Cognitive Dissonance

Dan Savage's latest column is an interesting study in contradiction.  It consists of two letters, both from gay men dealing with "kinks" (i.e., light sadomasochism) in their relationships.

The first man has found a good but apparently vanilla boyfriend whom he's afraid of scaring away if he asks to introduce his "need to engage in power exchange with someone."  Meanwhile, keeping his desires bottled up is stressing him out seriously.

Dan is supportive: "Your kinks are an intrinsic aspect of your sexuality and repressing them—not having any way to explore or express them—does take an emotional toll."  So far so good.

The second man has "a new boyfriend who just opened up to me about his kinks."

What’s interesting to me, Dan, is how often this happens. My boyfriend is easily the fourth guy I’ve dated in the last few years who laid down the exact same kink cards: wants to be tied up, wants to be called names, wants to be hurt. I’m learning to tie knots and getting better at calling him names when we have sex, and I actually really enjoying spanking him. But I was talking with a friend—our straight lady mutual (with the boyfriend’s okay!)—and she told me she’s never had a straight guy open up to her about wanting to be tied up and abused. Are gay guys just kinkier?

Dan takes a different tack in response.

I have a theory…

When we’re boys… before we’re ready to come out… we’re suddenly attracted to other boys. And that’s something we usually feel pretty panicked about. It would be nice if that first same-sex crush was something a boy could experience without feelings of dread or terror, TOP, but that’s not how it works for most of us. We’re keenly aware that should the object of our desire realize it—if the boy we’re attracted to realizes what we’re feeling, if we give ourselves away with a stray look—the odds of that boy reacting badly or even violently are high. Even if you think the boy might not react violently, even if you suspect the boy you’re crushing on might be gay himself, the stakes are too high to risk making any sort of move. So we stew with feelings of lust and fear.

Sexual desire can make anyone feel fearful and powerless—we’re literally powerless to control these feelings (while we can and must control how we act on these feelings)—but desire and fear are stirred together for us gay boys to much greater degree than they are for straight boys. We fear being found out, we fear being called names, we fear being outed, we fear being physically hurt. And the person we fear most is the person we have a crush on. A significant number of gay guys wind up imprinting on that heady and very confusing mix of desire and fear. The erotic imaginations of guys like your boyfriend seize on those fears and eroticize them. And then, in adulthood, your boyfriend want to re-experience those feelings, that heady mix of desire and fear, with a loving partner he trusts. The gay boy who feared being hurt by the person he was attracted to becomes the gay man who wants to be hurt—in a limited, controlled, consensual, and safe way—by the man he’s with.

Here Dan explains what appear to be essentially the same kink he described as "intrinsic" to the first guy's sexuality as an extrinsic, contingent result of the fears gay boys grow up with.  His theory isn't implausible, and he's far from the only person to theorize masochism like this, but although I don't have a better explanation, I don't buy it.  For one thing, I think masochism is much more common among heterosexual males than either Dan or his questioner recognize: usually it's expressed without getting genital.  The hierarchical games of dominance and submission between males that play an important role in patriarchy are sadomasochistic at core, even if no one has an orgasm.  (A number of theorist-practitioners of gay male S/M have claimed that genital sex plays less of a role in their erotic lives than the theater of dominance and submission, the cosplay, and so on.)  Expressing these roles through fucking and sucking is very difficult to negotiate between straight males, for the same reason that gay men find it necessary to closet themselves.  The straight female friend the questioner had discussed this with claimed she'd never encountered a man who asked her to dominate him.  That may well be, but it doesn't guarantee that none of them wanted her to. and they had good reason to be afraid to ask.  Some women are happy to play the dominatrix, but many others freak out over even a little kinkiness.  I bet Dan will get some letters about this from straight male and female readers alike.

But I digress.  The point for me is that Dan equivocated in the same column between claiming kinks as "intrinsic" and "explaining" them in the very same suspect way that homosexuality used to be "explained."  If kinks aren't inborn, that means they're acquired or (gasp) learned, and maybe they can be unlearned as well.  I don't think Dan intends or wants to say anything like this, but it follows from his armchair psychologizing.  Physician, explain thyself!

P.S.  This is the 2500th post of this blog.  No biggie, but a milestone nevertheless.

Que Sera, Sera...

This will be brief, I hope.  I'm thinking through a post on another larger subject and don't know when I'll feel ready to start writing it.  For now, then...

This week Dan Savage answered a question from from a man who's erotically excited by being cuckolded, and wondered why that should be.  The answer, with expert input, was a lot of admittedly unfounded speculation, but I was intrigued by Dan's closing remarks:

The erotic power of doing something that seems antithetical to the heteronormative and/or vanilla-normative expectations heaped on us by culture, religion, family, etc. should never be underestimated. While not everyone is turned on by the thought of transgressing against sexual or social norms, a significant percentage is. So long as our normative-busting transgressive turn-ons can be realized with other consenting adults, we should worry less about the “why” and more about the “when,” “where,” and “how.” (Now, in private, and safely!)

A few weeks ago, Dan fretted about white people who "fetishized" people of different "races."

It’s a good idea to ask ourselves whether our “types” are actually ours and not just assigned to us by conventional standards of beauty (white, slim, young) or a thoughtless/fetishizing reaction to those standards (a desire to transgress with nonwhite, larger, or older folks).

The new column raises some interesting questions about these strictures.  Suppose someone is turned on by a person of different skin color because it's transgressive.  In the real world, it's impossible to know that for sure anyway, but it seems likely to me that the erotic power of transgression also holds with "interracial" liaisons, even with same-sex eroticism. (For that matter, dating people outside one's comfort zone as a conscious strategy to broaden one's horizons is a kind of fetishization too, but it's likely to be anti-erotic in practice.)  I'm not sure it's necessary, or ethical, to inform a potential partner for a transient encounter that one is turned on by the prospect of transgressing against sexual or social norms with him or her; but then, he or she might just reply brightly, "Oh, that's okay!  I feel the same way about you!  Now quit talking and let's start transgressing."

But once again what I see here is Dan's own confusion about erotic ethics and values.  Is erotic transgression okay or not?  It seems that he draws the line at gender- or "race"- related transgressiveness, like many other people who fantasize that there is some pure, untainted erotic feeling that has nothing to do with real bodies.  I suspect that this fantasy -- or should I call it a fetish? -- is most common among people with very limited erotic experience, but the worldly Dan Savage really should know better.

What's in a Name? (Quite a Lot)

At first I thought this was just a minor quibble, but then I realized it was more important than that.

Dan Savage answered a letter this week from a gay man who likes what might be described as "destruction porn" (look at the column for more information), and finds that there's a lot of online manga porn in that mode, but its protagonists are depicted as "giant prepubescent boys."  Does this count as pedophile porn, even though he's not attracted to prepubescent boys?  Dan provided a definition of pedophilia: "Pedophilia, according to the best and most current research, is a hardwired sexual orientation—one that can never be acted on for moral and ethical reasons."

I've argued before that "sexual orientation" is the wrong word for pedophilia, first of all because the term refers to which sex one is erotically attracted to, and children are not a sex.  This is a consequence of the ambiguity of "sex," which can refer to the configuration of one's reproductive organs or to copulation.  Off the cuff, I propose something like "erotic fixation."  "Erotic" refers specifically to desire, so it's less ambiguous than "sexual," and "fixation" has the virtue of implying that the condition is fixed, not easily mutable if at all.  "Orientation," despite what we are often told does not have such an implication.

But, second, the problem isn't a purely semantic one.  When my city tried to add "sexual orientation" to its human rights ordinance in the 1990s, religious bigots objected that it would protect pedophiles as well as homosexuals.  They could, and I believe did, point to statements in the sexological literature which declared pedophilia a sexual orientation.  Whoever wrote the proposed amendment had forestalled this by defining sexual orientation as referring to homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual.  The amendment passed, but was overruled by a state law prohibiting municipalities from adding to the state human/civil rights law.

I submit that it would be a good idea to stop referring to pedophilia as a sexual orientation because of the confusion generated in many people's minds by the term's ambiguity.  This confusion extends not just to the ignorant and uneducated, but to educated people who are in a position to make policy, including judges and sex researchers.  (I winced at Dan's remark about "the best and most current research," because so much of the best and most current research on human sexuality is wrong-headed and just plain wrong.)  In the long run it could be used as a weapon against civil rights protection, and if you think things couldn't go in that direction, you haven't been paying attention for the past few years.

It's timely to bring this up because of Jeffrey Epstein's arrest, which has generated a predictable shitstorm in the Force, with many references to him as a pedophile.  I've noticed that when people are challenged on the accuracy of that word with regard to men who pursue adolescents, they often defend themselves by admitting that they're not using the word accurately but like who cares?  I think they like the clinical feel of the word while getting off on its emotional boost.  It's not necessary to label Epstein a pedophile to see him as a vicious abuser who should be behind bars.  But as with the rape of adults, there's a lot of outrage that I find suspicious.  Everyone will be furious about rape and the abuse of children in theory, but in actual cases they lack conviction.  The Roman Catholic coverup of priests' abuse of children is a prime example: the Church is second to none in denouncing immorality, but when it came to a paradigm case (thousands of them, in fact) of conduct it officially condemns in the strongest terms, it couldn't follow through.  The Penn State scandal of recent memory is similar: devoutly Catholic men in positions of responsibility simply seemed to sleepwalk when confronted with the abuse of children.

So I was pleased to read this tweet last night, criticizing a "class analysis" of the Epstein case: "we non-rich have our shares of pedophiles among us and plenty of families without epstein money have found ways to bury sexual abuse without a powerful prosecutor at their disposition".  She's exactly right.  The radical feminist movement of the 1970s paid a lot of attention to the sexual abuse of children, with many women reporting their own horrifying childhood experiences, encountering a wall of denial from the adults around them, including parents, when they tried to complain.  It was largely and predictably ignored by mainstream society.

Much of the reaction by commenters to vanessa bee's tweet was just as clueless, basically: wait, what? what are you talking about?  Bee continued trying to explain: "yes, the scale, the SCALE, obviously. i’m just saying poor & working class people do this shit, too. and put other things ahead of their class, partisanship, or safety of kids, in order to cover up other people’s abuse."  Children are blamed in the same terms as adults, too: seductive little Lolitas who've been "sexualized" by their mothers, etc.  As the Epstein case proceeds, we'll certainly see more attempts to blame the victims.

You Know You Want It

I've been thinking more about Dan Savage's remarks on sexual attraction, and I realized that I couldn't make any sense out of the final clause of this sentence:

But instead of reconsidering their ideas about attractiveness, a dumb fucking white person—even one from a liberal background—is likelier to say something stupid like “I don’t usually find Asian guys hot, but your Korean friend is attractive,” rather than rethinking their assumptions about their desires. 

As I wrote before, it seems to me that the statement he made up to attack represents someone rethinking their assumptions about their desires.  But then I wondered what "assumptions about their desires" are involved here.  Specifically, I wondered what Dan's assumptions about anyone's desires were, because I don't think he knows anything about the assumptions of the person he's criticizing.

Does he believe that she was already attracted to Asian men but simply, wickedly or fucking dumb whitely, refused to acknowledge it, even to herself?  Because Dan was expressing an assumption, he didn't need to express it clearly, even in his own mind. 

The reason I'm wary of the concept of sexual orientation is that it assumes that human beings contain a mechanism or an organ that responds erotically to a sex, male or female or both.  But as far as I can tell, most people are attracted not to males or females but to some males or some females.  Which ones often changes over time, probably based on experience; not just overt copulatory experience, because for most people the number of people we might want to copulate with is far greater than the number we do copulate with.  But we can still look, fantasize, dream, wish, and we do.  Some people do this more than others, but I doubt that anyone never does it.

People often talk about sexual fluidity, but they don't seem to really mean it.  If your desires aren't genetically, immutably rooted in your being, they don't really count and needn't be respected.  Which I think plays a role in the idea that discovering you're attracted to someone or members of a group you hadn't been attracted to before must be "fetishizing" them - if you weren't aware of it from the age of five, it's not authentic and is probably wicked and exploitative.  So, by Dan's assumptions, what does it mean that I wasn't attracted to fifty-year-old men when I was twenty, but I am now, at sixty-eight?  Was I really, genetically attracted to them already?  Should I have gone to bed with them even though I wasn't attracted to them, because I might be attracted them forty years later? If this case isn't comparable to being attracted to men of a specific "racial" category, how is it different?

There also seems to be a widespread assumption (which may coexist in someone's mind with other, contradictory ones) that our erotic partners are people who rock us to the core.  From what other people have written or said (listening to the stories of other volunteers on the GLB Speakers Bureau has taught me a lot), a significant number of people accepted erotic overtures from people they weren't particularly attracted to, with a "Why not?" attitude, especially but not always when they were younger and less experienced.

One of our volunteers from a rural background recounted how, when he was in high school, he met another gay kid his own age.  They came out to one another and became friends, and discussed whether they should have sex.  Neither had any experience up to this point, and didn't know how long it would be before they had another opportunity.  In the end they decided not to, because they weren't especially attracted to one another.  The instructor of the Psychology class we were addressing became uncomfortable at that point and reassured her students that not all gay men would have sex with just anyone, as if it were unreasonable for two people with few options to get together faute de mieux.  The situation isn't only a gay one; it's the premise of all the man-and-woman-on-a-desert-island cartoons I saw in magazines when I was growing up.  It's also the premise of arranged marriages, where erotic attraction is low on the list of priorities for the matchmakers.  What is important in any erotic situation is that both partners must have the right to say no.

Dan Savage seems to be assuming in this case that they don't have the right to say no, to not be attracted to people for irrational, even petty reasons.  But all erotic desire is irrational: it's not based on a fact-based evaluation of the possibilities.  No one needs a reason to desire another, or to refuse another's overtures.  I'm pretty sure Dan doesn't believe that it's illegitimate for him not to find women "hot."  I know that consent is one of the touchstones of his erotic ethic.  What I don't understand is why he thinks that he's justified in dumping on someone for not being attracted to any other people.  Not being attracted to someone of a given "race" is no worse, and no better, than not being attracted to them on any other basis, and no one should have to justify not being attracted to someone, even someone who wants them very badly.

There's also a difference between not being attracted to a person and choosing not to copulate with them.  One might decline for any number of reasons: being in a monogamous relationship at the moment, not wanting to copulate with anyone at the moment, having religious or other principled reasons for abstention, not being in the mood right now, not wanting to copulate without being in a committed relationship with the other, etc.  Someone I knew years ago, a white Southerner with pretensions to gentility, acknowledged the beauty of a young African-American man we both knew.  But then my acquaintance became uncomfortable: "Oh, Ah couldn't," he said repeatedly, "Ah just couldn't, Ah couldn't."  So, I said, don't.  But he couldn't seem to let it alone.  Maybe he eventually rethought his assumptions about his desires (though his desire in this case was clear enough) and his criteria for an erotic partner; it didn't come up again.  But should he have decided to bed this young man because he had hangups about sex with black men?  What assumptions are we dealing with here?

"Race" is not the only issue.  As I've mentioned, sex/gender is another, and it's not clear why it's privileged -- why Dan Savage shouldn't consider himself a dumb fucking gay man for not wanting to have sex with women.  One reason I object to the bogus claim that we're all basically bisexual is that in practice it's often used to try to nag someone who into having erotic experience they're not interested in having because not being bisexual is so uptight.  Even if I were bisexual -- a "perfect 3 on the Kinsey Scale" as some doofuses have put it -- there would still be plenty of people of both sexes I wouldn't be attracted to.

There has also been some controversy because some lesbians refuse to copulate with transwomen.  Whether that refusal expresses prejudice ought to be irrelevant.  If it is, who would want to get naked with someone prejudiced against them?  I happened on a blog post on this matter a couple of years ago, and some commenters denied that anyone was saying that lesbians must have sex with transwomen - but very quickly some other commenters made it clear that that was exactly what they were saying.  You can argue with the rationalizations that some have given for not copulating with transwomen, they might be prejudiced or bigoted, but none of this overrides the principle of consent: everybody's right to say no and to have that decision respected.

One of the ongoing themes in discourse about human sexuality has been the attempt to justify negating consent: why someone should not be allowed to say no.  Sometimes it's just personal petulance -- I want you, why don't you want me, you have to give me what I want because I want it. But even then, the nagger may try to invoke larger principles.  Almost everybody pays lip service to consent, but in practice, they're not so sure.  I still don't know why Dan Savage thinks that people should be shamed or coerced into acknowledging desires they don't in fact have.  If you're not consciously aware of being attracted to someone, you're not attracted to them.  Maybe that will change, but for now, it's not there.

Am I running on too long about a minor issue?  I don't think so.  Variations on this issue are surprisingly common.  Most attention has been given to defending people's freedom to have the kinds of sex they want; less has been devoted to defending their freedom not to have sex they don't want.  It's interesting how easily asserting the first turns into denying the second.

Prejudice

Dan Savage has struck again.  Answering a letter from a liberal white guy about his girlfriend's sketchy comments about the attractiveness of black and Asian men --

The position that I’ve always held is that we’re attracted to individuals, not types, and it’s wrong to have expectations of people based on race—especially when it comes to sexualizing/fetishizing people. I think we should date and have sex with whomever we want and not carry prejudiced expectations into our relationships. 

The woman's remarks, as he reported them, were perhaps sketchy but not outrageous: she "has a thing for black guys" and found a Korean-American friend "handsome despite not typically being attracted to Asian guys."  It seems to me that people tend to fall back on cliches in talking about their attractions and sex lives, because that's what we learn from our culture and few people bother to think it through.  If someone is often attracted to people of color, "I have a thing for them" is likely how they'll express it in casual conversation, partly because that's how other white people will phrase it to them.  "You have a thing for black guys, huh?"  And that question expresses all sort of malignant assumptions about whom a white person should be attracted to.  I've never been asked, "You have a thing for white guys, don't you?" even though most of the men I've dated have been white, just because of the law of averages in the American Midwest.  Dating non-white men inspires comment in a racist society.  If I don't feel it's noteworthy myself, plenty of other people will make it their business to enlighten me.

Since the letter-writer has no information about how she actually treats the black men she dates, it's premature at best to say that she's fetishizing / sexualizing (!) in a way that would bother them in face-to-face, pelvis-to-pelvis interaction.  (I threw in the exclamation point because when you're attracted to an individual, you are "sexualizing" them by definition.  Liberal discourse on sex is impoverished in its own way.)  The liberal guy goes on to blurt out, all unawares, some significant "prejudiced expectations" of his own, for which Dan rightly called him out.

But Dan also wrote:

But instead of reconsidering their ideas about attractiveness, a dumb fucking white person—even one from a liberal background—is likelier to say something stupid like “I don’t usually find Asian guys hot, but your Korean friend is attractive,” rather than rethinking their assumptions about their desires. Declaring one Asian guy an exception allows someone like your girlfriend to have her racist cake (“I don’t find Asian guys hot”) and eat it too (“But this Asian guy is hot”).

I think that saying something stupid like "I don't usually find Asian guys hot, but your Korean friend is attractive," is how a person begins to rethink their assumptions about their desires.  (Except for "hot," a label that has always grated on me.)  It may not come up to Dan's or Liberal Guy's standards of enlightened discourse, but then both of them have their own cliches for discussing attractiveness.  I don't see anything racist even in Dan's (and it's his, not her) supposedly stupid way of putting it.

Dan went on:

I have to say, though, I disagree with you on one thing: People do have types, and there’s nothing wrong with having types.

This starts off well.  I agree that people have types, and there's nothing wrong with having types, though this also means that it will inspire comment when people are attracted by someone who isn't their type.  But I also agree with Liberal Guy that we are attracted to individuals.  After a certain amount of experience with attraction, however, one may notice (or others will notice for one) that some of those individuals have some traits in common, so one may speak of having a type.  That can be a box one uses to limit one's reactions and experience, though people have the right to do so; or it may just be a mildly interesting fact one has deduced from one's experience.  There are those who humblebrag that they are only attracted to a vanishingly small number of people, one more of the many ways people find to rationalize and exalt their own tastes.  I learned early on that I was pleased, even delighted, when I was attracted to someone who wasn't one of my types.  I'm also intrigued when I'm not attracted to someone who 'should' be my type.  But in both cases, it's of intellectual not practical interest.  However you react to such a discovery, there is no obligation to follow through on it, and of course (except that many people forget this) there is no guarantee that the person you're attracted to will be attracted back.  Even if you're attracted to types, you will be interacting with an individual -- an individual with his or her own types and desires, who may not be attracted to you.

Since many are fascinated by the origins of desire, it's fair to ask where these types come from.  No one knows, any more than anyone knows where the type that is standard -- sex/gender -- comes from.  Is a type a master category encoded in me, an unconscious filter that determines who I'll desire?  Is it in my genes?  Was I born with it?  I doubt it very much.  I think it's something learned, based partly but not predictably on early experience, but also shaped by later experience.  When I was eighteen, for example, men of forty seemed old and I was almost never attracted to them.  Now I'm sixty-eight, and men of forty seem young, and I'm often attracted to them.  But I'm not attracted to all forty year old males, nor to all white men, nor to all Asian men, nor to all black men.

Which brings me to Dan's peroration:

It’s a good idea to ask ourselves whether our “types” are actually ours and not just assigned to us by conventional standards of beauty (white, slim, young) or a thoughtless/fetishizing reaction to those standards (a desire to transgress with nonwhite, larger, or older folks).

I agree, it's a good idea to ask these questions, and I have the only correct answer: "Yes," to both.  Our types are both ours and assigned to us by conventional standards.  The categories and language ("hot," for example) we use to think or talk about them come from society, but we aren't absolutely bound by them.  Where did those standards come from, anyway?  We know that they change over time and vary from culture to culture.  And not everyone conforms to the assignment; probably no one conforms in every particular, or all the time.  Nonconformity produces cognitive dissonance, and people will try to explain to themselves as well as to others, why they like someone they're not supposed to like, or don't like someone they should.  Most people will do a crappy job of it.  But it's not important to do it much better.  What is important is treating the people we're attracted to with respect, which seems obvious to me (if you want something from someone, shouldn't you ask nicely?) but clearly isn't obvious to everybody.

I think these problems arise partly because erotic desire produces anxiety: it's not under conscious control, and people hate that.  We try to get control by rationalizing our desires, which won't work because they aren't rational.  So you get Liberal Guy's cliches about fetishizing/sexualizing, which he got from society but adopted, or Dan's about conventional standards and whether they're ours or society's.  Yet Dan thinks more about these questions than most people; it's his job.  The wrench in the works is that heterosexuality is both something assigned (to everybody) by society, and yet it feels like one's own.  That's what social construction means: what we have learned feels as if it's "natural." 

Notice that Dan writes as if he assumes that desire for non-whites, older or heavier folks comes from a "desire to transgress" instead of being one's own authentic wish.  (What are non-whites in America supposed to do?  Society tells them that only whites are desirable, but society also tells them they shouldn't desire whites.)  That's certainly an assumption assigned by society - I can't count the times I've been told that I'm gay out of a desire to rebel against society, not from genuine desire for males.  One reason it's absurd is that so many gay people are utterly conformist.  Another is that rebelling is hard work, and if I had sex with men in order to rebel, it would eventually get tiresome, and I'd get less and less pleasure from it.  I wouldn't be surprised if some people try to deal with disapproval of their desires by rationalizing them as rebellion, but who knows?  Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?  And if we're going to talk about assigned desires and types, heterosexuality would be more suspect than any other fetish.  Homosexuality would be a close second, even though it's officially disapproved, but then it falls under Dan's proscription of rebellion.  It's very telling that someone like Dan, who believes that sexual orientation -- fetishizing one sex or the other -- is inborn, also believes that it's so malleable under social pressure.

Underneath Dan Savage's rebellious, foul-mouthed exterior there beats the heart of the Catholic conservative he was raised to be.  The function of his strictures, regardless of his conscious intention, is to keep people corralled within the boundaries of conventional standards.  You're white and attracted to a non-white person?  First make sure you aren't fetishizing them - and you can never really be sure you aren't, so play safe and fetishize only white people.  Apparently you needn't worry about fetishizing them.  Some years ago, Dan was celebrating his own fetish (which he delicately called a "bias") for slim, hairless, athletic young guys in "tighty-whities" (a variety of fetish underwear), to the point of inviting readers to send in photos.  As he pointed out, "Because it's my column, and when you've got a column you can get away with that sort of shit. (If Miss Manners can do it, why can't I?)"  Or maybe it wasn't a fetish, because it was Dan's.  Fetish for thee, bias for me.

Fetishize Me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar

A creepy Dan Savage column this morning.

Here's part of the first question.

I’m a straight white woman in my early 30s. In theory, I’ve always been into men of all races—but in practice, most of my exes are Latino and white. In September, I met this really handsome Chinese American guy, and I feel like he rewired me. I’ve been exclusively attracted to Asian guys since. I’m not writing to ask if this is racist, because I’m not asking these guys to, like, speak Korean to me in bed or do any role-playing stuff. We just date and have sex, same as my past relationships. But if any of these dudes saw my Tinder matches, they’d be like, “This woman has a thing for Asian guys.” Which I do, but it’s pretty new. Is this normal? Do people just change preferences like that?...

Here's the beginning of Dan's answer:

Here’s my general take on race-specific sexual preferences: So long as you can see and treat your sex partners as individuals and not just as objects—we are all also objects—and so long as you can express your preferences without coming across and/or being a racist shitbag, and so long as you’ve interrogated your preferences to make sure they’re actually yours and not a mindless desire for what you’ve been told you’re supposed to want (i.e., the currently prevailing beauty standard or its equally mindless rejection, the “transgressive” fetishization of the “other”), then it’s okay to seek out sex and/or romantic partners of a particular race.

There are okay things here, like "we are all also objects", and the prescription of treating one's partners "as individuals and not just as objects".  But there are problems.

For one, the demand to interrogate one's preferences "to make sure they're actually yours" etc.  Imagine how Dan would react if someone told a young gay kid to interrogate his or her preferences.   Couldn't being gay be just "a mindless desire for what you've been told you're supposed to want ... or its equally mindless rejection"?  (I was interrogated along these lines myself by heterosexuals when I first came out, in fact.)  And certainly one could demand the same of heterosexuals: are you sure your desires are yours, and not just what you've been told to want by the society, the media, et al.?

As for fetishization, that also characterizes mainstream heterosexuality, and mainstream homosexuality if there can be such a thing.  (Gay men are doing their best to make it a thing.)  Dan would cluck over it, but I don't think he's interrogated his own desires and discourse enough.  Once you start being suspicious of your or other people's motives for a pre-rational phenomenon like sexual desire, you'll find how deep the rabbit hole goes, because there is no bottom to the mind.  As I've discussed before, my own tastes in men have excited criticism from other gay men because I wasn't as excited by certain types as they were, and attracted to types they didn't like.  So, was I just "mindlessly rejecting" the norm?

It's certainly possible, and not uncommon, to treat people badly by objectifying them, but I don't think "fetishization" is the right word or idea for it.  I think there's a great deal of what we used to call puritanism in this interrogation of (usually) other people's desires: it involves a suspicion of desire and pleasure, especially other people's desires and pleasures: I like what I like because it's natural, you like what you like because it's your fetish, your paraphilia.  I've read, though I haven't checked it carefully yet, that some authoritative Christian divines postulated that the ideal, Edenic copulation would be done under control of the will, without irrational pleasure caused by the Fall.  (This distrust of pleasure is not only a Christian, or "Abrahamic" impulse, of course.)  Dan's Catholicism, even though he's left it behind, has not entirely left him.

But back to Dan.  He drags in an Asian American "writer and comedian whose work often touches on race and desire," and the guy helpfully piles on:

“It’s not uncommon for people later in life to discover that they’re attracted to something they’d never considered sexy before—full-grown adults are out here discovering they’re bi every damn day,” said Booster. “But she went 30 years before she saw one Asian man she was attracted to? And now this guy has ‘rewired’ her to be attracted only to Asian men?”

First, I don't think the lady said she'd never been attracted to any Asian men before.  Read it again: she's been "into men of all races" "in theory." Most of her exes have been white or Latino.  Since she's evidently dating around, I see no reason to suppose that she's never dated an Asian man before, let alone never seen "one Asian man she was attracted to."  (I've seen many men I was attracted to, but didn't have sex with because they weren't available for various reasons.)  But who knows?  We both might be reading too much into a query that doesn't answer every question we might like to ask.

Second, I take her claim that she's been "rewired" with a grain of salt.  She met the guy in question in September, six months ago.  Who knows when her letter was written, how long it sat around before Dan answered it?  Six months is a very short time for an adult to decide that her life has been permanently changed.  For comparison, Dan usually advises couples to live together for at least a year before they get married, because marriage is a big, quasi-permanent commitment.  And this writer is not even making a commitment.  No one, I hope, would criticize her if she starts dating non-Asian men again in another six months, or a year or two, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if she does.  My own tastes and desires have changed over the years, and I don't expect them to be permanent.  We hear a lot about the "fluidity" of desire and sexuality, but hardly anyone seems really to believe in it.

Dan's consultant is concerned that "she has shifted to exclusively fucking Asian guys and feels the need to write a letter about it. That feels like a red flag, and yet I can’t pinpoint why."  Well, maybe she feels the need to write a letter about it because she has experienced a seismic change in her attractions, which is interesting, and also because many people including Dan and his consultant would like her to feel uneasy about it, so she wants some reassurance.  I don't see any red flags in her letter myself.

What takes this particular column over the line from annoying to creepy is the second letter, from a white guy married to an Asian woman.  They have great sex, but she doesn't like to give blowjobs, and now the husband is fantasizing about getting a blowjob from a man.

How do I convince my wife to agree to this? She’s afraid I might like it; I obviously hope I do. There’s nothing I want more than to get head on the way home and then be able to tell her about it and fuck her later that night. How can I convince her to let me do this while also being able to tell her about it and be truthful?

Dan's answer focuses on an issue the writer hadn't actually raised, whether he would be bisexual or still straight.  This distracts him from what I see as a red flag, the writer's repeated wish to "convince [his] wife to agree to this" despite her anxieties.  Dan does at least say that if she says no and sticks by it, the answer is no.  I think he should have borne down a little harder on the husband's entitlement and even obliviousness.  As the first letter writer's experience shows, a good erotic experience can have a powerful effect on a person.  There is no guarantee that one hot blowjob from a guy won't lead this husband to want more of them, and as Dan would ordinarily stress, opening up a relationship increases the risks of STDs and other problems.  The wife's worries are well-founded.  (That she teased him about getting a blowjob from someone else before they were married doesn't change that.)  The trouble isn't that the husband is fetishizing anyone -- though fantasizing specifically about getting a blowjob from another man indicates that some of that is going on -- but that he's minimizing his partner's concerns and interests.  I can sympathize, Ven der putz shteht, ligt der sechel in drerd and all that, but Dan's take here lacks a certain amount of conviction.

Social Construction Workers

Dan Savage's sex-advice column for February 8 was a compendium of brief answers he gave to questions submitted by live audiences recently.  This one caught my attention.

Why are liberals okay with people self-identifying their gender but not their race? Aren’t both considered social constructs?

“If race and gender are both social constructs,” Evan Urquhart writes at Slate, “and if both have been built around observable biological traits, then what is the crucial difference that makes a felt gender identity a true one, but a felt racial identity fraudulent? The short answer is that most trans people and their allies suspect that transgender people are born that way.” (Read the rest of the essay here.)

The full trifecta: neither the questioner, Savage, nor Evan Urquhart, know what they are talking about, especially with regard to "social construction."  Urquhart gets a point or two for recognizing that social constructs are "built around observable biological traits," and also for not freaking out over comparisons between "racial identity" and "gender identity," but goes wrong from there.  And even "observable biological traits" is wrong, come to think of it.  Social constructs include language, religion, nationality, etc., none of which are built around observable biological traits.  I'm not sure how sexual orientation would fit in there either; probably it doesn't.  (It involves observable external biological sex -- whether one is male or female, and whether one's desired sexual partners are male or female -- and there's a common mythology about homosexuals as physiological sexual variants, to which I'll return.  But you cannot always or even usually tell a person's sexual orientation by looking at them; false positives and false negatives abound.)

As for "most trans people and their allies suspect that transgender people are born that way," well, it may be that this is what most trans people and their allies suspect (!), but there is no evidence that it's true, and Urquhart knows it:

I say that we “suspect” trans people are born that way because the science isn’t in, yet. When Caitlyn Jenner spoke vaguely of female brains in male bodies it was because there isn’t any clearer terminology that can be employed to speak about this hunch, but it persists in the minds of many trans people and their allies anyway. We do have increasing evidence for specific genetic and epigenetic differences between gay men and straight men that result in homosexuality, but so far scientists have yet to investigate the rest of the letters in LGBTQ as thoroughly.   For now, even those who are most familiar with this topic can’t say for sure what being transgender is, and what might cause it. There are, however, circumstantial reasons to believe it may also have a genetic and/or epigenetic basis. For one thing, many trans people report feeling that their assigned gender didn’t match their inner conception of their gender from earliest childhood. We also have evidence of individuals who dressed, acted, or passed as the opposite sex across many cultures and many historical eras. This, paired with the evidence that sexual orientations are innate, not learned, leads us to hypothesize that gender identities function similarly.

Urquhart is wrong about the evidence for a biological basis for homosexuality; he's also evidently ignorant of the history of "female brains in male bodies," which used to be a popular conception for male homosexuality.  (He presumably hasn't noticed either that the scientific "evidence" about inborn homosexuality is about sex/gender, not sexual orientation.)  Despite the ongoing scientific efforts to prove otherwise, however, there aren't "female brains," and a fortiori there aren't female brains in male bodies: the brain in a male body is a male brain.  Whatever differences have been claimed have been differences of degree, not of kind, just as with racial differences.  To assert otherwise is like claiming that a tall woman has a male height in a woman's body.  (Given the amount of hassle that tall women get, though, many people might accept that metaphor.)

Urquhart says that "science continues to be done that supports the idea of gender differences within the human brain, while the possibility of such differences existing between races has been roundly rejected."  This isn't true either.  Scientists continue to try to prove innate racial differences no matter how consistently such work is discredited, and popular media (and the public) are just as fond of the idea as they are of the idea of innate gender differences.  That scientists continue to try to find innate sex/gender differences, even though they consistently fail, says more about scientists' culturally-inculcated prejudices than it does about the validity of the idea, just as with race.

As it happens, the word Jenner used was "soul," not "brain," which is even less helpful for Urquhart's argument.  People do talk casually about the soul as if it were something that is known to exist, independently of the body, but it's not a scientific concept (for what that's worth).  Even if there is such a thing as the soul, we know nothing about it, and can't assign it a sex/gender, a race, a nationality, a political party, or any other trait.  It's not illegitimate to use the word as a metaphor, but it can't be used to prove anything.  As with height, just because there's a word for it, that doesn't prove it's a Thing.

Probably most gay people and our allies do believe that sexual orientation is inborn, but they're wrong too, so the same belief among trans people and their allies isn't evidence for anything.  In general, a conviction that one was born with a certain trait doesn't prove that it was in fact inborn. Nor, contrary to the equally widespread and equally false belief spread by Dan Savage and others, do civil rights depend on whether a given status is inborn, learned, or freely chosen.  (Or a social construct, a term which plays no role in civil rights legislation.)

Dan Savage's questioner probably was just trolling, though the troll was effective because it pinpointed basic incoherences in what trans people and their advocates say about gender.  Urquhart's article addressed chosen "racial" identity, occasioned by the controversy over Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who passed as black for several years.  As far as I can tell, though, Dolezal has not claimed that she was truly, essentially black (a black brain or soul in a white body?), or applied the other rhetoric typical of the transgender community and its allies; Urquhart doesn't, at any rate, report that she did.  (According to Richard Seymour, "Dolezal did not claim to be ‘trans-racial’; she claimed to be black, and still does.")  Trans people aren't claiming to choose their gender identities: as Urquhart says, they see their identities as innate and unchosen, forced on them by their genes or brain structure.  The term "self-identify" is unfortunate, though, since it does imply that some kind of choice is being made.  Yet the verb "identify as" has become normative, even epidemic, in LGBTQ discourse.  It's all very well to "identify as," but what are you really?  Are you Betty Jo Bialowsky, or are you Nancy?

So what about "racial identity"?  I can't see how it could be inborn, any more than any identity could be.  Identities are labels, names, and as such are cultural products.  However, many people do believe in inborn racial identities, and that someone's "felt" racial identity can be considered inauthentic.  There was controversy during Barack Obama's first presidential campaign, over whether he was really African-American because despite his Kenyan father he wasn't descended from slaves or because he was raised in African-American communities.  (He grew up with his white mother and her white parents.)  Leave aside the merits of these claims; I want to point out that they separate biology from racial status and identity as radically as transgender separates biological sex from sex/gender status and identity.  It would follow from these criteria that a white-appearing descendant of Thomas Jefferson's slave Sally Heming who grew up in an African-American community would be African-American, regardless of what she looked like, while a first-generation black Nigerian immigrant would not.  If you add to that a belief in the existence of the soul as a distinct and separate substance, then a person could plausibly claim to have a black soul in a white body.  And what about "mixed-race" people?  Do they have black brains and white brains in their bodies, fighting for supremacy?  Do they have "mixed-race" brains?  Or what?

People who invoke social constructs in these debates overlook something important in "social construction," namely the first word in the term.  "Social construction" doesn't mean that an individual can choose an identity (or whatever) at will.  If anything, it means the opposite.  "Social construct" means that there is more or less a consensus in your society about what it means to be (for example) a man or a woman.  There is a very great range of variation among actual individuals, so the social construct is often at odds with reality, and people learn to overlook the variation in order to maintain their stereotypes and the cultural solidarity those stereotypes support.  But the whole point of social construction theory is not that people "choose" identities, but that much of what feels natural to them is really learned, acquired, accepted -- not by conscious choice but by absorption of what they see around themselves as they grow up.  Which, come to think of it, undermines Urquhart's argument that gay or trans people's conviction that we can't remember having been otherwise, can't remember learning or choosing to be the way they are, constitutes evidence in favor of the conviction.  The whole point of social construction theory is that what feels natural and innate very often is not.

What this means is that recognizing that a trait is a social construct doesn't license individuals to choose another one.  Consider language.  Though the language I speak is a social construct, my inability to understand a language I don't know is not the result of false consciousness or a closed mind.  Though there is a great deal of variation within any given language, an individual speaker can't stray too far from the socially constructed norms of the language without becoming incomprehensible to others.  One can move around within the realm of one's language, passively acquiring or actively adopting variants that signal class, locale, gender, or other difference.  But that is exactly the point: by doing so, one signals the social meanings associated with those variations.  We can, and should, challenge the prejudices that devalue certain linguistic variants, but in doing so we'll come up against powerful essentialist beliefs about the nature of those variants.  If you say "ain't," for example, you are signaling to language bigots that you are an ignorant, uneducated, low-class person.  By nature.

As far as I know, though, no one has so far claimed a 'felt racial identity' at odds with the one assigned them by society.  It doesn't appear that Rachel Dolezal did.  Quite a few people are claiming a 'felt gender identity' at odds with the one they were assigned, but as we've seen, their rationales are not convincing.  There's no reason to believe that any gender identity is inborn.  This doesn't have to be a problem, just as it doesn't matter whether sexual orientation is inborn.  It seems that people react differently to claims about racial identity than they do to claims about gender identity, and that's an interesting problem in itself.

It seems pretty clear to me that people generally invoke biology and culture, social construction and essentialism, as expediency requires.  But that's not unusual when vexed issues are being discussed.  Perhaps it's a mistake to take them literally, since they aren't interested in rationality or evidence: they 'reason' backwards from their conclusions, to put a sheen of reasonability on what they believe for no reason, or for bad reasons.

I'm not sure that social construction theory is compatible with the political needs of trans people, or of gay people.  To assert an identity is essentialist, even when the identity is clearly not genetic or epigenetic: nationality, religion, etc.  This doesn't mean that trans people are wrong, nor that they must prove that gender identity is inborn before they can affirm the identities they have constructed and chosen.  But it is wrong to make claims about nature or cause that have no evidence to back them up; making false statements isn't good on general principles, and it's imprudent to hang political demands on grounds that don't exist and may be disproven, let alone on bad science that has already been discredited.

Didn't I Say That on the Other Side of the Record?

The advice columnist Dan Savage "called out" antigay bigot Ben Carson last week for saying on CNN that being gay was a "choice."  Carson had pointed to people who "go into prison straight and come out gay."  Savage challenged Carson to prove his claim by choosing to become gay himself, by sucking Savage's dick.

I've said before that one reason I'm finding it hard to write this blog is that I feel like I'm repeating myself.  But then, so is Dan Savage: he said the same thing to another antigay bigot a few years ago, and I can't add much to what I wrote about him at the time.  Since then, however, he's shown his moral superiority to bigots by calling some high school students "pansy-assed" because they walked out on one of his personal appearances, using a homophobic epithet to try to shame them; and by saying that he sometimes thinks about "fucking the shit out" of the antigay bigot Rick Santorum, again using the homophobic trope that fucking another man degrades him.  As I wrote of Savage's remarks about Santorum, Savage is indulging in homophobic abuse that no one should be allowed to get away with, using sex as a metaphor for debasement and humiliation. He's tapping into the same reservoir of male violence that drives queerbashers and rapists.  And, of course, he's also revealing his own hangups about being gay himself.  So why listen to Ben Carson when you can get your daily dose of antigay bigotry from Dan Savage?

Carson backed down and apologized, but also "criticized CNN for airing the comments he'd made in an interview and said he won't be addressing gay rights issues for the duration of his presidential campaign."  Hahahahah, I'm sure he won't.  If he's going to be a presidential candidate, he'd better get used to the comments he makes during interviews (!) being aired and otherwise published.  I doubt his candidacy will get very far, though, since like other Republican hopefuls he's prone to making stupid gaffes that will entertain his hardcore supporters but put off everybody else.

On the other hand, Carson said something true: that "up until this point there have been no definitive studies that people are born into a specific sexuality."  Maybe his medical training has paid off after all!  But if he really cared about factual accuracy, he wouldn't make any statements at all about the etiology of sexual orientation, and he certainly wouldn't have said what he said about the effects of prison on sexual orientation.  Nor would he claim, as he continues to do, that homosexuality is a choice.  But he seems to be driven to make a fool of himself, so even in the apology he posted on Facebook he said that "we are always born male and female", which as a scientist he should know is oversimple, and that he thinks "marriage is a religious institution"; if he really believed that, he'd reject civil marriage, the interference of the State in a religious institution.

It's interesting how far Carson (like other religious bigots) has surrendered to the Politically Correct Gay Agenda.  Does he want homosexuals to be executed, as Scripture commands?  Does he want to reinstate sodomy laws, or Don't Ask Don't Tell?  Does he want same-sex couples to be outside of all legal recognition and protection?  No, he does not:

I support human rights and Constitutional protections for gay people, and I have done so for many years. I support civil unions for gay couples, and I have done so for many years. I support the right of individual states to sanction gay marriage, and I support the right of individual states to deny gay marriage in their respective jurisdictions.

That's not a Bible-believing Christian talking, not one who stands firm against the moral erosion of American society.  That's a flaming liberal.  Even when he says that marriage should be restricted to one man and one woman, he's agreeing with the liberals that polygamy -- a Biblical and traditional value, mind you -- is wrong.  Someone really should ask him, though: since he thinks marriage should be defined and sanctioned by states rather than the Federal government, does he think that Loving v. Virginia, which overturned state laws against "interracial" marriage, should be overturned?  And if he really believes that permitting legal same-sex marriage is an illegitimate redefinition of marriage, why is he willing to let states do it?

"I am not a politician," Carson concluded.  As a presidential hopeful, he is a politician.  But he won't be one for long, the way he's going.

Ah there, you see?  I've said all this before, though sometimes about different people.

I And I-dentity

Speaking of identity, Dan Savage dug himself in a little deeper this week.

You may recall that a week ago he answered a question from a reader who in passing labeled himself "a poly."  Dan told him sternly "You are not 'a poly.' ... There's no such thing as a person who's 'a poly,' just as there's no such thing as a person who is 'a monogamous.'

So when tweaked by a tweet on Twitter, Dan protested, "from my perspective, polyamory and monogamy are relationship models, not sexual orientations."  But no one, not Poly or the tweeter, had said they were "sexual orientations."  As I wrote before, "sexual orientation" means which sex (male, female, or both) a person's erotic interests are oriented toward.  (We live in a strange world when pedophilia can be considered a "sexual orientation" by professional sexologists, but "polyamory" can't.)  Dan went on:

Poly can be central to someone’s sexual self-conception, and it can be hugely important, but I don’t think it’s an orientation in the same way that gay, straight, or bisexual are orientations.

Evidence?  There's none, of course.  I suppose Dan is relying here on the great circular argument that we know homosexuality is an orientation because it's inborn, and orientations are inborn so we know homosexuality is an orientation, which is therefore inborn because orientations are inborn.  This is at best an argument from definition, because there's no good evidence that homosexuality (or heterosexuality or bisexuality) is inborn.  Many gay people decided first that because they felt that their sex lives were central to their sexual self-conception, it must be inborn, and only then did the wave of research in the 90s try to find evidence to support the claim.  Another popular rationale was that they'd always known that they were gay, just as Poly wrote that "he has always known he's a poly."  If that's evidence for one, it's evidence for the other.  So far the jury is at best out, and preponderance of the evidence is against a primary role for the genes in the formation of sexual orientation.  Under the circumstances, no one can honestly claim that homosexuality is a "sexual orientation" if innateness is essential to the notion; we just can't say, because we don't know.

He concludes, "No one is legislating against polyamory here. Just thinkin’ about things."  Well, no, Dan isn't thinking, or even thinkin'.  He's just jerking the old knee.  Just like his old role model Ann Landers.  Landers used to lambaste people who wanted to get a divorce, Doctor Laura-style, because they were losers who didn't believe in commitment and responsibility.  Then her daughter got a divorce, and she changed her line to a more forgiving one.  Then Ann herself got a divorce.  As I recall, she eventually admitted that she'd made an agonizing reappraisal, and that her previous stance had been less than humane.  Dan seems to be made of sterner stuff.

No one needs anyone else's permission to claim an identity, no matter how outré or twee.  One might object that if Poly hadn't wanted permission, he wouldn't have asked Savage about it; but he didn't.  His question was whether a poly and a mono could find happiness together.  (Dan's answer to that part of it: Probably not; stick to your own kind, weirdo!)  It was Savage who took a detour to spend most of his reply telling Poly that he wasn't a poly, that there's no such thing as a poly, so there too!  It wasn't relevant to the question, just a hobbyhorse of Dan's.  He has related problems with bisexuals, and with the question of whether people who aren't born that way are protected by civil rights laws.  Well, we all have our blind spots.

Poly Wanna ... ?

Dan Savage, by contrast, gave me the giggles last week.  His latest column includes a letter from a " 30-year-old straight man who has always known that he is a poly."  ("Poly" being short for "polyamorous.")  This man is romantically involved with a woman who "is a monogamous person."  His question: "Can someone who is poly be happy with someone who isn't?"

Dan got into a big huff.

You are not “a poly.”

Poly is not a sexual identity, PP, it’s not a sexual orientation. It’s not something you are, it’s something you do. There’s no such thing as a person who is “a poly,” just as there’s no such thing as a person who is “a monogamous.” Polyamorous and monogamous are adjectives, not nouns. There are only people—gay, straight, bi—and some people are in monogamous relationships, some are in open relationships, some are in polyamorous relationships, some are in monogamish relationships, some are in four-star-general relationships. These are relationship models, PP, not sexual identities.

He was partially right.  Polyamory is not a sexual identity, because "sexual identity" means your sense of yourself as male or female.  (Which is not the same as being male or female.)  Nor is it a sexual orientation, since "sexual orientation" refers to the sex of the persons you are erotically interested in.  But both of these words get thrown around carelessly in ways that chips away at their actual meaning.  "Sexual orientation," for example, has been incorrectly applied to pedophilia, although children are not a sex.  "Sexual identity" is routinely confused with "sexual orientation."  This happens partly because of the ambiguity of "sex" and "sexual" in English, an ambiguity which many people seem bent on muddying even more than it already is.

But Savage is wrong that there's no such a thing as a person who is a "poly": he's answering a question from such a person.  The distinction between adjectives and nouns in English is vague, as is the difference between a person who does something and a person who is something.  There is no reason why a person who prefers non-monogamous relationships shouldn't "identify" as a poly, or just as polyamorous.

Savage's declarations can just as easily be applied to gay people, and have been.  For example, a homosexual relationship is a relationship (usually erotic) between two people of the same sex; you might say, and probably should say that "homosexual" is a relationship model, not a kind of person.  A homosexual, or bisexual, or heterosexual, is not a kind of person, any more than a Protestant or a Catholic is a kind of person. Gore Vidal insisted that this was the case for decades, as did Alfred Kinsey.  Indeed, one of the enduring claims of human sexual behavior and stigma-avoidance is that only one person in a homosexual act is "homosexual": the other, if male, is "trade," "normal," a "real man."  Just because you've, you know, experimented once or twice or a hundred times with gay sex, that doesn't mean you're gay; maybe you're just bi-curious.  Two male homosexuals fooling around together is "lesbianism."  This assumption also underlies most current scientific research on "sexual orientation."

Given the way language works, though, I don't see how it is unreasonable for people to refer to themselves by nouns or adjectives that refer to their relationship models, to the work they do, the religion they practice, the country they were born in, the language they speak, the hand they favor for writing, and so on.  This only becomes a problem when a person starts to believe that claiming an identity is evidence of the "kind of person they are."  It doesn't prove that you were born that way, or that your identity is your nature, or anything like that.  Many gay people, including Dan Savage, do make this mistake, but it is still a mistake.  He can see that when his poly reader makes it, but not when he makes it.

And yet, it doesn't seem implausible to me that a person might prefer non-monogamous relationships, or monogamous ones, as a matter of temperament.  This aspect of temperament might be influenced by biological factors, even (gasp!) by one's genes.  I'm sure that an enterprising psychologist would be able to generate plenty of meaningless correlations that would be used to argue just that, a genetic basis for nonmonogamy.  (Indeed, Dan himself enthusiastically endorsed a book which argued that human beings, especially males, are 'naturally' nonmonogamous.  How soon we forget... )  In which case it's not going very far at all to claim polyamory as a temperament, an essence, a kind of person.  Kinds of person are defined in all sorts of ways that have nothing to do with biology: language, place of national origin, marital status, religion, occupation.  And once you've opened the door to the idea that gay people could claim same-sex desire as a basis for identity, why not accept "poly" as an identity?  You have to give good reasons why not, but Dan Savage only offers ex cathedra pronouncements.  Why does he react so strongly against the idea?

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.

The Beam In Your Own Eye

One of my e-mail correspondents asked me yesterday for my take on the gay Romney aide who was forced to resign even before his job started, by a homophobes' feeding frenzy.  I haven't answered yet, because I don't really have a take on it.  It's not exactly a surprise; what would have been surprising would have been if Romney had stood by his man, as George W. Bush stood by his gay appointees early in his administration.

My reader made a popular point, one that I've used sometimes myself in the past: why would people want to join an organization -- a political party or a religion, say -- "which basically considers him subhuman."  I'm less inclined than I used to be to say things like this, because I've come to doubt whether words like "basically" or "fundamentally" can be applied to such institutions.  Is the Democratic Party, for example, really "basically" on the side of gay people, especially given the President's opposition to same-sex marriage? The Democrats lost a lot of white racists to the Republican Party after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but did it really become The Anti-Racist Party as a result?  Right now, I agree, the Republican Party is on balance a lot more hostile to gay people than the Democratic Party, but that could change, and overlooking the variation within groups is never a good idea.

The same thing is true of religion, which is what I originally sat down to write about today.  The Daily Beast just published an attack on Dan Savage by Jay Michaelson, an avowed gay Christian and associate editor of Religion Dispatches at the Beast.

At a high-school journalism convention two weeks ago, Savage said to the audience, “We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people … the same way we learned to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery,” and so on. When a few presumably religious kids walked out, Savage called them “pansy-assed.” He later apologized.

As well he should have, because Savage -- of all people! -- was using a homophobic slur to shame kids, when he didn't even know, any more than Michaelson does, why they were walking out.  But that's not what really bothered Michaelson.

Savage’s remarks ... were as damaging to LGBT people as the Christian right’s inevitable and hostile reactions to them. Worse, in fact, because they represented a notable gay leader affirming that one must choose between sexuality and religion, between God and gay.

This, not to put too fine a point on it, is a lie.  According to Michaelson's own quotation, Savage said the exact opposite.  I'm not sure who he meant by "we", but it is Christians and Jews who have "learned to ignore the bullshit in the Bible" about many matters.  (Why non-believers should be bothered even to ignore certain parts of the Bible escapes me.)  Maybe Savage meant that "one must choose between sexuality and religion" (he's not the most coherent thinker, as I've pointed out before) but it's not what he said, and it doesn't follow from what he said.

I've often been accused of the very same thoughtcrime by gay Christians over the years, so I recognize it as a typical red herring, easily disposed of.  Of course, as an atheist, I don't think that anybody should be a Christian, gay or straight, but that's not what my accusers mean.  I don't think there's any inherent conflict between being gay and being a Christian, any more than there's an inherent conflict between being gay and being a Republican, though either stance can lead to conflict and struggle.  Christianity has no inherent moral content or authority; Christians have been able to justify all kinds of practices forbidden by the Bible, whether by conveniently forgetting the prohibitions or by reinterpreting them.  Naturally, Christians don't want to hear this from me, even when I point out that atheism has no inherent moral content either.

Michaelson fits the pattern nicely.

But the truth is that there are many LGBT people who do not regard the Bible as bullshit. They lead open, affirming, sex-positive, and religious lives in every Christian and Jewish denomination in America. That includes gay evangelicals who are also Biblical literalists, gay Orthodox Jews who are committed to Jewish law, and queers of every religion who refuse the choice that Savage—like Rick Santorum, Focus on the Family, and other messengers of intolerance—insists that they make between God and gay. Our very lives refute Savage’s oversimplifications.

In short, religious affiliation has no detectable effect on one's sexual values or practices.  It's nice of Michaelson to agree with me, and with Dan Savage.  He just doesn't seem to realize that he's doing it.

We do not need to “ignore” what the Bible says about gay people, because the Bible says nothing about gay people at all. “Gay” is our construction of sexuality, not the Bible’s. What the Bible does discuss, in six verses out of 31,005 in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, is a set of specific sexual acts, in the context of drawing boundaries between the faithful and the Canaanites, "pagans," and so on. With no more textual acrobatics than we apply to basic moral norms like “Thou Shalt Not Kill”—which despite its seeming clarity is universally understood as not applying in cases of capital punishment, war, or self-defense—these extremely limited verses can be understood literally, narrowly, and with virtually no application to loving, same-sex relationships.

This is typical gay Christian apologetics, which I've often dealt with before.  It's interesting that Michaelson thinks that the verses to which he alludes are best understood "literally [!], narrowly, and with virtually no application to loving, same-sex relationships," though he doesn't follow his own advice.  None of the standard anti-homosexual verses "discuss ... a set of specific sexual acts"; it's a safe bet that Leviticus 18:22 has anal sex between males in mind, for example, but it doesn't specify it, though there's no reason to suppose that Yahweh would have approved of fellatio, as a literal, narrow reading might claim.  Romans 1 speaks only of males burning with lust for each other, and while it's true that Paul was drawing a line between "pagans" and Jesus cultists, that doesn't mean he would have permitted "loving, same-sex relationships" in his churches; "loving, same-sex relationships" were an institution in the "pagan" culture he was denouncing.  Considerably more "textual acrobatics" are needed to accommodate homosexuality than killing, since the Bible itself treats "capital punishment, war," and other kinds of killing as compatible with the Sixth Commandment.  There's no such basis for overriding the biblical prohibitions of male-to-male copulation.

"The Bible says nothing about gay people at all" is another standard evasion.  Michaelson could say as truthfully that the Bible says nothing about heterosexuals at all, or about Jews (in the Old Testament, anyway), or Christians,* or about sex or gender, since none of these words appear in the biblical text.  A narrow reading of Leviticus 18:22 doesn't really help unless you want to advocate lifelong chastity for gay men, or at least forswearing anal intercourse.  Neither is what I'd call a "sex positive" position, and I don't believe Michaelson would either.  As one gay Christian theologian wrote a few years ago, though, how many times does the Bible have to command your execution before it becomes a problem?

I don't really mean to single Michaelson out for bad biblical interpretation; Christians rarely do any better when they try to rationalize ignoring the parts of the Bible they want to ignore, whether it's Jesus' prohibition of divorce and remarriage, his exhortations to mutilate oneself rather than fall into sin, his command to separate from one's birth family and replace it with the Christian community, his condemnations of wealth, his teachings about Hell and damnation, or his apocalyptic teachings.  Which brings me to the core problem with Michaelson's apologetics.

Whereas the Bible has far more than six verses’ worth of non-bullshit about love, honesty, integrity, justice, compassion, diversity, and companionship. This is the positive case LGBT activists should be making: not ignoring the “bullshit,” but celebrating the positive values within Christian and Jewish traditions that mandate the affirmation and acceptance of gay people. Religious people should support equality because of religion, not despite it.

I've often encountered Christians who take this line.  They seem to believe, or at least imply, that if you find a way around the few anti-homosexual verses, there's no reason not to become a Christian. I answer them by arguing that there are a lot more than six verses in the Bible that are objectionable to humane people, and other reasons why Christianity (or any religion) is not a good choice for anyone.  There's a lot of inhumanity in Jesus' teaching, as I suggested above, and a lot that should be rejected for other reasons, such as his (false) teachings about the imminent final judgment.  While it's true that the Bible contains material about "love, honesty, integrity, compassion, diversity, and companionship," there's no need for anyone to rely on the Bible or any other religion to value those things, nor should Christians be allowed to claim them as particularly Christian, or even theist.  And I don't see how Michaelson advances love, honesty, integrity, etc., by writing a tissue of lies about his opponent.  I've often asked why, if Christians have the Truth, they find it necessary to tell so many lies.

I saw Michaelson's article because my Tabloid Friend linked to it on Facebook, which set off a flurry of comments.  The atheists and infidels were busy exposing their own failings, alas.  One answered my remark that atheism also lacks moral content thusly: "We do good because it is the right thing to do, we do not do things because Bronze Age goat herders heard voices in their heads."  Leaving aside the factual point that the books of the Bible are not Bronze Age documents, nor were they written by goat herders, this guy conveniently ignores the wide and deep disagreements among atheists over what "is the right thing to do."  I'm old enough to remember when most atheists took for granted that homosexuality was a mental illness that would fade away when religious repression of our natural sexual impulses was overcome.  Of course they were sure they weren't hateful about it: rather than burn us at the stake or throw us into prison, they compassionately offered us various kinds of "therapy," from talking cures to hormones to shock treatment.  Recent unfortunate events have shown that many modern male atheists have trouble grasping that women don't exist to provide emotional or sexual service to men -- they're people in their own right.  But they're not sexists! they protest.  They're modern liberated guys! ... If biblical sexism was the result of Bronze Age goat herders listening to the voices in their heads, what voices in their heads are today's atheists listening to?

No book, ancient or modern, should be taken as authority.  Everyone should approach claims to authority critically, by which I mean that they/we should be skeptical about them, as well as about our own reactions to them, but also try to think rationally about them.  Which isn't as easy to do as many people think.  That the Bible was written thousands of years ago in other cultures should be borne in mind, but it doesn't render all of its content invalid.  It was written by human beings who were concerned with "the right thing to do," even though I think they were wrong in many instances -- but then so were modern Euro-American rationalists, including me.  When I read most of the Bible some years ago to prepare for my own attack on it, I was still struck by how much of it spoke to me across the centuries.  (Though not many people would agree with me, I felt more of a recognizable human voice coming through the letters of the apostle Paul than through any of the gospels.  It doesn't mean I agreed with him, only that if I could travel back in time I'd rather hang out -- and argue -- with Paul than with Jesus.)

A corollary is that no one book or teacher is enough.  Not everyone reads as widely as I do, but reading and listening as widely as possible is vital to critical thinking.  It's when you attach yourself to one guru that you renounce your responsibility to judge.  The philosopher Walter Kaufmann, from whom I learned a lot, rejected Jesus' Judge not, lest you be judged in favor of Judge, that you may be judged.  It's a more honest position since I've never run into anyone who sided with Jesus's saying who didn't judge (and Jesus himself was extremely judgmental).  We have to judge, so we need to learn to do a better job of it.

*I was wrong about this -- the word "Christian" is used once in the Bible, at Acts 11:26: "The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch."  Which is even less often than the six times, according to Michaelson, that sex between men is mentioned, and would indicate that Christianity is that much less important than sex between men.