And Even Thee's a Little Diverse

Along with my coworkers, I went to a training session on diversity on Thursday. Both of the presenters (a man and a woman) were gay, which may be why they spent so much time on sexual orientation and "gender." That wasn't such a good idea, because those issues were the ones they were most confused about. (Not only those, I admit: the male presenter claimed that Sunni and Shi'a are "ethnicities" as well as religious sects, which is like calling Roman Catholicism an ethnicity.)

First the presenter began by distinguishing between "sex" and "gender," and in good 1960s Second Wave Feminist fashion she defined these in terms of biology/physiology/external genitals ("sex") and behavior/dress/job appropriateness ("gender"). Having done so, though, she kept equivocating, especially about "gender." For example, she defined "gender identity" as a person's sense of whether they are male or female. But "male" and "female" are sexes, not genders; the proper words would be "masculine" and "feminine," but they aren't identities. I understand why "gender identity" is used this way, of course: "sexual identity" was already being used for a person's sense of their sexual orientation, though that's also problematic too. Does it mean what someone knows inwardly about his or her desires, or does it mean one's publicly declared identity? The latter would mean that a closet case's "sexual identity" is heterosexual, because that's the mask he or she wears, so it seems an odd waste of the term.

Personally, I don't seem to have a "gender identity": I know that I'm male, but subjectively, inside myself, I don't feel that I'm either male or female. This makes me wonder about transsexuals: what does it mean, I wonder, to feel that one is the 'wrong' sex? The closest I could come to something like that is the shock I feel when I look in the mirror each morning and an old man looks back at me; but I've never much liked my own appearance, so it's not much of a change. (What am I rejecting in my reflection -- my "gender," my age, or my looks?) Nor do I feel masculine or feminine, though like many people I've often worried about how other people perceive me. Self-image is notoriously unreliable, but is that what's meant by "identity"? Sometimes it seems to be, and it should be obvious how problematic it would be to equate one's identity with one's sense of self: my "identity" is that of a fat person, but I'm actually skinny (or vice versa); I "identify" as a young person, but I'm 70 years old; everybody thinks I'm a manly man, but inside me is a little girl who wants to sit in Daddy's lap; and so on. These discrepancies are surely interesting psychology, but are they identities? What is an identity, anyway?

But back to "gender." The presenter stuck to the older sense of the word when she talked about transsexuals who get a sex change; they're not the same as the transgendered, who may not conform to local social norms about gender, and may seek to modify their bodies to some extent (just as the cisgendered do), but don't want to alter their genital organs. ("Sex" used to be used to refer to those organs: caught without clothing, he tried to conceal his sex.) But how far can you fail to fit the norm without being "transgendered"? After all, I fall short of masculine norms in various ways (such as my lack of interest in sports), but no one would call me transgendered. Does it count if you violate the norms but see them as part of normal variation? It often seems to me that the advocates of transgender equivocate between seeing it as an identity -- a label one applies to oneself -- and seeing it as a description that can be applied by others, at least as long the others are sympathetic. Joan of Arc, who cut her hair short and took up the military as a career, is often called transgendered nowadays, but she certainly never thought of herself that way.

It also seems to me that many (not all) transgendered people have a very conservative, restrictive view of gender: they are trans because they don't fit the norms, but they never question the norms. If a little boy plays with dolls, should adults assume he is transgendered? Or should they consider that little boys often like to play with dolls? I get nervous for children's sake when adults (who often have no expert knowledge at all, for what little that is worth) jump to conclusions about their future gender or sexuality on the basis of such crude stereotypes, which I'd thought had been challenged effectively but seem to be making a comeback -- and often among the same people who were supposed to be challenging them.

And Even Thee's a Little Diverse

Along with my coworkers, I went to a training session on diversity on Thursday. Both of the presenters (a man and a woman) were gay, which may be why they spent so much time on sexual orientation and "gender." That wasn't such a good idea, because those issues were the ones they were most confused about. (Not only those, I admit: the male presenter claimed that Sunni and Shi'a are "ethnicities" as well as religious sects, which is like calling Roman Catholicism an ethnicity.)

First the presenter began by distinguishing between "sex" and "gender," and in good 1960s Second Wave Feminist fashion she defined these in terms of biology/physiology/external genitals ("sex") and behavior/dress/job appropriateness ("gender"). Having done so, though, she kept equivocating, especially about "gender." For example, she defined "gender identity" as a person's sense of whether they are male or female. But "male" and "female" are sexes, not genders; the proper words would be "masculine" and "feminine," but they aren't identities. I understand why "gender identity" is used this way, of course: "sexual identity" was already being used for a person's sense of their sexual orientation, though that's also problematic too. Does it mean what someone knows inwardly about his or her desires, or does it mean one's publicly declared identity? The latter would mean that a closet case's "sexual identity" is heterosexual, because that's the mask he or she wears, so it seems an odd waste of the term.

Personally, I don't seem to have a "gender identity": I know that I'm male, but subjectively, inside myself, I don't feel that I'm either male or female. This makes me wonder about transsexuals: what does it mean, I wonder, to feel that one is the 'wrong' sex? The closest I could come to something like that is the shock I feel when I look in the mirror each morning and an old man looks back at me; but I've never much liked my own appearance, so it's not much of a change. (What am I rejecting in my reflection -- my "gender," my age, or my looks?) Nor do I feel masculine or feminine, though like many people I've often worried about how other people perceive me. Self-image is notoriously unreliable, but is that what's meant by "identity"? Sometimes it seems to be, and it should be obvious how problematic it would be to equate one's identity with one's sense of self: my "identity" is that of a fat person, but I'm actually skinny (or vice versa); I "identify" as a young person, but I'm 70 years old; everybody thinks I'm a manly man, but inside me is a little girl who wants to sit in Daddy's lap; and so on. These discrepancies are surely interesting psychology, but are they identities? What is an identity, anyway?

But back to "gender." The presenter stuck to the older sense of the word when she talked about transsexuals who get a sex change; they're not the same as the transgendered, who may not conform to local social norms about gender, and may seek to modify their bodies to some extent (just as the cisgendered do), but don't want to alter their genital organs. ("Sex" used to be used to refer to those organs: caught without clothing, he tried to conceal his sex.) But how far can you fail to fit the norm without being "transgendered"? After all, I fall short of masculine norms in various ways (such as my lack of interest in sports), but no one would call me transgendered. Does it count if you violate the norms but see them as part of normal variation? It often seems to me that the advocates of transgender equivocate between seeing it as an identity -- a label one applies to oneself -- and seeing it as a description that can be applied by others, at least as long the others are sympathetic. Joan of Arc, who cut her hair short and took up the military as a career, is often called transgendered nowadays, but she certainly never thought of herself that way.

It also seems to me that many (not all) transgendered people have a very conservative, restrictive view of gender: they are trans because they don't fit the norms, but they never question the norms. If a little boy plays with dolls, should adults assume he is transgendered? Or should they consider that little boys often like to play with dolls? I get nervous for children's sake when adults (who often have no expert knowledge at all, for what little that is worth) jump to conclusions about their future gender or sexuality on the basis of such crude stereotypes, which I'd thought had been challenged effectively but seem to be making a comeback -- and often among the same people who were supposed to be challenging them.

Angel Face Comic Book Review

Angel Face Comic Book Review

Guardians of the Cube #1 Comic Book Review Patrick Fillion

Guardians of the Cube #1 Comic Book Review Patrick Fillion

Manly by Dale Lazarov Gay Comic Review

Manly by Dale Lazarov Gay Comic Review

Comforting Fables For Atheists

After a false start or two, I finally got around to reading A. C. Grayling’s Life, sex and ideas: the good life without God (Oxford, 2003). I’m not sure whether Grayling is usually included among the current wave of New Atheists, though he’s listed at the Celebrity Atheist List and has apparently shared a pulpit with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens on at least one occasion. Grayling, a philosopher who teaches at the University of London, is mostly less shrill than his fellow evangelists. That’s probably why he’s all over the British media, including The Guardian where he has a regular column on philosophy for the masses.

As I indicated, I’d tried reading Life, sex and ideas before, I think because I’d seen it reviewed favorably somewhere, but something about his manner put me off. This time I was determined to get through it, just because I feel I need to keep up better with the recent wave of atheist writing. (Still haven’t gotten to Dawkins’s The God Delusion or Hitchens’s God Is Not Great). I persisted despite being put off by his sloppy style and recurrent dumb mistakes, such as his remark that “The Romans did not have a symbol for nothing (zero), and were so hampered by the lack that they were incapable of contributing to mathematical knowledge” (18); or that “Liberal education is disappearing in the English-speaking West” (9). Or this:

The minority sort of utopia is more austere, and is generally written by formidable feminist ladies. Sex has ceased to exist, utopia is all-female, whose occupants reproduce by parthenogenesis, and who stay wrinkle-free as a result of animal extracts (secured under conditions exceedingly pleasant for the animals). When the accidental discoverers of these utopias are pleasant young men, they of course fall in love with one of the female residents, only to be discomfited or even expelled when their dystopic instincts collide with the new order. (These characterisations are distillations of Utopian imaginings entertainingly collected in The Oxford Book of Uptopias [sic] and other sources.) [98]

Grayling’s sources must have stopped with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915); later feminist utopias include formidable feminist lady Marge Piercy’s classic Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), which is not only co-ed but features plenty of sex, as do most lesbian utopias (The Female Man [1975], The Wanderground [1978]) whose authors know that men aren’t necessary for copulation. What Grayling is actually talking about, I'll bet, are the stories of all-female countries or worlds, usually written by men, who fantasized about reintroducing the penis to hordes of sex-starved females; a sampling of such was collected by Sam Moskowitz for his 1972 anthology When Women Rule.

This shows up in his treatment of religion, which reads like warmed-over Bertrand Russell. Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with that, but why read Grayling on religion or philosophy when you could read Russell? In general, Grayling makes the same mistakes I’ve noticed in other contemporary atheists. In an essay titled “Evil,” he declares that “All religions are anxious to proselytize the young” (34.) Of course they are, including science and atheism. As the historian of science Ronald Numbers pointed out about the New-Atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett,

Displaying a degree of intolerance more characteristic of a fundamentalist fanatic than an academic philosopher, he called for “caging” those who would deliberately misinform children about the natural world, just as one would cage a threatening wild animal. “The message is clear,” he wrote: “those who will not accommodate, those will not temper, who insist on keeping only the purest and wildest strain of their heritage alive, we will be obliged, reluctantly, to cage or disarm, and we will do our best to disable the memes [traditions] they fight for”. … With the bravado of a man unmindful that only 11 percent of the public shared his enthusiasm for naturalistic evolution, he warned parents that if they insisted on teaching their children “falsehoods – that the earth is flat, that ‘Man’ is not a product of evolution by natural selection – then you must expect, at the very least, that those of us who have freedom of speech will feel free to describe your teachings as the spreading of falsehoods, and will attempt to demonstrate this to your children at our earliest opportunity” … . Those who resisted conversion to Dennett’s scientific fundamentalism would be subject to “quarantine.”

(In Petto, Andrew J.; Godfrey, Laurie R. [editors], Scientists confront Intelligent Design and Creationism, W. W. Norton 2007, p 45.)

In an essay titled “Evil”, Grayling declares:

There is no greater social evil than religion. It is the cancer in the body of humanity. Human credulity and superstition, and the need for comforting fables, will never be extirpated, so religion will always exist, at least among the uneducated. The only way to manage the dangers it presents is to confine it entirely to the private sphere, and for the public domain to be blind to it in all but one respect: that by law no one’s private beliefs should be allowed to cause a nuisance or an injury to anyone else. For whenever and whatever religion manifests itself in the public arena as an organized phenomenon, it is the most Satanic of all things [34-5].

In the first place, it is not at all clear what “religion” is, or that it can be excised from society like a “cancer.” (I noticed that Grayling largely replaces moral pejoratives with quasi-medical ones, which is not an improvement.) Religion historically and cross-culturally includes not only teachings about gods and spirits but the arts (including visual and plastic arts, music, and literature), the sciences, philosophy, and a good deal more. This is an important point, because though Grayling sneers at what he calls the “need for comforting fables”, he also acknowledges the importance of stories in moral and ethical thinking:

And only by being aware of a rich array of possible narratives and goals to choose from can one’s choices and actions be truly informed and maximally free. Once again, exposure to stories – which in part represent possible lives – is a vital ingredient in the ethical construction of an individual’s personal future history [14].

The great classical stories like The Iliad, The Odyssey, and the Greek tragedies were, as Grayling knows, religious stories. The role of parables, which are often stories, in Jesus' teachings shouldn't be overlooked either, nor the narratives in the Hebrew Bible. These are only rarely, if ever “comforting fables” -- who considers the story of Onan (Genesis 38) comforting, to cite just one instance?

In the second place, human beings invented religion, yet atheists like Grayling persist in talking as though religion were some alien and autonomous force that has intruded on the human sphere – a very odd notion for atheists or other naturalists / secularists to hold. It has long been disputed what role religion actually plays in starting wars, for example: would war evaporate if we could somehow eliminate religion, or would people just come up with other reasons and excuses and motives? I vote for the latter; I would hold that the U.S. invasion of Vietnam (for example) had nothing to do with religion, but with the U.S. craving for geopolitical power against the Vietnamese desire for national independence. The South Vietnamese government was dominated by Roman Catholics, it’s true, as a result of French colonialism supplanted by US interference, but religion served U.S. purposes rather than directing them.

Grayling is even more confused when it comes to sex:

A major source of hostility to sex is religion. ‘Christianity gave Eros poison to drink,’ Nietzsche observed, ‘but he did not die of it, he degenerated – into vice.’ The belief that soul is heavenly and body earthly, and that everything earthly interferes with the soul’s aspiration to heaven, is the fountainhead of negative evaluations of bodily things [47].

Astonishingly, the removal from public view of erections and sexually various activities, relegating them to dark places of whispering and anxiety, is a very recent phenomenon, and one restricted almost exclusively to cultural traditions stemming from the ‘religions of the Book’ – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Every other culture, historically and contemporaneously, which has escaped their attitudes to sex and the body has two notable features: a widespread celebration of sexuality in art and religion, and a complete absence of pornography (which is not, of course, the same thing as erotica) [48].

And where did “religion” get this hostility to sex? Grayling seems to think that only Judaism, Christianity and Islam try to control human sexuality, which shows his ignorance of other world religions. Asceticism – the desire to purify the body through self-mortification – is far older than Christianity (and largely absent from Judaism): the Buddha reacted against such extremes in Hinduism. Grayling even mentions “Plato’s view that spirit is good and must be cultivated, whereas body is bad and must be disciplined” (49) as an influence on Christianity’s hostility to the flesh, which undermines his effort to put all the blame on Yahwism, as well as his later eulogy of “the absence of mysticism and false sentimentality” in Greek philosophy (223). Like many university-educated Brits of his generation Grayling has a sentimental view of ancient Greece not really based in fact. (And has he really never encountered E. R. Dodd’s The Greeks and the irrational [1951], which is hardly an obscure work in his field?)

According to an autobiographical essay near the end of Life, sex, and ideas, Grayling grew up in East Africa, with access to a small but rich private library at home. What he read there shaped him so definitely that he seems still to be lodged intellectually in the early to mid-20^th century. Despite the occasional reference to Terry Eagleton (whom he dislikes) or Michel Foucault (whom he treats with surprising respect, given his background), Grayling doesn’t seem to have really learned anything since then. Either that or he’s dumbing down his columns for his audience, which isn’t a good thing either.

Comforting Fables For Atheists

After a false start or two, I finally got around to reading A. C. Grayling’s Life, sex and ideas: the good life without God (Oxford, 2003). I’m not sure whether Grayling is usually included among the current wave of New Atheists, though he’s listed at the Celebrity Atheist List and has apparently shared a pulpit with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens on at least one occasion. Grayling, a philosopher who teaches at the University of London, is mostly less shrill than his fellow evangelists. That’s probably why he’s all over the British media, including The Guardian where he has a regular column on philosophy for the masses.

As I indicated, I’d tried reading Life, sex and ideas before, I think because I’d seen it reviewed favorably somewhere, but something about his manner put me off. This time I was determined to get through it, just because I feel I need to keep up better with the recent wave of atheist writing. (Still haven’t gotten to Dawkins’s The God Delusion or Hitchens’s God Is Not Great). I persisted despite being put off by his sloppy style and recurrent dumb mistakes, such as his remark that “The Romans did not have a symbol for nothing (zero), and were so hampered by the lack that they were incapable of contributing to mathematical knowledge” (18); or that “Liberal education is disappearing in the English-speaking West” (9). Or this:

The minority sort of utopia is more austere, and is generally written by formidable feminist ladies. Sex has ceased to exist, utopia is all-female, whose occupants reproduce by parthenogenesis, and who stay wrinkle-free as a result of animal extracts (secured under conditions exceedingly pleasant for the animals). When the accidental discoverers of these utopias are pleasant young men, they of course fall in love with one of the female residents, only to be discomfited or even expelled when their dystopic instincts collide with the new order. (These characterisations are distillations of Utopian imaginings entertainingly collected in The Oxford Book of Uptopias [sic] and other sources.) [98]

Grayling’s sources must have stopped with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915); later feminist utopias include formidable feminist lady Marge Piercy’s classic Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), which is not only co-ed but features plenty of sex, as do most lesbian utopias (The Female Man [1975], The Wanderground [1978]) whose authors know that men aren’t necessary for copulation. What Grayling is actually talking about, I'll bet, are the stories of all-female countries or worlds, usually written by men, who fantasized about reintroducing the penis to hordes of sex-starved females; a sampling of such was collected by Sam Moskowitz for his 1972 anthology When Women Rule.

This shows up in his treatment of religion, which reads like warmed-over Bertrand Russell. Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with that, but why read Grayling on religion or philosophy when you could read Russell? In general, Grayling makes the same mistakes I’ve noticed in other contemporary atheists. In an essay titled “Evil,” he declares that “All religions are anxious to proselytize the young” (34.) Of course they are, including science and atheism. As the historian of science Ronald Numbers pointed out about the New-Atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett,

Displaying a degree of intolerance more characteristic of a fundamentalist fanatic than an academic philosopher, he called for “caging” those who would deliberately misinform children about the natural world, just as one would cage a threatening wild animal. “The message is clear,” he wrote: “those who will not accommodate, those will not temper, who insist on keeping only the purest and wildest strain of their heritage alive, we will be obliged, reluctantly, to cage or disarm, and we will do our best to disable the memes [traditions] they fight for”. … With the bravado of a man unmindful that only 11 percent of the public shared his enthusiasm for naturalistic evolution, he warned parents that if they insisted on teaching their children “falsehoods – that the earth is flat, that ‘Man’ is not a product of evolution by natural selection – then you must expect, at the very least, that those of us who have freedom of speech will feel free to describe your teachings as the spreading of falsehoods, and will attempt to demonstrate this to your children at our earliest opportunity” … . Those who resisted conversion to Dennett’s scientific fundamentalism would be subject to “quarantine.”

(In Petto, Andrew J.; Godfrey, Laurie R. [editors], Scientists confront Intelligent Design and Creationism, W. W. Norton 2007, p 45.)

In an essay titled “Evil”, Grayling declares:

There is no greater social evil than religion. It is the cancer in the body of humanity. Human credulity and superstition, and the need for comforting fables, will never be extirpated, so religion will always exist, at least among the uneducated. The only way to manage the dangers it presents is to confine it entirely to the private sphere, and for the public domain to be blind to it in all but one respect: that by law no one’s private beliefs should be allowed to cause a nuisance or an injury to anyone else. For whenever and whatever religion manifests itself in the public arena as an organized phenomenon, it is the most Satanic of all things [34-5].

In the first place, it is not at all clear what “religion” is, or that it can be excised from society like a “cancer.” (I noticed that Grayling largely replaces moral pejoratives with quasi-medical ones, which is not an improvement.) Religion historically and cross-culturally includes not only teachings about gods and spirits but the arts (including visual and plastic arts, music, and literature), the sciences, philosophy, and a good deal more. This is an important point, because though Grayling sneers at what he calls the “need for comforting fables”, he also acknowledges the importance of stories in moral and ethical thinking:

And only by being aware of a rich array of possible narratives and goals to choose from can one’s choices and actions be truly informed and maximally free. Once again, exposure to stories – which in part represent possible lives – is a vital ingredient in the ethical construction of an individual’s personal future history [14].

The great classical stories like The Iliad, The Odyssey, and the Greek tragedies were, as Grayling knows, religious stories. The role of parables, which are often stories, in Jesus' teachings shouldn't be overlooked either, nor the narratives in the Hebrew Bible. These are only rarely, if ever “comforting fables” -- who considers the story of Onan (Genesis 38) comforting, to cite just one instance?

In the second place, human beings invented religion, yet atheists like Grayling persist in talking as though religion were some alien and autonomous force that has intruded on the human sphere – a very odd notion for atheists or other naturalists / secularists to hold. It has long been disputed what role religion actually plays in starting wars, for example: would war evaporate if we could somehow eliminate religion, or would people just come up with other reasons and excuses and motives? I vote for the latter; I would hold that the U.S. invasion of Vietnam (for example) had nothing to do with religion, but with the U.S. craving for geopolitical power against the Vietnamese desire for national independence. The South Vietnamese government was dominated by Roman Catholics, it’s true, as a result of French colonialism supplanted by US interference, but religion served U.S. purposes rather than directing them.

Grayling is even more confused when it comes to sex:

A major source of hostility to sex is religion. ‘Christianity gave Eros poison to drink,’ Nietzsche observed, ‘but he did not die of it, he degenerated – into vice.’ The belief that soul is heavenly and body earthly, and that everything earthly interferes with the soul’s aspiration to heaven, is the fountainhead of negative evaluations of bodily things [47].

Astonishingly, the removal from public view of erections and sexually various activities, relegating them to dark places of whispering and anxiety, is a very recent phenomenon, and one restricted almost exclusively to cultural traditions stemming from the ‘religions of the Book’ – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Every other culture, historically and contemporaneously, which has escaped their attitudes to sex and the body has two notable features: a widespread celebration of sexuality in art and religion, and a complete absence of pornography (which is not, of course, the same thing as erotica) [48].

And where did “religion” get this hostility to sex? Grayling seems to think that only Judaism, Christianity and Islam try to control human sexuality, which shows his ignorance of other world religions. Asceticism – the desire to purify the body through self-mortification – is far older than Christianity (and largely absent from Judaism): the Buddha reacted against such extremes in Hinduism. Grayling even mentions “Plato’s view that spirit is good and must be cultivated, whereas body is bad and must be disciplined” (49) as an influence on Christianity’s hostility to the flesh, which undermines his effort to put all the blame on Yahwism, as well as his later eulogy of “the absence of mysticism and false sentimentality” in Greek philosophy (223). Like many university-educated Brits of his generation Grayling has a sentimental view of ancient Greece not really based in fact. (And has he really never encountered E. R. Dodd’s The Greeks and the irrational [1951], which is hardly an obscure work in his field?)

According to an autobiographical essay near the end of Life, sex, and ideas, Grayling grew up in East Africa, with access to a small but rich private library at home. What he read there shaped him so definitely that he seems still to be lodged intellectually in the early to mid-20^th century. Despite the occasional reference to Terry Eagleton (whom he dislikes) or Michel Foucault (whom he treats with surprising respect, given his background), Grayling doesn’t seem to have really learned anything since then. Either that or he’s dumbing down his columns for his audience, which isn’t a good thing either.

Surrender the Pink(er)

Another commenter at WhoIsIOZ challenged me to explain why I’d said that Steven Pinker’s quoting Camille Paglia on rape discredited him. The commenter helpfully posted the quotation itself:

For a decade, feminists have drilled their disciples to say, "Rape is a crime of violence but not sex." This sugar-coated Shirley Temple nonsense has exposed young women to disaster. Misled by feminism, they do not expect rape from nice boys from good homes who sit next to them in class....

These girls say, "Well, I should be able to get drunk at a fraternity party and go upstairs to a guy's room without anything happening." And I say, "Oh, really? And when you drive your car to New York City, do you leave your keys on the hood?" My point is that if your car is stolen after you do something like that, yes, the police should pursue the thief and he should be punished. But at the same time, the police---and I---have the right to say to you, "You stupid idiot, what the hell were you thinking?"

That first paragraph is a stunning non sequitur. What’s the connection between rape as a crime of violence and rape as a crime committed by nice boys from good homes? None that I can see. Nor do I see where she gets “sugar-coated Shirley Temple nonsense”. (P.S. Maybe she thinks that nice boys won't commit crimes of violence,but will commit crimes of sex?)

The second sentence of that paragraph is not only false, it’s the opposite of the truth. Since the 1970s at least, feminists have been arguing (with evidence from empirical studies) that most rapists are not dark-skinned brutes leaping from the bushes to ravish white virgins, but ordinary men like any others, and that most women are raped by people they know, not by strangers. Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will (1975) argued the point at length, as I recall (it’s been close to 30 years since I read it).

Feminists were vilified for supposedly sowing discord between the sexes, for allegedly teaching young women to regard every nice young man as a potential if not actual rapist. Paglia herself attacked the concept of “date rape,” not on the ground that rape is rape regardless of the status of the rapist, but … well, I admit I’m not sure. Maybe because if a girl goes out with a boy, she should expect to put out? Paglia is not known for the coherence of her thought.

As for the second paragraph, it’s not even clear that those girls actually do get drunk at fraternity parties and go to guys’ rooms “without anything happening.” What they seem to be saying is that going to a guy’s room does not, in itself, constitute consent to intercourse, whether the girl is drunk or sober, let alone passed out. This is a less controversial doctrine than it would have been, say, forty years ago. But at the university where I work, female students are advised not to drink excessively, to be careful where they go and with whom, to stay alert and aware. Male students are advised that a woman’s presence in their room, drunk or sober, is not in itself consent to sex.

That’s not to say that idiotic things don’t get said at times. One earnest male student, working under the head counselor at the dorm where I work (notorious on campus for its “political correctness”), put together an alarmist information sheet which advised that since most rape is acquaintance rape, you shouldn’t go on a date with someone you don’t know well. How, I wondered, would one get to know another person well, if not by spending time in their company? The student evidently interpreted “acquaintance” to mean “someone to whom you’ve been introduced but don’t yet know intimately,” as though women weren’t raped by boyfriends and husbands too.

I wouldn’t put an absolute divide between rape as violence and rape as sex: I would expect that rapists are no more consistent in their motives than anyone else. But I can’t understand how anyone could deny that men do sometimes rape women (or men, for that matter) as punishment (for being in the “wrong” place, for daring to say No to their importunings, and so on), not just because they’re overwhelmed by lust and have to have an outlet. The use of words like “violation” for forced sex is itself an indication that it is traditionally seen as an act of aggression, even to the exclusion of desire.

Consider this passage from chapter 16 of the book of the prophet Ezekiel, in the Authorized (King James) Version. Yahweh is addressing Jerusalem metaphorically as a “harlot”:

³⁶Thus saith the Lord GOD; Because thy filthiness was poured out, and thy nakedness discovered through thy whoredoms with thy lovers, and with all the idols of thy abominations, and by the blood of thy children, which thou didst give unto them;

³⁷Behold, therefore I will gather all thy lovers, with whom thou hast taken pleasure, and all them that thou hast loved, with all them that thou hast hated; I will even gather them round about against thee, and will discover thy nakedness unto them, that they may see all thy nakedness.

³⁸And I will judge thee, as women that break wedlock and shed blood are judged; and I will give thee blood in fury and jealousy.

³⁹And I will also give thee into their hand, and they shall throw down thine eminent place, and shall break down thy high places: they shall strip thee also of thy clothes, and shall take thy fair jewels, and leave thee naked and bare.

Uncovering nakedness in the Hebrew Bible is often a euphemism for sex, as in the prohibitions of uncovering the nakedness of near relatives in Leviticus 18:6-7. This passage, like others in the Bible, is a maelstrom of sexual violence. Yahweh does not propose to strip Jerusalem naked before her lovers out of erotic desire, but to shame and punish her. Similar fantasies appear in Hosea chapter 2, and in the New Testament Revelation 17, and they recur in later Western literature. Feminists didn’t invent the conflation of sex and violence – men did. Considering that Paglia made her name as a literary critic, she can hardly be unaware of this.

Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer purported to have shown that rape is not at all an act of violence. When I get back to the US, I plan to read the rest of their Natural History of Rape, to see just how they manage to do it.

Surrender the Pink(er)

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Shame, Shame, Shame, Shame On You!

Recently I was reading Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea’s Perversion of Power: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church (Vanderbilt UP, 2007), and found this interesting passage on page 58:

It is important to remember that the shame and potential danger were man-made, not God-given, attributes of the body. Mark Jordan, professor of religion at Emory University, reminds us: “Certainly it is not God who is ashamed of human gender – or God who pulls back from the shame meant to be inflicted on Jesus by crucifying him naked. We are the ones ashamed of our human bodies when we want to humiliate them.”

I agree that the body is not shameful, though not necessarily because I’m an atheist; many atheists do consider the body shameful. But I wonder how Frawley-O’Dea and Jordan know how Yahweh feels about it. “Certainly,” in particular, is a strong word; I can’t help suspecting that Jordan uses it because it’s impossible to be certain.

Even if Yahweh is not ashamed of human gender, it doesn’t follow that he doesn’t want human beings to be. (For what it’s worth, though, the Bible depicts him as quite squeamish about the body and its fluids, except for the blood shed in sacrifice and in the massacre of his many enemies.) God’s ways are not our ways, or Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi as the Romans used to say. According to Genesis, the man and woman he created were not ashamed of their nakedness until they ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And then their eyes were opened, and they were ashamed. “Their eyes were opened” indicates that they were ignorant before, they were blind but then they saw that their nakedness was shameful.

Since Yahweh also created various creatures to be unclean or otherwise impure, it can hardly be claimed that he would not create something inherently shameful. I know, Genesis also says that after creating the world, he looked at what he’d made and saw that it was good. Either “good” and “unclean” are compatible (and I’m glad I’m not a religious believer, so it’s not my problem to try to reconcile them), or he changed his mind later. And deities are entitled to change their minds.

Of course, as an atheist I don’t consider the Bible to be authoritative for me. But Frawley-O’Dea and Jordan are Christians (Frawley’s an ex-Catholic Episcopalian, Jordan still Catholic as far as I know), and it would be nice to know where they got their certainty about their god’s intentions and opinions, since other believers, equally sincere and convinced, would not agree with them. (That includes the believers who wrote the Bible.) It’s convenient to be able to blame whatever you don’t like on human beings, letting your god off the hook for everything, and it’s a hallowed tradition in religious discourse, from the Hebrew prophets to the present. So you get one prophet who says that Yahweh wants fatted calves and grain offerings on the altar, and another who says that Yahweh never wanted or asked for sacrifices, and look at these scrawny blemished cattle you’re giving him! (This appears to be the ancestor of Woody Allen’s beloved Borscht Belt joke: “The food is terrible here.” “Yes, and such small portions.”)

But atheists aren’t off the hook either. Atheism in itself, the lack of belief in gods, doesn’t tell you much. Like religion, it has no moral content by itself. I find myself increasingly bothered by atheists, including those whose books are getting a lot of attention lately, who talk about Religion as though it were something independent of human beings, something autonomous with a mind of its own. Look at the subtitle of Christopher Hitchens’s current best-seller: How Religion Poisons Everything. However, human beings invented religion. (The most devoted religious believers are generally quite happy to agree that other people’s religions were invented by men – just not their own.) But How People Poison Everything, though more accurate, wouldn’t be quite as transgressive for Hitchens’s purposes.

Religion’s not even a discrete ‘natural kind.’ Richard Lewontin noted that “sociobiologists provide adaptive stories about natural selection for a universal human tendency to form religions, although most cultures, including the classical Greeks, have no separate social function (or word) that corresponds to the modern Western category ‘religion’” (The Triple Helix, Harvard University Press, 2000, 77).

Why, then, did people decide that human bodies are shameful? I wish I knew. Jordan and Frawley-O’Dea see the belief as the wicked contrariness of human beings, but if their God exists, he made us prone, at the very least, to fall into that error, and he mysteriously failed to keep it out of his Holy Scriptures. It’s not just a Christian or Jewish tendency, either, but one common to many cultures. The Latin word for external genitals, for instance, is pudendum, “shame.” Which suggests to me that it can’t simply be blamed, as many atheists like to do, on wicked priests trying to control people’s minds. Shame is “natural”, for what that’s worth. Human beings couldn’t be manipulated by shame if we weren’t prone to it. We put shame into our cultures because it was part of our natural heritage as mammals, primates, Homo sapiens. (Homo pudens might be a more accurate name for us.)

But the rejection of shame is no less “natural.” (Contrariwise, “shameless” is a sexually-tinged English word implying a wicked human refusal to be ashamed of our bodies.) I’m told that John Shelby Spong, notorious for his polemics against fundamentalism, has said that he views God not as an external being, but as the “highest and best” in human beings. It seems to me that people have other qualities in mind when they invent their gods, including (or especially) Yahweh: pettiness and hysterical vindictiveness, or bloodlust and an inordinate fondness for virgins. If people were going to invent an embodiment of their highest and best, they could do better than the pantheons they’ve created so far. (I don’t believe Hitchens would do any better than anyone else: he shares, for instance, Yahweh’s squeamishness about body fluids. I’ve noticed that many male atheists are as uptight about human sexuality as any priest, mullah, or prophet. If they were put in charge… but let’s not go there, at least not today.)

I’d concede that people have put our best and our worst into the gods we’ve created. Frawley-O’Dea and Jordan want to blame the worst on people, while giving Yahweh the credit for the best; many atheists seem to want to do the reverse, which is odd if they really don’t believe in Yahweh. But many, I suspect, still do believe, back in the recesses of their tiny minds. But that kind of splitting-off, denying part of the self and blaming the bad part on something (or Someone) outside, is a major reason why we’re in trouble now.

Shame, Shame, Shame, Shame On You!

Recently I was reading Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea’s Perversion of Power: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church (Vanderbilt UP, 2007), and found this interesting passage on page 58:

It is important to remember that the shame and potential danger were man-made, not God-given, attributes of the body. Mark Jordan, professor of religion at Emory University, reminds us: “Certainly it is not God who is ashamed of human gender – or God who pulls back from the shame meant to be inflicted on Jesus by crucifying him naked. We are the ones ashamed of our human bodies when we want to humiliate them.”

I agree that the body is not shameful, though not necessarily because I’m an atheist; many atheists do consider the body shameful. But I wonder how Frawley-O’Dea and Jordan know how Yahweh feels about it. “Certainly,” in particular, is a strong word; I can’t help suspecting that Jordan uses it because it’s impossible to be certain.

Even if Yahweh is not ashamed of human gender, it doesn’t follow that he doesn’t want human beings to be. (For what it’s worth, though, the Bible depicts him as quite squeamish about the body and its fluids, except for the blood shed in sacrifice and in the massacre of his many enemies.) God’s ways are not our ways, or Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi as the Romans used to say. According to Genesis, the man and woman he created were not ashamed of their nakedness until they ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And then their eyes were opened, and they were ashamed. “Their eyes were opened” indicates that they were ignorant before, they were blind but then they saw that their nakedness was shameful.

Since Yahweh also created various creatures to be unclean or otherwise impure, it can hardly be claimed that he would not create something inherently shameful. I know, Genesis also says that after creating the world, he looked at what he’d made and saw that it was good. Either “good” and “unclean” are compatible (and I’m glad I’m not a religious believer, so it’s not my problem to try to reconcile them), or he changed his mind later. And deities are entitled to change their minds.

Of course, as an atheist I don’t consider the Bible to be authoritative for me. But Frawley-O’Dea and Jordan are Christians (Frawley’s an ex-Catholic Episcopalian, Jordan still Catholic as far as I know), and it would be nice to know where they got their certainty about their god’s intentions and opinions, since other believers, equally sincere and convinced, would not agree with them. (That includes the believers who wrote the Bible.) It’s convenient to be able to blame whatever you don’t like on human beings, letting your god off the hook for everything, and it’s a hallowed tradition in religious discourse, from the Hebrew prophets to the present. So you get one prophet who says that Yahweh wants fatted calves and grain offerings on the altar, and another who says that Yahweh never wanted or asked for sacrifices, and look at these scrawny blemished cattle you’re giving him! (This appears to be the ancestor of Woody Allen’s beloved Borscht Belt joke: “The food is terrible here.” “Yes, and such small portions.”)

But atheists aren’t off the hook either. Atheism in itself, the lack of belief in gods, doesn’t tell you much. Like religion, it has no moral content by itself. I find myself increasingly bothered by atheists, including those whose books are getting a lot of attention lately, who talk about Religion as though it were something independent of human beings, something autonomous with a mind of its own. Look at the subtitle of Christopher Hitchens’s current best-seller: How Religion Poisons Everything. However, human beings invented religion. (The most devoted religious believers are generally quite happy to agree that other people’s religions were invented by men – just not their own.) But How People Poison Everything, though more accurate, wouldn’t be quite as transgressive for Hitchens’s purposes.

Religion’s not even a discrete ‘natural kind.’ Richard Lewontin noted that “sociobiologists provide adaptive stories about natural selection for a universal human tendency to form religions, although most cultures, including the classical Greeks, have no separate social function (or word) that corresponds to the modern Western category ‘religion’” (The Triple Helix, Harvard University Press, 2000, 77).

Why, then, did people decide that human bodies are shameful? I wish I knew. Jordan and Frawley-O’Dea see the belief as the wicked contrariness of human beings, but if their God exists, he made us prone, at the very least, to fall into that error, and he mysteriously failed to keep it out of his Holy Scriptures. It’s not just a Christian or Jewish tendency, either, but one common to many cultures. The Latin word for external genitals, for instance, is pudendum, “shame.” Which suggests to me that it can’t simply be blamed, as many atheists like to do, on wicked priests trying to control people’s minds. Shame is “natural”, for what that’s worth. Human beings couldn’t be manipulated by shame if we weren’t prone to it. We put shame into our cultures because it was part of our natural heritage as mammals, primates, Homo sapiens. (Homo pudens might be a more accurate name for us.)

But the rejection of shame is no less “natural.” (Contrariwise, “shameless” is a sexually-tinged English word implying a wicked human refusal to be ashamed of our bodies.) I’m told that John Shelby Spong, notorious for his polemics against fundamentalism, has said that he views God not as an external being, but as the “highest and best” in human beings. It seems to me that people have other qualities in mind when they invent their gods, including (or especially) Yahweh: pettiness and hysterical vindictiveness, or bloodlust and an inordinate fondness for virgins. If people were going to invent an embodiment of their highest and best, they could do better than the pantheons they’ve created so far. (I don’t believe Hitchens would do any better than anyone else: he shares, for instance, Yahweh’s squeamishness about body fluids. I’ve noticed that many male atheists are as uptight about human sexuality as any priest, mullah, or prophet. If they were put in charge… but let’s not go there, at least not today.)

I’d concede that people have put our best and our worst into the gods we’ve created. Frawley-O’Dea and Jordan want to blame the worst on people, while giving Yahweh the credit for the best; many atheists seem to want to do the reverse, which is odd if they really don’t believe in Yahweh. But many, I suspect, still do believe, back in the recesses of their tiny minds. But that kind of splitting-off, denying part of the self and blaming the bad part on something (or Someone) outside, is a major reason why we’re in trouble now.