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Thursday, March 03, 2005
A Highly Fissionable Ideon
Columnist Mickey Kaus points to a report of a ludicrous contretemps at Harvard University -- over a talk given by actress Jada Pinkett Smith:
After some students were offended by Jada Pinkett Smith’s comments at Saturday’s Cultural Rhythms show, the Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, and Supporters Alliance (BGLTSA) and the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations have begun working together to increase sensitivity toward issues of sexuality at Harvard.Students said that some of Pinkett Smith’s remarks concerning appropriate gender roles were specific to heterosexual relationships.
In a press release circulated yesterday by the BGLTSA—and developed in coordination with the Foundation—the BGLTSA called for an apology from the Foundation and encouraged future discussion of the issue.
According to the Foundation’s Student Advisory Committee (SAC) Co-Chair Yannis M. Paulus ’05, the two groups have already planned concrete ways to address the concerns that Pinkett Smith’s speech rose.
The BGLTSA release acknowledged that the Foundation was not responsible for Pinkett Smith’s comments. But the Foundation has pledged to “take responsibility to inform future speakers that they will be speaking to an audience diverse in race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, gender and class,” according to the release.
Courtesy of Kaus, here's what Miss Smith actually said:
"Women, you can have it all—a loving man, devoted husband, loving children, a fabulous career," she said. "They say you gotta choose. Nah, nah, nah. We are a new generation of women. We got to set a new standard of rules around here. You can do whatever it is you want. All you have to do is want it.""To my men, open your mind, open your eyes to new ideas. Be open," she added.
If you agree with your Curmudgeon that Smith's comments are hardly the fare of a patriarchal white male running-dog lackey of the capitalist war machine, congratulations: you're relatively firmly anchored to reality, though that's not exceptional among Eternity Road's regulars. But to the strategically and tactically offended, which surely includes any sex activist of any stripe, there's a bomb in her words, whose fuse Harvard's Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Supporters Alliance, as mentioned in Crimson article, tried to light with one of their newest, favoritest words: heteronormative.
This isn't the first time we've seen this new bludgeon-word. Academics in the storied field of "gender studies" are trying to make it into a weapon on the order of "homophobia." Thus, points are accumulating on a new and ugly graph: one that seeks to dispute an indisputable fact about human sexuality: heterosexuality is overwhelmingly the norm, and homosexuality, whatever its genesis might ultimately prove to be, is abnormal and deviant.
This is the final stage in the completion of an ideon: a bundle of mutually supporting ideas that cannot persist if any one of its components is disproved. Let's call it the homonormalization ideon. Its idea-quarks would appear to be:
- Love is all that matters.
- An individual's sexual orientation is entirely fixed by forces beyond his control.
- Homosexual conduct has no objectively destructive effects.
- Unhappiness about one's sexual orientation stems entirely from oppressive cultural forces.
- The concept of "normality" is one such force: it has no objective referent; it implicitly elevates the heterosexual majority over the homosexual minority; it is used to build castles of heterosexual privilege in law and customary uses; and it must therefore be discredited or diffused into meaninglessness if homosexuals are to enjoy full "rights."
A typical ideon will fall apart if any one of its idea-quarks is removed or disproved. The homonormalization ideon is multiply threatened; every one of its idea-quarks is either questionable or outrightly false.
But homosexual activists and gender-distorters are banking on homonormalization as a final-stage thrust in their sociopolitical campaign, akin to the A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If heterosexuals can be shamed into denying their own normality and predominance, or at least compelled to keep silent about it, the sex activists will face no further barriers to their agenda. Same-sex marriage would only be the beginning. We could expect a progressive softening of the laws against pedophilia, pederasty, incest, and every other sexual offense -- because there is no basis for opposing these things in the absence of nature-based concepts of normality and health.
The entering wedge was the shift of consensus in the medical community away from the longstanding view that homosexuality is a disorder -- pitiable, and certainly not to be prosecuted as long as all its participants are responsible consenting adults, but nevertheless something to be minimized if possible...something from which impressionable children, in particular, were to be protected. With the transition to an "official" view that homosexuality is "just another lifestyle," the legal and cultural protections normal people had erected against the consequences of sexual deviance tottered and fell.
It's of a piece with the much larger assault on all cultural norms, of course. But unlike many other threads of that tapestry, there's still time to unravel this one and burn it. All it would take is an insistence upon sensible language that emphasizes the following:
Were heterosexuals once again brave enough to say this forthrightly, every quark of the homonormalization ideon would disintegrate in a trice, taking a large sheaf of expanding pathologies with them. It's long past time we should do so.
Comments
I’ve decided. Next time people who I suspect have ever used the term heteronormative start talking about current television shows and movies in front of me, I’m going to make a fuss about them being medianormative and exclusionary. Instead of, you know, simply shrugging and acknowledging that most people watch television more often than once every couple of years.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/03/2005 at 11:42 AMHey francis, trackbacks still seem to be broken.
Not the commonly accepted defnition of homophobia, but the word itself, and the concepts it represents.
Hetero-normative is equally as offensive to my mind.
This game of codewords that some insist we play is getting more and more offensive to me.
Say what you mean, mean what you say, and stop trying to force people to think exactly like you do.
Doesnt that sound like a reasonable rule?
Posted by Chris Byrne on 03/03/2005 at 04:19 PMHi Francis, I am a person who has been hetero-married for 45 years and am just fed up to the gills with all the abnormal, deviant, self gratifing, and here comes the bad word, “queers” out there trying to inflict all their abhorrent beliefs on the rest of us! Everett
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/06/2005 at 02:23 PM
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