> You're not going all the way with this: if we didn't incessantly
> pigeonhole ourselves and each other into sexual categories, there could be
> no systematic discrimination on the basis of the stable sexual categories.
>(I think I stole this from Joanna. It's come up on the list before.) The
>"desire for control" requires stable categories--cf.
The desire for control, the desire to impose a sexual hegemony on yourself and others, can be followed out even if you assume sexual orientation is dynamic. Look at the long history of religious groups that have been acting on the desire in just this manner, fighting the "temptation" of homosexuality under the assumption that sexual attraction can be swayed one way or the other by social influences. Establishing that people have this desire for control alone doesn't tip the balance on how mutable they assume sexual orientation to be.
>the incessant social concern with the correct racial classification of
>babies in the deep South during Jim Crow (people were fined and jailed for
>violating the "one drop" rule). Take away the stable categories, the
>system of racism (or heterosexism) cannot survive
This might work if you could get rid of the ability perceive race as a category altogether but just making the categories fluid wouldn't cut it. Discrimination could still be based one how close you fall to one of the ends of spectrum, e.g. someone is "too black." Anyway, I think this is a really goofy way of trying to fight discrimination, it goes after mental categories instead of dealing with the moral irresponsibility of being racist, sexist, anti-gay, that there is nothing justifiable about discriminating on the basis of the categories.
Arash wrote:
So I think what shifts the
> balance toward the popular view that sexual orientation is more static
> than shifting is that the actual life experience of many (not all)
> people reflects this kind of relative consistency in sexual attraction.
> About 80% of self-identified gays and lesbians report heterosexual desires
> and/or encounters at some point in their lives, and about 30% of
>heterosexuals report homosexual desires and/or encounters at some point in
> their lives (the latter number is no doubt suppressed by social
>desirability bias). Sexual desire is far more mutable and dynamic than our
> modern sexual categories imply.
I don't think my point here precludes people having occasional sexual encounters outside what their sexual orientation biases them toward. What I think remains stable over a lifetime is our sexual attraction, that feature of puberty where physical arousal becomes associated with the opposite sex if straight or with the same sex if gay. I could see myself being pleasured or pleasing another man but I don't think I could eliminate or transfer to men that involuntary sense of arousal I get from observing the female form. I think this is true for at least men, there was a study on arousal patterns and while gay and straight men diverged along male or female centered pornography most women, gay or straight, were aroused by both. I apologize for glossing over the potential differences between the sexes with some of my statements on sexuality.
>Thus there really isn't any puzzle here; as with many behavioral
>patterns and traits, homosexual behavior could exist and persist in many
>mammalian species even if it has no positive benefits or no effects on
>reproductive success at all.
But it is a puzzle if there is a negative effect on reproductive success, as there would appear to be for a trait that leads to near-exclusive homosexual behavior. Perhaps individual with this trait also ended up conferring some subtle positive effect on reproductive success in the original evolutionary environment (relative fertility, care-giving, protection) but so far an such effect hasn't been well zeroed in on.
Arash