Organization: The American University - University Computing Center
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1992 20:43:26 EDT
From: <HERSCH@auvm.american.edu>
Newsgroups: alt.politics.homosexuality,alt.discrimination,soc.motss
Subject: Re: Genes, Categorical Hypostatization, and You
 <1992Sep26.174456.23668@sun0.urz.uni-heidelberg.de>
 <92273.200258HERSCH@auvm.american.edu>
 <1992Sep30.192224.7291@sun0.urz.uni-heidelberg.de>

In article <1992Sep30.192224.7291@sun0.urz.uni-heidelberg.de>,
gsmith@euterpe.uucp (Gene W. Smith) says:
>
>In article <92273.200258HERSCH@auvm.american.edu> <HERSCH@auvm.american.edu>
>writes:
>
>Sexuality in the sense of "sexual orientation" is indeed the notion
>they appear to be using.  However, it should be bourn in mind that the
>paradigm here is not so much a possibly naive reading of human society,
>but animal models.  Gay rodents and homosexual rams, in other words.

Really? For the first time in this conversation, I start to become
interested in the underlying stuff. These dudes are proposing gay
rodents and homosexual rams? Can you give me some references? I'm
unlikely to find the project more congenial than I find it now, but
I actually would like to understand it better, and don't even know
how to find out. I know how to pursue a question in history, but
not in biology.

>
>My suspicion, which is no more than that
>really, is that the differences have been exaggerated by the practice
>of taking a society at its own estimation of itself.

An ever-present danger. Historians are trained to avoid believing
everything their sources say to them, but many things are believed
that aren't true. At the same time, what societies say about themselves
is important evidence about how human cultures work even when they're
telling lies.

>
>>There are ancient cultures still existing in New Guinea where ALL
>>adolescent boys have sex (ritualized to some extent, but apparently
>>enthusiastically enjoyed by all parties) with older boys or young men,
>>but where virtually no one can be found to engage in homosexual
>>behavior or even to admit to homosexual lusts as a life-long pattern.
>>Is there a sudden eruption in these people's genes that then goes away?
>
>One thing I would object to is the uncritical acceptance of this kind
>of anthropological data as simply factual, while regarding things like
>brain research as radically dubious. Greenberg typifies this.  He
>attacked the Levay paper (which started all this), but his book is
>filled with stuff like this, accepted as factual and with no real
>attempt at critical analysis.

One of the things that I've enjoyed, in talking to you, is that you are
unwilling to let anything get by that shouldn't get by. I could toss
all kinds of bullshit around to some people and they'd merely say
"yes, but...". What you say here is totally on target. Of course
the uncritical acceptance of this kind of bullshit is not likely to
contribute to a genuine understanding of how human societies work.
But there is, nonetheless, a whole lot of anthropological work
on New Guinea cultures (work that I'm not really qualified to
evaluate) that seems to call the "homosexual" and "heterosexual"
categories, as they are generally deployed, into question. There
really do seem to be cultures where "homosexual" behavior is
*universal* during part of people's lives. It may give some people
fits, but some of this evidence would seem to support a Freudian
explanation of polymorphous perversity with cultural direction of
lust, whether that cultural direction is across lifetimes or
only across situations.

>
>Why is this?  There are hundreds of little communities in New Guinea,
>with quite different customs and languages.  When I read Margaret Mead,
>it sounded as if she would just breeze in, learn enough about the
>language to get by, go on the the next tribe, and then draw some grand
>conclusions.  I don't really know very much about anthropology, so
>perhaps my scepticism is misplaced.  But when someone quotes a single
>study done years ago as "proof" that some tribe or other never even
>heard of same-sex relations, I am sceptical.  I am also dubious about
>the example above.  What is the *attitude* towards admitting adult
>same-sex relations?  How easy would it be for someone who wished to do
>so have them?

I overstated the case. The point really isn't that some culture
denied the existence of same-sex sexual relations; I'm not even sure
if the stuff that I was basing those comments on support that assertion.
The point really is more that "homesexual" relations among the male
population is *universal* during adolescence, in some of these cultures.
It is at least unusual at other ages, but whether it's unheard of is
beside the point. Where you have "homosexuality" universal in some
populations, but only universal for people of certain ages, and at
the same time you have "homosexuality" a life-long fact for a portion
of other populations, and still at the same time you have "homosexuality"
universal among a certain class of a population, but expressed primarily
in man-boy relationships, as in Greece....well, where you have that
kind of difference from one culture to another, I'd say you're dealing
with something cultural, and that if you want to treat "sexuality"
as something biological you'd better come up with a definition of
"homo" or "hetero" that makes a convincing case for  these things'
 being real physical phenomena rather than aspects of culture.
>
>>Much has been made in various ways of the experience of classical
>>Athens, but if one thing is clear, it is that grown men had sex
>>with boys, and never with other grown men.
>
>This not only is not "clear", it is false.  Sex with grown men wasn't
>as respectable, is all.

My brain fell asleep when I wrote that. Of course men had sex with
men. The Athenians regarded sex as something that men had with boys,
and  that men didn't have with men. What is clear is that the paradigm
of sex within Athenian culture is that man-boy sex was a universal
possibility, and that man-man sex was not. But man-boy sex *was*
a *universal possibility*. Is it universally possible within our
culture? And if not (and it is obviously not), how do we reconcile
its universal possibility within classical Greek culture with our
modern notion of sexual orientation?
>
>>This "scientistic" attitude, that *people* are capable of a completely
>>objective point of view that has no implications, no politics, no
>>dangers--this is disturbing and scary.
>
>This is an ideology which gets converted into a belief.  That is, one
>moves from the idea that science is supposed to be like that to the
>idea that scientists are in fact like that.

I probably have a lesser problem with actual scientists than with
non-scientists who believe that science and scientists are like that
AND that it's a *good thing* that they are. My original explosion
was directed toward someone who said "we just won't know until
science weighs in with its judgment"....that's a paraphrase, but
his point seemed to be that we really couldn't decide whether
"homosexuals" were to be pitied or despised until science told
us which way to feel.
>
>Oh dear.  I was not really proposing this seriously.  I've read enough
>philosophy of mathematics to become convinced that mathematicians are
>better off not deferring to philosophers, for instance.  My point was
>that Clio, the Muse of History does not really take intellectual
>precedence any more than Pluto, the Muse of Disney, or any or Muse
>which may amuse.

Yeah, I knew you weren't proposing it seriously, but I thought I'd
agree strenuously anyway. In a way, I really meant what I said.
Philosophers really are better equipped to argue questions of
ontology or epistemology than most historians are. The *real*
project is to tear down some of the walls between the disciplines.
And maybe deference is a first step.
>
>>I don't think I'm trying to have it more than one way. I suggest that
>>"homosexuality" is constructed within culture and within cultural
>>discourse. Treating it as a phenomenon is hypostatizing a category.
>>That is almost always a barrier to understanding. How am I working
>>both sides of the street by saying this?
>
>To identify as a homosexual, you must treat homosexuality as a
>phenomenon, as something which someone can be.  If I understand you
>right, that is what homosexuality means to us in our culture today.  So
>hypostatizing a category is something which any homosexual must do, in
>order to be a homosexual.

No, none of the above. I "identify" myself as a queer, which is
roughly equivalent to identifying as a "homosexual", I suppose. This
does not necessarily involve accepting a hypostatic category. I like
to have sex with men (well, boys, sometimes), like to associate with
other men who have similar tastes in lust, share a cultural identity
with other queers. That in no way involves accepting the *hypostatized*
category. I may be *living* the category, but that doesn't mean I'm
hypostatizing it.. I also love the opera, but when I attend a performance
of La Traviata, I don't imagine the audience to constitute a species.

>Standing (how do you do that, by the way?)
>at some point outside of society and looking in, you see that this is
>merely hypostatizing a social construct, and so presumably see that the
>homosexual identity and therefore homosexuality itself, inextricably
>bound with that identity, are in some sense an illusion.  In the "real
>world", so to speak, we see that there really is no such thing as
>homosexuality, and therefore there can be no real explanation for it.
>

Ya lost me, pal.

>But this "refutes" the idea of an explanation for homosexuality by
>denying its conceptual base, while at the same time talking *as if* the
>idea was one which was accepted (in your other role as a member of
>society, perhaps.)

Ya lost me twice.

I think that "sexual orientation" is a socially constructed part of
our identities. Not just "homosexuality", but this whole "orientation"
thing. That doesn't mean I deny the clear evidence that people really
*are* oriented. People live within and experience their identity
within culture. I still don't understand your point here.

H.

Herschel Browne
"The" American University
Newsgroups: alt.politics.homosexuality,soc.motss,soc.bi