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As is so often the case with Paglia, she starts by saying something I fully and unreservedly agree with, and then veers wildly into something I think is a bit dodgy. Like Zizek (whom, on the whole, I enjoy more), she always starts out spectacularly but seems to lack any reasonable sense of when to stop. Being a good Lacanian, I of course agree that from the moment we have a sense of ourselves we are a bundle of inchoate and chaotic desires - 'polymorphously perverse,' as Old Uncle Sigmund would say. So it makes absolutely no sense to say that anyone is 'born this way' if by 'this way' you mean 'predisposed to like big hairy bikers' or 'little hairless boys' or 'women's shoes' whatever. I flinch a little bit when CP says that "everyone is born with a potential for bisexual responsiveness" - as though infants merely have the potential to develop erotic lives, rather than being fully strung out on the rack of physical cravings from day one; and as if 'bisexual' is a label that exhausts all the possibilities of desire. We are not born bisexual; we are born perverted in every way. Shoehorning our desires into the categories that our society makes available to us is a long and painful process, and one that some of us never fully achieve. But I really part company with Paglia when she starts 'explaining' the aetiology of male homosexuality in terms of a single glib narrative. I don't know what a gay adult is 'actually remembering' when he claims to have been gay from childhood, but I would not assume that there is a single explanation - however sympathetic - that makes sense of every gay man's remembered experiences. I assume that our own specific channels of desire run from diverse sources, even when they seem to run in parallel. No two people here, I suppose, would give exactly the same account of how they came to be sexually aware of boys. And perhaps the dark origin of our desires is ultimately hidden from us entirely. So yes, 'retrospective psychohistory' may indeed hold the keys to what we vulgarly call 'sexual orientation,' but there is no single key that will turn every lock, and for most of us the solution to the problem of our particular psychohistories can be glimpsed only as through a glass and darkly. |