I'm surprised that Doug likes this. Yeah, I can read it, but it's a lot of words meant to support a thin premise - that sex is constructed socially. It's not in chimps and it's not in us. We're very unusual animals. We mature sexually very late in our life cycle. We are strongly social animals whose socialization is not mediated as much by chemistry or instinct as by societies that are the creation of our minds. We learn almost everything needed to operate socially before we develop the inclination to have sex. Nevertheless, we are animals and if you put young men and women who can't speak each other's language on an island at least some of them will be having sex very soon.
So I think it's confusing to us that we could be motivated by more primitive patterns because our minds mature before our bodies. Still, we have these consistent patterns and its entirely reasonable to understand some portion of our behavior as mediated by our biology. I just don't see how there can be any question that men tend to be visually stimulated. We've only been producing pornography since we could draw. Pornogrpahy dominated the Internet. Pornography has been produced almost immediately following the invention of every visual medium.
Again, I think there is a great deal that is socially constructed about gender, I just think that the idea that societies define gender narrowly while it is "naturally" more complex is backwards and flies in the face of all evidence. Societies have created myriad, often contradictory taboos and customs around gender and yet gender has not changed in all that time. Homo sapiens has been divided into men and women for a hundred thousand years and all our ancestral species were divided into male and female going back millions of years. Again, I don't know of any contention that our closest genetic relatives have any more than two genders and I don't see any reason to suppose it now.
I just do not see any reason to characterize people who exhibit different sexual behaviors as different "genders". It just makes no sense to me and seems to create impossible complications and necessitate constant redefinition when none is necessary.
boddi
On 11/17/05, Rotating Bitch <info at pulpculture.org> wrote:
> Only in your dreams. It's actually a good quote, revealing that she's not
> denying biology at all. I don't get what is so bad about it. You don't like
> the way she writes. So? Some people do. Some people don't like the way I
> write. Others do.
>
> She's simply saying that sex is naturalized in and through social
> practices. It's made to seem normal that men are always and only visual
> creatures, for instance, and that's why they like to look and, ostensibly,
> women don't. I just posted a brief summary of a book R brought home the
> other day, from the 20s, where the author devoted 14 pages to sex and
> olfactory perception, and about 4 to the visual aspect of sexual attraction
> and desirability --hafl of that devoted to Thomas's flagpoles and knots in
> trees. It was written by a scientist claiming that his was a dispassionate
> look at the facts of sexuality.
>
> Now, if it's so fucking natural, this visual thing, then you'd think it's
> be so powerful that a scientist wouldn't miss it. But, only a few short
> decades ago, a scientist devoted very little attention to appearance and
> sexual desire.
> http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/11/11/do-you-have-sex-on-a-regular-basis/
>
>
> But that's not all she's saying. She's saying that not only is sex
> naturalized in and through social practices (such as scientific discourse,
> etc.) but it's in the very process of naturalization that gaps or fissures
> are also produced.
>
> IOW, there is no seamlessness to this process. There's a seam. We can find
> where it's been stitched together. The seam? What we think is abnormal --
> what doesn't fit into definitions and social practices that constitute
> normal sexuality. BD/SM, GLBT, people with so-called diseases and genetic
> defects.
>
> It's a way of looking at what we'd traditionally call ideology and saying,
> wait a minute, ideology isn't wholly seamless, it's not some monolithic
> entity. Traditionally, philosophers have thought that the only way to break
> out of "social structure" was to look to something external as the source
> of social change. But, what's outside society? How does society change if
> there's nothing outside? Butler's saying that the very process by which we
> normalize sexuality -- make it seem that sex and gender are normal (that
> it's normal to find the male body unattractive or be indifferent to it, for
> instance) -- is also the very process by which a naturalized body is
> destabilized.
>
> It is, as she writes, a "productive crisis" Normally, we are taught to see
> deviants/deviance the not normal) as a threat. That's a mistake, she says.
> The deviant or not normal presents as a productive )(generative) crisis.
>
> Wow. That was so hard. I'll bet, if you look around you or even examine
> where you, yourself, are defined as the deviant, you can understand exactly
> what she means.
>
> And the thing about what she's saying -- people always misread, not unlike
> misreadings of Foucault. He's offering us "hope" -- not telling us its
> hopeless. He's saying, conversely, that the other way of looking at
> ideology is what is hopeless, what leads us feel "entrapped in the present"
> riding around on a cul-de-sac saying, how do we get out of this place? In
> some ways, Butler's saying the same.
>
> there's more to the quote. I just unpacked the snippet boddi referenced.
>
>
> At 07:42 PM 11/17/2005, boddi satva wrote:
> >C. Joanna,
> >
> >I think he posted that ironically.
> >
>
>
>
> >lk
>
> "Scream-of-consciousness prose stylings, peppered with
> sociological observations, political ruminations, and
> in-yore-face colloquial assaults" -- Dennis Perrin
>
> Bitch | Lab
> http://blog.pulpculture.org
>
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>