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It's a very important discussion. I should be clear that I don't argue -- as some of the more extreme pomo folks do -- that "orientation" is all socially constructed. There is a core of feeling each of us has that indeed we don't choose and that can be an "important shared experience" as you note -- indeed that shared experience is what brings us here. If you read Gary Leupp's or Gregory Pflughelder's books on the history of male-male sexuality in pre-modern Japan, you will find that there was a recognizable (as in recognizable to us) BL tradition -- they called it "waka-shu" -- or "way of youths" -- a man would be drawn to the "way of the youths" -- as opposed to cultivating geisha and the like. The point though is that men who followed "wakashu" were not marked off as a separate class of people. This "way" was akin to taste in arts or sports -- this man prefers to spend his time perfecting his calligraphy; that one his judo skills. There was also a sort of widely held belief that most people were drawn to anyone who was beautiful -- women or boys or more likely both, but it seemed some just didn't care for women and some just didn't care for boys -- no accounting for tastes, ha ha. What I have read about sexuality in the ancient Mediterranean world or medieval Persia seems quite similar. "Orientation" would have been understood, but it had little or no political significance. That began to change in the mid-19th century with the medicalization/ classification of sexual feeling and the posting of the "deviant" label on anything that didn't conform to Judeo-Christian norms overlayed as they were with the "natural law" business. We have had some changes in what constitutes an "okay" orientation and what constitutes a "deviant" or "pathological" orientation (i.e., adult-adult homosexuality has now been pronounced "okay") but the boundaries between "okay" and "deviant" are being more ferociously policed and pathologized than ever. Once one accepts the politicization/pathologization of sexual feeling (which Virped does), the war is lost. The only way forward is to fight the whole concept. It doesn't mean that each of us doesn't have his or her unique sets of sexual feelings and it doesn't mean that it isn't something akin to handedness (as in I didn't choose to be right or left handed; I can use both hands but favor the right -- I can manage to have sex with practically anyone in the right circumstances but am drawn to boys and men with something boyish about them). What it does mean is that my feelings should be a private matter -- not monitored by the police or pawed over by creeps such as Cantor and Blanchard -- and that that should be true of everyone -- man, woman, boy or girl. SR |