With this election, that is. Kate’s post brought it boiling back up, but so does practically everything right now. Just so you know we’re really out there: I’m mad as hell, and I’m not taking it any more. Not only can the Democrats not take my vote for granted, they’ve lost it. It doesn’t matter that with mindboggling generosity Hillary Clinton urges her supporters to vote in November. She’s not the one who caused the problem. The problem is the fauxgressives who think sexist bullying is okay, and the audiences who giggle nervously at best, and the candidates who ignore it. I don’t know how big a mea culpa it would take from all those people to bring me back in. I just know for sure that I’m not going to get it.

For some background to this rant, I want to tell you about something that happened in the high and far off times, when we were helping defend abortion clinics from fundie loonies down in the Deep South. Read more »

That’s all. Just thought you might want to know.

I’ve decided Joel Stein said something interesting. No, wait, hear me out. The LA Times’ so-called standup comedian in print may have so little depth that you wouldn’t get your feet wet if you walked through his soul in flipflops, but as a card-carrying jerk he can give us a chance to understand the mindset.

At first I just laughed. It didn’t seem blogworthy. But it continues to make me chuckle quietly to myself, so I thought I’d share it with you.

On March 14th, Mr. J. commented on the Spitzer fiasco. He did this by calling a high-end LA escort to find out what goes on. The very first thing he points out in the article is that he, Mr. J., doesn’t need to buy it.

The roughly $1,000 an hour that Spitzer paid for … was not … to guarantee secrecy. … And the exorbitant rate wasn’t a premium for weird or talented sex. … What Spitzer was really buying, she said, was [that] Emperors’ Club VIP … makes you feel very emperor-y.

“It’s like a five-star hotel,” she said. “If you call someone from the Yellow Pages, it’s very businesslike. It’s not a ‘girlfriend experience.’ ”

Men, she explained, don’t just want sex. They want a girlfriend experience. Or at least the part of the girlfriend experience in which she pretends to be fascinated while you talk about yourself. So more like a first-date experience.

The thing that’s funny is if they were talking about women they’d say, “Women want love.” Can’t say that about men, though. Not allowed. It has to be about sex. And, obviously, if you can’t even admit what you want, there’s no way to get it.

That’s the other thing that struck me as funny: That Joel Stein should be the one providing proof of what Portly Dyke) and I) and others have been saying forever: men are damaged by sexism at least as much as women.

eriposte at The Left Coaster has a gut-wrenching list of some of the ways sexism is slathered on Clinton’s campaign. I knew it was bad, but I’ve been trying to maintain my sanity. I didn’t realize it was this bad. Go read the whole thing. Go read it even if you already know we’re nowhere near a post-feminist society. There are some things which have to be repeated until we’re finally so cured we don’t know what they mean.

This was my comment to the post:

Thanks, eriposte. You’ve written the post I haven’t had the stomach to write myself. Carefully collecting all the evidence of hate just hurts too much.

The thing that hurts worst of all: the folks on supposedly “our” side, the “progressives,” who can always find a more “important” battle to fight than sexism.

We’re not supposed to get into an Olympics of -isms. Nobody’s suffering trumps someone else’s.

That’s true. Totally, entirely, completely true.

It’s true all ways. You have to care as much about my suffering as I do about yours.

If my suffering doesn’t matter to you, you’re just fighting for privilege.

Crossposted to Shakesville

Technorati tags: politics, sexism, Hillary, Clinton

We have a year to go, and already I’m tired of noticing how diseased some people are when it comes to women. Something about having to take a woman seriously as candidate for president seems to make these people break out.

Well, fine. I’m a big advocate of letting people do whatever they like in the privacy of their own homes. But when you’re in public, do cover up all the pus-filled boils.

The thing that really gets to me is all the jerks in the public eye — the talking heads, even the candidates themselves — who let the crap come out as if it was something perfectly normal. It means that to them it is perfectly normal. And that’s the most tiring, depressing, and soul-destroying thing of all. It’s not the knowledge that there are all kinds of bigots out there. I know there are. What’s so awful is that sexism is not something they have to hide. What’s so awful is what that means about everybody’s attitudes, not just theirs.

One recent example is the McCain staffer talking about “how to beat the bitch.” Once it got out, did McCain have to fire the person? No, he turned it into a fundraising event.

Imagine the reaction if Obama was the frontrunner, and the staffer had said, “How do we beat the nigger?”

That’s the difference I’m talking about. These days, racism has to be covered up, at least in public. It is Not Okay. But sexism is frivolous to worry about when we have “real problems.” Any women who are offended should lighten up and “get over it.” Or they should “have a sense of humor.”
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Talking Points Memo is one of the best sources for US political news. I’m not aware of anything that even comes close (but then again there are rafts of things I’m unaware of).

They generally do a fine job of avoiding bias … and yet when it come to Hillary Clinton there’s an undertow, all the more noticeable for its absence otherwise.

Commenting on how the news media couldn’t stop criticizing her laugh, and then began criticizing the lack of it:

Yes, we’ve apparently reached a point in the media’s coverage of the campaign in which news outlets find it noteworthy when they don’t notice anything unusual about Sen. Clinton’s laugh.

As Greg Sargent put it, “We’ve come full circle: Damned if you do cackle; damned if you don’t.”

Indeed. That’s the normal operating procedure for discrimination: you’re never good enough, you’re too fat, too thin, too dumb, too smart, too soft, too bitchy, etc. etc. etc. It’s refreshing that they recognize it and expose it to daylight.

And then they make fun of how ridiculous the media focus is:

In related news, Rudy Giuliani delivered a speech yesterday in which he didn’t answer his cell phone; Mitt Romney answered questions without abandoning a position he held five minutes prior; John McCain hosted a town-hall forum in which he did not refer to anyone as a “little jerk”; and Fred Thompson went the whole day without responding to a reporter’s question with, “I don’t know anything about that.”

They’re right that the media are making drooling fools of themselves. However, note the examples. Clinton’s laugh is being compared to evidence of manipulative boorishness, pandering, lack of impulse control, and stupidity. But a laugh is like a person’s gait or breathing. It can be consciously controlled, but it doesn’t say anything about one’s morals, maturity, or intelligence.

What’s going on with Clinton is even worse than what TPM realizes. The real parallels would be to say, “In other news, Rudy Giuliani delivered a speech yesterday during which he was still bald; Mitt Romney answered questions without wrinkling his forehead; John McCain hosted a town-hall forum in which he gestured sometimes; and Fred Thompson went the whole day with bags under his eyes.”

That’s so bad, it’s not funny. That’s what Clinton is putting up with.

Due to anatomical constraints, humans (and mammals generally) can really only have sex with one partner at a time. And if two people are having sex, then the fact that person A is having sex necessarily means person B is too.

We know all this.

So how is it that we’re so ready to believe research which says men have more sex partners than women? How could the scientists who did the research not notice that little flaw in their project?

Gina Kolata highlighted the issue with respect to heterosexuals in a recent NY Times article. She cites David Gale, an emeritus mathematician from UC-Berkeley, who pointed out the logical impossibility.

Although she doesn’t state it explicitly, note that a few promiscuous women can’t explain the survey results. In one study, for instance, men claim 12.7 heterosexual partners, on average, and women 6.4. That’s about a hundred percent difference. At least a few of these highly promiscuous women would be in the sample, and you’d see a skewed bimodal distribution. There’d be a large number of women with numbers of partners in the low single digits, a trough with very few having, say six to twenty partners, and then a spike showing that a few women had dozens or hundreds of partners. The overall average would still have to be the same for both sexes.

Nor can the results be explained by assuming men are having all that sex when traveling to places outside the survey population. Some men would be traveling to the survey population, and the women who are having sex with them should show up as more promiscuous than the men in the population.

But the surveys don’t show any group of women, however small, who are more promiscuous. If you want to believe the surveys, then somehow men are having sex with phantoms.
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It’s gone by other names, primarily female circumscision, as if it was nothing more than the male equivalent of removing the foreskin. It’s supposedly another one of those awful things that “can’t happen here.” Read the CNN report about the British, who may finally get serious about stopping the practice, and you’d never guess that tens of thousands of children suffer through the mutilation and its lifelong consequences right here in the good old U. S. of A.

Why the bizarre silence? Because it’s a “cultural issue,” you know. The approved term is now female genital cutting. Some people felt that the term “mutilation” was culturally insensitive.

For those occasions when somebody starts suggesting that this is a “cultural” matter, consider the facts.

First, an anatomy lesson, developmental anatomy, to be precise. The tissues in males and females come from the same embryonic structures. They just follow a different path of development. The biologists’ term for that is homologous structures. The types of nerves and arousal present in the different male and female structures are much the same, with some differences I’ll note below.
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… is for Melinda “Clueless” Henneberger to speak for herself.

She has a jaw-dropping opinion piece in the NY Times: Why Pro-Choice is a bad choice for Democrats. (Where do they find these female mouthpieces? Like those tented “women” in the Iraqi parliament who dutifully said whatever The Man told them to. She also wrote something subtitled, with not inconsiderable arrogance, “What Women Voters Want Politicians to Hear.”)

Her point seems to be that because some women are virulently anti-abortion, the Democrats should keep quiet on the subject to get their votes.

The mind reels. This isn’t about what color hat to wear. This is about the fundamental right to live according to your own beliefs rather than someone else’s. This is about the bedrock of this country.

But Ms. Clueless doesn’t see a problem with trading that away for a few votes.

You know what, Henneberger? Forced pregnancy is a crime against humanity equal to forced abortion. Just because the only human beings who can suffer from it are female, doesn’t make it less of a crime.

Another point: nobody is suggesting that anti-abortion women have abortions. They can live their lives exactly as they wish according to their beliefs. What they cannot do, at least not in a free country, is tell anyone else how to live. It’s too bad if that upsets them. Human rights are not negotiable.

And it cuts no ice whatsoever to say that opinions differ on when human life begins. It doesn’t matter, except to the woman involved, when she believes human life begins. She has to handle her pregnancy according to her own lights. However — and this is the essential point — nobody can order somebody else to provide life support against her will.

Whether you think a fetus is a person or a developing mass of tissue, a pregnant woman is providing the life support. It is up to her whether she does that or not. If you think otherwise, then you must also believe healthy people should be strapped onto gurneys and forced to give up a kidney because a patient will die without it.

It is simply breathtaking how little women count. In no other situation, none, not one, has anyone ever dreamt of pretending it’s okay to use one human being as parts for another. Yet that is exactly how women are treated. We’re so far from thinking of women as human beings that the point needs to be explained . . . and when it’s explained it sounds odd.

The fact that women are adapted by nature to provide life support, and the fact that they are happy to do it often enough to overpopulate the planet, doesn’t change the ethics of forcing a woman to be pregnant.

So, Melinda Henneberger, get a clue. You don’t know what women want. Nobody does. They don’t come off an assembly line down at the female factory. Nor do men come off an assembly line. That’s exactly why it’s so important for everyone to live their own lives and not somebody else’s.

Technorati tags: human rights, abortion, choice, politics, current events, Democrats, Henneberger

Via Carolyn Kay at Make Them Accountable comes this brilliant article by David Podvin: Always the lesser priority.

The cynical calculations of political movements… the burning ambition of leaders…the multiculturalism that emphasizes respecting misogynistic societies over defending females. From the liberal perspective, there is an extended litany of priorities more important than women’s rights. And for conservatives, every priority is more important.

Even feminist activists have a higher priority than advocating the rights of women. Increasingly, feminists have argued that women share an immutable common cause with “people of color”. That multicultural convolution explains the vulgar silence on the Left when Third World females are being tortured and murdered.

And, I might add, there is a peculiar blindness to First World crimes too. Somewhere between one in ten and one in six women between the ages of 15 and 40 are raped every year. Every goddamn year. This is a holocaust of sexual torture. It scars people for life. The fact that they find the strength to carry on and even heal does not make it less of a crime. The fact that I even feel the need to explain that, tells you everything you need to know about how low a priority these atrocities are.

So where is the outrage? And where is the pushback?

Nowhere, mon frère. There has long been an all-out war pitting a multicultural coalition of misogynists against women, but only one side has been fighting. Until that battle is joined the savagery visited upon females will not end. Feeble Feminism must be replaced by Kick Ass Feminism. The time has come to stop turning the other cheek and start turning the cheeks of the reprobates.

That vigilance begins where all vigilance begins… at home.

…

The endless assault upon females constitutes a crime against every person who values women. Integrity demands that the criminals be vanquished, but most people – even most good people – are just too busy worrying about higher priorities.

There can be no higher priority. At stake is the liberty of more than half the human population.

It’s what I’ve been trying to say in Are Women Human?, Lipstick is not liberation, The Cure for terrorism? Islamic law for women, Iran, yellow stars, and dress codes, as well as here, here, and here, and practically everywhere throughout this whole damn blog. It feels like water in the desert to find someone who gets it.

The 2008 US presidential elections have been called off. We will be having a male beauty contest instead.

I first heard about it when there was all that media time devoted to John Edwards’ hair. Expensive. Pretty. Shiny. Combed in front of a mirror. (They’d found camera footage proving it.) This was all way too much like a g-i-r-r-r-l. Not good.

Then, Howard Fineman, certified Washington DC pundit, and Chris Matthews, top flight TV political talk show host, on the subject of Guiliani and his looks.

FINEMAN: He doesn‘t—he looks like a guy who, if he had had the opportunity to grow up as a hunter, would have been a great one.
MATTHEWS: Yes.
FINEMAN: He just gives off the aura of a guy who wouldn‘t be afraid to use a gun, you know?

Via Talkingpointsmemo, intelligence from the Republican camp concerning the Presidential qualities of Fred Thompson:

“the actor/senator/lobbyist would make a good president, in part because of his speaking voice. … He has a commanding voice,” Wamp said. “He has a commanding presence.”

However, we’re past the days of radio, unfortunately. It has to be admitted that for television he is, well, a bit jowly. This causes others to cheer for Mitt Romney, the Mormon Without Minoxidil.

Politico’s Roger Simon:

Romney has chiseled-out-of-granite features, a full, dark head of hair going a distinguished gray at the temples, and a barrel chest (ref).
[Romney] has shoulders you could land a 737 on (ref).

Via Media Matters, transcripts of Bill O’Reilly’s trenchant analysis of what it takes to be President.

“[Romney's] got the jaw going on, the little gray thing in there. … I think that means a lot in America.”

Where, you might ask, does all this leave Hillary? She does have a bit of a “jaw going on” herself, but even the cleverest tailor with access to Texas-sized shoulder pads couldn’t make her look like the runway for a 737.

You see, this is where we plodding types were all wrong. We knew there was going to be a contest, but we thought it was about stuff like knowing we need national health insurance, and being able to deal with the awful truth of the Iraq War.

Of course, the Republicans would have been at a disadvantage in a contest like that. So instead, the contest will now be about who looks like The Man.

Technorati tags: election, 2008, politics

The big issue is supposed to be that women are attractive to men, which means there are only two possible alternatives. Women have to be kept in a box (or tent, according to taste) so the poor men aren’t driven to distraction, or women can be distracting and men have to deal with it.

Some man with a very limited little mind came up with that. Those are not our only choices. They don’t begin to cover the spectrum of possibilities. Half of humanity, for instance, is not driven to distraction by women, whether boxed or not. For women, there are issues of being pleased as well as pleasing, and that doesn’t even seem to be on the map for the limited little man.

And then, how about another whole range of choices? Imagine a world where everyone had a good sex life. A world where men didn’t have to come howling out of the woodwork whenever anyone made a noise like a vagina. One where women could express an interest in sex without being trampled. There’d be dozsens of choices then, not just two invented by some guy starving in a basement.

What brought on this rant was an article about the new, sexy music videos appearing in the Arab world.

Habib recalls how one of her early videos helped shoot her to superstardom.

“The video Akhasmak Ah was basically shot in a cafe in Beirut, and the woman was seen as a power figure in the video.

“She was dancing on the table and it was a room full of men and the men were just at her feet. And she was just commanding them. So in some ways it was seen as showing a woman as an object and in other ways it was seen as a woman being empowered.”

Many of the music clips – like those in the West – are selling sex in a way that is new to the Middle East.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I hardly know where to start, the whole world view is so pathetic. (If only it were limited to Arabs, but the BBC reporter himself obviously thinks in those terms too.)

Let’s just start with the whole sex-as-control aspect. Sex can’t be a tool of control if you want it. Then you’d have nothing to withhold and nothing to bargain with. So the first step is to be so out of touch with yourself, so unaware of your own desires, so castrated that you can dole out sex as currency. That is not empowerment. That’s being so thoroughly crippled, your only jollies are hitting people with your crutches.

Depriving a woman of her own life until she’s nothing but a figment of somebody else’s imagination is not empowerment. Not even when she’s given the means to be a disturbing figment. Wearing lipstick is not liberation. She’s still living in somebody else’s world, even if she gets to do it in technicolor.

Empowerment is having your own life. It’s having enough control to be able to choose which life you want. It’s having enough control over your own fate to be able to get what you want sometimes, too.

Everything about the report, and the world view it echoes, rests on the same ignorance about empowerment, and, for that matter, sex. Take the comment about “selling sex.” It’s not sex that’s being sold, but only women’s sex. The implication being the same old myth: only men want sex, women don’t want it and all they do is use it.

Or, take the following statement.

Many Arab women say they find the videos demeaning.

The discussion has been about “sex,” not about sexless (although of course sexy) women. So the quote implies women find sex demeaning. Nobody wants humiliation (except perhaps sadomasochists who’ve bought into the idea that sex equals it). Hence, again, over and over, the message is the same. Women don’t want sex.

Outside the world of sex-deprived men, though, it doesn’t take much to see how asinine the videos are. It doesn’t take a spiritual giant to know that a body slave is not really a step up from a maid of all work. All it takes is any sense of self. Women who see where the videos put them are closer to empowerment than reporters who sound like they have no idea what the problem might be.

The really sad thing is that this pathetic ignorance is far from harmless. It’s worse than not liberating. It is the opposite. It takes everyone further and further away from ever being free of it.

The truth (which on good authority is said to set us free) is that women spend at least as much time as men thinking about sex. Sometimes it seems like they think about it even more. If you’re female, you have no trouble remembering examples. (If you’re male, probably not so much. See “trampling,” above, if you wonder why.)

It’s true that at this point women don’t always dream of exactly the same sort of satisfactions as men, for the simple reason that men have succeeded in making sex either frustrating or even unpleasant for so many women. But it’s not nature that made things that way. Any time we want to stop living inside narrow fantasies, there’s a whole world of other choices out there.

Left to themselves, women are crazy about men. Left to themselves, women are crazy about sex. If they didn’t have to fear frustration or worse, they’d be having a lot more sex, not less. As a result, men would be having a lot more sex too, if they stopped trying to have all of it.

*(Written from a straight perspective. As they say: write what you know.)

Technorati tags: politics, gender, sex, relationships, liberation

It is astonishing to me that people of good will find anything to argue about in the statement that hate speech is not on.

Hello?

Kathy Sierra received death threats and had her address published all over the net. In what sense, exactly, is free speech served by protecting that behavior? There’s Sierra’s speech, which has been shouted down, and a bunch of useless yapping that did the shouting. The argument seems to be about how limits on really bad yapping can avoid infringing on yapping.

Even that last issue is not difficult. There is no valid point of view that requires the expression of personal threats against other people. It’s that simple. It’s also illegal. It’s called hate speech. It’s not free for a very good reason. It needs to be enforced, by the police and by all of us on our individual blogs. It needs to be enforced when it’s misogynist just as much as it does when racist, anti-semitic, or homobigoted. Sometimes it seems that these days the point is debatable only when misogyny is in question.

So, let’s make a start, here in blogland, by rejecting all forms of threats against people. Yes, that includes completely harmless crude threats hurled between commenters in the livelier blogs. Throw them out. I don’t know anyone who would miss them, except the commenters themselves, and they’ll just have to deal with it like men, even if they are highschoolers (whatever their gender). Shutting them up is the price of hearing voices with something to say, voices like Sierra’s.

Would that rule get rid of offensiveness on the web? No, not by a long shot. Bigotry isn’t excluded by that rule. Only bigotry directed specifically at individuals. You have to start somewhere.

And you have to stop somewhere. I’m not sure where, after hate speech is excluded, the line should be drawn. Bigotry expressed as an incitement to riot is already illegal, and should be. But I don’t see how one could make the expression of just plain honest bigotry, so to speak, illegal without at the same time destroying free speech itself.

The test has to be whether harm is threatened against specific people. If not, just turn it off and go pay attention to something else if you’re offended by the sentiments expressed. (Violent porn is an interesting hybrid area here. I would argue that since it does advocate harm against specific people, for entertainment no less, it falls squarely into the hate speech category.)

It gets murkier when one gets deeper into O’Reilly’s and Scoble’s Blogger Code of Conduct. (Intelligently, the Code is up for comment as of this writing, so make suggestions for improvement there.) They would like to excise “misrepresentation.” I agree. I’d like to excise it too. /*Falls into beautiful dream: no more Rush Limbaugh, no more Malkin, no more Coulter, no more Shrub . . . wakes up with a shock.*/ Anyway, yes, it would be nice. No, there is no way to do that short of including critical thinking in everyone’s education and making sure that everyone is educated.

O’Reilly & Co. are confusing the desirable with the essential, possibly because the worst aspects of this aren’t their problem. Women are exposed to 25 times the hate speech online that men are. Twenty five times. 2500% more. Yet, when it comes time to formulate a code of conduct, the names I see on the masthead are “Tim,” “Richard,” “David,” and so on. They adopted the outlines of the code from BlogHer, but then for some reason took the ball and ran with it. Possibly, it would have been easier to keep the priorities organized and to identify the worst abuses if the people who suffer the majority of them had been at the center of the project.

Whenever any limits are proposed on free speech, the shout against censorship goes up. The idea is that any censorship will lead to the end of free speech. This is obvious nonsense, as a simple thought experiment can show. If you’re in a room full of people, all shouting as loud as they can, does anyone have the freedom to speak?

Freedom of speech necessarily includes the freedom to be heard. (I’ve carried on about this before.) That’s why apartheid-era South Africa’s banning laws were a suppression of free speech. Talking to yourself in a room by yourself is meaningless. But an excess of noise works just as well as isolation to drown a message. The great danger to free speech now is not silence. The danger is that by not censoring noise, we’re going to lose the signal that freedom of speech was intended to preserve.

Deleting and silencing threats against people is not censorship. It is the essential volume knob that allows free speech to be heard.

Technorati tags: free speech, Code of Conduct, BlogHer, blogging, hate speech, trolls, censorship

Jesus General has another one of his brilliant posts, all about the current Administration’s “promotion of ‘manly virtues,’ almost all of which are related to a willingness to engage in violence and humiliation towards others.”

Funny. That had never occurred to me as a definition of manliness, but now that JG mentions it, I have to agree that’s indeed the definition oozing out of the White House.

Biologically speaking (that’s what you come to this blog for, right?) male violence has a role. Pregnancy and nursing, necessarily done entirely by females, raise the caloric and nutritional requirements of a 120 lb woman right up to that of a very active 180 lb man. If that woman also expended energy fighting and healing from wounds, there’d be no way she could survive unless she got all her meals at a nutrition-enhanced Macdonalds. For most of human history, there have been no Macdonalds.

So, having the men be first in line to deal with the world’s violence, in order to protect the group and the group’s children has enormous survival value. That’s why every human group that’s survived long enough to leave a record does it that way. From the group’s perspective, the manly virtues are protectiveness and self-sacrifice. (This isn’t to say that females don’t fight. They do when the threat is close enough. It’s just that they don’t generally put themselves first in line to take casualties.)

Protectiveness and self-sacrifice are a bit different from violence and humiliation. The opposite, in fact. And generalized male violence that includes the group has the opposite of survival value. It’s sociopathic.

I’m not sure why I’m surprised that a bunch of sociopathic chickenhawk kleptocrats would have as little understanding of manliness as they do of sex. These are, after all, cockroaches in suits. I just keep getting fooled by those humanoid outfits they wear.

Technorati tags: current affairs, chickenhawks, manliness, politics

I think I’ll step into a hornets’ nest. I think we need to get a couple of things clear regarding feelings about homosexuality.

The debate flared up again recently because Perfect Peter (aka General Peter Pace) said it was immoral. (The substance of that statement is hardly worth addressing. We’ve been floating along, letting immorality be defined as whatever anyone says it is, and now we have wingnuts calling a vaccine against a lethal disease “immoral.” So, just to define my own terms, immoral actions hurt someone, carelessly or on purpose, for no reason that the sufferer wants. Surgery is not immoral. Torture is. Since homosexuality hurts nobody, always assuming it’s taking place between consenting equals, it’s obviously not immoral.)

The reaction of the tolerance crowd (which, I hope, includes me) to statements like Pace’s is to bring accusations of bigotry. So far, so good. It is bigotry. But then there’s also the objection to expressing any dislike of homosexuality. That, I think, is where we go off the rails.

It is counterproductive to tell people how to feel. There is no point telling someone that their feelings about God don’t exist (as Dawkins is trying to do), or that it’s stupid to admire celebrities, or that they don’t actually like the taste of coffee but they’ve learned the habit. The only result of trying to tell people how they feel is a yes-no shouting match. Unless you’re telepathic, it is impossible to know another person’s feelings directly. Only the person involved has direct knowledge, and anyone else does not, and therefore has no business making pronouncements on something that they cannot know.

So there is no point telling people that they shouldn’t be put off by homosexuality. They are. Instead of denying how they feel about it, I think it would be much more helpful if they had the right context for those feelings.

Now, admittedly, a large segment of homobigots are simply anti-sex or else, when male, seem to have some kind of insecurity about masculinity. (I always feel, as a biologist, I should tell those guys that the various bits are firmly attached and won’t fall off if they don’t drive a truck.) I’m not talking about those attitudes here, since they go way beyond being put off.

Among the people who are put off, without a lot of added baggage, they assume that feeling is based on the wrongness of homosexuality. Since there is nothing actually wrong with it–and the more honest among them will admit that if pressed–what are they feeling?

I think we’re up against some very simple biology.

Look at our attitudes toward biological functions in general, not just sex. We all like to eat. We all get revolted at watching somebody else chew with their mouth open. We don’t feel bad taking care of personal hygiene issues, but we get very huffy if someone else doesn’t do that in private. There really isn’t any biological function you can visibly perform, except breathing, without causing comment. Breathing is probably exempt only because it’s invisible.

What I’m saying is that it’s in the nature of biological functions to gross us out unless we happen to be doing them ourselves. The more familiar we are with these functions, the less we freak out about them. New parents have more initial reserve, shall we say, about dealing with diapers than experienced ones.

Attitudes to sex follow the same pattern. Doing sex is great. Unexpectedly having to watch somebody else do sex is liable to get the couple involved arrested. It’s the same pattern: watching somebody else performing biological functions we’re not involved in tends to lead to avert-your-eyes situations.

Add to that the fact that homosexuality is less familiar to most straight people than heterosexuality, and there’s a double dose of feeling put off.

That’s all very well and good, you’re probably saying, but the problem isn’t gay people rolling around in the town square, doing their thing. The problem is that others don’t want them to do their thing anywhere.

Indeed. And I think that’s because talk of gay sex makes people think about gay sex, and that grosses them out. Then they leap to the conclusion that, of course, the disgust is based on the awful immorality of the situation.

No, the disgust is based on the same feelings we have about lots of other biology. It has exactly NOTHING to do with morality.

If that distinction could be more widely appreciated, people might realize that even though they’re put off that doesn’t mean they have to do anything about it. All they have to do is keep out of it. It’s not immoral and it requires no action except minding your own business.

I think the people who would like to see more tolerance don’t help matters by insisting that there’s no place for disgust. We conflate disgust and morality as much as the bigots, only in the other direction. We’d all be a lot further ahead if we provided context instead of denial.

We shouldn’t deny the revulsion that some people feel. They just need to understand what the revulsion means. It doesn’t mean any more than the same feeling about lots of other biological things. Thinking about people having sex, if you’re not attracted to them, is always vaguely, or even hugely, off-putting. (I mean, just think about your parents . . . no, don’t think about it. But it would be very unwise to start agitating against parents having sex, just because the thought was so gross.)

So let’s stop attacking people for feeling disgusted. I once saw a guy in a gay pride parade carrying a sign that read, “I don’t understand your sexuality either.” Where he’s a step ahead is that he knows that doesn’t mean he has to race out and do something about it. There are lots of people, straight people, whose sexuality I’d rather not think about. That’s okay. They can do their thing and I can do mine.

And that is the big take-home message: Biology is not morality. Feelings about biology are not morality. Morality is morality. And everything else is nobody’s business but your own.

Technorati tags: homosexuality, morality, Pace, Peter Pace, immorality

The BBC has a series of short reports from Iraqi refugees about their lives in exile and, sometimes, the events that precipitated their flight. Heartbreaking, every single one. This one about a woman named Fatima is just one example of the insanity.

It doesn’t seem like a lot to ask.