Subject: Re: Are Some Homosexuals Heterosexist?
callanw@crosswinds.net
Date: Sat 11 Oct 1997 - 22:15:21 BST
In a message dated 97-10-11 16:33:35 EDT, VickieTern@aol.com writes:
>I think also most mammals if not all, along with enormous numbers of
>vertebrates and invertebrates, discriminate members of their species by
>reproductive organs and practice heterosexism accordingly. This may be a
>procreative compulsion, but it is hyper-rationalism in the extreme to call
it
>"reproductive determinism."
I remember the quote of Harry Benjamin to Christine Jorgensen: "We don't know
what's natural, we only know what is conventional."
Because they couldn't use it, Disney used to send the nature film they shot
of animals copulating to the Kinsey Insitute. A reasearcher was watching
film of two porcupines, and noticed that they were both male. If porcupines,
for whom sex is not simple, have homosexual relations, then nature is far
from as simple as we would like it to be.
As has been shown many times, humans are not simply driven by their
instinctual urges. To humans, the constructed is natural, and we have
constructed an enormous amount from buildings to languages. No other animal
has the leisure time and capacities we do, and to move all of our choices to
base animal urges, to say that who we are is hard wired is to deny the
possibility of transformation that humans have shown again and again.
In any case, many will argue that Biology is Destiny. I would only suggest
that we cannot both argue that as an absolute and agrue for the possiblity of
change and transcendence, that biology is not destiny, at the same time.
To me, the difference between the drive to heterosexual desire and the
creation of a social system based on separating what is assigned to two
sexes, forcing them to come together to be whole are two different things.
Heterosexism is based on the biological instincts to copulate and reproduce,
no doubt, and most people like that idea, which is why they accept the
tradeoffs of the gender system to get something they desire.
Yet, the gender system limits everyone, and we are each hurt by in, in bigger
or smaller ways. And that social system does not come directly out of any
reptilian brain, at least in my eyes.
Heterosexual desire is hardwired, to some degree or other, according to the
Kinsey scale. Heterosexism uses that desire to construct social controls, at
least the way I see it.
Callan
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