> 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.
On your understanding of "socialization", your beliefs about sexual identity must be just as much a product of "socialization" as those to which your objecting, one different apparently from everyone else's in "our society".
As a psychological matter, the inability to see the self- contradiction to which this leads is linked to the associated idea that 'truth" claims have nothing to do with truth; they are masks for the will to power in Foucault's sense. Individuals making this claim also invariably ignore its implications for their own truth claims.
Ironically, however, it is true of their own claims. This can be seen in the dystopia which such "materialists" imagine as ideal and mistakenly identity with Marx's "true realm of freedom". The former ignores and is radically inconsistent with the ontological and anthropological premises underpinning the latter.
The Cockshott/Cottrell idea of "central planning" is a good example:
<http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/calculation_debate.pdf>
As I've many times pointed out, Marx himself makes these points about this kind of "materialism" in the third thesis on Feuerbach.
Ted