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Before Straight and Gay: The discreet, disorienting passions of the Victorian era
- sp332 10y agoIs it just me, or are people who were telling us that homosexuality is a genetic predisposition the same ones now saying that it's a choice and things are flexible?
- neaden 10y agoI don't think that is what the article is saying. We can look at it as essentially there is a set of desires which have a genetic/environmental factor (hormones you are exposed to in utero for example). Then there is a society around you that shapes how you act on those desires. So taking a hypothetical person and transplanting them to different cultures will change how they express/act on their desires. If you take someone who identifies as a homosexual today and brings them to Victorian England they wouldn't identify as homosexual but might, as the son in this example wonder if they had the soul of a woman. In the same fashion if we took someone who identified as straight today and raised them into ancient Greece they would probably engage in behavior we would think of as homosexual because it was the standard part of the culture at the time.
- sp332 10y agoYeah, that sounds totally plausible. But Lady Gaga has a song called "Born this Way", while at the same time saying that she's queer and denying that she was born any particular "way". Edit: I'll add in a better source here than a pop star. American Association of Pediatrics: "The mechanisms for the development of a particular sexual orientation remain unclear, but the current literature and most scholars in the field state that one’s sexual orientation is not a choice; that is, individuals do not choose to be homosexual or heterosexual." https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/113/6/1827.full.pdf https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/11...
- lightedman 10y agoWe call that 'marketing to your audience.'
- sp332 10y agoMaybe, but there is a specific audience she's selling to. One that claims their sexuality is fixed. (I just needed an example and I didn't want to pick on a private person.)
- givinguflac 10y agoI'm all for discussing the intricacies of this topic. However, by the way you position yourself it sounds like you think millions of people are choosing to be gay just to mess with you or something.
- legodt 10y agoLady Gaga also had a bunch of white gay men in blackface for a faux slave auction. She is hardly a paragon of queer values or the voice of any movement. She represents a pop commodity that is sold to as large of a market as possible, nothing more and nothing less.
- lkrubner 10y agoSo clearly, if you can take the 152 words that Neaden wrote, make them rhyme and set them to a catchy beat, then you might have a hit, with the added advantage of being more scientifically precise than Lady Gaga.
- legodt 10y agoFirst you need to stop seeing it as a binary (being gay isn't a bit that gets 'flipped,' it's more of a range that you are predisposed to fall somewhere within) and then this will start making more compatible sense. If you're willing to accept that, here's a really good interview on the subject: http://www.salon.com/2012/01/22/the_invention_of_the_heterosexual/ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/22/the_invention_of_the_heteros...
- lightedman 10y ago"First you need to stop seeing it as a binary (being gay isn't a bit that gets 'flipped,'" Are you as gay as I am? I had NO disposition towards men until I hit about 17 years of age. Suddenly, I couldn't stop dominating them in bed. Something sure as hell 'flipped' in me to suddenly make me go from banging tons of girls in high school to dominating men almost exclusively. And I've done modeling. I can pull whatever I want any day. Why did I suddenly prefer men? I still can't answer that.
- tokenizer 10y agoMost people ignore women's general bisexuality, and confuse this by equating sexual preference as "complicated". Not for men (for the most part, as in 99%). They either love vagina, and are disgusted by penis, or vice versa. On the other side, most "straight" women, fantasize and experiment with the same sex, and to them, preference is usually on a sliding scale. That all said, sexual preference is further confusing when we have a large subset of straight males, being attracted to very feminine transsexuals, like Bailey Jay. To me this means male sexual preference is holistic, meaning if you pass as a woman, but have a penis, you may attract many straight males, who would gag at the idea of a well toned and very masculine male. Even if the masculine "man" was a woman passing as one, with a vagina.
- tomp 10y ago> To me this means male sexual preference is holistic, meaning if you pass as a woman, but have a penis, you may attract many straight males, who would gag at the idea of a well toned and very masculine male. Hm... I'm generally attracted to (some) people who look like women, but that's just an assumption, open to change/dispute. I'm pretty sure I'd equally gag at the sight of that "pretty lady"'s penis...
- scarecrowbob 10y agoI had always thought that thinking of sexuality as a genetic predisposition was strange and essentializing, especially given the rest of the discourse around that understanding of sexuality. However, in the context of the larger cultural argument between people who are okay with various queer behaviors and people who did criminalize those behaviors, it makes more sense: the idea of 'genetic predisposition' is, I believe, an appeal to biases of the biased. A similar but unrelated case would be along these lines: I am for total decriminialization of drugs, but I can see the value in the argument for "medical marijuana". I don't particularly care about having just cannabis legal via prescription, but the people who have made cannabis illegal may be willing to compromise in that direction. That may be an improvement even if it's not a total victory. And though it may not be enough of an improvement to spend time arguing for, I also don't see the need to make an effort arguing against the position, either.
- drabiega 10y agoAs a general rule, no probably not. In my experience most claims to the hypocrisy in groups are due to the mental categories in which people group each other, not actually hypocrisy of any individual people.
- return0 10y ago[nothing]
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- sp332 10y agoLabels are just an easy way for people to dismiss each other. Let's not.
- lightedman 10y agoCategorization is important. Those who wish to use such categorization as a means to discriminate are not important, and should not be given any services until they change their ways. If society went back to this simple structure, (plus our educational system would recognize this instead of co-opting it) then this would change. But we're now in a more complex age. Good luck with that.
- neaden 10y agoThe problem is we can't really categorize people in the past. Was the Chevalier d'Eon[0] for instance a straight man who cross dressed, a homosexual man who dressed in feminine clothes as an expression of his homosexuality, or transgender? Karl Heinrich Ulrichs[1] is often thought of as one of the first homosexual activists but the word homosexual didn't exist at the time, he coined the phrase Uranian to describe himself and identifed as a female psyche in a male body, so should we say he is gay or transgender? Trying to retrospectively put people into categories that didn't exist when they were alive is impossible. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevalier_d'%C3%89on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevalier_d'%C3%89on [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Heinrich_Ulrichs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Heinrich_Ulrichs
- lightedman 10y agoThose were the historical examples of a Hermaphrodite. "Uranus was both man and woman." But neither of those sources bother with real Greek Mythology, just their poor interpretation of such. Source: JCL 4th level.
- dpark 10y ago> Though sex between men was a criminal offense ..., there was, as yet, hardly a homosexual identity defined by same-sex desire. Until the early 1950s, a man could have sex with another man without thinking himself in any respect “abnormal” How do you reconcile the fact that gay sex was a criminal offense with the claim that it wasn't considered abnormal? This feels like wishful history rewriting.
- jxf 10y ago> How do you reconcile the fact that gay sex was a criminal offense with the claim that it wasn't considered abnormal? Just because something is illegal doesn't mean people consider it abnormal. (I agree with you that it feels historically revisionist, but I don't agree with your argument.) For instance, smoking marijuana isn't considered "abnormal" by many folks. And yet it is a serious federal criminal offense in the US, punishable by significant jail time.
- dpark 10y agoThat's a good point but there is lots of evidence indicating the prevalence and acceptance of marijuana in spite of its illegality. Where is the evidence that make homosexuality was largely considered acceptable or normal by before the early 1950s? Again, this just feels like historical revisionism. As if gay male sex was totally acceptable until a ~50 year period starting in 1950. Meanwhile this whole article is about a family of gay people who (at least the males) couldn't or didn't engage in this supposedly accepted behavior.
- rsynnott 10y ago> Where is the evidence that make homosexuality was largely considered acceptable or normal by before the early 1950s? To be clear, the article's not saying that male homosexuality was largely considered normal. It's saying that having sex with men was not considered abnormal, which is a bit different. I think this is probably a bit of an oversimplification, but certainly, men who had sex with men would have been less inclined to think of themselves as different at the time than now.
- h4nkoslo 10y agoThe implication is that the modern identity of "gay" is a recent, politicized, Western (& really more like American) construction. The further implication is that this identity is also deconstructable. Which seemingly refutes the whole idea of "innate gayness" in as much as it amounts to any particular pattern of behavior.
- twblalock 10y ago> The implication is that the modern identity of "gay" is a recent, politicized, Western (& really more like American) construction. The further implication is that this identity is also deconstructable. Yes, that's the implication, and it's one that most people who have studied historical attitudes to homosexual behavior agree with. > Which seemingly refutes the whole idea of "innate gayness" in as much as it amounts to any particular pattern of behavior. There is no refutation of that -- behavior and predispositions can be innate, but basing a person's identity on a certain set of them is a social construction. We know that is the case because all human societies exhibit homosexual behavior, but only some have adopted the concept of homosexuality as a personal identity, frequently as a binary opposite of heterosexuality -- and western society only did so somewhat recently.
- Glyptodon 10y agoTo a certain extent I certainly find the current/modern fixation with classifying gender and orientation odd. It's not entirely clear to me why it's important that I know somebody is a "queer sapiosexual" or whatever else. But there are clearly a lot of people who think such things are very important. And of course what seems a tendency towards needlessly complicated overly-expository self-labeling encompasses a lot more than gender these days. It feels like there's a subtext to a lot of it which sort of suggests that ideas can only be heard and understood clearly by those who own the appropriate labels (including gender), and so people seek to have expansive identities that give them the social bona fides necessary to have their opinions, thoughts, and ideas treated with respect and presumed relevance. In other eras perhaps these social credentials came from wealth or class or other "accomplishments." But the modern world seems to have let an obsession with the the variously unfair, arbitrary, capricious, and discriminatory nature of these previous credentials become the basis for inventing new ones based around constructed identities, since such constructs are available to all. In a way we can see this in how protest movements are labeled - it used to be that they were labeled by their goals or the problems they were trying to solve, like the "Civil Rights Movement" or the "Conservation Movement." But now we label things by their identity. Rather than conservation movement, at some point we ended up with "conservationists" and "environmentalists," which have given way to things like the "Women's March," "Scientist's March," etc, which seem to imply that identity necessarily indicates viewpoint - just by knowing what category/identity is marching I should know what it is trying to say. As a lazy human being I find this not an all-together pleasing development, mostly because it seems to go along with a bit of all-or-nothingism, particularly for "allies," who, absent the appropriate labels, may only accept or not accept the broad determinations of those who own the operative label at risk of being excluded/denounced. Anyway, I enjoyed the piece. Always enjoy reading about Victorian stuff.
- Palomides 10y agoit's very difficult to discuss a thing or build a community around an idea without a label. that said, I do think there has been a reactionary pressure, leading to encompassing labels like "queer" or "genderqueer" which are more general rejections of modern, delineated ideas of gender/sexual identity.
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- dsfyu404ed 10y agoI can't be the only one that read "of all the doings in the Benson household" as "of all the dongs in the Benson household".