>CB: Does male homosexuality inherently participate in the interpersonal
>subordination of women in that women are , by definition, undesirable
>interpersonal partners for homosexual men ? In other words, doesn't sexual
>preference for men subordinate women interpersonally by definition ?
No. It makes us uninteresting. To each other.
CB quoting KW:
>--cross cultural, historical research shows that there is no normal or
>natural sexuality
Just shows you what hogwash cross-cultural, historical research can produce, when it falls in love with its own still image and stops observing Mamma Natura in action.
"Natural" and "normal" need to be distinguished, here, however impolitic it may be to do so. The fact that homosexual behaviour exists among all animals tells us that it is animal behaviour. So let's call it natural behaviour. That doesn't alter the fact that the survival of any species depends on most members being attracted to members of the opposite sex. Normal behaviour, meaning "behaviour practiced by most members most of the time", has no option but to be heterosexual. (Though of course if IV fertilisation gets to be popular that'll no longer be the case amongst us chatterers.)
Hatred and fear of, as well as distaste for homosexuality seems to be a strictly human phenomenon (experienced to a greater or lesser degree in human cultures across the globe and over time), so it's another manifestation of what we do so well: turn idiosyncratic (let's call it so as not to say abnormal) behaviour into something to feel guilty about. The human animal seems to be obsessed with drawing lines around stuff, even when they do more harm than good. Thus we devise categories for boys who like boys, girls who like boys, girls who like girls, etc, etc., and some of those categories are ruled In and some of them are ruled Out. When in fact there's no reason for categories at all, in this case: sexuality is on a continuum, as the members of all other species would patiently point out, if we could trouble them to think about it: some days a bull might want to mount a cow, some days he might feel like mounting another bull; some days a girl rabbit might pretend she's a boy rabbit and jump her sister. That doesn't conflict with the fact that, for most critters most of the time, sexual attraction is necessarily between two members that can produce offspring.
CB quoting KW:
>--biological capacities are transformed & mediated culturally, producing
>sexuality as a social need and relation
Dunno about transformed (depends on how it's meant); biological capacities are culturally mediated, willy nilly, I suppose. But how do we get from there to a need for sexuality? Sexuality is a construct, a concept, a cousin once removed from the business at hand (or rather, not at hand, we hope), which is sex. Right? So who needs sexuality? What kind of a need would that be? And how does sexuality get to be a "relation"? Sex -- now, there's a need for you. But, since both social and non-social animals experience and act on the need, evidently it doesn't require social mediation.
But I should have started with the caveat that I don't have to make a living from this subject, so I'm allowed the luxury of trusting my own eyes and ears, hah hah.
>(((((((((
>
>CB: This is an overstatement of the cultural transformation and mediation
>of sexuality across cultures. Most non-Western kin systems have
>heterosexual underlying presumptions. I have not seen one ethnography in
>which homosexual relationships have the same significance as heterosexual
>relationships in kinship structure.
They wouldn't last long if they did.
cheers, Joanna S.
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