The First Martyr for the Cause

Some of the material in William Benemann's Male-Male Intimacy in Early America seems excessively digressive and speculative to me, but sometimes even the digressions are suggestive in ways Benemann probably didn't consider.  Late in the book he devotes a chapter to forms of political protest the English colonists brought with them from the Old Country, including men who cross-dressed and blackened their faces with burnt cork before engaging in vandalism, sabotage, and riot: some of the Boston Tea Party vandals, for example, chose to masquerade as women rather than Indians.  This was not necessarily, as Benemann points out, because they really expected to pass as female or Indian, but also to symbolize the breakdown of social and political order.  What this has to do with male-male intimacy, even on Benemann's account, isn't clear to me, but it is interesting.

Even farther from Benemann's ostensible theme is his account of the use of boys in American revolutionary agitation and outrages.

Little attention has been given to the fact that prepubescent boys were deliberately employed as agents provocateurs in the years leading up to the rupture with Britain.  Many of the Stamp Act rioters in Boston were “Boys and Children,” and when a crowd attacked the home of Thomas Hutchinson, the scapegoat for the colony’s anger, the assailants were described as “a number of boys from 14 to sixteen years of age, some mere Children which did a great deal of damage.”  In New York the Stamp Act was protested by “a great number of boys carrying Torches & a scaffold,” and in the succeeding weeks hundreds of boys “frequently tramped the streets at night shouting ‘Liberty and No Stamps!’”  By 1769 boys were regularly employed to harass merchants who failed to comply with the nonimportation embargo.  Boys were even viewed as the vanguard of the Continental Army.  A song published in New York in 1776 gleefully boasted, “Our Children rout your Armies, our Boats destroy your Fleet!”

The use of boys was a deliberate policy followed by the Revolutionary leaders, but the reasons for the policy are somewhat complex.  Certainly one motive was to create a public disturbance and deliver a political message without provoking a strong response from the colonial government [256-7].

This immediately brought to my mind the role played by boys of the same age during the First and Second Intifadas, though Palestinian adolescents often suffered a stronger response from the colonial government.  I seem to recall some indignation among American pro-Israel commentators that the Arabs would use their children in this way; probably they were unaware of this aspect of American history, which allowing for differences in technology was surprisingly similar.  Even to this:

On February 22, 1770, a group of “many hundreds” of boys picketed the shop of Theophilus Lilly, a Boston merchant who refused to acknowledge the nonimportation boycott.  The boys were confronted by Ebenezer Richardson, a customs informer, who in turn became the target of the mob.  Richardson retreated to his home, and when the boys began to break in, he fired his rifle into the crowd, killing eleven-year-old Christopher Seider.  Seider was given a grand ceremonial funeral.  School was adjourned for the day, and a procession of 500 boys marching two by two, followed by more than 2,000 adults, wound its way from the Liberty Tree to the place of burial.  It was one of the largest funerals ever witnessed in colonial Boston.

Revolutionary leaders seized upon Christopher Seider’s death for its symbolic value.  Poet Phyllis Wheatley called him “the first martyr for the cause” [260].

Can it really be that I've never heard the story of Christopher Seider before?  It seems not to have played any part in my own schooling about American history.  I wondered if it might have been considered a bad or disturbing example for American's children, but apparently Seider's martyrdom is still being taught in Boston schools, even (see the photo above) to the point of reenacting it.  And its relation to male-male intimacy in early America is murky to me.

Leave Kinsey Alone!

Jeez.  I finally got off my butt and after nearly a year I'm again reading William Benemann's Male-Male Intimacy in Early America (Harrington Park Press, 2006).  I'm moving along pretty smoothly, just past page 70, and there's some interesting stuff in it.  I've been making notes for a longer post, maybe more than one, because this is a subject I've been procrastinating on for a long time.  But occasionally Benemann puts his foot in it, and I'm going to write about that too.

At the end of the introductory material that bogged me down before, Benemann rejects the "bifurcated" view of people as either homosexual or heterosexual.  That's a good thing, though it occurs to me that just about everybody -- certainly every scholarly writer -- who addresses this subject pays lip service to Rejecting the Binary.  What counts is whether you can actually apply that concept to the material you're discussing; so far Benemann is trying to.  And, as most such writers do, he cites Alfred Kinsey:

A more useful model is the one presented by Alfred Kinsey in 1948.  Kinsey described sexual orientation as a continuum, a scale from one to six with one being entirely heterosexual and six being entirely homosexual.  Most human beings fall somewhere between the two extremes of the scale [xvii].

So, first: the scale doesn't run from one to six; it runs from zero to six, with zero (not one) being entirely heterosexual.  In an endnote Benemann cites Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin's 1948 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, page 638, so he could have seen for himself.  On that page is a diagram like this one:

Zero to six, right?  But that's minor.  Second, Kinsey didn't "describe sexual orientation as a continuum" -- he didn't describe sexual orientation at all.  The continuum is a map of data points based on individuals' sexual histories.

Third, most human beings do not fall between the two extremes of the scale.  The interval from zero to one includes half (50 percent) of Kinsey's male histories.  The interval from five to six includes one twenty-fifth (4 percent) of his male histories.  Those who fall between the two extremes are the remaining 46 percent.  I don't know who originated the belief that the histories are distributed in a bell curve, but it has no basis in Kinsey's data.

Our Childlike, Emotional Leaders

For the past couple of days I've been reading David F. Schmitz's Thank God They're On Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921-1965 (University of North Carolina, 1999).  The larger picture of US support for right-wing dictatorships around the world is of course not news to me, but Schmitz provides lots of detail drawn from internal documents, and I'm learning a lot.

One place where I disagree with Schmitz is his choice of the word "paternalistic" to describe US elite attitudes toward the citizens (including political and other leaders) of other countries.  He evidently prefers it to the more inflammatory but still accurate "racist," but if the shoe fits, it should be worn.  So, for example:

President Truman, as his most recent biographer, Alonzo Hamby, has shown, might have "remained a racist only in the narrowest sense of the word and was considerably less so than the the vast majority of white Americans in the years after World War II."  Still, he used words such as "nigger" in private to describe blacks and held to the racial categories and stereotypes of his youth.  He found Latin Americans to be, "like Jews and the Irish, 'very emotional' and difficult to handle" [148].

I don't know that much about Harry S. Truman, so maybe I should look at Hamby's biography and see on what basis he thinks that Truman was "considerably less racist" than his peers in his day, or what "narrow" sense of the word "racist" he has in mind.  It certainly sounds to me like he was racist in a fairly broad sense of the word, not just for his use of "nigger" but for his adherence to racist categories and stereotypes.

Schmitz goes on:

State Department records are riddled with comments such as how Guatemalan leaders were known for their "mental deviousness and difficulty thinking in a straight line," or that trying to reason with Latin Americans was "rather like consulting with babies as to whether or not we should take candy away from them."  Descriptions of Latin Americans as children were common.  Spruille Braden opined that "our Latino friends were playing at economics, just as a child will pretend in his games to be something he isn't and has no immediate possibility of becoming" [149].

This view of foreigners -- just about all non-Anglo-Saxon foreigners, in fact -- as childlike fits the word "paternalistic," but it is also racist, since it casts whole populations as inferior by nature, and despite a certain amount of pious rhetoric to the effect that someday these childlike people may be fit to govern themselves, that day was always safely in the indefinite future.  The same rhetoric characterized a good deal of foot-dragging by whites about people of African descent (who'd always been stereotyped as childish) in the US itself.

The same theme recurs throughout Thank God They're On Our Side:

[FDR held] that the Vietnamese, along with many other Asians, were not yet prepared for self-government.  "With the Indo-Chinese," Roosevelt noted, "there is a feeling that they ought to be independent but are not ready for it.  They needed to be educated in the same manner that the Filipinos were.  In that case, "it took fifty years for us to do it."  He agreed with Queen Wilhelmina of Holland that because of Dutch rule the "Javanese are not quite ready for self-government, but very nearly," and would soon gain independence.  In contrast was the case of New Guinea, where the people were described as the "lowest form of human life in the world, their skulls have least developed."  They were probably "two hundred years behind the rest of the world" [169].

Notice, incidentally, Schmitz's use of the blind passive in "the people were described as..."  Why not say "Roosevelt described them as ..."?  Is it because he wants to dodge the unpleasant reality of FDR deploying such embarrassingly crude scientific racism?  It also occurs to me that if the people of New Guinea were "two hundred years behind the rest of the world" in 1944, when Roosevelt said this, that would put them in 1744, when American colonialists were moving rapidly toward independence.  You wouldn't think that was so backward.

The reference to the Philippines there is ironic, as is a 1959 remark by Dwight Eisenhower that "If we had not trained the Filipinos in democracy for forty years, the Philippines would now have become a military dictatorship" (225).  In 1972, that dream became a reality as Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law.

Again:

Invoking the standard paternalistic views that guided policy toward Latin America throughout the century, the secretary of state [John Foster Dulles] argued that the "most significant fact that throughout most of the world and certainly in Latin America there had been in recent years a tremendous surge in the direction of popular governments by peoples who have practically no capacity for self-government and indeed are like children in facing this problem" [220].

And so on.  But as I read on, the more I was struck by how childlike and emotional the US leaders were.  They were suckers for dusky men in uniform, from Benito Mussolini, who "was seen [by US diplomats and their bosses] as a moderate and the only reliable implementer of the policies essential to order, economic recovery, and development" (39) --

American businessmen were no less enthusiastic about Mussolini and his government.  Thomas Lamont of J. P. Morgan remarked after his first meeting with Mussolini that the Italian dictator was “a very upstanding chap.”  He wrote later that Italy was “going to be a great country despite its very limited resources.”  Otto Kahn, of Kuhn, Loeb, praised the recent change of government in Italy at the 1925 meeting of the International Chamber of Commerce.  “Parliamentary wrangling and wasteful impotent bureaucracy” had been replaced by an “efficient and energetic … government,” which had united Italy in “a spirit of order, discipline, hard work, patriotic devotion and faith.”  Ralph Easley of the National Civic Federation wrote to Thomas Lamont after visiting Italy, “I think, were we in Italy, we would all be with Mussolini.”  And Judge Elbert Gary of United States Steel remarked while in Rome in 1923 that “we have here a wonderful renaissance of youthful energy and activity.  A masterhand has, indeed, strongly grasped the hand of the Italian state.”  Gary added that he felt “like turning to my American friends and asking them whether we, too, need a man like Mussolini” [40].

-- to Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza --

[Former Secretary of War Colonel Henry L. Stimson] immediately liked Somoza, who sought to ingratiate himself with Stimson.  The colonel described Somoza as a "very frank, friendly, likeable young liberal" and noted that, because he spoke fluent English, Somoza "impresses me more favorably than almost any other" person.  So impressed was Stimson that he had Somoza act as his interpreter for the next few days while he finished the agreement [53].

-- to Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar --

Dean Acheson, in particular, was impressed by Salazar ... In his memoirs, Acheson described Salazar as one of the few people he was immediately drawn to upon first meeting.  He had come to power "to run a country that for twenty years had been sinking into economic chaos and political anarchy."  Acheson recalled that he saw Salazar not as "a dictator in his own right as Stalin was, but a dictator-manager employed and maintained by the power of the army ... "A convinced libertarian -- particularly a foreign one -- could understandably disapprove of Salazar.  But," Acheson wrote, "I doubt that Plato would have done so" [164].

(A Portuguese military philosopher-king!)

-- to South Vietnamese dictator Ngo Dinh Diem:

Senator [John Fitzgerald] Kennedy praised Diem for making South Vietnam "the cornerstone of the Free world in Southeast Asia, the keystone in the arch, the finger in the dike," while Mike Mansfield argued that the fact "that a free Viet Nam exists at the present time ... is the result of the efforts of Mr. Diem."  The Saturday Evening Post referred to Diem as the "mandarin in a sharkskin suit who's upsetting the Red timetable," and Life magazine, with no apparent sense of irony, justified Diem's refusal to hold the unification elections [mandated by the 1954 Geneva Accords] on the grounds that Ho [Chi Minh] would win.  "Diem saved his people from this agonizing prospect simply by refusing to permit the plebiscite and thereby he avoided national suicide."  The New York Times titled its 1957 profile on Diem "An Asian Liberator."  The paper of record applauded his work to "save his country from falling apart" and how he tirelessly toured the countryside so that the people would get to know him and perhaps like him more than they did Ho Chi Minh."  This effort was paying off as the "Vietnamese learn to respect their new Government and their new leader" [208].

Didn't the people already know their new leader?  They could hardly have done so, because Diem, "a Catholic in a predominantly Buddhist nation... had spent the entire war for independence in Europe and the United States" (205).  This material should also be borne in mind the next time someone laments the glorious days when American media were "adversary."  Not in the 1950s they weren't.  Or the 1960s.  But I digress.

Of course our leaders were often uneasily aware that our clients weren't always as docile as they would like.  Mussolini was an obvious case, but in Latin America especially they just didn't seem to know when they'd worn out their welcome.  When Rafael Trujillo's regime in the Dominican Republic began to look shaky, for example, the Eisenhower administration began looking discreetly for someone who could be "'a forceful leader,' albeit not necessarily as extreme as the generalissimo" (229).  Unfortunately, the generalissimo had killed or imprisoned anyone who might represent a threat to his tenure, and the respectable elements of Dominican society weren't about to stick their necks out signalling their availability to the US.  The American embassy warned that "the people are not now politically educated to accept democracy as it exists in the United States" (ibid.), hardly surprising since the US and Trujillo had considered any opposition to Trujillo to be communism, not democracy.  Trujillo refused covert US entreaties to step down voluntarily, even if he got to take his money with him.  (In the end he was assassinated by elements of his own army, none of whom proved strong enough to take his place.)  This is why there's an endless litany of complaints by apologists for US domination that our clients are sneaky, clever, irrational, corrupt, and so on.  As James Traub put it in The Freedom Agenda (FSG, 2008), "Some leading members of the [Filipino] elite absorbed the ethos of self-reliance and equality; others learned how to parrot it back to their gullible masters" (28-29).

The US elites Schmitz discusses and quotes kept saying that American "intervention" had to be avoided if at all possible.  I suppose by that word they meant sending in the Marines, because they used it even when they were intervening assiduously, not just through behind the scenes diplomacy but through covert action.  Negotiations with the local military about overthrowing a government, sending a naughty general into exile (with his Swiss bank accounts intact), training the police and army in American institutions (which Schmitz doesn't mention that I noticed), giving and taking away military or supposedly non-military aid and loans as a regime came into or out of favor -- none of this seems to have counted in their minds as "intervention," let alone interference.  After the US-supported ("contacts with the military were increased and planning begun for the overthrow of the government" [271]) coup that overthrew Brazil's President João Goulart in 1964, for example, President Lyndon Johnson "asked why the Brazilian Congress could not just make the president of the Congress, Ranieri Mazzili, the legal president pro tem to provide the cover of legitimacy, [Secretary of State Dean] Rusk responded that 'Ambassador Gordon was using the resources available to him to encourage Brazilian legislators to do just this'" (276).  They merely took it for granted that the US had the right to decide what happened in any country in our sphere of influence anywhere in the world; any objection to US domination was, by definition, communism, to be put down by any means necessary.

When Congress began to question these policies, its efforts were met with protests that are still familiar.  Gerald Ford, for instance, "wrote [Senator Frank] Church at the end of October 1975 to urge the committee not to make public its findings on assassinations and covert actions.  The president asserted that any public disclosure of allegations on the overthrow of foreign governments would 'result in serious harm to the national interest'" (297).  Oh yes, we've heard that one recently.

Schmitz argues in his conclusion that "U.S. support for right-wing dictatorships was always morally questionable.  Because American leaders used moral arguments and appeals to gain public support for their Cold War policies, those policies can be fairly judged on moral terms.  The United States has to accept varying degrees of responsibility for aiding in the oppression of people around the world by supplying economic assistance, military goods, and political legitimacy to a large number of despots … Worse, the United States often was responsible for the very existence of many of these governments and undermined genuine efforts at reform, self-determination, and democratic change around the world" (308).  Another conclusion that I think emerges from his book is that despite their arrogant assurance that they were the best and the brightest, exemplars of the noble Anglo-Saxon race that is naturally qualified to dictate to the lower orders, our leaders have consistently shown that they aren't nearly as smart as they think they are.  That's another thing that hasn't changed.

"Every Man Does Not Look Like Brad Pitt"

Dave Zirin interviewed the gay ex-NFL player Wade Davis for The Nation, and alas, Davis (who is "now the executive director for the You Can Play Project", which indicates he thinks he's some kind of spokesman) didn't do a very good job.  When the inevitable "objectification" (aka "What do I do if a gay guy looks at me in the shower?") question came up, Davis said:

You know, it all comes down to having experiences. I guarantee that if Jonathan Vilma has a chance to sit down with myself or any other gay person, he’d be like, “You know what? These old ideas that I had about gay people… they really aren’t true.” It’s not all Jonathan Vilma’s fault. Our country has a very monolithic way that they show gay men—the Modern Familys and what not. The exposure’s great, but let’s have some nuance to show that there are different types of gay people, so Jonathan Vilma’s mind can expand and he can say, “Oh, every gay man doesn’t want me.” Most guys look terrible naked, and I should know. And, straight guys look too… there’s a perception that straight guys don’t check out other guys’ penises, and that’s a lie. The one difference is that some straight guys get uncomfortable and think that every gay man wants them. Wrong. Every man does not look like Brad Pitt.

The best thing here is Davis's pointing out that "straight guys look too."  It's not necessarily erotic, it's more the expression of competitive anxiety over penis size -- though such anxiety doesn't necessarily exclude erotic interest.  But yes, having spent some years in locker rooms, whether under compulsion for high school PE or of my own free will when I was working out, I know that if every man who looks at other men's bodies in a locker room is gay, there are hardly any straight guys in locker rooms. 

But aside from that, Davis's remarks are a mess.  What "looks terrible naked" is open to considerable variation, and you don't have to "look like Brad Pitt" to be desirable.  (Not all gay men want Brad Pitt in the first place.  Or Channing Tatum, or whoever.)  This is just more of the same old garbage which puts down everyone who doesn't look like a model or movie star as too ugly to fuck.  Luckily, those of us who don't look like models or movie stars still do get laid, and checked out in the showers for that matter.

Besides, I wonder how many straight men really will be reassured by being told that they're too ugly to fuck.  Again, in my experience, many straight men -- and not only straight men -- are disappointed when they find out that a given gay man isn't secretly seething with lust for them.  And some, especially athletes like Vilma, may still want to ask "But what if some gay guy does want me?"  That's easy enough: you say, "No, thanks" or "Yes, please," depending on your own wishes.  It may help to reassure them that no matter what they look like, not all gay men will want them.  On the other hand, some straight men enjoy being admired and desired.  The real problem for people like Jonathan Vilma is that they think that just being looked at, admired and desired, unmans them.  But there's nothing much they can do about that, since they'll be looked at, admired and desired even when they're fully suited up for the game.

Zirin and Davis use the word "objectification" for this, but that's too easy: not all desire objectifies, and indeed objectification doesn't have that much to do with erotic desire -- it's about control, about seeing erotic relations as a power struggle from which the man must always emerge the victor.  (For many gay men, of course, being a bottom is victory.)  Should Zirin and Davis have gone into this?  If they're going to touch on straight male anxiety about being "objectified," yes.  I don't think we're going to be able to resolve homophobia and antigay bigotry unless we can think about such things.  About thirty years ago Joanna Russ wrote:

I’ve always thought that patriarchal male sexuality must be a rather difficult business. To over-simplify: A partner’s hostility or boredom is ordinarily a real turn-off – and yet this is exactly the situation under patriarchy, where so many women are not interested, not excited, not participants, and not happy. Yet men must penetrate and ejaculate if there are to be any babies – and so the problem for patriarchy (whether you think of this as a one-time invention or a constant process) is to construct a male sexuality that can function in the face of a woman’s non-cooperation or outright fear and hostility.

As long as that's the case, and I think it is the case, it's not surprising that the existence of openly gay or bisexual people is going to generate anxiety among many heterosexuals.  That means we not only need to talk about such issues, we need to do some hard thinking about what they mean in people's real lives.

All Along the Kinsey Continuum

This weekend I reread Conversations about Psychology and Sexual Orientation (NYU Press, 1999), by Janis S. Bohan, Glenda M. Russell, and several other contributors.  The book is an attempt to sketch out a social-constructionist approach to sexual orientation in clinical practice and in public policy; I first read it soon after it was published, and remembered that some of it was interesting and useful.  I decided to reread it to see how it looked to me now, especially after having read a lot more on the subject in the past fifteen years.  I'll probably have more to say about it later, but for now I want to lament that the authors have made the same error about Alfred Kinsey's work that so many other writers on sexual orientation have made.

Bohan and Russell write:

Perhaps more striking is the persistent plausibility of this dichotomous portrayal given that, even within this culture, its inadequacy was established more than forty years ago, when Kinsey and his colleagues demonstrated that this binary depiction of sexual orientation is flawed.  Their work revealed, instead, a range of self-reported sexual orientation described not by discrete categories but by a seven-point continuum, ranging from exclusive homosexuality (six on Kinsey's scale), through varying degrees of bi- or ambisexuality (scores of five to one), to exclusive heterosexuality (zero on the scale)...

Kinsey's work also suggested that sexual orientation is not entirely defined by sexuality per se; an individual's placement along the continuum reflected both overt and "psychic" reactions.  In addition, Kinsey's findings indicated that people's self-defined positions along this continuum may change over time and that many subjects identified periods in their lives when their sexual orientation was quite different from how they later identify themselves.  Thus, sexual orientation is portrayed by Kinsey's work is composed not of discrete categories, whatever the number, but of vague, permeable, and potentially shifting "locations" along a continuum [86-87].

Kinsey's work does not "portray" sexual orientation, self-reported or otherwise.  The Kinsey continuum represents sexual experience or "outlet" (to use Kinsey's term), overt behavior or "psychic" response.  I remember that his colleague Wardell Pomeroy wrote later about someone (who may have been his client rather than someone whose sexual history he took for Kinsey in the 1930s and 1940s) who thought of himself as homosexual until Pomeroy pointed out that he had more heterosexual experience than homosexual, but I don't recall Kinsey addressing this sort of thing in his big books.  He did, as I've mentioned before, refer once to "orientation" in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, when he referred to "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" (641).  But that's the only time he uses the word in the book, and in context it's clear that by "orientation" he means something like "predominant interest."  The Kinsey continuum refers only to sexual experiences, not to sexual orientation as it's talked about today.

I have no idea where Bohan and Russell got that bit about "many subjects [who] identified periods in their lives when their sexual orientation was quite different from how they later identify themselves."  I suspect it's because of the way Kinsey and his colleagues organized their data, for example, that 10 percent of the male subjects' experience (again: not "orientation") was more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55.  That's not the subjects talking, it's the researchers.  And since the data refer to experience, whether overt expression or conscious attraction and desire, it doesn't necessarily indicate a change in "sexual orientation": it may indicate a change in circumstances, opportunity, environment, or something else.

For example, a friend was shocked to find that while his father was stationed near San Francisco in the military before he married, he had some sexual experience with other men.  Being 1) young, 2) in uniform, 3) unattached and 4) located near a gay mecca made him accessible to gay men who are attracted to military trade and cultivate them, often generously.  When he was discharged and moved back to the rural Midwest, such opportunities dwindled.  He could have begun seeking out male partners -- they can certainly be found here -- but apparently he didn't.  It appears that he viewed his experiences with men in the Bay area as something that didn't count, since he was far from home and the military was a temporary gig; think of him as a sexual tourist.  He married heterosexually and raised two sons, one of whom turned out to be gay.  So my friend's father could have been a 4 or 5 on the Kinsey continuum based on his youthful experiences -- it's compatible with having a lot of homosexual experience for three years, followed by decades of exclusively heterosexual outlet -- though without getting his full sexual history it's impossible to know.  Did his "orientation" change?  There's no way to tell, because we have no way to measure sexual orientation.

True, the kind of experience a person has over time may tell us something about his or her "sexual orientation," but only a part of it.  Maybe it's like a student's grade point average as a sign of "intelligence" (another murky concept): chances are an intelligent student will have a high GPA, and a less intelligent student a lower one.  But the actual number will depend on various factors: which school he or she attends, for example.  A highly intelligent student may do badly in school because of stress, the inability to focus because of the distracting diversions of campus life, having chosen the wrong major, and many other factors.  A less intelligent student can still have a high GPA through working hard and consistently, choosing one's courses strategically, and so on.  And -- rather like the Kinsey continuum -- a student's GPA can move up or down the scale, but it's not likely to move from a 1 to a 4 GPA in four years, just as one's position on the Kinsey scale is not likely to move from 6 to 0 or vice versa.  One's declared identity can change that drastically (for equally diverse reasons), but one's sexual history is cumulative, and not directly a measure of one's inner nature any more than average grades are.

Perhaps some reader will ask me how I can claim I'm right about this, when all these other smart, credentialed people get it wrong.  I read the damn book, that's how.  I do wish I understood how so many smart, well-trained people can get Kinsey's work so wrong.

Already It Was Impossible to Say Which Was Which

(Updated below.)
I was listening to Democracy Now! this morning when something grabbed my attention.  They were doing a story on the failure of the United Auto Workers to unionize a Volkwagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennesee.  As one would expect, the Right, including Republican politicians in Tennessee, waged a strenuous campaign against the drive, resulting in a very narrow loss (by 86 votes) when the workers voted.  DN! talked to Steven Greenhouse, a New York Times reporter who works the labor beat.  He said: 

Some Republican lawmakers in the state Legislature said that if the union comes in, they’re not going to approve incentives to help bring, to help woo Volkswagen to bring a second production line to make SUVs at the plant. And then Bob Corker, Republican senator from Tennessee, former mayor of Chattanooga, said that he had heard from people at Volkswagen that if the union loses, then Volkswagen will bring in this second auto line.

Wait a minute.  Republicans want to vote for government "incentives to ... help woo Volkswagen to bring a second production line"?  That is socialism, if not communism, just like in Communist China: 

When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

(Boldface added.)  Of course I'm being sarcastic here, but it's always good to remember that "economic freedom" means massive government subsidies for big corporations.  Even for foreign corporations like Volkswagen.  Times have changed from the days when foreign auto makers were destroying domestic industry.  What "economic freedom" really means, of course, is freedom from unruly workers who might organize for their own interests.

Greenhouse also had some interesting comments on the UAW's response to the Republican campaign.

And Bob King very much indicated, "We are a new UAW. We are going to be more cooperative," and he signed this neutrality agreement with Volkswagen where he actually pledged to help keep Volkswagen’s wages competitive vis-à-vis some of the other automakers. So, he’s like bending over backwards to say, "We’re not the old confrontational UAW of old." So, on one hand, many workers kind of were uncomfortable with the UAW because they thought it would be too confrontational and hurt business image, hurt Chattanooga’s efforts to bring jobs. On the other hand, you know, some workers voted against the union because they thought it was being too accommodating and like bending over backwards and saying, "Well, we will restrain wages to help assure that the factory would be competitive."

This is nothing new -- as David F. Noble showed in Forces of Production (Knopf, 1984), unions have often appeased management in its drive to impose automation production lines. And once again, the left was caught flat-footed by a right-wing propaganda campaign.  No one could possibly have foreseen that business interests would react to a unionization drive in an anti-union region by fighting dirty!  The really depressing thing is that despite the union's failure to anticipate such a move by its opponents, the vote was still very close.  It could have turned out differently.

P.S. I was imprecise when I wrote of "business interests" opposing a unionization drive.  While the Republican politicians and others who mounted a propaganda campaign against the UAW drive to unionize Chattanooga's Volkwagen plant certainly represent US business interests, they don't represent Volkwagen.  The company also has workers' councils for most of its plants around the world, and is used to dealing with unions; so much so that VW expected unionization to succeed in Chattanooga.  Ironically, the failure of the union drive may mean that, contrary to the Republican anti-union line, Volkswagen will be less likely to build new plants in the US, at least in especially anti-union regions like the South.  I didn't know this until I read Richard Seymour's latest post at Lenin's Tomb, and then a friend sent me the links I included in this postscript.  Thanks to Seymour, and especially to CHH for filling me in.

The Social Construction of Social Construction; or, This Is Just Dumb Critical Theory

I actually meant to write about something else on Saturday, namely "social constructions."  I got into an interesting exchange in comments under the link my friend posted.  One of her friends, presumably an academic also, commented on the story, first:

who cares because this is just dumb science. these people need to put down their microscopes and study critical theory

and then:

i mean even neurobiology shows there's no good reason to believe in two sexes only; so how the hell is some gene going to tell you who to go out and fuck?

You don't even need neurobiology: gross external anatomy is enough to cast doubt on a simplistic two-sexes model, though that is a relatively recent development even in 'The West."  A one-sex model is older and persists in folk psychology to this day.  The newer social construction of "intersex" is built on mostly visible differences between bodies that have been known for millennia.  Since sex in this sense (as opposed to copulation) is a social construction, science (dumb or otherwise) can't settle the question of how many sexes there are, any more than critical theory can settle how many genders there are.  What anatomical differences constitute a sex?  Among the more chilling examples of medical malfeasance that I know of is the treatment of infant males born with a "micropenis" by cutting off the inadequate appendage and trying to raise them as girls, or the corresponding removal of supposedly oversized clitorises from females.  At what point does a relative difference became an absolute one?

And if science is "dumb", what is the relevance of neurobiology here in the first place?  (In fairness, I don't know whether the other commenter meant that all science is dumb, or just the kind of science that seeks to explain sexual orientation.)

Going from here, it makes no sense to ask "how the hell is some gene going to tell you who to go out and fuck?"  For one thing, as the article under discussion admitted, the scientists involved do not claim to have found a single gene for homosexuality, nor do they believe there is such a thing.  But that doesn't mean that sexual desire and preferences in sexual partners have no relation to the body.  What that relation is, or if there is one, no one has any idea.

The same person added:

and there's that pesky problem of "homosexuality" being a historically constructed category...

At this point I indulged in an intervention.

but then, "neurobiology" [and, I might have added, critical theory] is a historically constructed category too; so how can it, really, "show" us anything? So is just about everything that human beings interact with, think about, talk about. I'm really beginning to think that there should be a moratorium on the use of terms like "social construction" and "historical construction." For one thing, they imply another bogus binary, namely that there is a clear dividing line between social constructions and 'real' things (FSVO of 'real'). They also tend to be used, as you seem to be doing, to imply that social constructions are unreal, trivial, illusory, etc. None of this follows, and it just adds to the general confusion.

The constructions of critical theory would have to be viewed with as jaundiced an eye as those of "dumb science", but that doesn't seem to be the table here.  The other commenter replied:

to suggest that the idea of historical construction implies a distinction from "the real" would be a very serious misunderstanding of the concept

I intervened:

Yes it is, but many people who deploy the term misunderstand it in just that way. But "social constructions" like sex and race certainly have biological aspects: social constructions are constructed of/with bodies.

To which the other commenter answered:

lol so in other words you want a moratorium on one of the most powerful, foundational concepts of twentieth-century thought because some straw men might possibly misunderstand it? hahaha good luck with that

Appeal to authority and to what everybody else is doing; she loses.  Of course, biological determinism is one of the other most powerful, foundational concepts of twentieth-century thought, most often tied to Darwinian evolution misunderstood as a linear progression from primitive to advanced organisms.    So I wrote:

Oh, I don't expect any luck at all; but it's not "straw men" who "possibly misunderstand it" -- the misunderstandings are endemic among the academics who use it, to say nothing of non-academics who've picked it up and used it without understanding it. (The use of Foucault as Scripture is also a real problem in the US academic queer theory I've read, and I've read a lot of it.) It's this confusion that makes me wonder whether something wouldn't be gained by not using the term for awhile, so that people would have to say more explicitly what they mean, rather than merely gesturing at it.

It's not clear to me that this person doesn't "possibly misunderstand" social construction herself.  She did, after all, offer up "a historical construction" as a better explanation of "homosexuality" than the biological determinism of Dean Hamer and Michael Bailey. "Social/historical construction" is not an alternative to "born that way," any more than the Big Bang Theory or Natural Selection are alternative Creation Myths.  When the gay neuroscientist Simon LeVay said that his friends dismissed his interest in finding a biological cause for homosexuality by asserting that 'we know it's socially constructed', I wondered if it was he or they who had misunderstood the concept.  Both, probably.  "Born this way" and "socially constructed" are answers to (at least) two different questions.

A third commenter criticized me, rather more cogently, but still (I think) missing the point:

Social constructions are patently not made from bodies. They are made from -perceptions- of bodies. Race, for example, has no biological aspects that can be used to meaningfully understand morphological and genetic differences between humans. The reason for that is simple -- the genetic diversity expressed by people currently living on the continent of Africa actually subsumes the rest of the genetic diversity in the world. An African will be more different genetically from another African than a European will be from an aboriginal Australian. Humans are radically homogeneous as a primate species anyway...and any differences we want to see as racial are uniformly better explained because of clinal variation, or historical, social and cultural context.

Without bodies there are neither perceptions in general nor perceptions of bodies.  "Race, for example, has no biological aspects that can be used to meaningfully understand morphological and genetic differences between humans."  This is probably true, but that begs the question of what race 'is.'  It's not as if it was ever a well-defined concept, and its history mainly shows people who are convinced that it must mean something, and try tirelessly to get the evidence to justify that conviction.  The number of races increases, and then decreases.  (Rather like genders.)  A century ago, there were numerous "races" in Europe: the Celt, the Teuton, the Mediterranean, the Slav, and so on.  No one takes these seriously anymore.  Past classifications are dismissed as self-evidently misconceived but their replacements are no better.  And these classifications -- much like gender and erotic ones -- are the successors to older categories that are just as essentialist.

"... and any differences we want to see as racial..." Who's "we"?  I don't particularly want to see any differences as racial; I don't see it as a useful concept.  I feel the same way about "gender," though I don't get the impression that most social constructionist theorists of gender would agree. "... are uniformly better explained because of clinal variation, or historical, social and cultural context."  Again, I'd agree.  But that doesn't really affect my point.  She was quite right about the differences within groups opposed to differences between groups, but the tendency to turn average differences into absolute ones is not confined to essentialists -- social-constructionist scholars of gender can't seem to shake it, for example.  Whether biological, cultural or historical differences are significant, or how much or in what way, is also open to dispute. That people think they're significant is a datum in itself, of course.  And "better explained" according to whom?  The kind of academic, systematic approach this person invokes, which I also find valuable and useful, is still a social and historical construct, a product of a very specific and limited social and cultural context.  There is no approach that isn't.

None of this means I reject social constructionism, least of all in favor of essentialism.  I've argued before that essentialism is how social construction happens, and I still think that's true.  Perhaps more attention needs to be paid to the border that tenuously and porously divides them.