[lbo-talk] Michelangelo , was Re: The sources of suffering (Grow up!) ( Was Re: Harry Potter, Metritocracy, and Reward)

Miles Jackson cqmv at pdx.edu
Mon Aug 27 20:28:16 PDT 2007


John Thornton wrote:


> This is an example of overly complicating a rather simple question. Did
> Michaelangelo want to fuck boys, girls, both, or neither?

Your question reflects the conflation of sexual behavior and sexual types that I'm trying to distinguish. Because a person has a certain type of sexual desire or engages in a specific sexual behavior does not "make" that person a heterosexual or a homosexual. That typification of people into stable sexual categories can only occur in societies that have those social categories of people.

Thought experiment: Michaelangelo (or whoever) 500 years ago in Europe has sex with a man. Does he wonder about his "real" sexual identity?

Does he fear or hope that he is a gay man? No, because he does not draw any implications about his personality from the type of sexual behavior he engages in. People can just fuck--and do in many societies!--without labelling themselves or the people they have sex with as stable sexual types of people. I know this is hard to imagine in our society, but that's my point: we're socialized to automatically jump from saying that people carrying out sexual acts to saying that people have specific, stable sexual categories. This social process of labelling people as stable sexual types is not a cultural or historical universal; it is a social practice that has emerged in specific types of human societies.

So the whole issue of sexual identity is a far more complex and social process than you suggest.

Miles



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