But I'm a Cheerleader!

Now that we're only a month away from Election Day, the flood of sheer nuttery has burst the levees.  I've been considering blocking the Facebook feeds of several more of my friends there for the duration, especially those who have nothing much of their own to say but will pass along every meme attacking the opposition that comes their way.

Today I began wondering wondering why they do this.  Do they really think believe that these soundbytes are going to change anyone's minds?  It might be -- they're mostly clueless enough -- but a lot of the stuff they're posting, especially the Democrats, has to do with the importance of voting.  (That which isn't about Big Bird, that is; I almost forgot.  Maybe I was trying to repress the memory.)  And here I must confess, I'm generalizing from my own position.  I don't understand why so many people don't vote, though I'm aware of the voter-suppression projects that have always characterized American elections.  After you've been blocked and intimidated enough times, giving up would feel reasonable.  As an educated white male, I've never faced anything like that, and I've always voted.

So I'm not surprised by the people of color I know who are concerned to ensure that would-be voters are registered and will get to the polls and past the obstruction tactics the Republicans are making ready.  The people who baffle me are the ones like me.  They've got their photo IDs, they should have no trouble at the polls.  But they seem anxious, and I have the impression that they're afraid that they won't vote.  Is their Obama-worship secretly wide-stance?  Are they afraid that the Devil will take control in the voting booth and they'll suddenly vote straight Republican?

The reaction among liberals to their President's lackluster performance in debate with Romney last week has something to do with my feeling about this.  I suppose they entertained fantasies that Barack would "clean Romney's clock", blacken his eye and knock out a few of his teeth, or send in some Navy SEALs to gun him down.  Some whimpered that it was like The President didn't even want to win!  His campaign manager "had to pep up a demoralized staff in Chicago."  You'd have thought he lost the election that night, instead of merely putting in an uninspiring performance at a largely meaningless media spectacle.  But will they abandon their President in his hour of need?  Are they going to stay home on November 6 because Obama isn't a great debater?  If so, no wonder they throw vitriol at anyone who criticizes him: they're afraid they'll lose their own will to vote.

Attacking a Straw Kinsey

The book I was reading yesterday continues to frustrate and annoy me.  The author repeats his erroneous characterization of Kinsey's research -- "Kinsey's traditional behavioral scale for measuring sexual orientation" -- though I concede that this time he may be referring to later researchers' tendency to use the Kinsey continuum to measure sexual orientation, a use which Kinsey didn't intend in the first place and for which it doesn't really work.  But I don't think he understands this, because he clearly hasn't read Kinsey recently enough to have any idea what he wrote, or else has thoroughly misunderstood what Kinsey wrote.

The author spends some time explaining the limits of "a strictly behavioral approach to sexual orientation," and he's more or less right about them.  But then, Kinsey didn't purport to be studying "sexual orientation."  I stress that because so many writers on human sexuality falsely claim that he did.  Kinsey was studying sexual behavior, as the titles of his two big books make explicit.  Even that limited task was probably impossible, because most of his data came from interviews which sought to reconstruct people's sexual histories.  People who've had only one or a handful of sexual partners can probably remember all of them, though if they're over the age of about thirty, they probably can't remember accurately everything they ever did.  And that's assuming that the informant hasn't done anything he or she feels shouldn't have been done, and has either managed to forget it or chooses not to remember it for the interviewer.  It was Masters and Johnson who did some in-depth research into human sexual behavior in a laboratory setting, which more or less eliminated memory malfunctions for the behavior they observed, but couldn't reconstruct the subjects' histories.  Richard Lewontin's critique of another large-scale survey of human sexual behavior (only partially available online, alas, but you can see an exchange between Lewontin and the survey's principal author here) showed that people either can't or won't (or both) remember their sexual histories accurately, let alone report them accurately.

There are other factors, of course.  In an essay called "Aversion / Perversion / Diversion" Samuel Delany tells about a young man he met in a New York porn theater where men would go to have sex with other men.

As we began to touch each other, he leaned toward me to whisper, in a light, working-class accent, "You know, I've never done anything like this before.  All the other sex I've ever had has been with women.  But somebody told me about this place, so I thought ..."*

But Delany met the same young man at least twice more in the same theater over the next few months, and even though the youth greeted him with recognition, each time they began to touch each other, he would repeat the same formula.  Delany comments, "What troubles me in the memory of these encounters is, of course, how much of myself I can see in this fellow.  His litany, like some glorious stutter, recalls Freud's dictum: repetition is desire" (121).  What, I wonder, would the young man have told a researcher who was taking his sexual history?

It was a common criticism of Kinsey in his day that he didn't pay attention to the emotional side of sex.  Usually this complaint came either from religious figures, who weren't all that wild about the behavioral side of sex anyhow, or from psychoanalysts and psychiatrists whose claim to a more scientific account of sex was open to serious question.  The psychologist Abraham Maslow published a paper which purported to show that Kinsey's sample was skewed because it was made up of people who were willing to talk about their sex lives, which apparently proved them to be perverts.  I'll have to track down Maslow's paper, because I'd like to know how he or anyone else could claim to know anything about the sexual practices of the people who wouldn't talk about their sex lives.  From what I've seen, people who deploy this argument are usually quite sure they know what people really do, but they can never explain how they know.  The answer I usually get is along the lines of Nice people don't do things like that, because people who do things like that aren't Nice.  I wouldn't take for granted that people who don't want to talk about their sexual histories have necessarily had fewer partners or a narrower range of practices; it could be the opposite, that they have more to hide.  But again, who knows?

Kinsey focused on behavior, not because he was under any illusion that behavior was the whole story, but because it was what could (however inadequately) be measured and counted.  And that was important, because the real fury over his work came from its indication that far greater numbers of people did what they weren't supposed to be doing than the critics wanted to believe.  This was true not only of homosexuality but of premarital and extramarital intercourse, especially among women: Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, published in 1953, was widely seen as an insult to the virtue of the American Woman, and there's general agreement that Kinsey lost the crucial support of the Rockefeller Foundation because of that controversy.

But the author I'm quoting is unaware of all this.  I mentioned in the previous post a remark by Kinsey about younger men whose overt experience is exclusively homosexual (because, for whatever reason, it was more available to them) although they know they are primarily interested in women.  A reading of what Kinsey wrote would have shown him that Kinsey was aware of these problems.  But there's no way short of a direct memory tap (which, luckily, is beyond reach of our technology for the foreseeable future) to know what people have actually done, or what their true "deep-seated" desires really are.  Researchers who've attempted to study what Kinsey didn't have come up against the same barriers: people don't remember accurately, they can't reconstruct their emotional history in any detail, and there's no way for the interviewer to tell whether they're telling the truth.  As Richard Lewontin wrote about this problem,

Even though the world is material and all its phenomena, including human consciousness, are products of material forces, we should not confuse the way the world is with our ability to know about it. Like it or not, there are a lot of questions that cannot be answered, and even more that cannot be answered exactly. There is nothing shameful in that admission.

Unfortunately, too many researchers are unaware of this, or prefer to ignore it because they believe there is something shameful in that admission.  They dismiss Kinsey -- or rather, their fantasy version of Kinsey -- and blunder ahead without learning from his achievements or from his failures.  That's not necessarily a bad thing, considering how much of science is trial and error.  What is bad is when their (willed?) ignorance leads to the publication of misinformation about their work and its predecessors.  For myself, I'm willing to simply throw out Kinsey's research, but only with the understanding that no one after him has produced any more reliable knowledge about human sexual behavior.

*As reprinted in Delany, Longer Views: Extended Essays (Wesleyan University Press, 1996), pp. 120-1.

Un Peuple en Diaspora

I haven't read much by the late Eric Hobsbawm, who died this week at the age of 95, but this excerpt from his autobiography, quoted at Jews sans frontieres, got my attention:

What exactly could 'being Jewish' mean in the 1920's to an intelligent Anglo-Viennese boy who suffered no anti-Semitism and was so remote from the practices and beliefs of traditional Judaism that, until after puberty, he was unaware even of being circumcised? Perhaps only this: that sometime around the age of ten I acquired a simple principle from my mother on a now forgotten occasion when I must have reported, or perhaps even repeated, some negative observations of an uncle's behaviour as 'typically Jewish'. She told me very firmly: 'You must never do anything, or seem to do anything that might suggest that you are ashamed of being a Jew.'

I have tried to observe it ever since, although the strain of doing so is sometimes intolerable, in the light of the behaviour of the government of Israel. My mother's principle was sufficient for me to abstain, with regret, from declaring myself konfessionslos (without religion) as one was entitled to do in Austria at the age of thirteen. It has landed me with the lifetime burden of an unpronounceable surname which seems spontaneously to call for the convenient slide into Hobson or Osborn. It has been enough to define my Judaism ever since, and left me free to live as what my friend Isaac Deutscher called a 'non-Jewish Jew', but not what the miscellaneous regiment of religious or nationalist publicists call a 'self-hating Jew'. I have no emotional obligation to the practices of an ancestral religion and even less to the small, militarist, culturally disappointing and politically  aggressive nation-state which asks for my solidarity on racial grounds. I do not even have to fit in with the most fashionable posture of the turn of the new century, that of 'the victim', the Jew who, on the strength of the Shoah (and in the era of unique and unprecedented Jewish world achievement, success and public acceptance), asserts unique claims on the world's  conscience as a victim of persecution.

Right and wrong, justice and injustice, do not wear ethnic badges or wave national flags. And as a historian I observe that, if there is any justification for the claim that the 0.25 per cent of the global population in the year 2000 which constitute the tribe into which I was born are a 'chosen' or special people, it rests not on what it has done within the ghettos or special territories, self-chosen or imposed by others, past, present or future. It rests on its quite disproportionate and remarkable contribution to humanity in the wider world, mainly in the two centuries or so since the Jews were allowed to leave the ghettos, and chose to do so. We are, to quote the title of the book by my friend Richard Marienstras, Polish Jew, French Resistance fighter, defender of Yiddish culture and his country's chief expert on Shakespeare, 'un peuple en diaspora'. We shall, in all probability, remain so. And if we make the thought experiment of supposing that Herzl's dream came true and all Jews ended up in a small independent territorial state which excluded from full citizenship all who were not the sons of Jewish mothers, it would be a bad day for the rest of humanity - and for the Jews themselves.

-- Eric Hobsbawm: Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life (Pantheon, 2002, p.24).

Just what I need: another oeuvre of a prolific writer to add to my piles of books to be read.  I probably don't have to read all his work, and I've already read The Invention of Tradition.  I'll probably start with Interesting Times.

Orientationalism

The book I'm reading today contains the following sentence:

Kinsey described people’s sexual orientation on a point scale from zero to six, again mostly based on their behavior (what they did and with whom).

It doesn't matter which book it was, because the substance of the sentence turns up in so many others, as well as in daily talk about human sexuality.  What does matter is that it's incorrect. The author is an academic psychologist, so he's passing along this misinformation to his students, as well as to readers of his book.  Reading it today was the straw that broke the camel's back, as it were.  Since I was in the public library at the time, I went to the stacks and found Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy, and Clyde Martin, published in 1948 by W. B. Saunders in Philadelphia, and turned to the chapter on homosexual outlet.

As I've said before, Kinsey did not "describe ... sexual orientation."  The term doesn't appear in the book, in fact, though on page 641 he mentions "younger males" who "may even have all of their overt experience in the homosexual" because they "have not ventured to have actual intercourse with girls, while their orientation is definitely heterosexual."  This is the only time the word "orientation" appears in the entire book, and in context it's clear that he's using it to mean something like "predominant interest," not a fixed biological or psychological mechanism as the term is commonly used nowadays.

In fact, Kinsey repudiated any such notion.  In 1941 he had published a couple of papers demolishing hormonal theories of homosexuality, and he repeated throughout the chapter on homosexual outlet that he rejected the concept of homosexuals (or heterosexuals) as discrete kinds of persons.  The space he devoted to developing and explaining sexual experience as a continuum was one way he tried to undermine that concept.  (Despite this, he referred in the text to homosexual persons, though in context he clearly meant the term as shorthand for "persons with significant amounts of same-sex erotic experience.")

This can also be seen in his discussion of bisexuality.

As previously pointed out, it is rather unfortunate that the word bisexual should have been chosen to describe this intermediate group. The term is used as a substantive, designating individuals – persons; and the root meaning of the word and the way in which it is usually used imply that these persons have both masculine qualities and feminine qualities within their single bodies. We have objected to the use of the terms heterosexual and homosexual when used as nouns which stand for individuals. It is similarly untenable to imply that these “bisexual” persons have an anatomy or an endocrine system or other sorts of physiologic or psychologic capacities which make them partly male and partly female, or of the two sexes simultaneously [656-7].

… It [“bisexual”] should, however, be used with the understanding that it is patterned on the words heterosexual and homosexual, and, like them, refers to the sex of the partner, and proves nothing about the constitution of the person who is labeled bisexual [657].

He concluded,

The very general occurrence of the homosexual in ancient Greece ... and its wide occurrence today in some cultures in which such activity is not as taboo as it is in our own, suggests that the capacity of an individual to respond erotically to any sort of stimulus, whether it is provided by another person of the same or of the opposite sex, is basic in the species. That patterns of heterosexuality and patterns of homosexuality represent learned behavior which depends, to a considerable degree upon the mores of the particular culture in which the individual is raised, is a possibility that must be thoroughly considered before there can be any acceptance of the idea that homosexuality is inherited, and that the pattern for each individual is so innately fixed that no modification of it may be expected within his lifetime [660].

In rereading the previous paragraph I noticed something odd.  We don't really know much, if anything, about the incidence of homosexual desire or behavior in any culture, including ancient Greece.  What we do know is that sex between males was less taboo there, though it was also regulated and restricted in various ways.  We know this because of the documentation of such relationships in "mainstream" Greek literature and discourse from that period.  But no one ever did a systematic survey like Kinsey's to find out how many Greek men actually had sex with other males.  And despite the very strong prohibition and stigmatization of sex between males in early twentieth-century America, Kinsey found that its occurrence was very wide indeed.  It could be that even in those supposedly more tolerant societies, the actual occurrence of sex between males might be no greater than it is here and now.  We have no way of knowing.

Kinsey's strictures on biological explanations of homosexuality have not been confronted by later researchers.  Indeed, most researchers today have tried to ignore what he said and wrote, often by misinterpreting, or misrepresenting, or simply misunderstanding it. His criticism of hormonal theories was simply ignored, and the same inadequate concept of "the homosexual" is standard in research today.

Of course, it's quite possible that Kinsey was wrong.  But he hasn't been shown to be wrong.  There was a graduate student with whom I had some conflicts when I first began running the GLB Speakers Bureau at IU, who told me in one of his more conciliatory moods that sex research had "moved beyond Kinsey."  I told him that it looked to me as if it hadn't yet caught up with Kinsey.  It should be remembered that Paul Gebhard, one of Kinsey's original team and later head of the Institute for Sex Research, tried to discredit Kinsey's numbers for the incidence of homosexual behaviors.  To that end Gebhard removed all histories of prisoners and others who might have "contaminated" the sample and tabulated the results all over again -- but he found that the percentages dropped only a tiny amount: from 37% to 36.4% for males who'd had at least one sexual experience to orgasm with another male, for example.  Despite this, people who should know better continue to accuse Kinsey of overcounting homosexual experience because he included prisoners in his sample.

Another graduate student, a decade or so later, conceded that the Kinsey scale wasn't intended to refer to or measure "sexual orientation," but declared that sex researchers use it for that purpose today.  She didn't, however, explain how those researchers measure "sexual orientation."  There isn't, to my knowledge, any way to do it.  Today's researchers either allow subjects to assign themselves a number on the Kinsey scale, or administer to them a version of Kinsey's interview; the result is called their sexual orientation.  Since the interview can at best only count overt sexual experience, and a very impressionistic account of desires and fantasies, the result remains a sexual history, not a measure of sexual orientation.  (As the quotation about inexperienced younger males above indicates, experience is considerably affected by the availability of willing partners, as much as it is by one's own predilections.)

I think that what's going on here is that the biological sexual-orientation model is so dominant today that even people who've been trained to know better impose it on all discussion of human sexuality.  The psychologist I quoted at the outset simply took it for granted that in writing about homosexuality, Kinsey was describing "sexual orientation," although he wasn't and would have rejected the concept.  I wouldn't be surprised if he has never actually read the chapter on homosexual outlet in Sexual Behavior in the Male. (Just as I suspect that most people who quote Foucault's famous aphorism about the Origin of the Modern Homosexual have never read The History of Sexuality.)  Why bother?  Everybody knows what Kinsey said.  And everybody knows he was wrong anyway, and sex research has moved beyond his clumsy, primitive beginnings.  If I hadn't been conditioned by the authority-skeptical ethos of Gay Liberation, I might think the same way.

Our Precious Sexuality Fluids

In this week's column, Dan Savage answers questions he received in written form at a college appearance.  I thought this one was interesting:

I’ve always considered myself a lesbian, but a few weeks ago, I got really drunk and slept with one of my male best friends. Am I not a lesbian?

Female sexuality is a lot more fluid, as they say, and many lesbian-identified women have slept with men. Your sexuality identity—the label you choose to apply to yourself—should communicate the essential truth about your sexual interests and partner preferences. So you’re free to identify as a lesbian even if you slip and fall on the occasional dick.

His answer is thoroughly inadequate, but that's not entirely his fault, because there are no clear boundaries in this area.  As Savage says, many lesbian-identified women have slept with men, and (he might have mentioned) more than incidentally.  But I think he's wrong that "female sexuality is a lot more fluid" than (presumably) male sexuality.  Many gay-identified men have slept with women, and many straight-identified men have slept with men.  We have no idea how many, of course.  I considered invoking Alfred Kinsey here, but his research is really no help because he didn't study identities.  A lot of people say he found that 10% of the male population was gay, but they're wrong.  Kinsey found that 10% of the (white, incidentally) male population had mostly same-sex outlet to the point of orgasm for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55; he didn't report how they identified themselves.  We don't even know how the 4% of white males who had only same-sex outlet throughout their lives identified themselves.

I'm almost done reading Barbara Deming's A Humming Under My Feet, which I mentioned yesterday, and I'm struck, not just with how many times she records having let men have sex with her (read the book and you'll see why I put it that way) despite her knowledge that she only really desired and fell in love with women, but with how often she seriously considered marrying a man because that's what you're supposed to do: get married to a man, have his children, be a serious mature adult.  From Martin Duberman's account of Deming and her younger contemporary, the gay socialist David McReynolds in A Saving Remnant, it's clear that McReynolds's experience was similar.  Even more depressing, Deming abandoned her lover Nell to the courtship of her brother Ben, with the same rationale: a woman could only offer another woman a second-best kind of love.

But back to Dan Savage.  Just before the question from the lesbian, he answered this one:

I’m a guy who does not find guys physically attractive. Even so, I like to give and receive blowjobs with men. Does this mean anything about my sexual orientation?

Yes.

The question here, I suppose, is how many times you can have sex with someone who isn't covered by your sexual identity before it means anything about your sexual orientation.  Since part of the definition of "sexual orientation" is that you find people of that sex attractive, or as the American Psychological Association defines it:

Sexual orientation is an enduring emotional, romantic, sexual, or affectional attraction toward others. It is easily distinguished from other components of sexuality including biological sex, gender identity (the psychological sense of being male or female), and the social gender role (adherence to cultural norms for feminine and masculine behavior).

(Except that sexual orientation isn't really "easily distinguished" from those other components: most people, including professionals, tend to confuse them.)  "Sexual identity," as I've noticed before, is a confused and confusing label.  It ought to mean which biological sex (male or female) one identifies as, but it's commonly used to refer to which sexual orientation one answers to.  "Sexual identity" is often confused with "sexual orientation," whose meaning is itself unclear due to the ambiguity of the word "sex."  (It's often used to refer to any erotic preference, which has led to pedophilia being called a sexual orientation even though children are not a sex.)  Even among professional sex researchers and other putative experts, the terminology for human sexuality is a mess.  Among us laypeople, it's totally incoherent.

It's tempting to say that labels are useless, and we should just get rid of them and be people.  Many people give in to that temptation, but I haven't noticed that they really get rid of labels.  Instead they just shift them around a little.  If I choose not to label myself, other people will be happy to take up the slack, so I think I had better be prepared to deal with that.  If I do label myself, they will misunderstand the labels, and sometimes I suspect that misunderstanding is deliberate.  Or maybe it's just the old "Don't stereotype me, but I'll stereotype you all I want" approach.

A disturbing aspect of Deming's experiences with males as she describes them in A Humming Under My Feet is that the men who tried to pressure her into copulation (and too often succeeded) just assumed that if they wanted her, she must want them back, or at any rate be willing and available -- especially since she was a single woman traveling alone; this made her fair game.  They wouldn't take a direct "no" for an answer, and she had to be quite insistent that she wasn't available to them.  One notable swine, a Greek sailor whose roaming hands she had to fend off for hours, finally sneered at her, "So you don't like men?"

I believe in love, I told him.  I added that I was sorry if he'd misunderstood me.  He gave a contemptuous shrug and strode off [218].

Even if her "sexual identity" had been straight or bi, she might simply not have wanted him.  To say so might have been dangerous for her, of course: male pride is touchy, and is often defended with violence.  That too is one of the inequities feminism rejects: that women must always be careful of men's feelings, though men needn't reciprocate. 

This refusal to take "no" for an answer is not limited to straights, of course.  Many people figure that if you're the right sex for them, they're the right sex for you, and if your "sexual identity" confirms that, then you are not allowed to turn them down.  They're allowed to turn others down, of course, because that's different. These issues are really prior to questions of identities and labels.  There's no real need to explain why you're turning down -- or, for that matter accepting -- someone's sexual overtures in terms of orientations or identities; simply saying "No, thanks" or "Yes, thanks" ought to be enough.  People with inadequate erotic manners won't be stopped by a mere identity: they'll be sure that they can be the exception to your orientation.

Identities aren't just individual phenomena, though, they're social, and ideally they help us to interact considerately with one another.    They're also used for solidarity and control, which has a downside too.  If someone asked me the same question that young lesbian asked Dan Savage, I think I'd turn it around: What would you say if another lesbian you knew asked you the same question?  Your answer to her would be my answer to you.

A Real Life

I'm rereading Barbara Deming's A Humming Under My Feet: A Book of Travail (The Women's Press, 1985), which is a fascinating book.  It's about Deming's long stay in Europe in the early 1950s, when she was thirty-five or so.  That in itself makes it stand out among books of self-discovery, which usually are set earlier in the writer's life.  Deming had been struggling for a long time to save enough money to spend a year in Europe and establish herself as a writer.  Her father wouldn't pay for it because, he said, he didn't want her to become "dependent" on him.  When her grandmother offered to give her the money, however, he changed his mind.

A Humming Under My Feet began in 1952, when Deming wrote an opening chapter and sketched out how the book would proceed.  But friends to whom she showed the sample "couldn't help showing that they were embarrassed for me" (vii), and she abandoned the project for almost twenty years.  Her friends' embarrassment, of course, was due to her writing bluntly and casually about her love for another woman, to whom the book was addressed.  (Later, Jane Rule would take the same approach in her novel This Is Not for You.)  What amazes me is that Deming had written as unselfconsciously as she did about her lesbianism in 1952, when Cold War antigay bigotry was on the rise.  When she took up the book again in 1971, she had to reconstruct the period from notes and memory, and the result is a double vision like that of Christopher Isherwood's Christopher and His Kind, in which the older writer looks at the world both as her younger self saw it and as she saw it much later.

One thing I remember from my previous reading is that Deming surprised women in Italy and Greece because she was a woman traveling alone, without a male custodian.

The next morning I left to spend some time in Assisi.  On the train I managed a conversation with a group of women sharing the same compartment.  They were amazed that I traveled alone.  Without either parents or husband.  My parents must be dead, then.  Alive!  And I was here without them!  'Sola!' They whispered it -- the word marking me much more a stranger than the fact than the fact that I hardly spoke their language.  When we told each other our respective ages, it was my turn to be shocked by the differences in our lives. One of the women I had taken to be my mother's age was not much older than I.  A woman wrinkled as my grandmother was my smooth-faced mother's age...

'Sola!'  The word kept echoing in me.  Word uttered by the women in awe.  They had not my privilege to roam.  The whispered word named me privileged; it named me also outlaw -- one who fit no accepted norm [31].

I'm still only about seventy pages in, and I find a lot in Deming's writing that I identify with: her uncertainty about being a sojourner in other people's countries, and her sense that her own life is unreal compared to those of her heterosexual friends and relatives.  Some of this is due to being single and lesbian, not too surprisingly: she even let her brother Ben court and eventually marry a lover of hers, and when that love became pregnant, she kept trying to believe in the connection between them.

It seemed to me that I could feel her child stir within my own body.  I also wished that I could be that child and be born to her.  She wrote that when she thought of it as a girl, she imagined it to be like me.  Reading these words, my heart beat quickly and I imagined myself in her arms again, a tiny girl.  That imagining flickered and went out.  It was not with my life that she was pregnant.  She wrote that her shape was changing.  Yes, the child was changing her.  And once born, it would change her even more.  I sat on, letting this knowledge touch me.  Though she had married, I believed she loved me still.  Of course I knew that she also loved Ben; but I had clung until now to the dream that our lives could be joined together still, I didn't know quite how.  Until this letter, her marriage had not been more real to me than the love between us I knew to be still alive.  But the child she expected -- the child was changing her, and the child would also change the marriage.  I sat there, the letter in my hand -- in the flower-bright park.  Sat waiting for this birth.  Not able not to love the child, and not able not to dread it.  Sat wishing that I were the awaited new life [53].

There's more to Deming's sense of unreality than this, though: I believe that if she could have asked those around her whose lives seemed more substantial, they might well have told her that to them, their own lives felt shadowy and incomplete.  This is a consequence of the fact that other people's inner lives are not directly perceptible to us, as our own are.  We feel our every doubt, fear, and shameful craving, but not those of others.  It was a shock and a revelation to me when someone who seemed grounded and sure of himself told me that he didn't feel that way to himself at all; and when other people, later on, told me that I seemed stable and self-confident, it completed the revelation.  I wasn't freed of all insecurity and confusion, but it did stop me from imagining that I could have been free of them if I'd only been born someone else.

You've Got To Be Carefully Taught

I read Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye last week, just before I went out of town, so I didn't have time to write more about it.

As I read it, I was watching for the aspects Samuel Delany had criticized, not just the Fantasy Police but the demonizing of lighter-skinned African-Americans.  He was right, I think, but I'm not sure I'd have noticed it if he hadn't pointed it out.  I try to be alert to such things, but not being black, let alone lighter-skinned black like Delany, they don't hit home personally for me.  (He was also right about the uneven quality of the writing, but then The Bluest Eye was Morrison's first novel.)

The copy I read was an edition commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Bluest Eye's publication, and it included an afterword by Morrison that confirmed Delany's Fantasy Police accusation.  The afterword begins:

We had just started elementary school. She said she wanted blue eyes. I looked around to picture her with them and was violently repelled by what I imagined what she would look like if she had her wish [209].

On the next page:

Implicit in her desire was racial self-loathing. And twenty years later I was still wondering about how one learns that. Who told her? Who made her feel that it was better to be a freak than what she was? Who had looked at her and found her so wanting, so small a weight on the beauty scale? The novel pecks away at the gaze that condemned her [210].

A "freak," huh?  A couple of pages later Morrison remarked:

Because that moment was so racially infused (my revulsion at what my school friend wanted: very blue eyes in a very black skin; the harm she was doing to my concept of the beautiful)… [211]

I don't blame the schoolgirl Morrison for her visceral reaction to her friend's wish.  Children aren't nearly as open-minded as many sentimental adults like to imagine.  What disturbs me a great deal, and I do consider it blameworthy, is that the adult Morrison still hasn't gotten over it.  Her "gaze" condemns and shames a child for her fantasy.  I don't think the child wished to be a freak; that's Morrison's judgment.

As Delany remarked, if the girl had expressed the same wish after the 1960s, someone would just have told her to get tinted contact lenses.  True, white-centric standards of beauty have been harmful to black women's self esteem (though also to white women's -- let's not forget the long debates among white feminists on that subject), but Afro-centric standards would be no less restrictive.  Any time one kind of body is held up as a standard, it will exclude and downgrade those who don't conform to it, and most won't conform to it.  This isn't helped by African-Americans' own color prejudices: the standard beautiful African-American woman is lighter-skinned than her man, if I go by popular films made for and by African-Americans.

I immediately thought of what Robert Reid-Pharr wrote in Black Gay Man (NYU Press, 2001) a decade ago:

[George Jackson] warns Angela Davis of his brother Jonathan, “Tell the brothers never to mention his green eyes and skin tone. He is very sensitive about it and he will either fight or withdraw.”

Those telltale green eyes and that never quite dark enough skin create a rather precise index of the traditions of racial commingling that exist more or less comfortably under the sign of blackness. The black in America has the maddening tendency to reveal in her eyes, skin, hair, in her body a history of contact and conquest, of slavery and rebellion, in which the African is certainly central, but never alone. Thus, when George Jackson nominates the black domestic unit as one of our basic weaknesses, when he argues that there are deep structures that produce these weakness[es], he begins to turn us, however awkwardly, toward serious consideration of the fact that the black family is perhaps not quite so black as we might imagine. The work of the black family is precisely to enable the maintenance of a coherent structure of American racialism. Blacks, browns, yellows, red, and whites are given in black families access to a black body, the original body stolen from Africa, the innocent body, the body imagined as the site of revolution [65-6].

In fact, then, black babies have been born with green eyes and probably with blue eyes.  Morrison surely knows that as well as I do.  What is wrong, though unfortunately not freakish, is moralizing skin or eye color.

And then this turned up on the Intertoobz: some guy took a photo of a young Sikh woman with facial hair whose appearance he found confusing.  Word got around, the young woman heard about the picture, and posted her own commentary, forthrightly asserting her difference and her right to it.  Amazingly, the guy who'd posted the picture apologized for his original attitude, and it reads like a genuine heartfelt apology, not the I'm-sorry-I-got-caught kind that's the norm in American public life.  I admire the young woman's attitude, though I have some troubles with her dismissal of those who do modify their bodies: "By crying 'mine, mine' and changing this body-tool, we are essentially living in ego and creating a separateness between ourselves and the divinity within us."  That goes back to Delany's notion of Fantasy Police, and as one commenter at Jezebel pointed out, cutting fingernails and bathing also modify the "body-tool," to say nothing of wearing clothing.  Some body modifications, like circumcision, are demanded by some deities.  But it is still a moving exchange, and it inspired some interesting discussion in the comments.