I Don't Know How You Were Introverted

I like and agree with this meme, which a Facebook friend passed along the other day.  I've been critical before of the discourse around introversion and extraversion, which goes back to Carl Jung and that's not a recommendation.  It turns out that there's a lot of variation if not disagreement about the concepts among professionals, and the popular discourse is predictably even worse.  My only reservation about radicarian's suggestion is that it seems to assume that the maximum and minimum amounts of social interaction are fixed in each individual, as if we were measuring cups with limited capacity, which seems unlikely.  I think it's important to notice that "introverts" may crave quite a lot of social interaction until we reach our limit and need some solitude to recover, and I'd bet that even the most "extraverted" also have their limits and need to rest.

Some people commented that the concepts are meant to be a continuum, not a dichotomy, and while that may be true, I don't believe most people see it that way, or frame it that way when they talk about it.  Many people don't like the idea of a continuum and refuse to understand it -- compare the Kinsey continuum, a popular focus of misunderstanding -- and even those who like it and appeal to it tend to get it wrong.  Jung himself admitted that gendering his concepts of "anima" and "animus" was misleading, since those constructs are present in every person, but he evidently couldn't resist gendering them, and characterized traits as masculine or feminine anyway.  (Another reminder that "essentialism" doesn't have to refer to supposedly physical or biological traits: essences can be psychological or spiritual.)

Another person climbed onto her hobbyhorse and commented:

I think the difference is still worth talking about as long as we live in a capitalist culture that celebrates and rewards only particular orientations. Who gets to have their introverted/extroverted needs met is also deeply bound up with class, race, gender, disability. Like all identities, these labels are political, and can help us describe and change the societies we live.

I don't see any reason to bring capitalism into it (let alone "orientations").  Pre-capitalist societies also categorized people, rationing rewards and punishments according to their ability or willingness to conform.  I don't agree that introversion and extraversion are identities, but when a trait or label becomes an "identity" it becomes problematic for other reasons.  Labels and identities are political, all right, but they didn't start to be with the rise of capitalism -- another label that is political, and difficult if not impossible to define.

Someone else chimed in:

Margaret had a great response to this! I would just like to add, being an introvert is a positive identity for me. I have shared characteristics with other people who consider themselves to be introverted. And, frankly, I'm not concerned if other people think that identity is a negative or a positive.

Maybe I should have replied that I'm not concerned if this other person thinks that identity is a negative or a positive.  I'm not going to tell them that they shouldn't regard introversion as a positive identity, but they can't legislate for other people.  The bit about "shared characteristics with other people who consider themselves to be introverted" shows the problem with adopting identities.  What are those shared characteristics?  Are they inherent to introversion, or are they accidental, like, say, diva worship or cross-dressing among gay men, which encourages people to regard them as essential parts of the identity and promotes the imposition and policing of irrelevant boundaries?  I vote for the latter, and I consider it negative because not only does it promote groupthink (also known as "tribalism") but promotes ignoring that people outside the granfaloon share those supposedly gay, male, or introverted characteristics.  Such mischaracterization is not just false but harmful and counterproductive.

Someone else remarked,

I think the terms are efficient ways to identify those thresholds without having to say that entire sentence to describe yourself.

A chacun son gout, but efficiency in such matters tends to be oversimple.  To get any precision, you need ever more complicated classifications to describe yourself.  People will hear your term as they understand it, which may be very different from how you understand it.  If you realize the confusion, it will probably take more than just one sentence to clear it up.

But you don't have to repeat that entire sentence.  You don't even need a label to do it.  You can just say something like, "Sorry, I'm burnt out on people right now and need some time to myself."  Yes, that's a longish sentence too, but it has the virtue of being accurate without relying on confusing and inadequate labels.

Identity Poetics

This post on "Graysexuality" (via) turned out to be somewhat better than I thought when I first looked at it, but it still has flaws.

They begin with the first sentence: "Graysexuality is fascinating because we get to watch the process of a new orientation being constructed in real time." The writer is using "orientation" as shorthand for "sexual orientation," which it isn't.  "Sexual orientation" means which sex one is attracted to erotically; it doesn't mean any particular variation of erotic object choice, desire, or practice.  I admit that the term has been inflated to cover such aspects of human sexuality, but that's inaccurate, confused, and confusing.  If "orientation" were correct in this case, it couldn't be a "new" one, because orientations are supposedly innate, part of our biology and nature; it might not have been noticed or labeled before, but like America, it was there before some sexological Columbus "discovered" it.  And the territory covered by "graysexuality" does not appear to be anything new in human eroticism.

The writer also seems to think that "orientation" is the same thing as "identity," for the two terms are used interchangeably in the post.  (This is not uncommon, unfortunately.)  It's quite possible that a new identity is currently being constructed around "graysexuality," but that's a very different matter.  When the New York Times published a long article on the "down low" in 2003, it occurred to me that a new erotic identity might be abuilding.  Not "orientation," because men on the down low were either homosexual or bisexual in their orientations and behavior, but because some men were clearly using the term as an identity, distinguishing them from exclusively heterosexual African-American men and from gay or bisexual African-American men whose flamboyant self-presentation embarrassed them.  (See Terrence Dean's autobiography, which I discussed here.  He seems to have adopted "gay" as a label since then, however.)  There was an interesting contradiction in the use of "down low" as an identity, because it means "secret" -- or "closeted," in gay jargon -- and if some men were going to refer to themselves publicly, openly, as "down low," the term's meaning was going to stretch pretty far.  Imagine someone telling Ellen and her vast TV audience that he was closeted.  Once you've told the world, you are not closeted anymore, by definition, though I can imagine some people would try to claim otherwise.  As far as I know, though, "down low" didn't catch on as an identity, though like "closeted" it is still an attitude and a practice.

What is "graysexuality," then?  The blogger Ozymandias provides numerous definitions in their post.  Here are some, from the Asexuality wiki: graysexuals

• do not normally experience sexual attraction, but do experience it sometimes
• experience sexual attraction, but a low sex drive
• experience sexual attraction and drive, but not strongly enough to want to act on them
• people who can enjoy and desire sex, but only under very limited and specific circumstances

Similarly, some people who might technically belong to the gray area choose to identify as asexual because it is easier to explain. For example, if someone has experienced sexual attraction on one or two brief, fleeting occasions in their life, they might prefer to call themselves asexual because it is not worth the bother of having to explain these one or two occasions to everyone who asks about their orientation.
Gray-As may also append a gender orientation to the label, as in "Gray-heterosexual".

It seems to me that these criteria are probably too diverse.  Some people will recognize themselves in one or two but not the others.  Ozymandias gives other examples, to which this also applies.  And before long, we'll see more new identities being constructed, using one criterion and excluding the others.  Then there will be gatekeepers, self-appointed boundary cops excluding those who, they believe, aren't real graysexuals.  We've seen this already with "gay" and "homosexual," which cover too much ground for some people and not enough for others.  Is the guy who penetrates another guy "a homosexual," or is it only the guy he penetrates?  Is he homosexual if he enjoys being penetrated by other males, even though he penetrates women "avidly"?  Is he "gay" if he's never danced shirtless in a Pride parade?  Is a male who calls himself a woman, dresses as a woman, and seeks out male partners "gay," as such males classified themselves in the US until about the 1980s, or is he "transgender"?  "Transgendered" used to be acceptable, but it was replaced with "transgender," and anyone who uses the former can expect to be the target of vitriol.

Similar considerations apply to "lesbian."  Some women-eroticizing women reject the term because they associate it with two femme women performing erotically together for a male audience; some, because they associate it with uncouth working-class butches and femmes.  I read somewhere the writing of an early twentieth-century womanizing woman who distinguished between "lesbian," "tribade," and "sapphist" as specific erotic practices; a tribade, as the term's etymology implied, rubbed vulvas with her partner; I don't remember which was which, but of the other two, one practiced cunnilingus and the other used her hand.  Were these different "orientations"? Were they the 'true' meanings of the words?  Of course not: words have no true meanings.  The interesting question is how widespread these meanings were.

All of these patterns of desire and behavior are much older than the contemporary American terms for them.  Even if you allow "orientation" as the equivalent of "identity," none of them are new, though many of them have been touted as new at various times. I have no stake in these disputes myself, I'm happy to be terminologically polyamorous, but I do expect people to use the terms they've defined consistently, and they mostly seem unable to do this.

Though I admit I wonder at times. Consider again "transgender," which is supposed to refer to having a gender identity at odds with the sex/gender one was assigned at birth.  It's about people's subjective sense of themselves.  So why do numerous academics, including trans academics, use it to refer to any and all gender variation, including visible behavior such as voice, dress, body language -- what's known as "presentation"?  These may correlate with gender identity, but they are still conceptually or analytically distinct from "transgender" as it is officially defined.  (I might be trans by the official definition, for example, without modifying the way I dress, let alone seeking sex/gender reassignment surgery.  Or I might present myself in conventionally gender-discordant ways while still identifying with the sex/gender I was assigned at birth.)  The excuse I've seen is inclusion, but that's not valid -- especially since it's common for them to reverse course almost immediately, and fall back on the official definition.  That's equivocation, not flexibility.

When "queer" first gained traction as a reclaimed identity around 1990, there was considerable debate about whom it could include.  Was the heterosexually married Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, an important academic Queer Theorist, "queer"?  Could the straight women friends of gay men be queer?  Sure, why not?  (Everybody's queer but me and thee, and even thee's a little queer.)  I think that you can draw the line pretty much anywhere you like, as long as it serves some useful end in terms of thinking, discussing, or living.  The standards are, or should be, higher in professional academic discourse; in practice, as I've noted, they often are not.

It might be useful, for example, to distinguish between "label" and "identity."  Consider "men who have sex with men," which was invented during the peak of the AIDS crisis as a hopefully neutral label for the purposes of AIDS education.  It had numerous faults, among them that "sex" was not unambiguous: many people didn't think even of anal copulation as "sex."  But it was a label, not an identity; some men may have thought of themselves, "identified," as men who had sex with men, but I've never encountered anyone who did. A label can still be valid even if the person doesn't think of him or herself in those terms, perhaps to evade stigma -- consider "racist" for example, a label almost all racists try to reject -- or if it refers to a trait that isn't salient to his or her sense of self.  An example of this could be height: I am sixty-eight inches tall, but it's not my identity.

Another example is "monosexual," referring to people who relate erotically only to partners of one sex as opposed to "bisexuals" who relate erotically to partners of both sexes.  I am certainly a monosexual, but it's not an identity.  The word can be useful in discussion, though, and I can imagine situations where I might identify myself as monosexual, though it hasn't happened so far.

Ozymandias writes:

Indeed, we can see this with people whose experiences are equally far from the norm on the other side. A person with hundreds of sexual partners who’s had anonymous sex and who prefers to have sex two or three times a day might call himself “horny” or “slutty” or say he really enjoys sex; he will not characterize himself as having a sexual orientation related to being really really into sex.

Of course, this is very similar to the experience of gender-based attraction before the invention of heterosexuality. An ancient Roman man who is exclusively attracted to men might call himself a boy lover or say he doesn’t like women; he will not call himself “gay” and consider himself to be part of a group with all other gay men, opposed to all heterosexuals.

An ancient Roman man "will not call himself 'gay'" mainly because he speaks Latin or Greek, not English.  It's not clear -- scholars are still debating it -- exactly what linguistic, social, cognitive space terms like "boy lover" or "woman hater" (or their local equivalents) occupied or demarcated in their historical context.  In Japanese samurai male love stories, it seems that the Japanese equivalent of "woman hater" was used precisely to indicate that a man was interested erotically only in other males.  "Boy lover" and "woman hater" seem to have functioned as identities for men who preferred other men as erotic partners.  But in the 1950s and 1960s I used to see the English "woman hater" used in popular journalism to signify the same kind of males, males who would probably have labeled themselves "gay," "homosexual," perhaps "inverts."

For that matter, as I indicated above, it's not clear what space "gay," "homosexual," or "queer" demarcate.  They are disputed, contested, wrangled over.  All three of them have become loan words to other languages, generally with some alteration of meaning.  And, of course, "gay" went from an in-group code word to a neutral public term to a schoolyard insult within a generation, to the extent that some younger gay men thought it had always been pejorative.

Returning to Ozymandias, I'd also like to know why people who have a lot of erotic partners shouldn't have an identity for their particular life/erotic pattern.  It's not as if they are considered the unmarked positive norm, after all.  Some people, of both sexes I think, have tried to reclaim "slut" for just that purpose.  "Promiscuous" can be and has been used for such people, but it tends to equivocate between being a descriptor, however badly defined, and a pejorative.  Or remember how the sex-advice columnist Dan Savage had a conniption over a reader who identified as a "poly," or a polyamorous person.  "Poly is not a sexual identity, PP," he scolded, "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.'"  But an identity is not a "thing," it's a self-labeling and if I say I am something, it's one of my identities.  As Savage is old enough to remember, many bigots have claimed that homosexuality isn't something you are, it's something you do. (Savage backtracked later, after his readers criticized him.  Notice that he too seemed to equate or confuse "identity" and "orientation.")

I don't object to people defining themselves as graysexual, demisexual, or other identities that people have invented (and all identities are invented), since they clearly feel important to them, and I'm in favor of people defining themselves.  I am interested, however, in having contexts where these labels and identities can discussed and contested.  That extends, of course, to labels I apply to myself, such as "gay" or "fag."  Whether it's okay for men to fall in love with other men, to have sex with other men, to build communities of men-loving men, is one question; whether the origin myths and other rationalizations we have invented to support and justify our loves are valid is another.  I have my doubts about the discourse surrounding asexuality, just as I have doubts about the discourse surrounding gay men.  I've criticized, for example, the attempt by one advocate for asexual visibility to come up with an evolutionary basis for asexuality -- not because I'm an anti-Darwinist but because I reject the Darwinian fundamentalism of his argument, and because he showed a disturbing ignorance of basic aspects of human sexual biology.  None of which means that I reject people's right to refrain from sexual activity for whatever reason.

Once other people start using the term you've defined with such care, you lose control of its meaning and definition.  Not because they intentionally distort it: it will drift regardless.  That's the case, mind you, among academics writing for professional publication, where some rigor in language is to be expected, even if it doesn't occur in fact.  Move outside of that restricted space of discourse, and the sky's the limit.  When you enter the arena of public discussion at any level, though, you had better be prepared to justify your definitions and your arguments.

Which takes me back to the Asexuality Wiki's remarks about graysexuality vs. asexuality: some graysexuals, it says, might identify as asexual instead "because it is not worth the bother of having to explain these one or two occasions to everyone who asks about their orientation."  Again: neither graysexuality nor asexuality is an "orientation."  They are identities, and avowing an identity is supposed to inform other people of things about yourself that are important to you, if not to them.  "Not worth the bother"?

Who asks you about your orientation anyway?  Potential sexual partners?  When you've reached the point where it's going to matter, it seems to me that a potential partner is entitled to a fuller and more accurate account of where you stand than a one-word brand name.  As I've said before, if you can't give an accurate, honest answer, no classification system will help you.  If you're not talking to a potential partner, your orientation or the level of your erotic drive is not their business.  One of the really useful things I learned from the advice columnist Miss Manners is that you don't have to give detailed reasons why you're not going to have sex with someone, and there are many reasons besides asexuality or graysexuality why that should be.

Transcend Your Own Labels, and Then We'll Talk

These divisions are a major part of what makes us human. And not specifically human -- other social species also divide themselves.  Marge Piercy recently got a new kitten, and she's been writing on Facebook about the delicate process of introducing a new cat into an established household.  I'm not sure you can have inclusion without exclusion of someone else; if I understand the term correctly, the two terms deconstruct each other.  It's not caused by language (or "labels"), since cats don't have labels but they still have boundaries and conflicts.  

The mistake is thinking that human beings are 'naturally' harmonious, touchy-feely, and kissyface huggybear -- or would be if not for the International Space Jews from Iran who bring division among us with their labels. I think this bit from Ben Ehrenreich's fine book, The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine (Penguin, 2016) sums it up nicely. He's talking about a Bedouin town in the Occupied Territories:

Eid and his brothers and cousins and all of the one hundred or so residents of this part of Umm al-Kheir were members of the Hathalin clan. There was another half to the village, with another hundred or so residents who lived about a ten-minute walk closer to the highway. They were also Hathalin, but for reasons no one would discuss, the two sides of the village avoided one another. Humans find ways to disagree [292].

Even worse, the meme above blames "race," "religion," etc. for human divisions, as though those were real entities.  It would be nearer the truth to say that people invented "race," "religion," "politics" and "wealth" as rationales for dividing themselves against one another.  This is something that Karen E. and Barbara J. Fields are adamant about in Racecraft: nothing is "race-based," as many white liberals and many people of color mistakenly claim; "race" is constructed after the fact, to justify the injustices people perpetrate.

In the Beginning Was the Word

Maybe I overuse the "X for me, Not-X for thee" template, but it encompasses so much bad faith that it's hard to resist.  Yesterday a queer friend of mine posted one of those "Labels are for cans, not for people" memes.  I have at least two reactions to this slogan; one is that you can't really have language without labels; the other is that the people who claim to dislike labels actually like them quite a lot: first for other people, but also for themselves.

For other people there are labels like: homophobe, transphobe, bigot, Bible-thumper, so-called Christians, redneck, and so on.  That leaves aside the more straightforwardly abusive neologisms, often constructed with the -tard suffix: theotard, Republitard, Reichtard, and so on.  These latter have their right-wing counterparts (libtard, etc.), but for the moment I'm talking about people who'd consider themselves liberal, rational, compassionate, loving, open-minded.  More labels, of course.

For themselves, the labels proliferate.  I was recently invited to give a presentation on LGBT history in the area, and while putting it together I was struck by how many labels were coined in the late nineteenth century -- invert, Urning, Uranian, homosexual, androgyne, third sex, etc.  These were words that sex/gender nonconformists invented for ourselves, or adopted for our use.  When I was newly out forty-some years ago, gay men were fond of labeling sexual acts and roles: French active/passive, Greek active/passive, and an older man laid out for me a full list of nationalities linked to sexual practices.  We were also fond of constructions based on "queen": chicken queen, closet queen, opera queen, and (my favorite) fish queen.  (I liked "fish queen" not because of its misogyny but because it incorporated straight men into its taxonomy, classifying them as homosexuals so twisted that they were queer for women.)  Lesbians of the period had their own system: butch, femme, butchy-femme, soft butch, and so on.  I don't know how much of this is still current, but similar self-labeling is certainly going on today: pansexual, asexual, demisexual, genderqueer, transman, transwoman, and so on.

Just a few weeks ago, Caitlyn Jenner's "I am a woman" pull quote was all over the media, and none of the anti-label people got on her case for labeling herself: indeed, they celebrated and defended her.  In this case too, the label is a moving target: "man" and "woman" are meaningless social constructions on one hand, and pre-existent, pre-social benchmarks that define who one is.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing.  It's the hypocrisy, the doublethink, of those who claim to reject labels but use them anyway that I'm criticizing here.

I'm presently working my way through a collection of stories by Vincent Czyz, Adrift in a Vanishing City (Vanishing Mountain Press, 2015).  In one story, the French narrator reflects on another character who's labeled a pédé (location 2061 of the Kindle edition):

We French also say pedale, homosexual, tante, de la jacquette flottante – he whose jacket blows lightly behind him – not much else.  It is not the big deal of snow to the Eskimos who have 50 or 60 words for it to distinguish between wet, powdery, crusted, high drifts and so on.  Americans must hold most sacred of all the homosexual since they have any number of words for it – fairy, fag, tinkerbell, queer, three-dollar bill, limp-wrist, homo, fruit, pansy, queen, flit – imagine if my English were up to date.

(I wonder how true it is that French has relatively few words for men who take it up the butt; I doubt it, but my French isn't good enough for me to say. I do know that Spanish has a rich supply of such labels, rivaling what we have in English.)  Even if it were true that Eskimos "have 50 or 60 words" for snow, the variety of American terms for queer men wouldn't be the same kind of thing.  They aren't a taxonomy to enable fine-grained distinctions between varieties of homosexual, they're a ragbag of epithets for the same supposed species.  Some are abusive epithets used by ostensibly heterosexual culture cops, others are self-classifications invented and used by queers ourselves, some moved from one side to the other and back again.  As I mentioned above, though, queers are fond of proliferating labels for ourselves, which sometimes distinguish and sometimes lump us all together.  Unless you're still an adherent of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis -- and I think a lot of laypeople are, especially in its more deterministic forms -- I don't think there's much to be learned from the existence of all those terms.

On the other hand, I think the linguist Tim Machan's reflections on language change are interesting.  From Language Anxiety: Conflict and Change in the History of English (Oxford, 2009, digital edition):

Indeed, as Labov has noted, language actually points to conclusions that oppose natural selection: ‘the major agent of linguistic change – sound change – is actually maladaptive, in that it leads to the loss of the information that the original forms were designed to carry’.  More generally, change and variation are responsible for a great many socially debilitating situations.  They produce mutually unintelligible languages and their attendant barriers to communication, the communication, the communicative obstacles that even regional variation can present, and the sociolinguistic drive to instruct generation after generation of students in the details of spelling, punctuation, and usage, which are never internalized and transmitted to subsequent generations in some Lamarckian fashion.  In view of the tumult of history and the blame placed on inadequate communication, I would venture that if there truly is a general drive to optimal communication, it has failed miserably.

Which would seem to imply that people who insist that language is essentially for communication and demand that people communicate clearly with language may be trying to use language for a purpose it didn't evolve to perform.

Back to the desirability of labels, then.  It could be argued that labeling impedes communication, but it seems to me that the people who refuse certain labels (while, remember, embracing others) aren't really worried about that.  Inventing new labels in the name of rejecting labels is hardly an improvement in the communication department.

Take the rejection of the label "gay," which I've written about before.  I'm fascinated by the reasons people give for rejecting it.  They may see it as a pejorative, which is understandable but not so much when they want to replace it with something like "queer."  Again, from the way such people talk, they seem to believe that the word "gay" is inherently and essentially negative, which it wasn't always; sometimes they claim to prefer "queer" because it's somehow indeterminate, though given the negative baggage that attaches to it historically, this explanation makes no sense.  It sometimes is expressed precisely as a refusal to communicate, because of the supposed indeterminacy of "queer": I have my own personal special-snowflake definition of what it means, which I might or might not share with you.  Well, to each his or her own.  Take the African-American graduate student I mentioned in another post, who rejected "gay" because in his mind it referred to two "cis" men together; presumably he thought "queer" doesn't have this denotation.  But "gay" doesn't mean that: its use during most of the twentieth century involved a lot of gender nonconformity and gendered division of sexual labor.  The same goes for "homosexual," which (conflated with "gay") supposedly involves "two individuals who are of the same sex and the same gender," though in fact gender nonconformity is associated with homosexuality both at the popular and at the academic level.  (There's also the notion of "a (postmodern) gay ideology, in which both partners in a same-sex sexual relationship are viewed equally in terms of their sexual orientation."  This, as I've argued before, involves a basic confusion about the "ideology.")

Another common factor in the rejection of "gay" or any other label is stigma: people will look down on me if I say I'm gay.  Another student who preferred not to label himself on a recent classroom panel explained that if he called himself "gay," or even "bisexual," people would misunderstand and think things about him that weren't true.  He didn't specify what those untrue things were.  Of course if he didn't label himself, people would also think things about him that weren't true.  They might believe him to be exclusively heterosexual, for example, or they might label him "faggot" or "punk," no matter how many women he also dates.  And often the trouble with those "misunderstandings" that people worry about is that they aren't misunderstandings at all.  I sympathize completely with the ambivalence other people feel about adopting a stigmatized identity; though they often refuse to believe it, I felt exactly the same way before I came out.  But the only way I know of to counter these misunderstandings is to face them and counteract them, as best we can.  If someone has stereotypes about gay people (and let me remind you, gay people also have stereotypes about gay people!), you won't get them to give their stereotypes up by pretending to be straight.  To add to the fun, many of the people who fear "misunderstandings" involving stereotypes do their best to embody the stereotypes when they do come out.  I can understand and sympathize with that too, but it's a consequence of the prior denial.

Labels can be misused, and I argue that this historical ignorance and self-serving, inconsistent rejection of labels constitutes misuse, because of the confusion that it engenders, probably by design.  There's no foolproof way to avoid confusion, stereotyping, historical baggage, or the limitations of labels; you just have to try to deal with these matters as best you can, in conversation with others, educating yourself and them as you go.  You won't get anywhere by refusing to use labels, because people will go on using them around you, like it or not.  So you must engage with others -- and don't assume that you already know everything and they know nothing.  As human beings using labels, we can't avoid using them altogether; we must learn to use them as well as we can.

How Do I Make My Voice Do This?

I have my differences with Amanda Marcotte, but in general I like her writing.*  Yesterday she wrote this footnote to a post on why people tell pollsters they bcelieve in gender equality when they really don't.  One reason many (well, most) people deny that they are feminists even when they claim to believe in gender equality, Marcotte speculated, is "the American fetishization of individualism, which leads a lot of people to shun labels in an effort to show what special snowflakes they are."  At the end of the post she added:

This is a major pet peeve of mine. The irony is that there is nothing more basic than snootily declaring that you are above labels. In my long experience with this, I’ve learned that nothing tells you that someone is a boring, unoriginal person quicker than having that person declare that they can’t be fit into boxes. It’s actually hilariously counterproductive to the obvious goal of being perceived as a special snowflake. Genuinely interesting people realize that labels aren’t boxes, they’re descriptors. How can you be an actually interesting person if you shun all descriptors? That’s like calling clear a color.

Ooh, yes.  This is a major pet peeve of mine too, especially since I began to notice that most volunteers on our Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Speakers Bureau had begun introducing themselves by saying they "identify as" gay, lesbian, or bisexual -- or perhaps pansexual, or queer.  Every time I hear them say this, I think of the lines from "Rocky Raccoon":

Her name was Magill
And she called herself Lil
But everyone knew her as Nancy

(Firesign Theater alluded to the song soon afterward in their audio drama "The Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye":

Nick Danger: That cheap, tarnished piece of tin is worthless!
Rocky Rococo: Worthless?  Ha!  Not to Melanie Haber!
ND: Melanie Haber?
RR: You may remember her as Audrey Farber ...
ND: Audrey Farber?
RR: [uneasily] Susan Underhill?
ND: Susan Underhill?
RR: [triumphantly] How about ... Betty Jo Bialosky?
ND: [aside] Betty Jo Bialosky!  I hadn't heard that name since college.  Everyone knew her as Nancy.

But I digress.  Aside from the Constitutionally protected, Bible-based desire to be a Special Snowflake, this resistance to labels seems to be motivated by a wish to evade stigma.  People who reject labels like gay, lesbian, or bisexual often rationalize their choice by pointing to the negative stereotypes supposedly embedded in the words.  These are often fanciful.  Just a couple of weeks ago, for example, one of our volunteers explained to a class that he didn't like "gay" because it usually referred to "two white, cisgendered men together."  He preferred "queer," which has its own baggage, but doesn't mean much of anything.  But then neither does "gay."  Contrary to his claim, "gay" doesn't necessarily say anything about the gender identities or presentation of the people involved.  I believe he also misunderstood "cisgendered" to refer not to congruence between one's subjective sense of gender and the gender assigned to one by society (though he defined it that way when prompted for a definition, since not everyone in the class knew the term), but to one's presentation / expression as masculine or feminine. 

A funny thing about the people who say they reject labels, though: they are quite fond of labels, and use them freely about others and themselves. These Special Snowflakes object only to certain labels, which they carefully redefine so that they don't apply to them.  They often assume a linguistic determinism which holds that the meaning of words is somehow innately and rigidly contained in them.  I've pointed out before that although they complain that certain labels are too "narrow," the opposite is usually the case.  "Gay," for example, includes not only gender-variant sissies and tomboys but gender-compliant people; yet those who want it to refer only to the gender-compliant still find it difficult not only to avoid the gender-variant connotations of the word for others, but for themselves as well.  So, for example, people will refer to a gay man as extremely gay to indicate that he is stereotypically effeminate.  I'm not sure what "extremely gay" could reasonably mean instead -- maybe someone at the 6 end of the Kinsey scale, with no heterosexual experience at all?  I believe most people would see such a person as simply gay, not extremely so.  There's also the ongoing disagreement over whether both persons who engage in same-sex copulation are gay, or homosexual.  It appears to be a straw-man accusation that some other people assume that both partners have the "same sexual orientation."

It's probably impossible to use language without using labels regularly.  (Some people like to dismiss language, but the dismissal doesn't seem to stop them using it, and taking it quite seriously when it suits them to do so.) The other day I was reading Christopher Ives's Imperial-Way Zen (Hawai'i, 2009), which is mainly about the role Buddhism played in the Japanese cult of war and conquest.  But among the issues Ives discusses is Buddhist, and especially Zen Buddhist concepts of reality:

This concept that nothing exists independent of other things or has any essence prior to or separate from its interaction with them has been given a popular expression by Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh: “What we call a self is made only of nonself elements.  When we look at a flower, for example, we may think that it is different from ‘nonflower’ things.  But when we look more deeply, we see that everything in the cosmos is in that flower.  Without all of the nonflower elements – sunshine, clouds, earth, minerals, heat, rivers, and consciousness – a flower cannot be" [p. 75]

I agree that nothing exists independent of other things, and so on, but I don't think I agree that this interdependence means that "a self is made only of nonself elements" -- I think that's the reverse of the error that a self is made only of 'self' elements.  What but nonself elements would a self be made of (assuming that it is a thing in the first place)?  What are the nonself elements composed of?  Thich seems to grant more independent reality to "sunshine, clouds, earth, minerals, etc." than he does to flowers, but from their perspectives, they are selves, composed of nonself elements.  The flower is made up not only of nonflower elements but of flower elements, specifically those which lead us to notice it against the nonflower background.  What makes it "different" is not that it's made from nonflower things, but how those nonflower things are arranged and combined to make what we call a flower.  [P.S. See Bodhipaksa at Fake Buddha Quotes on this concept.]

So too, a lot of social constructionist writing de-essentializes certain concepts, such as "homosexuality," but leaves others essentialized: sex-as-bodily-configuration (male or female), for example, or sex-as-copulation.  And why not?  Without some elements taken as essences, it probably would not be possible to do any analysis at all.
 
Not long ago an undocumented friend told me that a coworker had called him a wetback.  He walked off the job for a day, his boss mediated, and the coworker apologized.  I don't know why the coworker chose to be insulting, and I was glad to hear that things turned out well, but I also wanted to ask him why he objected to the term "wetback," since it refers to undocumented Latin Americans and he is one.  In the same way, I reject attempts to "save" terms like "faggot" by redefining them so they only refer to self-evidently bad people, because I recognize that "faggot" as an insult is based on, indeed requires, the confusion between male sexual receptivity and "one who kneels and accepts the dominance of others."  I've upset some of my Latino friends by labeling myself a maricón -- "No you're not!" they protest, but whether or not I fit every connotation the word has, I am one of those it is meant to stigmatize.

We are the people our parents warned us against, a Gay Liberation slogan of the early Seventies said.  I've said before that one reason why mainstream boy culture reacted with such fury to the emergence of openly gay people in the 60s and 70s was not just that we'd hijacked the innocent word "gay," but that we'd taken ourselves out of their control.  We had, in effect, hijacked not-so-innocent words like "fag," "dyke," and "queer."  As with "looking illegal," I claim these words as a statement of solidarity and a rejection of the cult of individualism Amanda Marcotte mocked. 

But, like the Palestinian queer activist quoted by Sarah Schulman, I'm not wedded to any specific term:

"I find it ['queer'] useful for the time being but I am not attached to it or any other term. I am happy to move along with language. I am not looking for a term to marry. When it comes to language, I believe in short affairs."

Or as Glenn Greenwald said about another kind of label:

I noticed very early on that people wanted to apply a label to you because, once affixed, they don't have to bother with the substance of what you argue any longer. If the label is something they like, they'll agree - if it's something they dislike, they can dismiss it without having to do the work ("oh, he's just an X - who cares what he says"?).

Beyond that, these labels mean so many different things to so many different people that they're now meaningless. If someone insists on applying one to me, I'm not going to fight to reject it, because I really don't care about the label. I'm interested in the arguments and the substance.

This is what I consider a constructive response to the misuse and limitations of labels.  It's not surprising that Greenwald's approach is resisted strongly in mainstream political discourse.  As Marcotte says, labels are descriptors, not boxes.  I think some people want to be put in boxes -- or at least, to put other people in boxes.  They want, in Sartre's words, the durability of stone, they want to exist all at once and right away; so instead of engaging with descriptors, they reject them in an endless quest for the perfect label that will define them perfectly, without ambiguity.

*P.S. February 2017.  This has changed: I still like the material I discussed in this post, but the 2016 presidential election campaign and Trump's victory has driven Marcotte, like many liberal Democrats, mad in several senses of the word.

Read the Label Carefully

Some years ago I participated in an online discussion about the words that are used to describe sexual orientations.  One participant, a graduate student in sociology as I recall, said that the words "homosexual," "heterosexual," and "bisexual" irritated him: why couldn't we just use the word "humansexual"?  He had a point, I guess.  While we're at it, why bother with classifications like "vertebrate" or "invertebrate"?  Why can't we just use a word like "earth entities"?  It would be so much more inclusive.  While we're at it, why not just give up using language altogether?  Words are so confusing and divisive.  In the good old days before we invented all these different languages, we just sniffed each other's butts, and everybody got along fine.

I hadn't thought about this point until now, but what would "humansexual" even mean?  If it's constructed on the model of "homosexual," it makes no sense at all.  I think it was supposed to mean that one's sexual orientation was toward other humans -- which would exclude animalphiles, and that's just not fair.  Still, I suppose that something like that was in that guy's mind: we should just brush aside all human differences and focus on what we have in common.  Fair enough.  If only it were that easy.  In any case, humans are not a sex, so the term would make no sense to begin with.  Obviously the guy who proposed it -- a highly educated person, remember -- didn't understand what "homosexual" and "sexual orientation" mean.  To quote Kinsey again:

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

In this matter, years of schooling have little or no effect on people's misunderstandings.

In the years since that exchange, I've seen many similar coinages, both in ordinary conversation and in scholarly discourse, that were equally off-kilter.  "Homosensual," for example, which also shows a misunderstanding of what "homosexual means."   "Homosocial" and "homoerotic," of course; also "homoromantic" and "homoaffectional."  The author of one amazingly demented scholarly paper tossed in "homodepressed," "homoplatonic,"and  "homomorbid."  I wonder what the point of these inventions is; probably the hope of going viral in other scholars' footnotes.  Which is a valid goal on its own terms, but doesn't add anything to the archive of human knowledge.

The book I've been griping about for the past week, by the way, is Understanding Asexuality by Anthony F. Bogaert (Rowman and Littlefield, 2012).  I've gotten bogged down in the first chapter because of his bogus attacks on Kinsey -- which continue throughout the book -- but I've harped on that numerous times already.  On his principal topic, asexuality, he also goes astray.

I checked out Understanding Asexuality because asexuality has been turning up on the mainstream radar lately.  I'd noticed a couple of articles about it at Salon, and then some asexual individuals expressed interest in volunteering for GLB Speakers Bureau and the sexuality panels we do.  That was fine with me; I had some questions of my own about it, and I'd have been interested to hear what they had to say, but they don't seem to have followed up by becoming volunteers.  For example: is asexuality a sexual orientation, or is it the absence of one?  (This is analogous to the question whether atheism is a religion or the absence of one.  Is not collecting stamps a hobby, or the absence of one?)

Bogaert presumably thinks that asexuality is a sexual orientation.  He argues for a distinction that could be useful, between "sexual attraction" and "romantic attraction," and postulates that many asexuals have romantic feelings without wanting to express them genitally.  It appears, though this is not something he really follows through, that "romantic attraction" still has a sexual orientation, towards one's own sex or towards the other.  (Remember, the "sex" in "sexual orientation" refers to the sex of the partner, not to what one wants to do with them.)  It doesn't seem that asexuals are indifferent whether they bond romantically to males or to females, and this again leads to confusion in the labeling: it "is not unusual for an asexual person to say that he is asexual but biromantic, or that she is asexual but heteroromantic" (15), Bogaert says.  Again, this shows a misunderstanding about the meaning of "sexual" in "sexual orientation."  "Heteroromantic" could be shorthand for "my romantic interests are heterosexual," but I see no reason to suppose that Bogaert or his asexual informants realize that.

Am I saying that I think asexuals aren't really asexual after all?  No, I'm not.  I'm pointing out an ambiguity in the term, which fits well with the general confusion about terms like "heterosexual," "homosexual," and "sexual orientation."  Like "bisexual," which originally referred to physical sex and to reproduction, the word "asexual" has roots in reproductive biology: one-celled organisms generally reproduce asexually, without the exchange of genetic material that sexual reproduction involves. Asexual people can reproduce if they want, just as homosexual people can.  But they don't have to reproduce if they don't want to, just as homosexual people don't.  Or heterosexuals: wanting to copulate doesn't mean you necessarily want to have children.

Most painful is Bogaert's attempt to invent an evolutionary basis or function for asexuality.  He's a Darwinian fundamentalist, who believes that every detail of behavior or physiology must have been selected by "Nature" herself for the benefit of the species.  To that end he confuses asexuality and celibacy, though they're not at all the same phenomenon.  He even tries to find an evolutionary rationale for solitary masturbation, seemingly unaware that autoeroticism is widespread in the animal kingdom.  (I use the word "autoeroticism" there because "masturbation" means that the self-stimulation is done by the hand, which isn't even always true among human beings.  Both males and females often achieve self-inflicted orgasm by rubbing against something, a mattress or a pillow or some such.)   He gives no plausible reason for thinking that autoeroticism is anything but a fringe benefit of the pleasure associated with reproductive sex.

And he seems unaware of the existence of the clitoris -- well, he mentions it once: "the organs of sex most directly associated with physical arousal (i.e., penis, clitoris, vagina)  are brimming with nerve endings, which ultimately connect to the pleasure centers of the brain that are capable of making us experience intense pleasure" (23).  Look, I'm a big ol' homo, but even I know that the vagina doesn't have a lot of pleasure-related nerve endings, and most that it does have are near the opening.  It's the vulva, including the labia, and the clitoris that are mainly involved in female erotic pleasure.  Yet whenever Bogaert discusses female sexual arousal, he mentions only vaginal lubrication (see 74, 75, 112, 136).  That's not irrelevant, but it seems like mentioning only the "pre-cum" lubrication produced by a man's urethra before he ejaculates, and ignoring his erection.

But back to my main concern here, which is labeling and identity.  There's going to be some difference between sex researchers and asexuals about what it means to be asexual.  Bogaert wants to define it in terms solely of an absence of erotic attraction, not an absence of erotic drive (or sexual desire, as he calls it), and that's fair enough, because many asexuals apparently masturbate, they just don't associate the pleasure with a real or fantasized partner.  I also suspect that some of the same issues will arise about asexuality that have divided gay, lesbian, and bisexual people, because asexuality seems to lie at one end of a continuum of erotic expression: not an either-or division, but a more-or-less difference of degree.   And people in general really hate differences of degree: they constantly try to turn them into differences of kind.

The word "intimacy" also turns up in this area, and people tend to forget that "intimacy" has long been a euphemism for copulation.  There's never been much agreement about the relation of copulation to intimacy, though most people seem to take for granted that emotional closeness, especially between males and females, will inevitably lead to the old in-out-in-out.  That won't be true for asexuals, but it isn't always true for "sexuals" either.  The most enthusiastic sexual copulator will still probably be emotionally close to people with whom he or she doesn't want to copulate: parents at least, children hopefully, and friends of either sex.  In my own case, and I know I'm not unique in this, there have been numerous people I've loved seriously and even regretted not wanting to have sex with.  It's a perennial though not universal human complaint.  Often emotional closeness kills off erotic interest.  Is this connected to asexuality?  I have no idea.

Those who've written about asexuality mention the incredulity many "sexuals" display at the very idea that some people simply aren't interested in copulation.  That's not really so surprising: as Bogaert acknowledges, most people tend to universalize their own experience and tastes to all of humanity.  I've tried to learn not to do that.  I think it's valid, and important, for people to figure out what they want and need, and try to find people with whom they can share their interests.  One of the main lessons Kinsey tried to teach, but that very few people learned, was that there is enormous variation within human erotic drive, desire, and expression.  That variation isn't going to go away; we might as well learn to respect it.