Tag Archives: Sexuality

Misogyny Vs. The Human Chin

Nicholas Kristof speaks to evolutionary psychologists and decides that misogyny doesn’t exist because there is no evolutionary motive for hatred, only a “desire to control them and impregnate them, so as to pass on one’s genes.”

The idea that something can’t exist because there is no convenient evolutionary just-so story for it is absurd. Kristof should read some Stephen Jay Gould:

Gould’s favorite example is the human chin, whose presence is an incidental consequence of the differential growth rate of two bones in the lower jaw. The dentary bone which carries the teeth elongates more slowly than the jawbone itself, so the chin juts out. In our ape-like ancestors the jawbone grows more slowly so no chin develops. Of course one can always try to invent a story about why having a chin confers more reproductive potential, but that is a parlor game, not science.

If humans can have chins, they can also have misogyny. Maybe even misogynists with chins.

Anthropological Authority and the Marriage Debate

Box Turtle Bulletin, the blog that previously published a letter from Bill Maurer and Tom Boellstorff responding to a statement from Focus on the Family that there is anthropological consensus as to the definition of marriage, is currently hosting a debate about the matter. Patrick Chapman has posted a lengthy response to a ‘white paper‘ by Focus on the Family’s Director of Family Formation Studies Greg Stanton. It’s a fascinating debate to me not necessarily because I am interested in definitions of marriage (though I am) but because of the way that anthropology is invoked by both sides as having authority on the subject. As Chapman writes: “What is particularly important with Stanton’s report is the recognition that anthropologists are the experts when it comes to understanding and defining marriage.” Anthropologists: Do not despair! Someone still cares what we have to say. Anthropologists are seen to have the last word on human nature and therefore as potentially having knowledge that could settle debate on the topic. The typical ‘pro’ gay marriage stance in relation to anthropology is to emphasize the diversity of world cultures and to emphasize that human nature exists in and as this diversity or adaptability. The typical ‘anti’ gay marriage stance emphasizes the fact that nothing quite like gay marriage has really been seen before in the ‘anthropological record.’ To me what’s interesting is how a moral question appears to be disguised in these debates as a ‘scientific’ one, and therefore the real nature of the conflict gets displaced. If in fact some tribe somewhere had/has a custom literally called ‘gay marriage,’ where two men or two women and their families celebrate their union through ritual and exchange, do we imagine that that would convince Focus on the Family of the validity of the institution? I actually think that these arguments are, at the core, about the moral legitimacy of modernity — and I think our very own Oneman has brilliantly guided discussion on this matter previously here at SM.

Maurer & Boellstorff respond to Focus on the Family

The gay blog Box Turtle Bulletin responded to an article at Focus on the Family’s ‘Citizenlink’ claiming anthropological consensus as to the definition of a family: “A family is a unit that draws from the two types of humanity, male and female… Those two parts of humanity join together, create new life and they both cooperate in the legitimization of the child, if you will, and the development of the child.” BTB’s Daniel Gonzalezs contacted Maurer for a response from an ‘actual anthropologist’:

Since its beginnings as a scientific discipline in the 19th century, anthropology has documented the historical and cultural variability of marriage and family forms. From ghost marriages to “female husbands” to polyandry, polygamy and cousin marriage, the cultures of the world exhibit incredible diversity in how they manage the universal problems of cultural transmission and the reproduction and care of the next generation. Indeed, Lewis Henry Morgan, one of the field’s forefathers, documented hundreds of distinct kinship arrangements. For over a hundred years, anthropologists have continually surprised themselves and other Western observers with the diversity of family and marriage arrangements deemed sacred, valuable, and morally necessary for the reproduction of society. The American Anthropological Association, the oldest and largest professional organization for anthropologists, affirms this diversity and noted its support for gay marriage in 2004-05. In fact, the Association requires academic recruiters who advertise with its service to state whether they provide benefits to same-sex partners and whether they forbid discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. It does this because the scientific evidence is on its side: there is not now, and there never has been, one single definition of marriage. Marriage may be universal; but what counts as marriage is not. The current American political debate is thus quite parochial when seen from the point of view of 10,000 years of human history.

For more information: American Anthropological Association; on the gay marriage debate, see this link.

Bill Maurer
Professor and Chair
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine
and
President, Association for Political and Legal Anthropology

Tom Boellstorff
Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine
Editor-in-Chief, American Anthropologist, and
Former co-Chair, Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists

For every bee there is a flower …

Having recently been scolded for citing survey data on an anthropology blog (mea culpa), I’d like to rectify the situation by referring readers to this fun piece in the NY Times about the myth that men are more promiscuous than women:

In study after study and in country after country, men report more, often many more, sexual partners than women.

One survey, recently reported by the federal government, concluded that men had a median of seven female sex partners. Women had a median of four male sex partners. Another study, by British researchers, stated that men had 12.7 heterosexual partners in their lifetimes and women had 6.5.

But there is just one problem, mathematicians say. It is logically impossible for heterosexual men to have more partners on average than heterosexual women. Those survey results cannot be correct.

The article offers two explanations. One is that “men exaggerate the number of partners they have and women underestimate.” The other is that “men are going outside the [survey] population to find partners.” For instance, most surveys don’t include paid sex workers. Feministe plays with the idea that promiscuous women “don’t count”:

But I’d say that what we’re seeing here is actually the conventional explanation for the discrepancy: women don’t have much sex compared to men, but supposedly there are some women who “make up for the difference” by having LOTS and LOTS of sex with then menfolk. Furthermore, these women don’t count, at least not for the CDC’s purposes — they’re beyond the pale, outside of society. They’re prostitutes, or as Ms. Aral suggests, they’re foreigners. In the past (of segregation and slavery) and still today in so many cases, they’re women of color. They’re women who have to be left out of the math in order to make the “common sense” 7:4 ratio accurate. They’re the original reference of the shame-word “slut.”

They’re every type of woman who’s been made to to serve as the “whore” of the classic “virgin/whore” dichotomy — to balance this mathematically impossible equation by having all the sex that good marriageable white-wedding girls supposedly don’t. (Even though this is also the survey that pointed out that 89% of Americans have premarital sex.) I could go even further and start talking about how this relates to characterization and exploitation of trans women as sex workers, in the US and around the world, as a kind of ultimate “doesn’t count as a woman” but I’ll save that for another post. You get the idea.

That the press and the public love to see their gender stereotypes reinforced, despite the questionable nature of the data, is something that has also been extensively covered at Language Log in a series of posts on the myth that women talk more than men.

Addressing Publics Positively: Some Developments in HIV Prevention

Serosorting Enjoy AZT

Earlier on Savage Minds, I asked about contemporary shifts in the symbolism and sociality of HIV/AIDS — a global epidemic. The question concerns me as someone who found himself along with other members of ACT UP, in the early mid-90s, in places like the parking lot of the Astrodome yelling at delegates to the Republican National Convention about funding for healthcare. It concerns me as someone who, in the late mid-90s, was employed as a professional ethnographer (!) tracking social knowledge related to sexual risk in San Francisco. These days, I am interested in the meaning of HIV and the ways in which that meaning is mediated and manifested specifically through what might be called technologies of public persuasion, whether they are relatively complex, such as social marketing campaigns (on the left above), or fairly simple, such as political protest posters (on the right).

A pointed exchange of sorts in the pages of Anthropology News last fall highlights the role that anthropologists are playing in ongoing efforts to respond to–and shape–the HIV/AIDS epidemic and its meaning today. An initial article (read: puff piece) lauded the research of Ted Green, who has worked closely with the Bush administration on its AIDS strategy. Green has embraced ‘risk elimination’ programs for HIV prevention — especially those that (according to Green) primarily prioritize abstinence and partner reduction over condom use and education. By his own account, this represents a paradigm shift in thinking on HIV prevention:

Green believes that the transformation of his maverick and unorthodox ideas into official US policy has been nothing short of groundbreaking.

The article works hard to place Green gingerly in between ‘fashionable academic anthropology’ and the conservative government he apparently works with quite closely, despite being a Democrat (we read of him on a private trip to Africa with CEOs of major pharmaceutical concerns and top Bush administration officials). Green sees Uganda’s famous ‘ABC’ approach as reflecting an ‘indigenous’ Ugandan response to AIDS, and apparently he emphasizes the need for HIV/AIDS agencies to take into account local perspective(s). His political party affiliation notwithstanding, Green’s research is embraced by the right wing of the political spectrum.

Douglas Feldman and Tom Boellstorff each published sharp letters in response to the AN piece. Continue reading →

Other Developments in the Modernity of Kinship

Apart from questions of prescription and description (or representation and practice) embedded in such questions as what counts as ‘cousin marriage’ here and there, and to what extent endogamous marriage strategies have property as the primary motivating interest, styles of reflexively-apprehended ‘kinship’ come to stand for whole sets of values and traditions, as noted below in Kerim’s post and responses.

As, for example, in places like the United States. The semiosphere (I really hate the term ‘blogosphere’) has lately been aflame with debates about gay parenting, prompted especially by Mary Cheney’s announcement that she and her partner are having a child. The symbolism is profound of course: here, at the very heart of one of the most consequentially anti-gay administrations in U.S. history (rivaled on anti-gay terms I think only by the Clinton administration), is a gay family. It’s rather uncanny how gays keep erupting on the putatively anti-gay Republican scene (Mark Foley, anyone?).

The properness of gay parenting was recently the subject of a controversial piece in Time magazine by James Dobson, who runs the conservative moralist group Focus on the Family (and who recently had his own uncanny encounter with the homo when his ‘friend’ Ted Haggard was forced out of the closet). The piece is controversial not only because it constitutes something of a personal attack on Mary Cheney and her decision to become a mother, but also because it misconstrues social research in order to argue that same-sex parental couples damage children. Carol Gilligan has released a letter calling on Dobson to cease citing her work in support of his argument that children can only properly be raised by their own biological father and mother. (To my mind, a rather odd gesture, since one of the hazards of publishing is that people are free to read and interpret your work as they like.) I actually think the best response to Dobson’s piece has been Saletan’s at Slate. (Saletan’s ‘Human Nature’ column is consistently fascinating.) Saletan points out that the real danger to children isn’t gay parents, it’s men.

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Mead the Positivist

Via a link left by Rex in my recent post on Margaret Mead, I discovered this article entitled “Margaret Mead vs. Tony Soprano” by Micaela di Leonardo, one of the few anthropologists who has taken trying to be a public intellectual seriously, writing regular articles for The Nation.

She argues that the early Mead of Coming of Age in Samoa was not the romantic antimodernist “Technician of the Sacred” she is portrayed as being, but instead was an empiricist whose Samoa is “‘human experiment’ under ‘controlled conditions.'” She argues that it was Mead’s later book, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, that established her place as a commentator on American sexual politics, but (contrary to how she is remembered) in a fundamentally conservative way:

Mead’s “gender malleability” statements are, in fact, lodged inside a larger argument against women’s equal rights as represented by the contemporary Soviet Union. Mead saw in the opening of all occupations to women there a “sacrifice in complexity” of culture: “The removal of all legal and economic barriers against women’s participating in the world on an equal footing with men may be in itself a standardizing move towards the wholesale stamping-out of the diversity of attitudes that is such a dearly bought product of civilization.”

She points out that “Betty Friedan in 1961 spent almost an entire chapter of her celebrated book attacking Mead’s pernicious ‘super saleswomanship’ of the Feminine Mystique” and that much of her political activity was in support of “progressive social engineering, and thus her profound commitment to the notion of disinterested science and the rule of experts”

Similarly, Mead’s war work for the American government extended into both her very successful postwar advocacy of federal funding for anthropological research and her cold warrior stance against, among other actions, antinuclear and anti-Vietnam War protests. (The latter issue led to a huge fight at the 1971 American Anthropological Association meetings, during which Mead was hissed by an antiwar audience of 700.) These political actions were overwhelmed, in popular culture, by Mead’s highly public approbation of “questing youth” from the mid-1960s forward, and the liberal feminist alliances of her last years. She even had her own character in the first stage version of Hair, who celebrated male “long hair and other flamboyant affectations,” and whose song ended in the recitative, “Kids, be whatever you are, do whatever you do, just so long as you don’t hurt anybody.”

She goes on to discuss Mead’s legacy in establishing certain kinds of stereotypes for (feminist) anthropologists in the public sphere, and the difficulties those pose for constructing a truly progressive public anthropology.

While reading this article I was tempted to do an entirely separate post on the various “Halloween costumes” di Leonardo describes: popular culture stereotypes of anthropologists. Maybe at the end of this month …

Savage and Tripping Minds

I just had the extraordinary pleasure of seeing longtime friend and fellow-traveler Richard Doyle give a talk at Rice called “Just Say Yes to the Noosphere.” Rich is the author of On Beyond Living and Wetwares; we met at MIT; his advisor at Berkeley had been Evelyn Fox Keller who had moved to MIT. Rich is a rarity in academia: a kind of contemporary Bateson who insinuates himself into all kinds of interesting research projects; he’s just as willing to run a composition and rhetoric program as he is willing to be the American representative to the International Electrotechnical Commission’s Joint Standards Committee on Bio-Telemetrics. Rich’s talk was about the 20th century history of psychadelics research, and especially, research in unlikely places: like AMPEX, for instance (the inventor of magnetic video-tape), whose engineers experimented with LSD. It’s no secret how widespread the experimentation and research on psychadelics was from about the 1930s into the 1960s. After that, however, hysteria served to associate the research and on psychadelics with 1) drugs 2) bad graphics and 3) pseudo-science and new age mysticism.
Continue reading →

(Non)infection as a Social Relation

This summer marked the passing of a birthday of sorts, the 25th anniversary of the first identification of AIDS in the United States. Although there is conclusive and still-emerging evidence that people died of AIDS at least as early as the mid-twentieth-century in Africa, it was the appearance of a rare form of pneumonia in otherwise healthy young men in Los Angeles that began to concern the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in 1981. National attention focused on “AIDS at 25,” as for example on the cover of Newsweek.

In San Francisco’s legendary Castro neighborhood, year 25 of the epidemic was recognized by community organizers with a banner mounted on the side of a Bank of America building at the corner of 18th and Castro. (The same site became a make-shift memorial to Princess Diana when she died; it was also the site of a little noticed memorial to both Jacques Derrida and Rodney Dangerfield the week that they died.) Organizers created large papier mache flowers that drooped over the Castro for a week or so. But though the gay community was ‘officially’ remembering this tragic event in its history, no one I know in my clique of thirtysomething denizens of the gay ghetto actually talked about it. The flowers just hung there and then went away.

HIV/AIDS is in the public eye again, in part because of the 2006 international AIDS conference in Toronto, which just ended. Reports from the conference indicate that the big ‘Double Bill’ session, featuring two of the world’s most famous and powerful men — Bill Gates and Bill Clinton — was standing room only. News is hopeful: antiretroviral drugs have dramatically transformed the disease from a terminal syndrome to something like a manageable chronic illness. These drugs reduce fatality, they can reduce infection, and they are very expensive. Massive funding will be needed to get these medications to the people in poor places who badly need them, and these include parts of the United States. Controversy swirls around whether or not U.S. initiatives aimed at Africa are constrained by the moralistic and inefficacious imperatives of the Bush regime. The consensus appears to be that because the means to hasten an end to the epidemic are now available, there is now a collective moral burden to make these means available to those whose lives they could save.

Meanwhile, in the United States, recent developments in HIV, law, and public health may be of interest to social anthropologists, especially those who work at the interstices of government, public health, medical technologies, and kinship. Reasons are manifold (AIDS disproportionately affects marginalized people, policy sometimes depends on knowledge of sexual practices and social networks that ethnographic methods uniquely reveal, the epidemic of its very nature mobilizes complex inter-connected/sometimes fractious social relations of vastly different orders [between sex partners, between ‘North’ and ‘South’]). I am am presently trying to think through some aspects of HIV/AIDS from a social perspective. I am interested in how different kinds of persons and publics are summoned by HIV. An example:He Knows

This image is from a pervasive social marketing campaign in the United States. You can see it, and similar ads, on the sides of buses or trams, in subway stations, on billboards, all over major urban areas. This year, I noticed several of these advertisements in San Francisco that were timed to coincide with National HIV Testing day. Here is an abundantly happy couple: attractive, apparently quite in love. The ‘know’ — knowledge of HIV status — the campaign assures us, is ‘spreading,’ to my mind an unfortunate metaphor in the context of an epidemic. Who is hailed in this call to gain self-knowledge? What indeed does this couple know? What is implied about the relationship between them? What does the advertisement ask its viewers to do? What does it promise them?

In upcoming posts, I will hazard an analysis of some current U.S. HIV prevention strategies, paying attention especially to ways that they construct ‘the public’ and its good. Recent emphasis on individual HIV testing, combined with legal decisions that criminalize the transmission of HIV between persons (and that problematize the status of one’s self-knowledge in the context of HIV), raise vital questions about individual agency and community responsibility. A provocation: suppose the person who responds to the “Know HIV/AIDS // No HIV/AIDS campaign” tests positive for HIV. How will this advertisement and ones like it frame the experience, its meanings, its psychological effects, its social entailments?

In an era in which biomedical interpellation is a pervasive and over-riding fact of life, the means and meanings of medical testing bear ethnographic inspection and social reflection.

Female Genital Cutting, Sexuality, and Anti-FGC Advocacy

I don’t normally cross-post here from my research blog, but I thought my recent post on female genital cutting (FGC) might interest some of Savage Minds’ readers. Drawing on anthropological research and first-hand testimony reported across the literature, I’ve tried to counter a lot of the ethnocentrism, racism, and sexism that characterizes anti-FGC arguments, especially in the mainstream. This is not an argument for FGC, by any means, but rather, in the spirit of Geertz, “anti-anti-FGC”.

What Does Jewish Rock Look Like?

A couple months ago, my then-girlfriend and I were surfing channels and happened to light upon Gene Simmons’ reality show. It was the end of the episode, and Simmons was lecturing a young band about something or other.

“He seems really smart,” my ex said, somewhat surprised.

“Of course he does,” I half-jokingly replied. “He’s Jewish.”

She was surprised to hear that The Tongued One was Jewish. Pressing my case, I continued: “Of course, most of your major rock stars are Jewish.” Continue reading →

Elementary Structures of Sex & the City

It has recently become fashionable to argue that the contradictory nature of the information about the sexual habits of the great apes does not allow any resolution, on the animal plane, of the problem of whether polygamous tendencies are innate or acquired. Fashionable, yes; empirically defensible, no. Social and biological observation combine to suggest that, in women, these tendencies are natural and universal, and that only limitations born of the environment and culture are responsible for their suppression. Consequently, to our eyes, monogamy is not a positive institution, but merely incorporates the limit of polygamy in societies where, for highly varied reasons, economic and sexual competition reaches an acute form ( vide the NYTimes wedding announcements page).
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Wild Thoughts: Gender Edition

Welcome to the third installment of Wild Thoughts, your sporadic round-up of whatever I haven’t found time to flesh out into a full post. I haven’t been as active as I’d like the last month or so, not least because I’ve been preparing a new class (at a new school) in Women’s Studies. Entitled “Gender, Race, and Class”, the course meets two separate general ed. requirements, so it is quite popular across the spectrum of students. In preparing for the class, I’ve been collecting quite a few stories that deal with gender (as well as race and class, of course, but those will have to wait — or you can just follow Karen Brodkin’s assertion that race, class, and gender are always imbrecated and consider that these links necessarily deal with race and class because they deal with gender). In the interest of clearing my Firefox tabs, and as a follow-up of sorts to Kerim’s recent post, I present the Gender Edition:

  • The Deputy Prime Minister of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, has proposed legalizing polygamy (he means polygyny), a suggestion that has been endorsed by the Deputy Speaker of the Russian Duma, who plans to introduce legislation to legalize multiple marriages across Russia. The reasoning behind these suggestions should be familiar to anthropologists: the ongoing conflict in Chechnya has decimated the male population and left millions of women widowed or unmarried, with no available, unmarried men to take on the job of supporting these “surplus” women — a textbook case, really. Left unquestioned, of course, are the various factors that leave unmarried women without adequate resources to survive — for example, the dismantling of the Soviet-era system that, whatever its faults, integrated men and women somewhat equally into the labor force, affording unmarried women some degree of autonomy. At work, too, may be a kind of population panic, as increasing numbers of women flee Russia for work — often sex work — in Western Europe or North America.

    • Continue reading →

On The Origins of Sexual Prohibitions

In the latest issue of the New Left Review, Jack Goody has a review of Maurice Godelier’s Métamorphoses de la Parenté, about which he says:

There has never been a book that adequately covers the range of human kinship and domestic organization. This is as near as anyone has got.

Those of us who struggle over French will have to wait for an English translation. Till then, however, Goody’s review gives us a taste of things to come, while taking Godelier to task on a number of issues.

Of particular interest is Godelier’s discussion of primate societies, which he uses to critique his former teacher, Lévi-Strauss, who argued that the “the prohibition of incest … saw the original passage from nature to culture defining human society as such.”
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