[lbo-talk] the latest skirmish in the sexpositivity wars

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Wed Jan 10 10:00:13 PST 2007


On 1/10/07, Daniel Davies <d_squared_2002 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> What I'm interested in is the close first-cousin
> relationship between the desire of
> minority-sexual-preference communities to have
> their rights respected (which is entirely achievable and laudable),
> and their desire to have the practices themselves taken seriously
> (which is entirely impossible and probably not laudable).
> I'm trying to make the point that the whole debate seems to me
> to have an element of oddity to it, in that people want a degree
> of regard from the world as a whole for their sexual personae
> which it is utterly impossible to provide.

I'm no fan of Orlando Patterson, but his recent NYT column offers a useful tool here, the distinction between sincerity and authenticity:

<blockquote>In the 1970s, the cultural critic Lionel Trilling encouraged us to take seriously the distinction between sincerity and authenticity. Sincerity, he said, requires us to act and really be the way that we present ourselves to others. Authenticity involves finding and expressing the true inner self and judging all relationships in terms of it.

Authenticity now dominates our way of viewing ourselves and our relationships, with baleful consequences. Within sensitive individuals it breeds doubt; between people it promotes distrust; within groups it enhances group-think in the endless quest to be one with the group's true soul; and between groups it is the inner source of identity politics.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

But it is in our attempts to come to grips with prejudice that authenticity most confounds. Social scientists and pollsters routinely belittle results showing growing tolerance; they argue that Americans have simply learned how to conceal their deeply ingrained prejudices. A hot new subfield of psychology claims to validate such skepticism. The Harvard social psychologist Mahzarin Banaji and her collaborators claim to have evidence, based on more than three million self-administered Web-based tests, that nearly all of us are authentically bigoted to the core with hidden "implicit prejudices" — about race, gender, age, homosexuality and appearance — that we deny, sometimes with consciously tolerant views.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I couldn't care less whether my neighbors and co-workers are authentically sexist, racist or ageist. What matters is that they behave with civility and tolerance, obey the rules of social interaction and are sincere about it. (Orlando Patterson, "Overrating the Self," 26 December 2006, <http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/26/opinion/edpatter.php>)</blockquote>

So, it's unreasonable to demand that everyone have authentic regard for all of others' beliefs, practices, and identities, but it is not unreasonable, in many cases including this one, to demand that all sincerely act as if they did for most of them. That's the rule of polite society, especially the case in Britain and Japan as stereotypes, which are in part rooted in truth, have it. Politeness is often tragically underrated, however, particularly in cyberspace. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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