Guest post: Strength has been something to aim for
Originally a comment by Steamshovelmama on Go, and sin no more.
Labels… *sigh*. This is a conversation I have had many times with my 22 year old daughter, who is rather more woke than me. Labels are important, especially to young people who feel lost and excluded because there is no one else like them in their culture and/or peer group. To that young person, finding that there is an actual name for what they are is a huge validation – and young, unhappy, confused, isolated people do need that validation.
The problem is, as always, reification. The label is usually an artificial term, placing boundaries round something that is really a point on a continuum. Unfortunately, people are strongly prone to believing that those boundaries represent something real and objective. When that happens, the label becomes a trap. No longer just “This describes what I feel, and I share this feeling with these people,” but more “This is what I am, and because of that, I know I cannot be that other thing as well, because that lies outside the boundaries of the thing that describes me.”
Of course, this applies to identities that are rooted outside the physical – ace (arguably), aro, demi etc.
re: the adoption of fragility
I don’t get this either. I’m 50, and for most of my life strength has been something to aim for. I grew up as a member of he English working class, which in itself is a strong non-physical identity (USAians may not experience this, but take it from me, in England class is a major part of your identity).
I grew up in a female culture where women considered themselves superior to men in all senses but the physical. The joke was: Q. What do you call a woman who wants to be equal to a man? A. Unambitious. Men were frequently regarded as immature boys (which, of course, meant that many of them were happy to play that role).
Women were the ones who held the family together, who took on all the responsibilities of feeding and clothing everyone, of stretching the “housekeeping” to do it, despite many of them working part or full time themselves. The very idea that you might need some sort of validation for who you were would have been considered ridiculous. You looked after your own, and if you wanted something you damned well got off your arse and worked out how to get it.
You developed a thick skin, especially towards male attitudes because, growing up, you were cat called and/or harassed on an almost daily basis from about 11 years onward. Now, that is certainly not how it should be (and it does seem to be a little better now, looking at my daughter’s experience), but the idea that you might be deeply hurt by a name (or pronoun) that somebody called you? Your Mother, Grandmothers, Aunts and friends would tell you to bloody well get up and stop making a fuss.
One of the most insulting things you could say about a woman was that she was “precious” – dainty, ladylike, feeble. Proper women were tough. They’d have had no time whatsoever for some man (and they would certainly see a trans woman as a man) poncing about in women’s clothes and talking about feminine essence. Feminine was not a large part of their lives or self image.
Re attaching labels to oneself–there’s a good book about that:
https://www.richardsennett.com/site/senn/templates/general2.aspx?pageid=31&cc=gb
A friend of mine told me years ago that her high school aged son was ‘ace’. How is it sensible for a child who has probably not finished puberty to decide, indefinitely if not for the rest of his life, that he’s not interested in sex? What ramifications does it have to him if he’s attached this label to himself before actually having the opportunity to determine what his adult relationship to sex and sexuality is? What kind of pressure will he feel if, after announcing to everyone he knows that he’s ace, he starts, in the natural course of things, to have sexual feelings? What effect does selecting a sexual label have on children who select these labels while still sexually immature? I can’t remember who it was, but I heard a psychologist talk about the fact that, due to the widespread availability of porn and the pressure they feel to adopt a sexual identity, children are deciding that they’re ‘gay’, ‘poly’, etc. before they actually have adult sexual feelings. And re porn, honestly I couldn’t blame a child who, after experiencing some of the porn available now, decides then and there ‘you know what, this is pretty repulsive and unpleasant, therefore I must be ace.’
My daughter regards herself as bi and aro. I am also bi, and I think that the bi is likely a physical thing. One of the biggest trigger of a “WTF?” response for me personally – and a huge irony – is that for decades non-heterosexuals gave been fighting to have their sexual attraction to bodies of the same physical sex as themselves regarded as “normal”. The evidence that homosexuality is, at least largely, inborn has been growing to the point that only fanatics now consider it a lifestyle choice. Yet now, we are expected to nod in support when we are told that homosexuality is about gender, and if you don’t respond to a person who identifies s the same gender as you, but has a body that is built along the other human sexually dimorphic pattern, then you are bigoted and a “genital fetishist”. (To which I think the only response can be “Well, of course I bloody well am! That’s called having a sexual orientation.”)
My daughter is a bit on the woke side – well, she’s only 22, extremism is common in that age! But she us mostly an intelligent and compassionate young woman. We have talked about the aro thing. She sees it as being like an orientation, whereas I’ve said it seems to me more like a taste, similar to not liking jazz (or music in general). When we talk, a lot of what she describes as distasteful to her is the way love, coupledom, and romance are portrayed by society and the media – the idea that romantic love is the central reason for existence, that it trumps all other relationships and priorities, the “instalove” of movie romances – put two people with interlocking genitalia together and they automatically fall in love forever, regardless of whether they even like each other or have anything in common – the songs which tell you that only another person can complete you, that you are less than a whole person if you don’t have a romantic partner… all if that. And you know what? I absolutely agree with her. And I am in a relationship with her father that is nearly 30 years old – but then none of the cultural crap about romance has had the slightest thing to fo with my experience of being in a relationship.
A friend of mine, who has a lesbian 14 year old daughter (There is a Gay Club at her Secondary [High] School! Sonetimes things fo change for t
… and I accidentally hit post. I’m typing on my phone, and the bus went over an unexpected bump! Sorry.
Sometimes things do change for the better, was the end of that sentence.
My friend, who is neither particularly woke, or political, told me that she thinks plain heterosexuality is currently portrayed in a particularly cheap, tacky, and unattractive way. She referenced such cultural landmarks as “Love Island”, with the comment that is she was in her young teens, she wouldn’t want anything to do with it either. Her thought is that this kind of portrayal is off-putting enough that young teens who have any degree if bi-ness in their sexuality are choosing to explore exclusively the same-sex facet of their orientation, whereas in times past, there were so many negative consequences to exploring same sex desires that anyone who had any opposite-sex desires at all tended to only ever explore those.
While I agree with this, my instant response is always “why should we care?” I believe that, even if it were a choice, we would need a damn good reason to intrude into the sexuality of consenting adults, and that everyone should be free to choose who their sex partners will be. I realize I am speaking to other people who would probably agree, but sometimes I do need to rant about the ridiculousness of thinking that it being a choice would make it less worthy of being given the right to be. If you are not hurting anyone else, not destroying the economy, not starting a war or overthrowing the government, not stealing or lying or cheating your business partner (or other economic partners), why should the government tell you no? It does them no harm if you “choose” to have sex with another of your same sex, or with several other members of any sex, or with no one at all.
I will agree with this wholeheartedly, but I don’t think that is all that new. Forever, we’ve been presenting heterosexual coupling as the be all and end all goal, especially for women. I was listening to a Peter, Paul, and Mary concert the other night, and they were singing a song (a traditional, old song) that basically says if you lose your man you get nothing at all. Really? You might actually be the lucky one of many, since most romantic pairings end poorly or at the very least in disappointment at some level.
Of course, so many men feel they are entitled to own women that it isn’t too surprising girls are turned off by heterosexual relationships, in a world that finally tells them they can do things that we weren’t being encouraged to do when I was younger – and in fact, many of us were being actively discouraged. Rape, domestic violence, divorce, abandonment – why would a girl want any of that? Sex may be a human urge, but it is not the only one, and not having that urge doesn’t make anyone less of a person.
I couldn’t agree more. It’s that strange doublethink: “No one has a right to question another person for not finding them attractive. Noone has the right to demand that they be considered sexual desirable. Except trans women. They can do that because… reasons.”
Yes, exactly. The world has changed, just enough that many girls (not all) have more of a choice. The social consequences for not being in a sexual relationship, or for your basic lesbianism are low enough – particularly for the young adults – that it is a valid choice for many of the under thirties.
What worries me is that social attitudes swing back and forth, like a pendulum. I think we’re currently at one extreme of the pendulum swing, and sometimes very soon it is going to swing back. In fact, it may already have started, In the USA with the dleiberate erosion of women’s and non-white people’s rights, and globally with the terrifying resurgance of fascism. We won’t lose all of the civil rights gain that we’ve made, but we won’t keep all of them either. I’m really hoping we’ll be left with the acceptance of gay marriage and sexual orientations, but lose the “Let’s experiment on children with hormones!” side of things – I have my doubts though.
Re “choice”:
This is a review of a book by Martin Duberman, a historian and, as described in the review, a pioneer of LGBTQ studies. Duberman challenges the “born this way” narrative, saying it is both strategically poor and scientifically questionable.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/martin-duberman-on-what-the-gay-rights-movement-has-lost
An excerpt from the review:
I haven’t yet read the book, but it sounds marvelous.
Exactly. Just another form of gender essentialism. I can wear pants and do science without assuming I must really be male, and my husband can be a librarian and match his colors without assuming he was born in the wrong body.
I’m not familiar at all with Duberman, but I found it interesting that he challenges the “born this way” narrative for sexuality as well as for “gender identity”. I’m also wary of that narrative, in part because I don’t find it convincing, but also because it privileges innate characteristics in an area that should simply be preference and thus allowed to change. The arguments Duberman makes seem much more solid than what I was thinking, so I might go ahead and grab a copy of the book.
I’ll have to try and get a copy of that – it sounds fascinating. I’ll be very interested to see what he says about orientation not being “inborn”, as much of the research I’ve seen strongly supports that idea.
Of course, we are human beings, and our behaviour, compared to many animals, is highly plastic. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the outcome was partly inborn/partly choice depending on the individual. I remember the “political lesbianism” as adopted by some of the feminists I knew in the mid to late 1980s. It never seemed particularly successful to me, but I was on the outside looking in, so who knows?
At the end of the day, as Iknklast says, it should be irrelevant whether a sexual orientation is chosen or inborn. As long as it occurs between two individuals able to give full consent, nobody should care.