R.L.G.B. Interview and Some Other Fun Things

Re: Weeks, Norton, Sex Museum, R.L.G.B., Thunder Cats, Foucault, Mad Men and more fun items

Just a little bit more on Essentialism and Constructionist Theory

Questions to be answered: Is indentifying one’s sexual orientation considered knowledge? Or is it a matter of the senses? Example: Can you know that you like women or men, before you actually feel a certain sexual attraction for a man or for a woman (and vice versa, for the sake of argument)? Finally, is knowledge, for that matter, empirical or innate? John Locke says that knowledge is strictly empirical; he says that knowledge is gathered through sense experience and that a person is born with a blank mind (blank slate a.k.a. Tabula Rasa). By Locke’s theory, sexuality is a product of one’s environment. That means orientation, fetishes, positions, and so forth are all teachings of the external world.

For more on this, here is an interview I conducted.

Interview with a R.LG.B. (Real life gay Boy) named Chris

David: Okay here’s my first question. When did you first realize you were homosexual?

Chris: Whaddya mean? Like when I first started sucking cock and fucking guys? Or like thought to myself, Hey! I’m gay!

David: When did you first know it? For example, you walk around with a chocolate fudge mark on the left side of your face and not know it. Then you look in the mirror and say to yourself “Aww man, there’s a chocolate fudge mark on the side of my face.” Like that.

Chris: Hmm. I think freshman year in high school, because that was when I actually began being gay—like dating guys and etc.

David: So do you think you always had a sexual interest in men? I don’t even mean, like, beginning to understand those mysterious nomenclatures such as Homo or Lezbo. Were you attracted to masculine things as a child? If Hercules was on at the same time as, let’s say, Pokémon, were you more likely to watch Kevin Sorbo run around without a shirt on than to watch cartoons?

Chris: I really don’t know. I can’t remember if I tried. Well, when I was in 5^th grade I had a crush on this girl—but it was like one of those little kid crushes, nothing serious or heterosexual even.

David: Did you like her, because you admired how she appealed to the other boys?

Chris: Maybe, that could be it. But I think if you’re gay, then you were born that way. That’s how you were programmed. Like, you were born in the closet. You can’t go in, you can only come out. And as for those guys who come out, like, when they’re fifty, after their married or whatever, they were just in denial their whole life.

David: Okay, what about bisexuals?

Chris: Uh, pick one. You can’t have both flavors honey. Sorry, ya gotta share.

David (laughs): But do you think there’s a level of Gayness or just, like, a base level that everyone is on?

Chris: Well, there are definitely guys gayer than I am.

David: How can you be gayer than someone? Can you elaborate?

Chris: The way you dress, act, or talk, even. Just more feminine I guess. You know, like the Limp Wrist, wearing high-end fashion, aligning your footsteps when you walk and, like, talking with a high pitch, I guess. You know, the obvious things—just watch Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It’s like the encyclopedia.

David: Do you think the epitome of gayness would be to perfectly embody the socially fabricated, stereotypical female persona? Without regard to internal organs, I mean.

Chris: Well that’s one way to put it, but there are Gay guys who look straight and there are these Metrosexuals, so it’s very hard to tell. 

David: Thanks, R.L.G.B.!

Moving on to…

Presence of Sexual content on television

Television and Cinema embodies the expanding freedom of our sexual verbosity. Public television has certainly gone to new heights in terms of creating crevasses in the filter that desperately gropes to keep George Carlin’s Seven dirty words inside a sphere of silence. Not only has television changed sexual discourse, television has changed discourse in general. For example: MTV has accelerated the sexual libido of adolescents through the broadcasting of their promiscuous music videos. Then there is cable—a realm where sex is entertainment.

Despite the fact that contemporary society is now more open about sexuality then it has ever been, I understand why we may still be reluctant to take off our pants on the train—it’s because we’re not completely free yet, but we are breaking some chains.

Presence of Sex in Cinema

In Elia Kazan’s “A Streetcar Named Desire,” censorship limits were pushed to its limits when a sexually aggressive Stanly Kowalski—played by Mr. Brando—attacks and rapes Blanche Dubois—played by Vivien Leigh. The film was edited to exclude some of the gauche sexual violence that stirred up so much controversy within the film world. On the contrary, sexual taboos are virtually absent in cinema nowadays—take for example: the rape scene in The Last House on the Left, or the pederasty present in American Beauty and An Education and Hard Candy, or the numerous sexual exploits in the American Pie series.

The Sex Museum brings forth another example: Pornography. Sure, it may only available to those over a specific age, but all that is changing. This age requirement is a rule that restricts pornographic materials from children, but with the Internet it seems that these restrictions no longer apply. Anyone with a connection to the World Wide Web can access its wealthy collection of pornographic images and videos.

And what about those Madison Avenue behemoths who reigned supreme over a post war America? I’m talking about the guys whose untrammeled use of sex in pushing cigarettes into the mouths of gullible adolescents caused an unfixable dent in the façade of sexual discourse. This being said, another question arises—has advertising morphed the vernacular of a country that was once pragmatically oppressed by a bourgeois regime? Perhaps.

We may have discovered some new mediums for sexual discourse—television and the Internet for example—but we are still swimming in the contaminated waters of the Victorian era.

A few comments on Foucault’s A History of Sexuality chapters 4/5

There have been shifts of power from the Monarchs to the Bourgeoisie to the relentless business moguls. Throughout this exchange of powers, the oppressive laws that have kept sexuality in a clandestine whisper have been thriving off its own invisibility. Also, it helps to align that which is taboo with that which is restricted by law with that which is nonexistent (page 84, please), because that is the key to total oppression.

Foucault: “…it links the inexistent, the illicit, and the inexpressible in such a way that each is at the same time the principle and the effect of the others; and that which one must keep silent about is banished from reality as the thing that is tabooed above all else.”

Nowadays, rationality has taken the wheel in the Delorean to the future. Rulers can no longer kill at will—there are trials and human rights and all that fun stuff. We may have been placed in rooms without windows, but now there are doors. As human beings in a contemporary world that has rid itself of rulers made solely of avarice and evil, we now have the opportunity to work towards a less sexually oppressed world. Which is always fun.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 21st, 2010 at 10:30 pm and is filed under David Li, Foucault: History of Sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.