.

I had it in mind to apply this point to the current controversy over the Confederate battle flag, but then I read a post on same-sex marriage -- or rather, on marriage in general -- by Amanda Marcotte at Rawstory.  Marcotte tries to administer a dope-slap to reactionary opponents of same-sex marriage:

Basically, their real concern is that people are going to stop seeing marriage as a miserable duty to be endured and instead start thinking that love, happiness, and companionship should be what marriage is about. The marriage-for-love mentality is no doubt especially threatening to some of your more sexist men. There’s already a lot of fear that women prefer singleness to being with a man who isn’t loving and supportive. That’s what all that hand-wringing about single motherhood and singleness generally is about—anger that women might actually have standards and not just marry the first guy who will take them.

She then quotes Mike Huckabee speaking on CNN:

“Regardless, heterosexual marriage is largely in trouble today because people see it as a selfish means of pleasing self, rather than a committed relationship in which the focus is on meeting the needs of the partner,” he said. “That sense of selfishness and the redefinition of love as to something that is purely sentimental and emotional, has been destructive.”

Marcotte then denounces

this bleak view where marriage is about cosmic duty, not about being happy. In fact, there’s a suspicion of happiness underlying this, a belief that if you’re enjoying your relationship, you must be doing something wrong.

Jeez, where did Marcotte ever get the idea that marriage is about love and happiness?  She really should check out the century or more of feminist analysis and critique of marriage, and then all the research that found that the only people less unhappy than married women are unmarried men.  This research was cited by mostly male reactionaries to attack feminism (women totally owe it to men to sacrifice their happiness to propping up the male ego!), but that doesn't discredit the evidence.  This article sums up First Wave feminism's take on marriage, though it probably stereotypes Second-Wave feminism unfairly.  The best-known Second Wave critics of marriage are probably Shulamith Firestone and Ellen Willis.  The situation has changed slightly as married women gained more autonomy and have had their own outside-the-home jobs, and could control their own money -- which, perhaps oddly to this mindset, means that having a job makes you happier.

And then there's the "marriage equality" movement itself, which has made a big deal about all the zillions of "rights" that married people get.  Special rights, of course.  Right after the latest Supreme Court ruling I had an educational exchange on Facebook with a marriage-equality devotee who flatly angrily denied that the movement was about anything but Love!  Like, what part of "Love Wins" didn't I understand?

Marriage is not about equality: it's about inequality.  It privileges certain couples -- those who are registered with the State -- over other, unregistered couples, to say nothing of single people.  Marriage is, and always has been, about property, not about love, and certainly not happiness.  From what I see, most of my younger acquaintances, especially the gay ones, are really interested in having a wedding.  Preferably a big expensive spectacle of a wedding, like in the movies.  Preferably in a church, which is going to frustrate them when they learn that they can't force a church to be the soundstage for their spectacle.  How are they supposed to get a viral Youtube video and website out of their wedding if they can't have it in a church?

"We loved the T-Mobile advert spoof of Wills and Kate's wedding," [NIna, 28, the bride] said.

"Ever since I saw that I've always fancied giving it a go."

Back in the Seventies when I first began to realize that I preferred being single, I was bemused when to find that my coupled friends (mostly lesbians at the time) were saying that they needed to find me a nice boyfriend, so I'd be happy like they were.  When I replied that being in a couple hadn't made me happy, they would change their tune: Well, you're not supposed to be happy!  Being in a relationship is hard work!  You'll be miserable, but it's good for you! You're just selfish! ... and so on.  Bear in mind, they weren't talking about legal marriage (not available then to same-sex couples anywhere) or civil union or domestic partnership, but just about having a boyfriend.  Ironically, they succeeded in confirming my sense that being coupled was not for me.  For them, maybe, but not for me.  (A few years later, all those would-be matchmakers had broken up with their partners.  They found new ones, of course.)

Since then I've often observed that people to tend to stay in relationships long after after those relationships are making them miserable -- for fear of being thought a quitter, or immature, or selfish, or a failure -- or for fear of being alone.  Again, the propaganda that pervades the Culture of Therapy encourages those fears.  It isn't only old fundamentalist males who say this stuff.  And civil marriage makes getting out of a bad relationship even harder, as it's meant to.

Not only does marriage not equal love, love doesn't equal marriage.  I love many people; I'm not even theoretically interested in marrying most of them.  (My niece, my friends, my grandnephews, etc. -- but not my sex partners either.)  "Love" is a multivalent and confusing concept in many cultures, not just ours; often it's an outright euphemism for erotic desire or for copulation.  Equating love with marriage is propaganda, as is linking it to happiness.  One reason so many marriages fail is that people have unrealistic expectations about the institution -- again, it's not just old religious people who say this, it's a staple of the Culture of Therapy.   But what are realistic expectations?  Inflating the importance of marriage or even just of couplehood, making romantic love a prerequisite for happiness, is patriarchal propaganda.

But all this is the easy part, I think.  It's easy to mistake Amanda Marcotte for a radical: she's brassy, confrontational, and she talks dirty.  But confusing tone with content is usually a mistake. Her stated position here makes it explicit that she stands in the liberal tradition of the atomized individual.  "There is no such thing as society," Margaret Thatcher infamously said, "there are individual men and women and there are families."  Obviously Thatcher drew different conclusions from that premise than Marcotte and many other liberals do: that doctrine can be used to rationalize a wide variety of positions.  Mike Huckabee would probably be shocked to learn that Christianity as represented in the New Testament is an individualistic (though not liberal) cult, as religions of salvation usually are.  Jesus' teaching focused on the safety of the individual, who must be prepared to break with and defy all the institutions of his society -- family, marriage, religion, state -- in order to get into the Kingdom of Heaven.  As the Confederates found with their doctrine of states' rights, the early Christians had to contain this doctrine immediately if they were to survive as an institution themselves: the apostle Paul's letters show him balancing the freedom of the individual against the rest of the community (conceptualized as the Body of Christ), under his authority as Christ's deputy.  But the early Christian communities could only be built by taking individuals away from already-existing communities.  It's worth remembering that although most early Christians probably married, Jesus' and Paul's exaltation of sexual abstinence encouraged and empowered many people to reject marriage -- especially women.

You can't have individuals without community, or a community without individuals, and social history can usefully be read as an account of the tension between those poles.  Propaganda for same-sex marriage has cited the importance of social recognition and acceptance of Our Relationships.  Which, ironically, confirms the complaint of many opponents of SSM that ratifying same-sex civil marriage forces not just them but everyone to endorse those relationships against their religious principles.  You can make an argument that this isn't so, but the proponents of SSM tend to flipflop after having done so, and demand social acceptance and support from everybody for their marriages.  Civil marriage isn't about individual happiness, it's a social and political construct, and it can enable or obstruct individual happiness.

Individual choices are not (necessarily) determined by social or cultural forces, but they are pressured and limited by them.  The choices we make are limited by the options available, the rewards for compliance and the penalties for noncompliance.  So the question still has be asked, quoting Ellen Willis quoting Rosalind Petchesky: Why do we choose what we choose? What would we choose if we had a real choice?  I agree with Marcotte's insistence that women have a right to choose their partners and relationships, to draw lines within their relationships to preserve their autonomy, and that men have no right to demand that women make all the concessions and provide all the service.  But she should consider the question whether (especially civil) marriage civil marriage, despite the reforms that have been enacted in parts of the West, is a gateway or an obstacle to personal happiness.

But, you know, if Firestone and Willis are too radical for you, there's always Nancy Polikoff's excellent and moderate Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage.  Simply negating the demands of the religious patriarchs isn't the only way to refute them, and such negation has a tendency to snap back and hit you in the face.

Some of My Best Friends Are Putzes

Dr. Ruth Westheimer got some attention a few days ago by saying some stupid things about rape and consent in a TV interview.  Amanda Marcotte was one of many online pundits who gave her a good dressing-down.

Here's a partial transcription of Westheimer's remarks:

I am very worried about college campuses saying that a woman and a man—or two men or two women, but I talk right now about women and men—can be in bed together, Diane, and at one time, naked, and at one time he or she, most of the time they think she, can say “I changed my mind.”

No such thing is possible. In the Talmud, in the Jewish tradition, it says when that part of the male anatomy is aroused and there’s an erection, the brain flies out of that and we have to take that very seriously, so I don’t agree with that.

It sounds like Westheimer's trying to be a kosher Camille Paglia.  I'm not going to address her remarks about consent, because Marcotte and others have done that more or less ably, including some of Marcotte's commenters, who referred to their own experience for counterexamples.  But I noticed an annoying tendency among the commenters to dismiss the Talmud, though they clearly had no idea what it is.  Well, I mean, like, who cares what a bunch of dead white men said like millions of years ago?  We're modern enlightened people and we have science, which totally proves that you can get naked with someone and they can't rape you, so there!  We don't need your Stone Age Talmud!

I'm not a Talmudist, not even Jewish.  I'm a goyisher atheist, but I have picked up some shiny bits of information in my reading about the human heritage.  The Talmud is not the Jewish Bible -- that would be what Christians call the Old Testament.  The Talmud is a huge, complex text made up of Mishnah and Gemara.  The Mishnah was compiled around 200 CE; according to tradition it preserves in writing the Oral Torah, the discussions of Jewish scholars and authorities from the time of Moses down to, roughly, the destruction of the Second Temple around 70 CE.  This is probably not true, any more than the written Torah was written by Moses, or the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek by seventy scholars in seventy days, or the New Testament gospels were written by some of Jesus' original followers.  The Gemara is commentary on the Mishnah, which accumulated over three or four centuries.  To add to the complexity, there are two Talmuds, the Jerusalem and the Babylonian, but the Babylonian one has priority for most use by rabbis and scholars.

Overall, the Talmud is an archive of "legal" debate among scholars.  I put "legal" in quotes because there's a tradition among Christian apologists to see rabbinic Judaism as a system of cold, soulless legalism, abetted by the fact that the Torah (which means "instruction," somewhat euphemistically) is referred to as nomos, or "Law," in the Greek of the New Testament.  To oversimplify so we can move along here, rabbinic Judaism is a system of warm, soulful legalism.  It is, like any legal or religious system, thoroughly human in its origins, implementation, and function.  As you might guess, then, it's usually inaccurate to treat the Talmud as a monolithic authority, as Westheimer did.  There's an old joking proverb: Two Jews, three opinions.  The Talmud is, like law or philosophy or theology or literary criticism, or science for that matter, a record of dissent and debate.  My first suspicion when I read Westheimer's claim was that if I looked at the text in its context, it would be a lot less direct and clear than she wanted people to believe.

One of Marcotte's commenters referred to the Talmud and rabbinic Judaism as "primitive."  No, it's not.  In a previous post I quoted a technical definition of "primitive" from the sociologist and Hindu monk Agehananda Bharati's book, The Light at the Center: Context and Pretext of Modern Mysticism (Ross-Erikson, 1976).

"A primitive society, by anthropological criteria, is a small, band-like society structured entirely on kinship lines, which does not deploy fulltime specialists for anything" (142).  Two things about this: 1) it's not derogatory or racist to use the word "primitive" in this way, just as there is probably a definition of "tribal" that isn't derogatory or racist, but either word can be used to put down what one doesn't like in one's own allegedly "advanced" culture, just as "childish" can be; 2) by Bharati's definition there are still "primitive" aspects of modern Western society, but these are not necessarily bad: friendship, kinship, taking care of others as amateurs rather than as specialists, without expecting cash payment for doing so.

I remarked to the commenter that he might as well have referred to the Talmud as fat or gay as call it "primitive."  He countered that the Talmud isn't fat or gay, but it is primitive, so there.  If you use "primitive" to mean "something I don't like," then yes, the Talmud is primitive.  If you're using the word in anything like the anthropological sense, however, it's not.  (There are other valid uses of "primitive," as in the arts, but he didn't mean those either.)  Ancient Judaism -- the much older Hebrew Bible, I mean, as well as the Talmud -- was the product of a literate society with fulltime specialists such as priests, scribes, and teachers.  You could call it "primitive" to mean that it was a long time ago and didn't have printing or telescopes or cell phones, but then the Greece of Plato and Aristotle, or the Roman Empire, or the sages of Vedic Hinduism, or the Buddha would be primitive too, and I doubt the commenter had them in mind.

On attitudes to women and sex, and rape in particular, the modern, enlightened West would also have to be referred to as "primitive."  Modern Western science has been -- well, I'll be nice and just call it "terrible" on these matters.  Think of the brilliant scientists (both male, of course, but aided and abetted by female colleagues) who, based on their evidence-based research, recommended that young men be required to take rape-prevention classes before they were issued driver's licenses and young women be advised not to wear tight sweaters.  Steven Pinker was embarrassed by the stupidity of the recommendation but still defended Thornhill and Palmer in The Blank Slate (page 371) -- they were so not justifying rape! -- by adducing the authority of Camille Paglia.  Then remember Michael Ruse -- philosopher of science, champion of Darwin against the Bible-thumpers -- showing his complete inability to grasp the difference between rape and consensual sex, or between rape and crapping on your boss's Persian rug.  There must be male scientists who are better than this, but I don't know of any.  Advances in thinking about rape came from man-hating, hairy-legged feminists, not from Science.

Some of the commenters pointed out that women were forbidden to study Talmud until recently.  The determined resistance by male scientists to letting women work in the sciences must not be forgotten either.  (Especially since there is still a drive to erase the achievements of women scientists from the history, sometimes by tokenizing them.)  It's not really that hard to remember, since it is still with us, if slightly less virulent.  Yes, even now in the primitive times of the twenty-first century, male scientists are trying to explain away the lesser numbers of women in the sciences by blaming it on women's supposed innate lack of interest in science, or their supposed lack of compulsive competitiveness, or even because their brains aren't organized to do science like men's are.  You can condemn religious traditions for male chauvinism and misogyny, and you should; but you must also be aware of the same tendencies in Science.

Also relevant here is current scientific thought on homosexuality, which incorporates conceptions of gender and sexuality that could perhaps be called "primitive"; certainly they are descended from concepts that are ancient. As I've said before, where but on sex/gender do the primitive myths and misconceptions of the masses get respect from enlightened scientists, who seem to be under the impression that they invented them themselves?

But I digress.  When I read about Westheimer's statements I began wondering almost immediately: Did the Talmud say what she said it says, that "when that part of the male anatomy is aroused and there’s an erection, the brain flies out of that and we have to take that very seriously"?  I thought I recognized a Yiddish proverb invoked by Philip Roth in Portnoy's Complaint:  Ven der putz shteht, ligt der sechel in drerd -- When the prick stands up, the sense (or judgment) lies down in the ground.  This is of course an alibi made by men themselves, and has no scientific standing.  For one thing, the putz doesn't have a brain, as Westheimer implies: sexual desire is mostly in the brain a couple of feet above the gonads.  For another, sexual desire can impair judgment, but it doesn't destroy it altogether; an aroused person can still hear the words "No" and "Stop."  If a person is taught that he (or she) is not responsible for what he does when aroused, he will not even try to behave responsibly.  As Marcotte pointed out after Westheimer protested that she wasn't defending rape, "no rape apologist in the history of rape apologies has ever admitted to rape apologizing."

But did Ashkenazi folklore take this proverb from the Talmud?  I realized I'd better try to find out, and it turned out to be easier than I expected.  The writer of this helpful article tried to ask Westheimer for a reference for her Talmudic wisdom, but the Doctor was out.  The writer then talked to some rabbis, who recognized the proverb but didn't think it came from the Talmud.  Indeed, they said, that the Talmud is extremely anti-rape and pro-consent.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, whose books about sex and Judaism include “Kosher Sex,” “Kosher Adultery” and “Kosher Lust,” said, “I know Dr. Ruth and very much like her, but anyone in the Jewish community should strongly object to what she said. Consent is offered by a woman, and it can be withdrawn at any moment."

“The idea that men are ravaging beasts who are controlled by their hormones and can’t stop themselves is a Neanderthal view that Judaism would never embrace. It’s a shockingly frightening excuse for rape.”

Rabbi Dov Linzer, head of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a liberal Orthodox rabbinical school, and co-host of “The Joy of Text” monthly podcast on Judaism and sexuality, agreed with Ruttenberg and Boteach. Linzer pointed to the passages they cited and also noted a passage in Berachot 62A saying that even when a man and his wife are naked together in bed, it is incumbent upon him to make sure she desires to have sex before beginning the act.

Although known for its conflicting opinions and arguments, the Talmud is notably consistent about sexual consent, Linzer said, adding that he could not think of any passage that forgives or condones sex without full consent and that “the whole issue of responsibility and culpability is a major theme in the Talmud.

This sounded very impressive. Why, the Talmud is completely in accord with modern feminism!    (Notice, however, Boteach's reference to "Neanderthal" brutishness.  We don't in fact know anything about the sexual behavior or manners of the Neanderthals.  The word has the same function here that "primitive" did for the commenter I mentioned earlier.  If the Neanderthals were contemptuous of consent, though, that would mean they weren't primitive but as modern as Dr. Ruth or Michael Ruse.)  English translations of the Talmud are available online, so I decided to find these passages if I could, and see how the rabbis expressed these modern ideas so many centuries ago.  I began with Berachot 62A online, and I cannot find anything about the necessity of a husband's ascertaining his wife's willingness to copulate there, in or out of bed.  The section is mostly a discussion of outhouse etiquette between men, mainly rabbis.  For example:

Our Rabbis taught: Who is a modest man? One who eases himself by night in the place where he eased himself by day.  Is that so? Has not Rab Judah said in the name of Rab: A man should always accustom himself [to consult nature] in the early morning and in the evening so that he may have no need to go a long distance? And again, in the day-time Raba used to go as far as a mile, but at night he said to his attendant, Clear me a spot in the street of the town, and so too R. Zera said to his attendant, See if there is anyone behind the Seminary as I wish to ease myself? — Do not read 'in the place', but read, 'in the same way as he eases himself by day'  R. Ashi said, You may even retain the reading 'place', the reference being to a private corner.

Kinky, but not relevant to rape or consent in the marital bed.  I checked other passages cited in the article.   Nedarim 20A says nothing I could find about connubial drunkenness ruling out consent, though it does contain some familiar folklore about children being marked by their parents' behavior during and after conception:

R. Johanan b. Dahabai said: The Ministering Angels told me four things: People are born lame because they [sc. their parents] overturned their table [i.e., practised unnatural cohabitation]; dumb, because they kiss 'that place'; deaf, because they converse during cohabitation; blind, because they look at 'that place'. But this contradicts the following: Imma Shalom was asked: Why are thy children so exceedingly beautiful? She replied: [Because] he [my husband] 'converses' with me neither at the beginning nor at the end of the night, but [only] at midnight; and when he 'converses', he uncovers a handbreadth and covers a hand breadth, and is as though he were compelled by a demon. And when I asked him, What is the reason for this [for choosing midnight], he replied, So that I may not think of another woman, lest my children be as bastards. — There is no difficulty: this refers to conjugal matters;  the other refers to other matters. 

There follows some discussion of anal penetration of the wife, which the rabbis generally accept because

R. Johanan said: The above is the view of R. Johanan b. Dahabai; but our Sages said: The halachah is not as R. Johanan b. Dahabai, but a man may do whatever he pleases with his wife [at intercourse]: A parable; Meat which comes from the abattoir, may be eaten salted, roasted, cooked or seethed; so with fish from the fishmonger.

Only 37A came within a country mile of R. Boteach's account: "Ye maintain that a menstruant woman is permitted yihud [privacy] with her husband: can fire be near tow without singeing it?"  This seems to me far from "the man has to prop himself up on his elbows and subside," however, and it seems to imply that the proximity even of a menstruating wife will "singe" her husband with desire.  Or maybe not.  But on the basis of these scholars' references, I can't see that the Talmud is particularly humane or enlightened about women, copulation, consent, or reproduction.  That, however, is more because it's the work of male scholars, than because it's religious or "primitive."

How Do I Make My Voice Do This?

I have my differences with Amanda Marcotte, but in general I like her writing.*  Yesterday she wrote this footnote to a post on why people tell pollsters they bcelieve in gender equality when they really don't.  One reason many (well, most) people deny that they are feminists even when they claim to believe in gender equality, Marcotte speculated, is "the American fetishization of individualism, which leads a lot of people to shun labels in an effort to show what special snowflakes they are."  At the end of the post she added:

This is a major pet peeve of mine. The irony is that there is nothing more basic than snootily declaring that you are above labels. In my long experience with this, I’ve learned that nothing tells you that someone is a boring, unoriginal person quicker than having that person declare that they can’t be fit into boxes. It’s actually hilariously counterproductive to the obvious goal of being perceived as a special snowflake. Genuinely interesting people realize that labels aren’t boxes, they’re descriptors. How can you be an actually interesting person if you shun all descriptors? That’s like calling clear a color.

Ooh, yes.  This is a major pet peeve of mine too, especially since I began to notice that most volunteers on our Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Speakers Bureau had begun introducing themselves by saying they "identify as" gay, lesbian, or bisexual -- or perhaps pansexual, or queer.  Every time I hear them say this, I think of the lines from "Rocky Raccoon":

Her name was Magill
And she called herself Lil
But everyone knew her as Nancy

(Firesign Theater alluded to the song soon afterward in their audio drama "The Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye":

Nick Danger: That cheap, tarnished piece of tin is worthless!
Rocky Rococo: Worthless?  Ha!  Not to Melanie Haber!
ND: Melanie Haber?
RR: You may remember her as Audrey Farber ...
ND: Audrey Farber?
RR: [uneasily] Susan Underhill?
ND: Susan Underhill?
RR: [triumphantly] How about ... Betty Jo Bialosky?
ND: [aside] Betty Jo Bialosky!  I hadn't heard that name since college.  Everyone knew her as Nancy.

But I digress.  Aside from the Constitutionally protected, Bible-based desire to be a Special Snowflake, this resistance to labels seems to be motivated by a wish to evade stigma.  People who reject labels like gay, lesbian, or bisexual often rationalize their choice by pointing to the negative stereotypes supposedly embedded in the words.  These are often fanciful.  Just a couple of weeks ago, for example, one of our volunteers explained to a class that he didn't like "gay" because it usually referred to "two white, cisgendered men together."  He preferred "queer," which has its own baggage, but doesn't mean much of anything.  But then neither does "gay."  Contrary to his claim, "gay" doesn't necessarily say anything about the gender identities or presentation of the people involved.  I believe he also misunderstood "cisgendered" to refer not to congruence between one's subjective sense of gender and the gender assigned to one by society (though he defined it that way when prompted for a definition, since not everyone in the class knew the term), but to one's presentation / expression as masculine or feminine. 

A funny thing about the people who say they reject labels, though: they are quite fond of labels, and use them freely about others and themselves. These Special Snowflakes object only to certain labels, which they carefully redefine so that they don't apply to them.  They often assume a linguistic determinism which holds that the meaning of words is somehow innately and rigidly contained in them.  I've pointed out before that although they complain that certain labels are too "narrow," the opposite is usually the case.  "Gay," for example, includes not only gender-variant sissies and tomboys but gender-compliant people; yet those who want it to refer only to the gender-compliant still find it difficult not only to avoid the gender-variant connotations of the word for others, but for themselves as well.  So, for example, people will refer to a gay man as extremely gay to indicate that he is stereotypically effeminate.  I'm not sure what "extremely gay" could reasonably mean instead -- maybe someone at the 6 end of the Kinsey scale, with no heterosexual experience at all?  I believe most people would see such a person as simply gay, not extremely so.  There's also the ongoing disagreement over whether both persons who engage in same-sex copulation are gay, or homosexual.  It appears to be a straw-man accusation that some other people assume that both partners have the "same sexual orientation."

It's probably impossible to use language without using labels regularly.  (Some people like to dismiss language, but the dismissal doesn't seem to stop them using it, and taking it quite seriously when it suits them to do so.) The other day I was reading Christopher Ives's Imperial-Way Zen (Hawai'i, 2009), which is mainly about the role Buddhism played in the Japanese cult of war and conquest.  But among the issues Ives discusses is Buddhist, and especially Zen Buddhist concepts of reality:

This concept that nothing exists independent of other things or has any essence prior to or separate from its interaction with them has been given a popular expression by Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh: “What we call a self is made only of nonself elements.  When we look at a flower, for example, we may think that it is different from ‘nonflower’ things.  But when we look more deeply, we see that everything in the cosmos is in that flower.  Without all of the nonflower elements – sunshine, clouds, earth, minerals, heat, rivers, and consciousness – a flower cannot be" [p. 75]

I agree that nothing exists independent of other things, and so on, but I don't think I agree that this interdependence means that "a self is made only of nonself elements" -- I think that's the reverse of the error that a self is made only of 'self' elements.  What but nonself elements would a self be made of (assuming that it is a thing in the first place)?  What are the nonself elements composed of?  Thich seems to grant more independent reality to "sunshine, clouds, earth, minerals, etc." than he does to flowers, but from their perspectives, they are selves, composed of nonself elements.  The flower is made up not only of nonflower elements but of flower elements, specifically those which lead us to notice it against the nonflower background.  What makes it "different" is not that it's made from nonflower things, but how those nonflower things are arranged and combined to make what we call a flower.  [P.S. See Bodhipaksa at Fake Buddha Quotes on this concept.]

So too, a lot of social constructionist writing de-essentializes certain concepts, such as "homosexuality," but leaves others essentialized: sex-as-bodily-configuration (male or female), for example, or sex-as-copulation.  And why not?  Without some elements taken as essences, it probably would not be possible to do any analysis at all.
 
Not long ago an undocumented friend told me that a coworker had called him a wetback.  He walked off the job for a day, his boss mediated, and the coworker apologized.  I don't know why the coworker chose to be insulting, and I was glad to hear that things turned out well, but I also wanted to ask him why he objected to the term "wetback," since it refers to undocumented Latin Americans and he is one.  In the same way, I reject attempts to "save" terms like "faggot" by redefining them so they only refer to self-evidently bad people, because I recognize that "faggot" as an insult is based on, indeed requires, the confusion between male sexual receptivity and "one who kneels and accepts the dominance of others."  I've upset some of my Latino friends by labeling myself a maricón -- "No you're not!" they protest, but whether or not I fit every connotation the word has, I am one of those it is meant to stigmatize.

We are the people our parents warned us against, a Gay Liberation slogan of the early Seventies said.  I've said before that one reason why mainstream boy culture reacted with such fury to the emergence of openly gay people in the 60s and 70s was not just that we'd hijacked the innocent word "gay," but that we'd taken ourselves out of their control.  We had, in effect, hijacked not-so-innocent words like "fag," "dyke," and "queer."  As with "looking illegal," I claim these words as a statement of solidarity and a rejection of the cult of individualism Amanda Marcotte mocked. 

But, like the Palestinian queer activist quoted by Sarah Schulman, I'm not wedded to any specific term:

"I find it ['queer'] useful for the time being but I am not attached to it or any other term. I am happy to move along with language. I am not looking for a term to marry. When it comes to language, I believe in short affairs."

Or as Glenn Greenwald said about another kind of label:

I noticed very early on that people wanted to apply a label to you because, once affixed, they don't have to bother with the substance of what you argue any longer. If the label is something they like, they'll agree - if it's something they dislike, they can dismiss it without having to do the work ("oh, he's just an X - who cares what he says"?).

Beyond that, these labels mean so many different things to so many different people that they're now meaningless. If someone insists on applying one to me, I'm not going to fight to reject it, because I really don't care about the label. I'm interested in the arguments and the substance.

This is what I consider a constructive response to the misuse and limitations of labels.  It's not surprising that Greenwald's approach is resisted strongly in mainstream political discourse.  As Marcotte says, labels are descriptors, not boxes.  I think some people want to be put in boxes -- or at least, to put other people in boxes.  They want, in Sartre's words, the durability of stone, they want to exist all at once and right away; so instead of engaging with descriptors, they reject them in an endless quest for the perfect label that will define them perfectly, without ambiguity.

*P.S. February 2017.  This has changed: I still like the material I discussed in this post, but the 2016 presidential election campaign and Trump's victory has driven Marcotte, like many liberal Democrats, mad in several senses of the word.