8 years ago
21
Why Being ‘Born Gay’ is a Dangerous Idea
There is another way. It will not satisfy those who wish that we would all unquestioningly accept that sexuality is, simply, a natural phenomenon, nor will it placate those who wish to identify the LGBT community as a symptom and cause of moral ills. Yet it is more accurate as a description of the biology of sexuality and its social nature. Desire might be biologically driven, but it moves on tracks laid forth by human culture.
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Odds are, Shamus Khan wasn’t born to tell the very rich what they want to hear. Or, as he might prefer to call it, his “strong focus on elites.” Rather, his concern that our betters fully grasp how very much better they are, and that deep-pocketed patrons of the arts are properly fawned over for their generosity, is probably a ‘social construct’ in which he chose to be what the French might call a ‘fayot.’
Doubtless he will find an appreciative audience for this piece, in which he threatens that if we accept that some behavior may have its basis in an innate condition, then we must then be Nazi eugenicists, as a matter of necessity. Laurels and coin of the realm may rain down on his head for having conceived this brilliant indictment of homosexuality, and I have no doubt Khan is seeing to that presently. This obsequious need to be of service, even as an intellectual hired hand, is likely to be the result of cultural conditioning, more so than his having some genetic predisposition toward flattery of the upper crust, what he calls his work “within the areas of cultural sociology and stratification.”
Me, I accepted there might be some small genetic basis for behavior when I began to recognize my parents, quite strongly, in myself. And I needed even less obvious evidence than that to know that instincts and drives are often innate.
However Khan found his calling, his pronouncement that the very idea anyone has an innate sexual orientation is ”a false idol of bad science,” and more than just that, that it is “dangerous,” will be more warmly received by his intended audience than people that know better. Say, for instance, people that have had, to their despair and their to-anyone-else unimaginable suffering and alienation, an inconvenient innate sexual orientation.
Khan can’t help it that this screed is about as sharp as a sack of wet mice. Any inherent weakness in his argument in this piece is no doubt due to the pay rate he was offered by Aeon, and the missing zeroes at the end of his grants and endowments. If only society’s elites of elites were less stingy when it came time to pay their loyal sycophants, no doubt he would ’ve been able to fashion a better sort of work for them. Perhaps he will no make that case to them, as he sees about getting checks for this rich piece of work here.
I fully expect we’ll hear much, much more from this fount of traditional values. I very much doubt he could put a cork in it if he tried. Born that way, I expect.
Wow, this is scathing! I had never heard of Khan before this. Had you been following him, or did you look all this up now? Did you coin the phrase "sharp as a sack of wet mice"? I'll have to remember that one. This is a wriggly piece of writing, to be sure. I was unable to divine who its intended audience was. It didn't exactly hang together well, and I'm sure my reading it very late at night didn't help matters. I must say I didn't read it as an indictment of homosexuality, but perhaps I should take another look at it. I had trouble getting through it the first time, TBH.
No I hadn’t heard of him before, either. Guess we travel in somewhat different circles. No, that phrase isn’t mine. As has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, that’s due to the Warner character Foghorn Leghorn. Who’s a parody of a parody, so I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it was even older than that.
If you do go back and read this piece, with its actual headline “Not born this way,” let me know what you think.
I love that you use Foghorn Leghorn quotes! I would not have guessed the source, but when I watched the clip I do recall having seen it as a child. I shudder to think what all is lodged in my subconscious from watching all those cartoons as a youngster, ha. Also, thanks for the history on the character. I think it's pretty neat to have a parody of a parody.
I did go back and look over the article again, and I see what you're saying. The author seems to be going out of his way to not exactly say what he's saying, if you know what I mean. I think that's why I found it so confusing. I still don't completely understand where he's coming from, TBH. It seems like he'll say contradictory things, sometimes even in the same paragraph, which is super annoying. I would love to hear more about your perspective if you feel inclined to share it. I know you wrote quite a bit already, but it was more about the author, and I didn't find it terribly illuminating. Is there some connection I don't grasp between the 'elite' and views of homosexually? What do you think his agenda is exactly? I understand if you don't want to spend anymore time on this, but I value your opinion.
One interesting thing about reading online is that I find things that I don't know how to interpret. If someone is coming from a very different background or has an agenda that I don't have a context for I can get disoriented. I often read comments to gain insight into differing interpretations and perspectives on things, and usually this is helpful and leads me to further reading. I have rarely read such an opaque and convoluted article as this, and I wanted to see what people thought of it. I almost didn't share it because I was concerned that people would find it offensive, but I'm glad I did because it's generated some interesting conversation.
Seems to me that Khan works at making his readers believe that he believes just as they believe, but once you rinse away the ooze, what's left is bony, stark and nowhere nearly as attractive as it may’ve been before.
That piece of Khan’s from the Times is coated with the same slickness found in this article. That last paragraph is a cipher, which was, I believe, fully intended.
It's as if, if you ask me, Khan has considered what people of various mindsets will make of his pieces, and constructs them like pachinko machines to guide his readers down through his sundry and various points to a dramatic finish. The same finish every other reader sees, though they may have very different ideas of how they got there and what they saw along the way. People in this thread, who’ve made real efforts to suss out what’s going on in the piece, have commented that they got very differing impressions of the exact same piece. This is artful writing, but as admirable as that capability is, in this piece arguing what he’s really arguing, it smacks to me of deception. Or, at least, of letting people see what they want to see, believe what they want to believe, all while getting away with running a three-card Monty operation.
I would say that Khan’s point with this piece is that being gay is a choice, the idea that there is innate sexual orientation is a dangerous and suddenly now widespread in society because of ‘activists,’ and that if you insist on such a thing then you may as well be a Nazi eugenicist. That's a simplification of his pachinko maze, in which we ignore mechanical devices like his suggestion that believing in innate sexual orientation is a disservice to transexuals, because, I assume, he has in mind some supposition that transexuals have obviously made a socially-constructed choice about what body they want, and doesn't get that intersexed people, for instance, had no choice about which mortal coil they were given at the factory.
But I don’t believe that is his real point. I think his point is that he can secrete enough waxy resin all over his writing to slip a fairly toxic bolus under people's nose without them noticing, like this thing he's gotten out under Aeon’s masthead, and that he should be generously funded by the right people to make this skill into a going brand of so-called ‘traditional values.’ To my mind, he’s shopping himself out as a thinking-man’s scold. He’s put in his time telling elites how hard they have it in the modern world, how great their characters are under such trying conditions as our times, and now he means to make it rain as a popular ideologue.
The clearest evidence of this that I’m struck by, peeling away the sticky plaques of phrases like “are not wrong” and “biological determinism,” is that this bright fellow has no sympathy at all for the people he’s writing about here. He discusses innately gay people in dismissive terms, consciously is my sense, by denying them agency in their own lives referring to his actual targets here in terms of ‘activists,’ ‘supporters,’ and ‘the gay-rights movement.’ The stretch in this piece where he revels in disgust at ’pederasty’ is, I think, nearer his real frame of mind than other parts of this pinball text in which he goes on about how innate sexuality is mere ‘desire.’
I’m not particularly interested in this piece, think it’s a glib put-down of people meant to polish his brand of sycophancy to hi...
Read FullThanks so much, /u/AdelleChattre! If Snapzu had some kind of special award feature for going above and beyond I would give it to you. You're so thoughtful, and I know this must have taken some time to write. I do appreciate it.
I think you're dead on with your analysis. This article is almost like multiple articles superimposed on top of one another, and you're likely to see the one you already agree with, or at least already understand on some level. I guess I'm not used to such tricky writing, and it is kind of impressive. I like reading things that are a bit challenging, because how else am I to learn anything? I'm glad to be able to get other perspectives here. I don't always agree with what I post, but I try to post thought provoking things. (Well, that and the usual frivolity like baby bat videos and articles about buttered coffee).
I am occasionally afraid to share something because I don't fully understand it, or because I think it will be poorly received, but then I tell myself that that's silly and I should have more courage than that. Interestingly, I find I'm not very good at predicting what anyone will think of anything, anyway. Thanks again for taking the time, and just being around in general. You share such interesting things, and you have a rare and admirable mind. :)
You flatterer! Shameless, you are.
"Sharp as a sack of wet mice" -Foghorn Leghorn Quotes. Your right, it's a great phrase.
My favorite Foghorn quote: "Dumb as a sack of hammers."
Haha! I never would have guessed that, but it does make sense now that I know. Thanks for the link. :)
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I think he's right in the sense that tying the acceptance of a behavior solely to its innate nature creates problems when it comes to protecting both the behavior and the people who do that.
The notion of innate brings with it the notion of "cure". I don't know if you like the xmen movies, but in the second one, they have a cure for mutants. So once that cure is available,there's less desire on the part of the rest of the public to tolerate mutants and the pressure on said mutants to get cured is high. And I've heard a similar argument made of trans. They're born that way, sure, but we should cure them.
But the reverse is true as well. Since legitimacy hinges on innateness a single study can undo everything. What happens if you can trace gayness to something else, say a poor relationship with parents, or bullying, or something like that? Do gays suddenly go back to square zero and become diseased misfits? What has changed other than the origin of the behavior? It doesn't suddenly become harmful, it doesn't somehow become easier to spread, or less consensual.
It isn't even our default method of determining what is and isn't legal in most other cases. No one claimed a genetic cause for Christianity or conservative politics or entertainment choices. I've never heard someone defend hip hop or Star Trek by saying that they're genetically predisposed to liking those things. They're legit because people do them and it is harmless to the society at large. That should be the criteria for adult behavior being acceptable.
The author doesn't really say much. It honestly just seems that the author fundamentally misunderstands what people mean by "Born this way". It's not some scientific statement about how it is determined (something that is still not understood, so it is odd that the author offers their own conclusion), it is the fact that you have no choice in your sexual preferences. Essentially, the author is making a problem out of their own pedantry.
He seemed to be saying a lot, but I agree it didn't add up to much. It's a bizarre article, IMHO. After reading it I wanted to hear someone else's take on it, but there didn't appear to be any comments, so I posted it here. I since realized that there was a discussion about the article elsewhere on the site, so I added a link to it, in case anyone is interested. Anyway, thanks for your input!
I'm not sure I agree with this author, but I'm also not sure I fully understood the article. I need to go back and reread it when it isn't 1 a.m. to try to fully grasp the idea. However, as I was reading through it I kept getting feelings of "this doesn't make sense," "this doesn't fit with my experience," and "I don't think this point supports his idea in the way he claims it does." Maybe it's the actual argument, the writing, or (quite probably) my level of alertness, but something doesn't seem right.
I felt the same way, which is why I posted it. The article seemed to be all over the place, and I wasn't sure what I was supposed to get out of it. Parts of it were interesting, but I found it baffling overall. I thought someone else might have some insight. Feel free to come back and reply if you do end up re-reading it and have something more to say. I'm glad I'm not the only one who had difficulty following it.
More thoughts on the article:
Maybe I'm not looking at it correctly, but the opening hook doesn't even make sense to me. I think there's a big difference between, for example, claiming race will determine your success in life, or that hair color determines personality, and saying (essentially) that if you're gay... you're gay. Sexual orientation, gender identity, etc. are very fluid for some people and very rigid for others. Technically neither determine your destiny because people have lived and still do live in repression, self-inflicted or otherwise. Just because we can sometimes pass for being straight/cis and live our entire lives masquerading as such doesn't mean our biology doesn't compel us differently, and it also doesn't mean that we should have to live in repression just because we can. What's the point of the opening statement, then? (Damn, it makes so little sense to me that I can't even figure out my argument to it because I'm not even sure what the author is trying to say.)
These two things aren't related in the way the author implies. People fought against the opinion that biological differences (race) made some people more or less valuable than others because it was ridiculous. This is true for the LGBT(QIA) movement as well, as we fight against the opinion that biological differences (sexual orientation and gender identity) make some people more or less valuable than others. The author claims we "embrace biological determinism" as if it is the equivalent of, for example, a black person "embracing" the Nazi view that whites were superior to blacks, when it's nothing like that at all. We're not claiming biological determinism as a statement of inferiority, we're claiming biological determinism as a statement of lack of conscious control over these traits, just as people who are straight lack conscious control over their heterosexuality. We're not embracing a divide, we're fighting for equality.
I think this is where I'm going to stop, because rereading the article just makes me think the author has no more clue as to what his point is than I do. The comparisons and arguments don't make sense, the writing is all over the place and confusing, and if I analyzed everything in the article I'd end up writing a book. It's an interesting read, but it looks like utter bollox to me. (I'm not even Irish but that's the word that has been coming to mind while rereading this, so that's what I'm going with.)
Yay, thanks for coming back to this! :)
- Ah, very well said! Also, so consise that I think the author could take a few pointers from you. :)
- Hahaha! Fair enough. Thanks for trying. I don't think I'll bother trying again, either. I just wanted to know if I was missing something, but it seems not. I approve of your use of the word bollox. ;)
Take care!