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| Re: A mildly flameworthy logical question Date: May 24, 2012 02:45PM |
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Ted King
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rjmacs
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Ted King
I'm pretty sure I follow what you are saying, but I think there is some tension between your characterizations of "fundamental identity traits" and 'ways of being'. I'm sure that for at least a very long time there have been people who have felt pretty exclusively sexually attracted to only members of their own gender.
Out of curiosity, why is it that you believe this? I'm not asking because i think you're wrong, i'm just asking you to interrogate the assumption.
I believe it because I think that feeling pretty exclusively sexually attracted to only members of one's own gender is usually the result of biology (environment - especially the environment of the womb - or genetics or likely a combination of the two), not the result of social circumstances, and I don't believe our biology has changed significantly over many thousands of years.
Okay. This belief is embedded in a socially constructed understanding of sex, gender, and the biological 'purpose' of attraction (which i critiqued above and will not revisit here), but you're entitled to it. The belief that exclusive same-sex attraction is biologically determined is simply an inversion of a system in which exclusive other-sex attraction is 'normal.' As a follow-on thought experiment, i would ask why exclusive other-sex attraction is necessary or desirable, biologically?
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Ted King
I mostly agree with what you say here, including the point about essentialism. I think, though, that we should not bifurcate between either essentialism or identity as purely contingent on cultural conventions. Someone in an earlier post said that they don't believe in continuums... well, I think most human attributes - whether the consequence of biology or culture or a combination of the two - do come in a continuum. Many attributes like the length of index fingers that certainly do come in a continuum are probably almost always just background "noise" in a culture that contribute extremely little to nothing to a sense of identity no matter what culture we are talking about. But I also think that some human attributes do rise significantly above the background noise of cultures in a fairly consistent general way; e.g., gender identification. I suspect that feeling strongly sexually attracted to only members of one's own gender is an attribute that tends to rise above the background noise enough to be something that contributes at least somewhat to that person's sense of identity, but the degree to which is rises above the background cultural noise depends very much on the prevailing attitudes of the culture with respect to that attribute.
This 'continuum' construct of sexuality seems at odds with your same-sex or other-sex biological determinism above. Or perhaps you mean that there are continuums, but not when it comes to sexuality (because that is binary)?
Also, i don't feel like we're completely at odds here, but we are offset where we put emphasis. You are basically saying that sexuality is a key and significant part of being human, and it's not going to be marginal or unimportant no matter the cultural/historical circumstances. I am happy to grant that point.
However, the assumption that some variety of 'homosexuality' and 'heterosexuality' will naturally emerge from human experience in every society at any time or place logically depends on a few assumptions. First, the biological determinism referenced above, which i claim to have undermined in earlier comments. Second, the idea that sexuality is static and set at birth, or puberty, or at some other moment, rather than being stabilized and policed by discursive forces throughout one's life. (Not all cultures or societies, past or present, believe that sexual identity is static or unchangeable in the individual - in fact, there are societies in which transitioning from same-sex to other-sex orientations is both typical and ritualized.) Third, that the sexual identity 'position' that exists in one time and place for someone who is same-sex oriented is ontologically similar to a position of a same-sex oriented person separated by thousands of years of time and culture. Again, you're falling back into a kind of essentialism that doesn't work for me. How i make sense of my attractions, how i come to know myself as a person attracted to same- or other-gender persons, isn't a priori - it's something i acquire and navigate culturally and socially.
If you want to claim that there have always been 'homosexuals' throughout time and space, then you are forced to reduce the meaning of that term to 'individuals who are exclusively attracted to members of their own sex.' Fine, you say - that's easy enough - let's stick to denotation. Except that such a reductive definition of the term reflects NOTHING of what the term actually means in society. And it completely ignores and sidesteps the social and political conditions under which the term came to exist, and how it has functioned in the world since. Once you do that, you have privileged science and the terms of science as being ahistorical and True; once you do that, we are at an impasse because you have elevated the discourse of science over all others as transcendently valid and invulnerable to critique. As a student of philosophy, i am quite sure you know how untenable that is...
rj
AKA
Vreemac, Moth of the Future
| Re: A mildly flameworthy logical question Date: May 24, 2012 06:56PM |
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Chakravartin
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rjmacs
If you want to claim that there have always been 'homosexuals' throughout time and space, then you are forced to reduce the meaning of that term to 'individuals who are exclusively attracted to members of their own sex.' Fine, you say - that's easy enough - let's stick to denotation. Except that such a reductive definition of the term reflects NOTHING of what the term actually means in society. And it completely ignores and sidesteps the social and political conditions under which the term came to exist...
I think you're stuck on two things.
1. ...The word homosexual: The word and the words that were used in similar fashion before it do not have fixed meaning. We, in this discussion today, are creating parameters that define the word and the sensibility.
Don't fixate on the word.
"Preference for same-sex coupling" works just as well for most of this discussion and has less baggage.
I have been focusing on the word homosexual because words - and what they mean - matter. In particular, they matter in this case because "the words that were used in similar fashion before it" did NOT mean the same thing that this word means, which is the crux of my entire argument. If you disagree, we have nowhere to go in this discussion, but it's amply clear to me that - for example - "sodomite" and "homosexual" do not have the same meaning or value.
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Chakravartin
2. "Society" is not the subject of the discussion. Social identity may be tied to gender/sexual identity in several ways of varying significance, but society does not define self-identity any more than morals inevitably dictate ethics. (They do not.) So stop fixating on "society."
Again, my argument - for the reasons listed above - is that society does exactly that. Your declaration that 'society does not define self-identity' would fare better with an accompanying argument. We come to know and understand who and what we are ONLY through social interaction and exchange.
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Chakravartin
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rjmacs
Actually, my last post claims that modernity (indeed, all societies) do create separate classes/categories, and they do NOT just give a label to something that already was. That 'thing that already was' actually wasn't that 'thing' before it had a defined social position; this doesn't mean that same-sex behavior was absent before 'homosexuality' was invented, just that it wasn't 'homosexuality.' You can claim that homosexuality was always 'there,' lurking beneath the surface and simply not named or categorized, but it's a weak claim. You have nothing but supposition and inaccessible interiority to support the argument, and i don't buy it.
Wait a second... You're alleging that it's more plausible that a couple of thousand years of documented human behavior has been misinterpreted because of the modern popularization of a descriptive word than that the word was created to describe the documented behavior?
Really?
Reeally?
I don't really understand this point. I never said, or implied, that anything was 'misinterpreted.' I said that modern socially constructed concepts that are applicable within a particular historical context don't automagically apply to all of time and space. The 'documented human behavior' in question represents absolutely no evidence that 'homosexuals' in any meaningful sense of that term have existed for thousands of years. I explained above why this is the case, but you haven't addressed my substantive points.
Really.
rj
AKA
Vreemac, Moth of the Future
| Re: A mildly flameworthy logical question Date: May 25, 2012 01:26AM |
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Chakravartin
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rjmacs
I have been focusing on the word homosexual because words - and what they mean - matter. In particular, they matter in this case because "the words that were used in similar fashion before it" did NOT mean the same thing that this word means, which is the crux of my entire argument. If you disagree, we have nowhere to go in this discussion, but it's amply clear to me that - for example - "sodomite" and "homosexual" do not have the same meaning or value.
Gotcha.
So long as you continue to allege that words are magic things that make absolutes out of intangibles and relatives we are not going to be able to have any sort of meeting of the minds.
Agreed! As long as you're unwilling to recognize the critical importance of language to human understanding and identity, we'll not find common ground.
I'm gratified, though, that we're able to have a civil conversation about it without getting personal or petty.
rj
AKA
Vreemac, Moth of the Future
| Re: A mildly flameworthy logical question Date: May 25, 2012 09:33AM |
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Chakravartin
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rjmacs
As long as you're unwilling to recognize the critical importance of language to human understanding and identity, we'll not find common ground.
If you were making that argument, we wouldn't be so far off, but you've been insisting that words have fixed meanings and create identities.
Words change meaning in the same society, the same era, among the same people in the same room from minute-to-minute in the same conversation.
"Dude, that hit was so gay!"
"Stop it, man. I'm really gay."
"Geez, way to let a guy know!"
"You're freaked? That's so gay!"
Whatever the meaning of "homosexual" is to you, it's only your definition. And your entire "argument" has been that your definition is all-encompassing and unchanging.
I put "argument" in quotes because you haven't made an argument. You're alleging the existence of an inviolate paradigm. That's not an argument. It's a religion.
I don't think you've grasped what i'm trying to argue, but that's clearly my fault. Discourse is not reducible to words, but i don't know that i'm capable of explaining my entire 'paradigm' in the forum.
We are coming from very different places, obviously. I think we fundamentally disagree about the way the social world is organized. You are a dyed-in-the-wool individualist (based on this and other conversations), and i'm a believer in constitutive relationality about as far in the other direction. I think social structures and interaction are more important than individual disposition when it comes to things like identity.
This is the root of our disagreement. I think, rather than just continuing to argue past one another (which is what is happening now), we might do better to acknowledge that difference and move on.
rj
AKA
Vreemac, Moth of the Future
| Re: A mildly flameworthy logical question Date: May 25, 2012 09:37AM |
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Ted King
rjmacs
I do believe that there are facts about the world that are independent of any conceptual and semantic milieu evolved within the context of a culture/society; e.g., that most humans have ovaries or they have testicles. I do believe one of those facts is that whether a person tends to be sexually attracted to people with ovaries or people with testicles is largely biologically established for most people in the womb as they undergo fetal development. If I understand you correctly, you do not agree with that. If so, I don't think there is enough scientific information to establish which opinion is more likely to be correct. As I said early on, these are hunches I have.
Okay, Ted. Though, even if we were to agree about this, it doesn't get us closer to agreement about the category 'homosexual' or 'heterosexual.'
I am sensing that this discussion has played itself out, so i won't badger you to respond to my points about history, culture, etc. It was a great back and forth. Thanks!
rj
AKA
Vreemac, Moth of the Future
| Re: A mildly flameworthy logical question Date: May 25, 2012 12:22PM |
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J Marston
Insofar as I understand, I agree with rj.
Hooray!
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J Marston
It is only more recently--in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that sexual orientation has become the basis of identity: until then, people had hetero- or homosexual sex, but the acts were not considered to constitute identity. To argue by (flawed) analogy, everyone I know has told a lie; but I don't really know any "liars," because we don't consider that a part of one's constituted identity. (In the old west, however, there were people known as liars; and according to Epimenedes the Cretan, all Cretans were liars.)
You're pretty close to what i've argued, though i wouldn't say that sex acts were not important for delimiting/determining identity in previous eras. I'd say, instead, that how those sex acts were important was deeply different than it is now. It wasn't until the binary categorization of 'heterosexual/homosexual' that people started to think of sex acts as indicating an either/or position.
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J Marston
rj, again if I understand the problem, is suggesting that "homosexual" as an identity (rather than simply as a classification of a kind of sex act) is a contemporary usage that can't be projected onto past ages without distortion.
Yup, you got it on the nose! If you want to project 'homosexual' retrospective onto all of history, you can only use the term to describe acts, not selfhoods. (I'm gratified that someone else seems to have grasped my points - perhaps i'm not as unintelligible as i think.)
rj
AKA
Vreemac, Moth of the Future
| Re: A mildly flameworthy logical question Date: May 26, 2012 06:26PM |
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Marc Anthony
Yes, there were people who had situationally gay or straight relations and probably didn't have an identification or feeling of belonging to any group as a result; that still happens in today's world. We can reasonably assume that people, even in ancient times, were aware of what was going on in their own minds; some would—through genetic variation or positive reinforcement—be less pansexual and have a greater or exclusive attraction toward one gender. A description might not have existed, but the predilection did, therefore, homosexuality/heterosexuality is not an invention of modern times but emerged with the very first person who knew what side of the street they stood on and decided not to cross.
| Re: A mildly flameworthy logical question Date: May 26, 2012 11:12PM |
The above discussion largely assumes that the purpose of sexual activity is reproduction. If sexual behavior has other social functions in addition to reproduction, then non-reproductive sex will not be maladaptive. It will only be maladaptive if it sufficiently disrupts reproductive sex.
I am surprised that the subject of bonobos has not yet been mentioned. Are they gay, straight, or just omnisexual? And how would they categorize themselves if they could talk?
Also:
[www.unl.edu]
I am surprised that the subject of bonobos has not yet been mentioned. Are they gay, straight, or just omnisexual? And how would they categorize themselves if they could talk?
[www.primates.com]Quote
Whereas in most other species sexual behavior is a fairly distinct category, in the bonobo it is part and parcel of social relations--and not just between males and females. Bonobos engage in sex in virtually every partner combination (although such contact among close family members may be suppressed). And sexual interactions occur more often among bonobos than among other primates. Despite the frequency of sex, the bonobo's rate of reproduction in the wild is about the same as that of the chimpanzee.
Also:
[www.unl.edu]
| Re: A mildly flameworthy logical question Date: May 26, 2012 11:37PM |
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Janit
I am surprised that the subject of bonobos has not yet been mentioned. Are they gay, straight, or just omnisexual? And how would they categorize themselves if they could talk?[www.primates.com]Quote
Whereas in most other species sexual behavior is a fairly distinct category, in the bonobo it is part and parcel of social relations--and not just between males and females. Bonobos engage in sex in virtually every partner combination (although such contact among close family members may be suppressed). And sexual interactions occur more often among bonobos than among other primates. Despite the frequency of sex, the bonobo's rate of reproduction in the wild is about the same as that of the chimpanzee.
Also:
[www.unl.edu]
Not sure they're the best example.
They're almost extinct.
| Re: A mildly flameworthy logical question Date: May 26, 2012 11:41PM |
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Chakravartin
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Janit
I am surprised that the subject of bonobos has not yet been mentioned. Are they gay, straight, or just omnisexual? And how would they categorize themselves if they could talk?[www.primates.com]Quote
Whereas in most other species sexual behavior is a fairly distinct category, in the bonobo it is part and parcel of social relations--and not just between males and females. Bonobos engage in sex in virtually every partner combination (although such contact among close family members may be suppressed). And sexual interactions occur more often among bonobos than among other primates. Despite the frequency of sex, the bonobo's rate of reproduction in the wild is about the same as that of the chimpanzee.
Also:
[www.unl.edu]
Not sure they're the best example.
They're almost extinct.
Wow. The fallacies just keep a-coming.
rj
AKA
Vreemac, Moth of the Future
| Re: A mildly flameworthy logical question Date: May 27, 2012 01:44AM |
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Chakravartin
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rjmacs
Wow. The fallacies just keep a-coming.
Please be more specific:
What portions of the quoted material do you think were fallacious?
You dismissed the bonobo case by appealing to an irrelevant claim. The threatened extinction of bonobos has nothing to do with their sexual behavior. It's a red herring.
rj
AKA
Vreemac, Moth of the Future
| Re: A mildly flameworthy logical question Date: May 27, 2012 02:10AM |
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Chakravartin
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rjmacs
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Chakravartin
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rjmacs
Wow. The fallacies just keep a-coming.
Please be more specific:
What portions of the quoted material do you think were fallacious?
You dismissed the bonobo case by appealing to an irrelevant claim. The threatened extinction of bonobos has nothing to do with their sexual behavior. It's a red herring.
Others might call it wry humor.
'Guess we have two different words for it.
Oh, i missed that you were conceding Janit's points with a joke. That works for me. My apologies for misinterpreting you.
rj
AKA
Vreemac, Moth of the Future
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