Part of me doesn’t like to rehearse nature v. nurture arguments about gayness, in part because at a certain point I got tired of concerning myself with arguing about gayness in a public forum, choosing instead just to get on with living my life, in part because my thoughts on the matter seem to shift back and forth over time. But after reading MassMarrier tackle the subject, read the opinion polls, and make this observation,
Pew continues to ask about attitudes toward the nature of homosexuality. This certainly affects voters and legislators alike. When the anti-gay/anti-SSM folk can convince others that there is a homosexual lifestyle instead of an innate nature, they effectively divorce all gay rights from civil-rights issues.
In contrast, when people accept that homosexuality is inborn, discrimination is plain — and calls for remedies. The nasties have to find some other group to hate and punish legislatively.
… I thought it would be worth pointing out that there are several anti-”nature”, social constructivist positions more complicated than a voluntarist model of choosing one’s sexual orientation.
To my mind there are two models we might imagine. The first is language. People aren’t born speaking English or Wolof or Mandarin, obviously. Yet, well by the age of 5, children have learned language. What’s more the language they learn becomes a deep-seeded thought structure that carries them through their lives, one not possible to “break out of” in some voluntaristic way. Some of the best nurture arguments about sexual orientation suggest the ways that all sexuality is learned, in a process that’s tied intimately with learning gender roles and identity. Like language, all human societies end up having a system of ingrained sexual disposition, but there is surprising latitude in the cultural forms of human sexuality. (Phenomenlogical question: do people in hunter-gatherer societies have fetishes?)
(Along these lines, this well-meaning but maddening offensive post from the Valve - calling gay people sell-outs for believing that relatively fixed sexual orientation exists - poses way too voluntaristic an understanding of social construction.)
Alternately, if you find the blank-slate assumption suspect, think about how race works. Objectively, as the anthropolists remind us continually, there is no such thing as race. Rather, people, situated in their culture, selectively take objective, nature-created qualities and group them conceptually into a fixed cultural idea that then takes on a reality of its own. Race, that is, is both artificial and real, both culturally defined and genetic in base. Extrapolating along these lines, even if we say there’s a genetic basis for heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality or any other sexual disposition, what we may well mean is that genetics determine some set of sexual and proto-psychic responses that we in this culture and historical moment have learned to understand as “homosexuality,” “heterosexuality” etc. I might call this a qualified “nature” argument.
In any case, while rhetorically nature and nurture arguments are used rhetorically to support homophilic and homophobic policy respectively, I don’t think that ultimately it lines up that way. Racists are perfectly able to direct hostility to others on the basis of immutable characteristics. And classist discrimation is still obviously discrimination even though its basis is clearly not inborn. Ultimately, it’s the socially transmitted, systematic hostility and in-group-ism that’s the issue.
No comments have been added to this post yet.