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While I am profoundly suspicious of your motives for this profession of ignorance, I'll give you a definition of social construction and take it all the way down for you.
To the extent that desire, whatever its origin, is expressed through an individual's manifested activities with other people, the expression of that desire is entirely a social construction. Just as art, language, and myth are predominately social constructions that both manifest and express some fundamental psycho-social realm in symbolic form, so to with social conventions, which are merely the ritualistic and dynamically acted out reflections of apparently more fixed symbolic forms, for example in language. None of these forms exist in their proper or full potential as expression until they are conjoined in the concerted acts of social relationships. The mask is dead without the actor, the music, and the dance and none of these are complete without the chorus, the audience or its analogue as a de-individuated consciousness of society, that is to say the gods or history.
Human beings simply do not exist in any humanly meaningful form in absentia of their specific spatio-temporality as a socio-cultural gestalt, period. The totality of our individual ontological dependence on human society is inseparable from every conceivable point of view that seeks to understand human beings and their activities as human.
To say that this definition is a tautology does not argue against its validity, but rather affirms the axiomatic identity between what is human and what is socially constructed.
To argue that our biology must have existed prior to society is probably not empirically verifiable nor correct. It is quite likely that our biological evolution was at least as channelled by the social configurations of our ancestors as the variety of eco-systems they inhabited. So the apparently enigmatic dichotomies between biological or social determinations are quite likely not mutually exclusive polarities, but rather an inter-penetrating dialectic.
On the other hand, not every aspect of the polarized dialectic between biological or social construction is necessarily linked through causal chains to one particular pole or the other. Rather some features of the human gestalt are better understood as seen through one set of epistemological parameters rather than the other.
For example, grooming seems to be a common feature of social primates, and in fact it appears to be a fundamental expression of their social character. Grooming is merely one activity among a host of other social interactions that bind, express, and tautologically constitute primate society. What the adaptive significance or biological origins are of grooming in particular seems to ask the wrong question. Seen strictly from a causal biological point of view, grooming as such appears as a fortuitous artifact. On the other hand, grooming activity seen from the social construction point of view appears to serve a manifold of social purposes that depend on other social relations such as mating hierarchy, age rank, and relative group status.
I am not sure I can construct either a biologically or socially significant differentiation between primates picking lice off each other and nibbling the tasty morsels and what is described here as Queer Eyed TV.
Chuck0 writes: ``Well, I think the show is fun, but my main motivation for watching it is to improve my sad sense of style. I've long been fashion-challenged, which is due to my activism and ironic given that I have a fine arts degree.''
Submit and repress your anarchist desire to resist all that is. Find somebody to groom you. I let my best buddy in high school do the honors, later my wife, and after that my son.
Levi-Strauss Grimes