All Your Genes Are Belong to Her

I found myself grumbling crankily over liberal reactions to American Eagle's ad campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney, so here's a little more.

Another brand put out a commercial featuring a pretty actor saying “This tan? Genetics. I just got my color analysis back and guess what? Golden summer.” While susceptibility to tanning rather than burning may have a genetic component, a tan is no more genetic than a haircut, or the clothes the actor is wearing.  That's another reminder that most people don't know what "genetic" means, and shouldn't be taken seriously when they invoke it.  (Still, from a white-supremacist viewpoint, the "best" genes are the northern European ones that burn in the sun without tanning.)

But that includes inclusivity-minded liberals who think that being gay or trans is in one's genes, or that one's cultural tradition is in one's DNA, or that a man seeks the US Presidency because his DNA drives him to do it, in hopes of connecting with some hot female DNA once he's arrived. (That last one is particularly painful, since the claim comes from one of America's best liberal writers, who subscribes to a bonkers idea about what DNA does and clings to it, rather sadly, despite harsh pushback from his commenters.)

I think a similar confusion drives the liberal freakout over Sydney Sweeney.  Why not say: okay, she has good genes – so do any number of other people.  Sure, racists think that only whites and especially she has good genes. The problem is that liberals think so too: if she has good genes, no one else has them.  Remember Chris Hayes's claim, in his book on meritocracy, that once you've found the absolute best soprano in the world, there's no reason to listen to any other. Then remember A. E. Housman's comment on another classical scholar's work: "Three minutes' thought would suffice to find [that] this [is complete wackery]; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time."  But liberals are addicted to "Oh, how can you say such terrible things?" as the first move in public discourse; for thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.

I've written before that people like Sweeney, far from being special, are the least common denominators of human attractiveness. They can therefore be marketed to the largest possible number of consumers.  Marketing and consumption is what they are used for - and never forget that without mass communications and the institutions of publicity and marketing, she wouldn't exist as a star.  So thousands, even millions of men, can fantasize that her smiles are for them alone, and if she was lucky enough to meet them, she'd immediately recognize their supreme value; likewise, thousands or millions of young women can fantasize about being that desirable.  On some level they all know it's just a fantasy, but it's still a rush.

If Sydney's genes are so great, though, she should be having babies - lots of babies - to perpetuate them.  She's only their temporary custodian; that's what eugenics is all about.  American Eagle's copywriters know it too: "In the ad, the blonde hair, blue-eyed actress says, 'Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color.'" (You didn't think she wrote her own lines, did you?)  The same is true of her appearance.  Her genes may give her a head start, but without workouts, makeup artists, and hairstylists, she wouldn't glow as much, and time's winged chariot is already bearing down on her.  Not to pick on her alone, this is a well-known problem faced by all people whose appearance is their fortune; the examples of Cher, Michael Jackson, and Madonna - not to mention Laura Loomer, Kristi Noem, and Lauren Sánchez - stand as a warning to us all.  

And while she's apparently a registered Republican, if she utters any heterodox opinions, her MAGA fan base will turn on her without mercy.  So far it doesn't seem that Sydney Sweeney is such a big star; no doubt she's hoping to parley her new notoriety into reaching a higher level.  That will have to be seen.

All Over the Place

Dagnab it, I'm not supposed to be this busy and distracted when I'm traveling!  I guess I'm not complaining.  But I am behind.

On my flight to San Francisco I read Afrekete, edited by Catherine E. McKinley and L. Joyce DeLaney, published by Anchor Books in 1995.  It's an anthology of Black Lesbian writing, and as usual with anthologies, it's a mixed bag, very uneven.  One of the more interesting pieces is "Revelations" by Linda Villarosa, about the former Essence editor's experience coming out as lesbian and encountering conservative Christian objections to homosexuality.

Like so many gay people who've grown up in what might be called soft-shell churches, it had never occurred to Villarosa that there might be any conflict between her Christianity and her lesbianism.  When she discovered that many people thought there was, she did a little research.  Not too much -- just enough so she could say she'd been there and done that.  And right off, she came up with one of those delicious tidbits of ignorance, like the Saint James Bible, that make gay Christians so entertaining:

The New Testament had been written in Greek and then translated into Hebrew [221].

I've never seen this one before.  As a collector of gay Christian misinformation, I'm always delighted to encounter a new specimen.  Yes, there have been translations of the New Testament into Hebrew, but they were made centuries after the originals were written, and they have nothing to do with the main tradition of the Biblical text: no English translation would use them as source material.  Villarosa seems to believe that an official Hebrew version was prepared early on for use by the church, which of course isn't true.  It's a minor error, but still revealing of the biblical illiteracy of so many American Christians.

Today there's a fuss about some remarks made about homosexuality by Texas governor Rick Perry while he was on a goodwill mission to the heathen state of California.  In the very heart of Sodom, San Francisco itself, Perry told an audience last night:

"Whether or not you feel compelled to follow a particular lifestyle or not, you have the ability to decide not to do that," Perry said. "I may have the genetic coding that I'm inclined to be an alcoholic, but I have the desire not to do that, and I look at the homosexual issue the same way." 

This inspired the predictable liberal responses: Ohhowcouldhesaysuchanawfulthing!  Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, a former mayor of San Francisco, demanded on Twitter that Perry "'must apologize for (his) ignorant and hateful remarks,' noting also that it is Gay Pride month."



The trouble is that, first, there's no real yardstick for deciding whether a condition is a "destructive addiction" or "an aspect of human diversity"; and second, gay people and our allies have relied on the same highly dubious kind of science which claims alcoholism to be a genetic condition to claim that homosexuality is a genetic condition.  Much of mainstream gay apologetics holds that we shouldn't be discriminated against because we were born this way and it's in our genes, we can't help ourselves.  This, as I've argued before, does not construct a terribly positive conception of homosexuality.  It makes the bogus claim that inborn conditions are necessarily good, which is belied by the reaction when someone compares homosexuality to other supposedly inborn conditions that clearly aren't good.  It also assumes that only inborn and immutable conditions are worthy of legal protection against discrimination, which is false.  (Civil rights laws cover not only inborn conditions like race and sex, but learned and mutable conditions such as religion.)

It pains me to say it, but Governor Perry made a defensible point; it's just irrelevant to a serious discussion of the issue.  We do expect people not to give in to every natural, inborn desire they have -- to commit adultery, for example, which the advocates of same-sex marriage must surely concede.  Perry was wrong about the moral status of homosexuality, though that is not graven in stone either: it's a judgment.  Gay people who jump from the (false) belief that homosexuality is inborn to the (false) believe that it therefore is morally good or at least neutral are playing with the same set of assumptions as Perry.  Much that is "natural" is bad; much that is human choice is good.

I'm leaving aside here the question whether homosexuality is chosen, which I don't believe it is; but "born this way" and "choice" are not opposites, nor do they exhaust the possibilities.  Nor is it clear how "choice" can be assigned to sexual orientation, or to many significant aspects of the human condition.  The twentieth-century psychiatric diagnosis of homosexuality as a disease assumed that it was not a choice, but resulted from disturbed family dynamics beyond the control of the victim.  Like the nineteenth-century diagnosis of drapetomania, I'm not sure the close-binding-mother / absent-father theory was ever definitely disproved, as much as it was abandoned for other reasons.  (It made a slight comeback among the ex-gay reparative therapy movement associated mostly with reactionary Christianity -- which is ironic, because if homosexuality is a disease it can't be a sin.)  There was also, for the change therapists, the inconvenient fact their treatments didn't work.  This doesn't prove that homosexuality is inborn, though, because psychiatric treatment doesn't work in general.

In good American politician's fashion, Perry is now trying to avoid clarifying, discussing, or defending his remarks.  (See the video clip embedded above.)  So it goes.  While I was working on this post, sitting near the TV in my hotel room, I heard a soccer fan, excited about the beginning of the World Cup, say "This game, when you're born into it, it's in your genetics."  It's a reminder just how confused most people are about what it means to be "born into" anything, or what "genetics" involve.