Reconciliation

Just read this story in the news about a Christian group that showed up to Chicago Gay Pride holding signs apologizing for other Christians who have hurt the people there in the past. I was literally crying as I read this. It’s one thing to claim that you “don’t have anything against gay people” or that you should “love the sinner, hate the sin.” These people actually took compassion so far as to acknowledge the pain and humiliation that they may have caused others in the past, and to apologize for that. I just think it’s an incredible testament to the true love and compassion of Christ that Christians are supposed to embody, and just reading about this really felt incredible.

The painting on the wall

A few years ago, I had an assignment in my Intro to Women’s and Gender Studies class, in which I was required to write down at least five things every day for several weeks that made me think about gender. For instance, I might notice that in one of my classes, most of the girls were wearing skirts, or that the signs labeling a bathroom for men or women are blue and pink, respectively. Or, I might notice subversive gender roles, like the fact that one of my male friends owns about six pink shirts, which is probably four more than I do. The following is a slightly-modified copy of the essay I wrote after that project.

 

We live in a world whose social structure is stratified first and foremost by our sex and the gender roles that are “supposed” to follow along with it. Gender, and the ideas of sex and sexuality that nearly always surround it, is a set of roles and ideologies that have become so ingrained in our society that we only rarely, if ever, stop to give it any thought. It is the painting on the bedroom wall that you only notice when it’s crooked, the song you stop hearing because it sounds every time your phone rings, the sock on your foot that you only notice when it starts to fall down.

We are surrounded by gender, but only aware of it when something challenges our understanding of the way it “should” work, and even then not always conscious of why we are upset by that discrepancy. This message is sent through everything from blatant marketing of pink things for girls and blue for boys to common expressions like “Man up!” or “You throw like a girl.” In this essay, I will examine some specific examples of these things, as well as include some general observations about my experience in the context of our class readings and discussions.

This project first and foremost led me to a new awareness of the ultimate intersectionality of sex, gender and sexuality, in more than just the seemingly obvious senses. For instance, when I was educated about the differences between sex and gender, I was taught that sex was physical, while gender was mental. However, during our class discussion of the movie Boys Don’t Cry, I came to the sudden realization that sex is not merely what’s on the outside, but also a consciousness of being part of that body and identifying with it (or not). There is a difference between a woman who exhibits so-called “masculine” behavior or styles, such as wearing her hair short or playing football, and an individual born in a female body who knows inherently that he should be in a male one. Following that logic, then, gender is not just whether you think of yourself as male or female, but quite separately, a series of ideologies and actions that are performed based on cultural ideas of what defines masculinity and femininity.

At the most basic level, we know that these ideas are socially constructed because when examined with an unbiased eye, we constantly find differences in gender roles between different times and places. For instance, because I work in a children’s clothing store and virtually all our baby clothing is either blue or pink, I am trained to ask customers, “Are you shopping for a boy or a girl?” If I lived a hundred years ago, I would be recommending the virginal blue (representing Mary) for a baby girl, while boys would get the more masculine “toned-down-red” color, pink. Today, though, these ideas have been switched such that the toning down of red emasculates it, while blue stands for the “strong” baby boy. Clearly, there is nothing fundamentally “male” or “female” about a color, but these ideas are still so crammed into our heads that a man told me at work the other day that he “wasn’t comfortable buying anything pink or blue because [he] didn’t know if the baby was a boy or a girl.”

But we can analyze even deeper than that. Note, for instance, my description of a baby boy as “strong,” above all else. As discussed in, “X: A Fabulous Child’s Story,” (a fantastic short article) when friends and relatives come to visit a new baby, “the first thing they asked was what kind of a baby X was…nobody knew what to say. They couldn’t say, ‘Look at her cute little dimples!’ And they couldn’t say, ‘Look at his husky little biceps!’” (Gould 109). Anyone who’s ever seen an unfamiliar adult interact with a child knows these things are true—but most never stop to wonder where they got these ideas, or even to realize that they are just ideas, rather than facts of life.

This, in fact, was one of the things that most interested me going into this project—the realization that as much as I think about gender and sexuality on a regular basis, whether due to classes or intense discussions at WoCo: A Feminist House, Drew’s feminist living community, I rarely think about my own gender. For instance, while I might think about the fact that I like girls, a clear source of contention for some people because I am one, I rarely make the leap towards actually thinking about my gender, even when contemplating this contention. This fact is particularly interesting in the context of the word “lesbian.” There is no analogous word for a gay man, a single noun that means, literally, “a man who is sexually interested in other men.”

Going by this logic, it would stand to reason that I would think of my gender by default when considering sexuality. Michael Kimmel’s article “Men and Women’s Studies: Premises, Perils, and Promise” may be of some use explaining this seeming contradiction. In it, he quotes one woman as saying, “‘To me, race is visible every day, because race is how I am not privileged in our culture. Race is invisible to you, because it’s how you are privileged’” (Kimmel 25). In other words, while it is certainly true that being a woman has made me less privileged as a whole, because it’s not an absence of privilege that I think about regularly or am often consciously aware of, being unprivileged in terms of sexuality often takes the higher priority in my mind.

The other possible reason for this barrier relates to the insistence upon dichotomies within American society. Individuals are considered gay or straight, male or female, masculine or feminine. Though this idea is occasionally accepted when it comes to sexuality, I can say from personal experience that even after receiving a lengthy explanation as to why neither of those descriptions quite describes my own sexuality, even close friends will often persist in referring to me as a lesbian. “Bisexual” has become an accepted term among some individuals, but is still scorned as flaky or even traitorous by many of those who do identify as definitively gay or straight—and the options are even slimmer when it comes to sex and gender.

As Fausto-Sterling says in her article “The Five Sexes,” “biologically speaking, there are many gradations running from female to male” (21). She asserts that while five sexes would be a more accurate description of sex range, it would still be insufficient to categorize the wide scale of sex possibilities. Gender is widely considered similarly inflexible, starting “with assignment to a sex category on the basis of what the genitalia look like at birth,” followed by the child being “dressed or adorned in a way that displays the category” (Lorber 142). There is no room for little boys in dresses or baby girls in tiny conductor’s outfits, but once the matter is truly recognized and considered, it’s nearly impossible to discern why these things are true.

Even men and women who have been educated to think outside these parameters—including those who do so, every day—easily fall into these patterns. For instance, a male friend that I know truly respects women on a deeply spiritual and personal level yelled, “Bros before hoes!” when his friend declined the opportunity to watch a TV show with him in favor of spending time with his girlfriend. Another male friend, one who is usually adamantly anti-gender- and sex-typing, said during a conversation, “Well, if it was a baby girl, she couldn’t wear that outfit,” pointing at one that had green stripes and was hanging in a section with many blue items.

The problem is that these stereotypes and ideas are all around us, all the time. Some of these observations I might have caught even without the gender log assignment, but others I realized happened every day, and I had never noticed them before. Some students in our class mentioned things like putting on a bra as reminding them of their gender, while for me it was simply something that I do and don’t think about. Though I certainly have my idiosyncrasies, the particular pet peeves that I notice and protest in every-day life, another girl might think nothing of the fact that during my Gender and Culture class, a girl said, “I don’t know anything about sports, so guys…” We are so bombarded by these messages that they have worked their way into our very language, body image and way of dress, yet they rarely enter the conscious mind. As a result, we continue to pass by, not noticing a thing unless the painting falls sideways.

References

Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 1993. “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female are Not Enough.” The Sciences March/April 1993: 20-25.

Gould, Lois. 1972. “X: A Fabulous Child’s Story.” Pp. 108 to 113 in Learning Gender.

Kimmel, Michael. 1996. “Men and Women’s Studies: Premises, Perils, and Promise.”  Pp. 24-28 in Women: Images and Realities: A Multicultural Anthology, 4^th edition, edited by Amy Kesselman, Lily McNair, Nancy Schniedewind, with Susan Kelly. 2009. McGraw Hill: NY.

Lorber, Judith. 1994. “The Social Construction of Gender.” Pp. 142-145 in Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and Contemporary Readings, 4^th edition, edited by Susan Shaw and Janet Lee. McGraw Hill: NY

More on the Bible and gay sex

This post was written in response to a comment that I received on my last post. I’ve attempted to clarify some of the points that I made in that post, as well as going more in-depth into the issue of homosexuality in the Bible, and directly responding to the criticisms offered in that comment. For reference, please refer to zacattack4781’s comment on my post “Salvation Army does something awesome.”

I’m actually really glad that you brought up those two Bible passages! The first you mentioned, from Romans 1:26-27, is actually what I was talking about when I said, “many of the passages in the Bible that talk about men having sex with men refer to idolatry or other acts that weren’t allowed for those who practiced Judaism.” If you read that passage from where it begins on verse 18, you see that according to St. Paul, these men actually began having sex with other men and women with other women as a result of practicing idolatry. He was basically equating homosexual sex with paganism or other religions outside Judaism/early Christianity—as I mentioned when I said that homosexual sex in the Bible was usually equated with other things that are prohibited for Christians or Jews, because they are practiced by other religions. While this of course doesn’t necessarily let gay sex “off the hook,” so to speak, it’s a very different reading than the simple, “Gay sex is bad” that people come away with than they simply read Romans 1:26-27 on its own.

I’m also very familiar with the passage from Genesis 18:16-19:29 (Sodom and Gomorrah). Interestingly, the notes in my Bible say, “Israelite tradition was unanimous in ascribing the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah to the wickedness of these cities, but tradition varied in regard to the nature of this wickedness. According to the present account of the Yahwist, the sin of Sodom was homosexuality (Gn 19), which is therefore also known as sodomy; but according to Isaiah (1, 9; 3, 9), it was a lack of social justice; Ezekiel (16:46-51) described it as a disregard for the poor, whereas Jeremiah (23:f14) saw it as general immorality” (The New American Bible). Furthermore, I’d direct you to Judges 19:22-29. You might find that the story is shockingly familiar: corrupt men of the city surround the house and demand for the male stranger to be sent out, while the owner of the house offers a woman instead. However, in this story, the men accept the woman, and “rape and abuse” her until she dies. How does that play into the “The men were gay, and that’s why they wanted to rape the male visitors” theory? I don’t mean that facetiously, but as an actual question. I would argue instead that just as men who rape other men in prison aren’t necessarily gay, these men weren’t necessarily “gay,” but attempting to use sex as a method of gaining power over another. Of course, this is considered morally wrong in all circumstances, regardless of the sex of the two partners.

As far as whether or not the concept of being gay existed in Biblical times, I wasn’t quite talking about the social construction of what is gay (like your examples of having a lisp or caring about fashion), though of course I agree that those stereotypes didn’t exist yet. What I meant is more that the idea of being gay didn’t exist. There may have been men who had sex with men or women who had sex with women, but that didn’t describe what they were, it just described who they had sex with. In other words, there weren’t really men or women participating in loving, monogamous relationships with people of the same sex in Biblical times. Therefore, there was no standard of a potentially healthy relationship to compare it to—all they saw was people having wild, passionate affairs similar to those that the pagans practiced, as opposed to the Scripturally-acceptable unions that men and women shared. It’s also interesting to think about how our ideas of those unions have changed since then—in the Old Testament, the same people decrying gay sex were often the same ones who had multiple wives, something we find totally unacceptable today.

On that note, I can sit here and attempt to point out alternate ways of reading and interpreting Scripture all day, but some of the passages there’s just no getting around. There are plenty of things in the Bible that today’s Christians have not only phased out of their religious and personal beliefs, but believe are flat-out morally wrong. There is slavery in the Bible. There is polygamy in the Bible. The Bible contains stories of concubines and sanctioned vengeance-murders. We are perfectly willing to accept that these things were part of a different culture and a different time, and set them aside. So why is it so impossible to accept the possibility that the same might be true of gay sex, especially when, as I’ve said before, “homosexuality” as a monogamous, loving state didn’t exist then?

Salvation Army does something awesome

So, I found this awesome thing on the Salvation Army website. It’s a “Code of Conduct” for men, and includes not just things like “I WILL NOT abuse my wife or partner,” but also things that get more at the roots of patriarchy, like “I WILL INTERVENE when my male colleagues, friends, or family belittle or degrade women” and “I REJECT all forms of sexual harrassment, including wolf whistling, sexual insinuations, and unauthorized physical contact,” and even includes a pledge to spread this code to their friends, family and children.

I always get into little debates with myself over things like this. I know the Salvation Army is among the group of Christians who claim that “same-sex orientation [is not] blameworthy in itself. Homosexual conduct, like heterosexual conduct, requires individual responsibility and must be guided by the light of scriptural teaching” (Salvation Army). Of course, for gay people, that means total celibacy never to be in a loving sexual relationship, but let’s put that aside for the moment.

The thing that confuses me about this is that the reasoning beyond their logic is that same-sex relationships are prohibited in Scripture. Well, I’m a feminist, so don’t get me wrong, but I’m pretty sure that there is a lot of support in the Bible for treating women as inferiors. I could also probably show you a dozen places in the Bible where it says to treat everyone equally, and to respect women.

Problem is, it’s the same thing with homosexuality. For every reference that says something about a man lying with another man, I could come up with a passage talking about the sanctity of love. Yes, it’s kind of hard to find a Scripture passage that says “There’s nothing wrong with being gay!” But that logic doesn’t fly. The Bible doesn’t talk about “gay people” or “homosexuality,” because it didn’t exist then the way that we understand it now. It just talks about men and women running around having sex with random people. The Bible says that’s wrong for everybody! People talk about the importance of chastity, because Scripture never sanctions having random sex outside marriage. But they don’t claim that those prohibitions for resisting random sex mean you shouldn’t be straight. Plus, when looked at in context, many of the passages in the Bible that talk about men having sex with men refer to idolatry or other acts that weren’t allowed for those who practiced Judaism (most of the “anti-gay” passages in the Bible come from the Old Testament. And Jesus never mentions it.) It was all part of a very strict code of conduct followed by the ancient Hebrews, like keeping Kosher and not wearing mixed fibers.

So while I’m obviously not advocating for treating women poorly, it just seems like a little bit of a contradiction to me. I think it’s super awesome that this group is getting behind equality and trying to break down the patriarchy that tends to be especially prevelant in religion. I’m just kind of bewildered as to how they make their choices about what to follow in Scripture and what not to follow.

The thing is, if I judge them solely by “the gay issue,” I’m as bad as the people who say Planned Parenthood is evil because they perform abortions. Those people totally ignore all the other stuff–affordable health care of all kinds, including cancer screenings, etc.–that Planned Parenthood does. Right? I mean, I’ve been to a Salvation Army store before. They didn’t say a word to me about hating the gays, or even about God (plus, I have nothing against God. Just people who use God as an excuse to tell people not to be in love). So If I refuse to donate my clothes to Salvation Army, does it hurt them, or does it hurt the people who don’t have afordable clothing options?

Either way, this whole code of conduct thing is awesome. Maybe Salvation Army will just have to join the ranks of things that are great, except for when they suck (a statement that is true of most things, and was originally stated in reference to Callie from Battlestar Galactica).

Also, if you’re interested in reading more in-depth about some of the arguments I was discussing about homosexuality in the Bible, I’d look into The God Box and Thinking Straight. Both are YA fiction novels, the first much more “fluff” than the second, which is a more intellectual novel.

Washington for the win

Just a short blurb today, but congrats to Washington State for passing marriage equality! They’re waiting for the governor to sign, which he’s promised to do. After that, it’s just a 90-day waiting period—during which opponents have promised to fight it to the death, of course—before same-sex couples can start getting married!

Prop 8 no more!

Prop 8 was struck down today!!

Okay, so I know I just gave you this whole big speech about how I’m not going to only talk about LGBT and feminist stuff anymore, but come on. Prop 8! This is big stuff we’re talking about here!

Of course, the fact that Prop 8 was ruled unconstitutional doesn’t mean the whole country (or even the whole state, for that matter) is going out and buying rainbow flags (somebody actually told me recently that their father did this when they came out. I wish, right?) and throwing parties tonight. Couples in California are still pretty skeptical, and even if there wasn’t still a stay in place on same-sex marriages, most couples wouldn’t exactly be running right out to the justice of the peace. Too many of them are afraid they’re going to end up in a situation like the 15,000 plus couples who got married when same-sex marriage was first approved in Cali., only to have the right revoked a few months later. So at this point, we’re mostly waiting to see what happens.

I remember having a conversation about Prop 8 just after it passed in 2008. I was told not to get too excited about gay marriage, because eventually all the states that had passed gay marriage laws would go the same way as California.

…yeah. I’m not entirely sure why that was considered an appropriate or acceptable or response either.

Incidentally, gay marriage is coming up to a vote in the New Jersey State Senate next Monday. The bill missed the mark when legislators voted in 2010, but according to The Advocate, the Senate believes there is enough support for the bill to pass this time. Unfortunately, Governor Chris Christie seems as determined to spoil our fun as usual (as a gay college student in N.J., I don’t have much to love him for), but. I guess we’ll see how that goes.

Anyway, I’m excited.

On a (kind of) totally different note, I’m really excited about (and stressed out by) this project I’m working on for my senior seminar in Sociology. I’m giving a 30-minute presentation about LGB teens in the foster care system! DID YOU KNOW–20 percent to 40 percent of homeless youth identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual, but there are ridiculously few GLBT-oriented homeless shelters or agencies that even train foster parents to deal with these issues? Watch this video for the story of one LGBT welfare center and some really interesting statistics around the 2:05 minute mark.

Petition and also Tom

Hey guys, I’m about to drive to RI from NJ, so I don’t have time to write a full post right now, but I just wanted to send you a couple things!

First off, sign this petition to remove the ban on blood donations from men who have had sex with other men (that is the way it’s worded in the actual ban, btw–it doesn’t specify gay men, exactly. So I guess that’s something, anyway). According to the article and some stats that I will double-check for you in my BIo Sex book later, about 32% of cases of HIV diagnosed in 2008 were done in heterosexuals, and about half of those living with HIV in 2009 were women.

Secondly, Tom is cool and you should read his blog. Especially this one about gay marriage passing in NY. Also, if you feel so inclined, you should watch a couple funny videos from the same cause: this one is called Make Homosexuals Marry (so they can be miserable like the rest of us). And this one has all the arguments against gay marriage, complete with A LOT of f-bombs, but I love this group!!