You know perfectly well I never wrote "but that's so GAY!" so why do you put it in quotes? I didn't use an exclamation point and the words aren't mine. I wrote: "Yoshie, GAY." You have assumed that it was pejorative because you expect any man who talks about male heterosexual desire to be anti-gay. You've spoken positively of prostitutes and female porn stars in the past. Are you anti-gay?
No.
I was clearly reminding Yoshie that it was unsurprising a GAY man knew men who saw their penises as objects of desire. Since my POINT was that male objectification tends to make it easier for people to objectify themselves and since GAY men objectify other men much the same way STRAIGHT men objectify women, it's not surprising that there should be GAY men who find it easier than most men to see their bodies as objects of desire (and thus "love" those bodies).
To say that SCIENCE "always presumes some pre-existing sense of physicality outside discourse" is exactly right. Did you learn nothing from the Sokal hoax? The presumption of SCIENCE is that nature is as it is and we always see it through an imperfect lens. We therefore test our subjective discourse against objective Nature.
One can assume, as philosophers often do, that man is perfectly subjective and detached from nature. But this would suggest that man is not an animal, which was a popular notion when we looked to philosophy rather than science to explain our origins and Universe. I think sexuality, particularly heterosexuality looked at in terms of the majority of people over lots of time, is the one area where we would expect humans to be most animal-like. I think that, in some ways, that's obviously true.
Let me put it this way: how much do you like looking at girls and how much do you think you were taught to like it versus just plain liking it?
boddi
> All right, I've got a little more time now.
>
> What I like about this is that she's arguing that so many of these
> things that the Boddhi's among us think are "natural," even encoded
> in our genes, are reproduced every day in social practice. Constantly
> repeated social practice (like Boddhi's, "but that's so GAY!"), in
> which the caps and exclamation point suggest an anxiety about just
> how precarious these identities really are. And since these allegedly
> natural distinctions must be constantly reinforced through speech and
> practice, that means they can be disrupted by interfering with the
> repetition.
>
> It's always interesting to note when people turn to biology for a
> grounding of their position. As Butler says, that invocation always
> presumes some pre-existing sense of physicality outside discourse,
> but that's to assume what's under investigation. The invocation
> usually occurs around some anxiety, and there are few anxieties more
> profound than when the allegely fundamental difference between M and
> F is questioned. In other words, when people invoke biology, that's
> the time to get extra suspicious.
>
> Also relevant to the SSRI question.
>
> Doug
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>