An Everlasting Name That Will Endure Forever

 

Just a quickie about this lefty guy's words of wisdom.  It's funny to see "eunuchs" used to mean "subservient toadies," when eunuchs historically have been regarded as ruthless, ambitious plotters who worked behind the scenes to undermine the power structure, not support it. If anything, it's macho men who love hierarchy and subordinate themselves for its perpetuation, and men on the left can't seem to shake off its appeal.

More and Better Masculinities!

I just finished reading Masculinities in Chinese History by Bret Hinsch, published in 2013 by Rowman & Littlefield.  I'd previously read Hinsch's Passions of the Cut Sleeve (California, 1990), a breakthrough study of homosexuality in China, so I figured he'd be worth reading on Chinese manhood.  The book is a bit rushed, as you'd expect when someone tries to cover a huge and complex culture over several millennia; I suspect Hinsch was aiming at an undergraduate readership.  As an introductory survey, it's probably good. but then I'd already done a fair amount of reading in the area.

It wasn't until I'd almost reached the end of the book that I noticed a curious omission in Hinsch's coverage.  In writing about the end of Imperial China he mentions the ongoing theme of Chinese "emasculation" at the hands of the West, though it seems that it was the Japanese who came up with the "sick man of Asia" epithet; certainly they seem to have used it most.

Stricken by a sense of national emasculation, intellectuals and activists began to search for ideologies that could put their nation back on its pedestal, thereby restoring collective honor to Chinese men [151].

The radical reign of terror [of the Cultural Revolution], together with a general sense of powerlessness under an arbitrary totalitarian system, had left many men feeling emasculated [156].

Portraits of virile manhood [in TV series] fascinated a society haunted by a widespread sense of emasculation [158].

As China reconnected with other countries and cultures after 1970,

Ironically, even though women [under Mao] had emulated stereotypical male traits, outwardly bolstering the masculine atmosphere of society, men themselves were left feeling insufficiently manly.  Opening to the outside world further exacerbated the problem.  Chinese were once again able to compare the state of their own masculinity with slick images of idealized manhood transmitted by Western and Japanese media -- and found their own men inadequate in comparison [156-7].

Oh, that's always a good idea -- comparing your reality to fantasy images of cowboys and gangsters from other societies, taken out of their contexts so that you miss all the anxiety about manhood that inspired and permeates them.

What virility actually meant, of course, was the exaltation of violence by "bandits" and rebellious peasants, but

Although the novel and film [Red Sorghum] trumpet male strength and sexual potency, they also depict violence, sadism, murder, and domination of women as signs of a rejuvenated manhood.  The new man [same as the old man] was not necessarily someone a woman would want to meet, much less marry [160].

I've seen a lot of handwringing about male anxiety and inadequacy in academic and other writing about Asia, but also of course about the West.  I'm sure that Hinsch is aware of works like Susan Jeffords's The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Indiana, 1989), about the hit American masculinity took by failing to conquer Vietnam, as worked out in American cinema; and perhaps also Kim Kyung-Hun's The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema (Duke, 2004), a monument of transnational male anxiety inspired partly by Jeffords.  Germany and Japan went through similar tribulation after their respective defeats in World War II.  Chinese men could hardly have imbibed a message of male confidence from other cultures' media, since those media are also steeped in male tears.

Notice too that although women constitute half the Chinese population, as they do in all societies, the burden and trauma of foreign conquest and social change are always assumed to affect only males, and their fragile little egos.  That women suffer by being subjugated, whether by foreign invaders or by local subjugators, is generally ignored, or explained away as harmless due to their "nature" as women.  Most of what I've read by Asian and Asian-American men about their imperiled manhood pays lip service to feminism, since it emerges from American academia, but once lip service has been paid, male resentment of uppity women always returns to center stage.  Despite their pro forma denunciations of Western / American standards, they don't really reject Western masculinity: they are just indignant that they can't share in it.  Masculinity in almost all its forms is a zero-sum game: if you achieve some humanity (which is equated with manhood) less is left for me.  As a faggot no less than as one influenced by feminism, I feel no great sympathy for this attitude.

But back to the matter of "emasculation."  I suddenly realized as I read this final chapter of Masculinities in Chinese History that Hinsch had never said anything about eunuchs -- literally emasculated men -- in Chinese history, though they played a significant role in the imperial court and in the cultural imaginary.  In Europe and America, castrated men are at most a historical aberration, or an orientalist symbol of the cultural Other, long ago and far away.  In China, however, as in much of the rest of the world, castration was an alternative path a man might take -- or have forced on him -- in order to achieve a limited amount of power and status.  Granted that Hinsch might not have chosen to address this because of limitations of space, it's strange that he never mentions it except as a bugbear for Chinese men in the late nineteenth century and later.  In China, emasculation was not just a bogeyman, a metaphor for loss of masculine power, but something that happened in real life, even possibly to people one knew.

There's another reason why eunuchs would be relevant to Hinsch's survey.   He describes the conflict about the spread of Buddhism in China during the Jin Dynasty of 265-420 CE.  Many traditionalist Chinese objected to the rising influence of a barbarian (that is, foreign) religion, and the Buddhist challenge to normative manhood was a major area of contention.

Judged by these standards, the ideal monk presented a disturbingly flawed picture of aberrant manliness.  He abjured marriage, renounced fatherhood, was ill positioned to care for parents, did not own property, declined public office, deprecated secular learning, mutilated his body (a gift from his parents) by shaving his head, and rejected orthodox manners and rituals for an alien set of rites.  According to the masculine standards of the time, how could such a person even be called a man? [50, emphasis added].

Such behavior, of course, is a rejection of normative masculinity in most societies.  But what interests me here is the reference to shaving one's head as self-mutilation.  Hinsch returns to the point a few pages later:

Filial piety extended to the body, demanding that a man keep his person intact, as he had received it from his parents.  However, Buddhists expressed skepticism regarding the value of a perfect body.  For example, hair was traditionally an important symbol of gender identity, and filial piety demanded that a man keep his hair fairly long.  The society of the time associated hair on both the head and the face with ideal masculinity.  For example, Prince Rencheng of Wei was famous for his valor and manliness, as well as for his magnificent beard.  And in a continuation of Han dynasty judicial practices, medieval officials shaved the heads of convicts as a humiliating punishment.  So for a monk to shave his head and face not only violated gender norms but also disfigured the body that he had received as a precious gift from his parents.  Accordingly, Buddhism's opponents pointed to the monk's cleanly shaven head and chin as proof of the religion's contempt for filial piety [55].

It wasn't until I encountered the complaints about "emasculation" a hundred pages later that I realized how conspicuous was Hinsch's silence about Chinese eunuchs here.  Some sort of aside, at least, about the mutilation involved in castration seems to be in order.  And didn't those opponents of Buddhism accuse monks of making themselves into eunuchs, not only by cutting their hair but by foreswearing marriage and fatherhood?  If so, Hinsch doesn't say, but it would follow logically.  It's a strange omission.

Chinese men must surely have harbored some anxiety about emasculation, as both a literal and a symbolic assault on manhood, long before the big-nose European barbarians invaded China in the 1800s.  In keeping with masculinity as a zero-sum game, hierarchical models of masculinity require that men abase themselves before men of higher status -- fathers, older brothers, teachers, military superiors, the Emperor -- so normative manhood is always unstable and endangered.  In order to have Real Men, you have to have Lesser Men and Not-Men.  (Just as you must have Bad Women in order to have Good Women.)  And since Real Manhood is achieved, it can also be lost.  I haven't seen enough recognition of this in masculinity studies.

Oh Myyy ...

This meme has been making the rounds on Facebook this week, and George Takei just spread it, so it's taking off.  I've composed a brief critical comment that I've been posting every time it turns up, which really ought to be enough, right?  Because we're all entitled to our opinions in a free society, right?  Haters gonna hate, but I know who I am and what I stand for, right?  But since I believe that people should be prepared to defend their stances with argument and fact, I'm going to go a step further.

Presumably by "sinful" the maker of this meme means "forbidden by the Bible," since he or she makes some claims about what the Bible says.  Some of those claims are at best shaky, and some are flat-out false.  But from the start there's a begged question: many people don't tie their opposition to same-sex marriage on the claim that "homosexuality is sinful," but because of various assumptions about the nature of marriage -- that it is a religious institution, for example, despite the necessity of civil marriage in American society.  Many gay people agree on that point, of course, and want religious ceremonies to ratify their unions.  Think of the city of San Francisco, which supplied religious officiants and dispensed blessings even to people who registered en masse for domestic partnerships.  That seems a blatant violation of separation of church and state to me, and surely not all the couples involved were religious in the first place.  But this is a time-honored violation, since clergy are brought in to bless state highway overpasses, and just about everything else.

So let's look at the content of this meme.  The first point is that "Jesus never uttered a word about same-sex relationships."  The first thing to notice is that the meme-maker is changing the subject, as will become clearer presently: the subject of the meme is "homosexuality," not "same-sex relationships."  Leaving that aside for the moment, it's trivially true that Jesus in the gospels doesn't mention men boning each other.  (Though not all gay Christians would agree about that.  Some believe that Jesus "affirmed a gay couple," referring to the centurion whose dying slave Jesus healed.  It's not certain that these men were sexually involved with each other, but it's a tribute to the high moral standards of today's Christians that they think Jesus would approve the sexual use of a slave of either sex.  Some have also argued that the Ethiopian eunuch mentioned in Acts 8 was a gay man, but that's not likely.)  This is what's known as an argument from silence, which is usually considered a no-no in scholarly circles.  That the gospels don't report him saying anything on the subject doesn't mean he never did so; and Jesus' silence about sex between males doesn't necessarily mean he approved of it.  But he never said anything about a lot of subjects, such as slavery, and the gospels do report that he took a rather dim view of sex in general.  The Jesus of the gospels is not a sexual liberal: he expected his heterosexual followers to keep their libidos on a tight leash, even refraining from lustful thoughts.  His stricture against divorce and remarriage was so extreme that his disciples concluded that it was better not to marry at all, though some of them already were; and he didn't disagree with them.  If gay Christians want to apply those principles to themselves, more power to them, but I haven't noticed that any do.  Jesus' reported silence on homosexuality, then, is not much comfort to gay Christians.

"The [Old Testament] also said it's sinful to eat shellfish, to wear clothes woven with different fabrics, and to eat pork."  Trivially true, but none of these require the execution of the offender.  This is a popular approach among gay Christian apologists, who usually overlook the small detail of the death penalty, which indicates that Yahweh considered sex between males a rather graver offense than eating pork.  Apologists also like to confuse impurity / uncleanness with "abomination," again overlooking the fact that impurity is remedied by at most some days of isolation and then a ritual washing.  (According to the Torah a woman was impure for a given period after giving birth, but no one would argue that the Bible considers childbirth sinful.  I hope.)  Sin in general can be atoned for with sacrifice, and it's noteworthy that atonement doesn't seem to be an option for men who have sex with other men.

The other trouble with this retort (it's not an argument) is that the proper response would be to observe the whole Torah, not to throw the whole thing out.  Christians, according to the Apostle Paul (not to Jesus) are free of the Torah, or most of it, or something.  Some of its standards still are binding even on Christians, including those relating to sex.   (Except for divorce, which Paul agreed was mostly unacceptable.)  After all, Jesus said that the greatest commandment was to love Yahweh your god with all your heart, and how better to show your love than by obeying his every wish, instead of picking and choosing at your own selfish convenience?

"The original language of the N.T. actually refers to male prostitution, molestation, and promiscuity, not committed same-sex relationships.  Paul may have spoken against homosexuality, but he also said that women should be silent and never assume authority over a man."  (One commenter on Facebook pointed out that Paul's requirement of silence for women referred only to worship services; he was incorrect, however, that the ban on female authority was similarly limited.)  The claim that the NT "actually refers to male prostitution, molestation and promiscuity" is false.  The meme-maker probably has in mind 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 9:9-10, which consist of lists of sins that will keep one out of the kingdom of heaven.  Some of the Greek words have been translated as referring to homosexuality, but because these words are rare and there is no real context, scholars are still not sure what they mean.  To claim that they really refer to male prostitution, molestation, and promiscuity is as dishonest as to claim that they refer to "homosexuality."  (I suspect that by "molestation" the writer meant "child molestation," which is still false.)  And to repeat, the vital doctrine of Christian freedom from Torah is in Paul only: Jesus never says a word about it, so I suppose it can be tossed out and Christians will start keeping kosher.

By bringing in "committed same-sex relationships," I think the writer means to claim that the New Testament only condemned exploitative and abusive expressions of sexuality, not warm mature loving Christian couples.  There's no reason to think so, because loving relationships between males were part of the Greco-Roman landscape in Jesus and Paul's day, celebrated in poetry and drama, and the Jewish polemic against paganism condemned them along with prostitution and "promiscuity."  (See, for example, my discussion of Robin Scroggs' book on the New Testament and homosexuality, here.)

"Because God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve."  "That was when the earth wasn't populated.  There are now 6.79 billion people.  Breeding clearly isn't an issue any more!"  It wasn't an issue when Yahweh forbade men to have sex with each other, either.  Or, it was at least as much an issue when Paul and Jesus encouraged their followers not to marry at all.  As far as I know, there's no evidence that homosexuality interferes with "breeding" anyhow.

"The Bible also defines marriage as one-man-many-woman, one man many wives and many concubines, a rapist and his victim, and conquering soldier & female prisoner of war."  This being so, why are gay Christians so insistent that they don't approve of polygamy?  It's a biblical value, after all, like slavery.  Yet gay Christians always agree with their antigay opponents that polygamy is as yucky as marrying your first cousin.  To sum up what I've written before, Christianity rejected polygamy mainly because of the influence of Roman culture (and also perhaps because of Christianity's general dislike of marriage at all: at most, one spouse).

Which brings me to the final riposte, against the declaration that gay sex is just plain disgusting.  "Props for being honest.  However, a whole population of people shouldn't have their families discriminated against just because you think gay sex is icky.  Grow up!"  "A whole population of people" is presumably courtesy of your Department of Redundancy Department; more seriously, it assumes that gay people are a discrete "population" separate from general humanity, which I think is debatable.  And I've noticed that many gay and pro-gay people are opposed to polygamy and to marriage between cousins, not because they have any arguments against such families but because it's obviously gross.

Behold, the meme-maker has given you two choices: one, "Have fun living your sexist, chauvinistic, xenophobic lifestyle choice.  The rest of culture will advance forward without you."  The Department of Redundancy Department is still hard at work, I see.  Two, "Congratulations on being part of civilized society!"  To paraphrase Gandhi, civilized society would be a good idea.  It would also be nice if gay Christians and their allies were any more scrupulous about fact and logic than their antigay opponents.

Eunuchs to the Left of Me, Eunuchs to the Right of Me

The "Would Jesus Discriminate?" campaign (hell yeah, he would) does more than claim that Jesus "affirmed a gay couple." Two of its billboards try to claim a gay-positive early Christianity by reconceptualizing eunuchs -- castrated men -- as gay men.

The passage of Acts cited here tells of an encounter between the apostle Philip and an Ethiopian eunuch. After converting Samaria, Philip was directed by an angel of Yahweh to go to the desert road between Jerusalem and Gaza. There he encountered the eunuch, an official of the court of the Ethiopian queen, on his way home from worshipping in Jerusalem. He had stopped his chariot to read from Isaiah 53:7-8:

He was oppressed and He was afflicted,
Yet He did not open His mouth;
Like a lamb that is led to slaughter,
And like a sheep that is silent before its shearers,
So He did not open His mouth.
⁸By oppression and judgment He was taken away;
And as for His generation, who considered
That He was cut off out of the land of the living
For the transgression of my people, to whom the stroke was due?

(This passage has been interpreted by Christians as a description of Jesus and his mission; it's not very convincing, but that's another topic.)

Philip preached Jesus to the eunuch, converted and baptized him, and "When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; and the eunuch no longer saw him, but went on his way rejoicing" (Acts 8:39). That's a handy means of transport; the early Christians could have used a good deal more of it.

It's an interesting story. If the Queen's treasurer had gone to Jerusalem to worship, he must have been Jewish; there was, and still is, an Ethiopian Jewish community of great antiquity. Although Deuteronomy 23:1 forbade any emasculated man from entering the assembly of Yahweh, Acts is vague as to whether the Ethiopian had been allowed to worship or not. In a later interview, with Isaiah, Yahweh had promised that the eunuch who kept his covenant and his sabbaths would be given a name that would never be cut off. (Unfortunate pun, that, but it's in the text.)

So, what does this have to do with a gay man? Castrated men were often assumed to be sexually receptive to other men -- or at least sexually accessible to them. The page at Would Jesus Discriminate, apparently also excerpted from Jeff Miner and John Tyler Connoley's tract The Children Are Free, which expands on the billboard slogan first tweaks people who stereotype:

Once they find out someone is gay, it is as if that person has a neon sign on his or her forehead, flashing, “Gay! Gay! Gay!” But God sees people differently, looking past incidental labels and seeing into the core of each being.

But the writers then do exactly that. They write, "It is clear from the ancient literature that eunuchs as a class had a reputation for being attracted sexually to men, rather than women", and assume that this reputation was accurate. They support this by claiming that eunuchs were castrated because (and evidently after) they had shown a "disinterest" in women and an interest in men, and conclude:

This does not mean all were gay. But clearly, as a class, they were strongly associated with homosexual desire in the popular mind. To introduce one’s self as a eunuch in ancient times was roughly akin to introducing one’s self today as a hairdresser from San Francisco.

Evidently the writers are as invested in stereotypes as the people they criticize. (This is clear from their attack on "radical fairies," which I quoted before.) If eunuchs had a reputation for sex with men, then by golly, the Ethiopian eunuch must have been gay, and Philip knew it, and that settles it.

As far as I can tell, they have it backwards. The authorities they cite that I've been able to check don't back up their claim. At best, it appears that the idea of men who were eunuchs as it were by nature developed later in antiquity, after the time of Jesus and long after Acts of the Apostles was written. I'm hoping to look into this more before long, though as you'll see, it's not all that important to this issue.

There's another problem with their account. If Miner and Connoley were correct and eunuchs were primarily men who were not interested in women, if they were naturally impotent -- then why did anyone bother to castrate them at all? Women in the harems would have been safe from them even if their testicles were intact; they wouldn't have been interested in them, and if they were impotent, couldn't have done anything with them anyway.

Gay men, however, are generally not impotent -- certainly not with other males, and often not with females. (When I was younger and more naive, I was surprised at how many drag queens and other effeminate gay men had been heterosexually married and were fathers. There are powerful social and other reasons why this should be true, but it belies any notion that gay men's reproductive organs don't function.) It seems that Miner and Connoley are also buying into the batty, if popular, notion that "gay" men are only and always penetrated by other males, and that the men who penetrate them are not gay. This sort of confusion is hard to understand from two gay men, Christian though they be.

They confirm their confusion in their explication of the next billboard, "Jesus said some are born gay."

In this passage, Jesus forbade divorce, overturning the permission Yahweh had given to Moses. Marriage was indissoluble, and a person who divorced and remarried was committing adultery against the former spouse.

¹⁰The disciples said to Him, "If the relationship of the man with his wife is like this, it is better not to marry."

¹¹But He said to them, "Not all men can accept this statement, but only those to whom it has been given.

¹²"For there are eunuchs who were born that way from their mother's womb; and there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men; and there are also eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to accept this, let him accept it."

This little witticism has given Christian interpreters no end of difficulty. For now, it's enough to notice that if Jesus was saying that "some" are born gay, then he was also saying that others are made gay by men, and others become gay for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven -- in short, for "some", being gay is a "choice", an idea that is anathema to today's gay Christians and the American gay rights movement. But it's probably truer to say that, read in context, Jesus was not talking about gay men in this passage. (And where do lesbians come in? That's another post, coming soon I hope.)

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Gay people should not be spreading misinformation -- that's what bigots are paid to do. The misinformation about Christianity that gay Christians spread is their business, I suppose, but it doesn't distinguish them importantly from their opponents.