Or You Can Just Blame Your Mother…
Or You Can Just Blame Your Mother…
The Alfred Kinsey and US Senate reading this week seem the paramount example of scientia sexualis; numbers, facts, and (false) theories predominate in both pieces. But what interested me the most was the “blame game.” According to Kinsey, “disapproval of heterosexual coitus…before marriage is often an important factor in the development of homosexual activity.” In other words, if you hold them in long enough, your desires will subvert themselves, and you’ll end up conducting “homosexual activity” because you need to do something. This absurd assertion brings to mind those who tell women that dressing promiscuously (however one defines that) causes men to rape, because they are just so overcome with desire at the sight of a breast or a thigh that they lose control.
Asserting that women conduct homosexual activity because it’s second best to sex with men disempowers women, and makes their choice of sexual partner almost meaningless. Their free choice (a foundation of our society and criminal justice system) is taken away from them, because their choices are presented not as real choices but as inevitabilities. My argument, of course, then argues less for a social constructive view of understanding of sexuality and more for an essentialist one. But Kinsey’s theory of inevitable homosexuality is an extreme fom of social constructivism.
“H. H.” plays the blame game even more smoothly than Kinsey. He pins his love of “nymphets” on his first love — that young girl Annabel. His entire life, which is consumed by his desires, is the result of an unfulfilled first affair that occurred when he was young. Is it too easy to blame Annabel? Is she the source of his illicit desires? Certainly he can’t blame his unfulfilled love for the way he treats Lolita, but what about for the desire itself? Again, I find myself returning to the originals essays by Weeks and Norton as I try to understand. Where his desires inborn, or caused by his environment, the way Kinsey posits for unmarried females? I’m going in circles here. How about, as the title of the post says, we all just blame our mothers?
Tags: essentialism, free choice, homosexuality, Jeffrey Weeks, scientia sexualis, social constructivism
