Coffee and Conversations
I was reading Gavin Ashenden in the JEP, which is something I generally try to avoid doing, as he seems obsessed with telling everyone the world is obsessed with sex, and I read this:
“I was careless the other day and glanced at a letter in which my critic found himself bemused. He had met me once, at a funeral I had taken, and found me apparently reasonably humane. He just couldn’t square the experience of meeting me in person with the person who expresses the ideas I do, in print.”
Actually that does not surprise me at all. People writing, at a distance from the people they are writing about, are generally more outspoken than they might be if they met someone, for example, for a coffee and a chat. That’s certainly true of myself, and probably true of Gavin Ashenden. I suspect that even the late Ian Paisley would not conduct a conversation over coffee in the same strident way he made his speeches for the media.
But just because people are reasonably humane if met in person, doesn’t mean they may not hold values which can be seemingly at odds with the pleasant person you might meet.
As an example of Godwin’s law, I cite (of course) Adolf Hitler. There are home movies of Hitler in his mountain retreat, drinking cups of tea, being kind to his dog, and generally behaving in what seems like a very affable way. People like Lloyd George or Neville Chamberlain, who met Hitler face to face, remarked on his charm and charisma. But that does not mean that Hitler, in full rant, at Nuremberg, was a very different kind of person.
Now I’m not suggesting that Gavin Ashenden is in the slightest bit like Hitler. All I am doing is giving an example of an extreme case to illustrate a general truth. How we behave depends a lot on the social context and who, and how, we are interacting.
So it is quite possible for someone like Gavin to express his views forcibly in the medium of a newspaper to an unseen readership, than it might be if he was meeting someone face to face. For one thing, it is not likely he would push the same views at a funeral, because there is a certain standard of decency in behaviour at funerals which most people adhere to.
Meanwhile in his JEP article, we have:
“Sexual appetite is one of our least noble and most basic, and almost animalistic of our appetites and activities; however fun, captivating and sometimes almost addictive it might be.”
I could not help but think how different a position (and so much more positive) was taken by C.S. Lewis in “The Four Loves” about human sexuality:
“It has been widely held in the past, and is perhaps held by many unsophisticated people to-day, that the spiritual danger of Eros arises almost entirely from the carnal element within it; that Eros is "noblest" or "purest" when Venus is reduced to the minimum. The older moral theologians certainly seem to have thought that the danger we chiefly had to guard against in marriage was that of a soul-destroying surrender to the senses. It will be noticed, however, that this is not the Scriptural approach. St. Paul, dissuading his converts from marriage, says nothing about that side of the matter except to discourage prolonged abstinence from Venus (i Cor. VII, 5)”
“With all proper respect to the medieval guides, I cannot help remembering that they were all celibates, and probably did not know what Eros does to our sexuality; how, far from aggravating, he reduces the nagging and addictive character of mere appetite”
I do detect a hint of asceticism and disapproval of sexuality in Gavin Ashenden’s piece. The only time he mentions “love” in the entire piece is in the context of an anecdote in which he decries the use of it:
“I remember a friend of mine whose hand I held as she ‘came out’ to her parents and grandparents when she was 21. I wiped her tears and helped her be brave, and encouraged them, to love her enough to hear the truth. Which is why I was so taken aback when she told me when she was 30, that she was in love and marrying a man.”
He find he cannot understand the modern “gender fluidity” and this is an example, and also explains why he says: “One practical problem for me is that I have found sexuality so complex, variable and fluid, that don’t see how anyone can sensibly use the clumsy term ‘gay’. “
I think part of the trouble is that the modern changes in how we view gender is largely cultural rather than biological, and we get muddled because we are trying to bring together rather different things which may overlap, but do not necessarily do so.
Biologically, gender is very simple, it is denoted by what are termed secondary sexual characteristics, which are markers of someone being male, or female, or in rare instances both – while hermaphrodites occur, they are rare among human beings. Nevertheless, they do happen in nature, and this shows us that biology cannot be constrained into a simply binary system, and Darwin’s own observations suggested that origin of separate sexes came from an ancestral hermaphroditic organism.
But gender as a cultural and fluid phenomenon seems to resemble far more a language, where words may appear the same, but the underlying meaning and usages changes over time. There is nothing right or wrong about linguistic changes, they are simply how language functions.
The problem with language is when you try to impose artificial grammatical rules on it, to make it fixed according to some basic system, when language is not like that. The Victorian grammarians and the French Académie française (which speaks of “linguistic treason”) both try to make language behave in ways that it was never meant to behave. A grammarian is often bewildered by the change in the English language over the last century or two, and the preponderance of books telling people how language should be used properly is testimony to the rearguard action of non-linguistics confronted with a breakdown in what they saw as eternal verities.
“Gay” was one of the earliest terms for colloquially describing homosexuality. Both homosexuality and bisexuality have a long history, and Freudians would have a field day with both monastic communities of the Middle Ages and public schools. For illustration, grounded in basic historicity albeit fictionalised, I would look at Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose”, and the Lindsay Anderson film “If”.
Terminology can be scientific in tone – “homosexual” being an example of what is essentially a description of certain markers in sexual attraction, while a term like “Queer” tended to be used in a more insulting fashion, as did “a queen”. When “gay” began to be used and rose to become dominant, sometime during the 1970s and 1980s, it was very much a term adopted by homosexuals themselves, taken over the dominant meaning of the word “gay” which had been extant, and which still can be seen in words like “gaiety”. It provided a non-derogatory term which therefore fulfilled a need.
Gavin Ashenden is surely being disingenuous when he claims not to understand this, and also how gender attraction can change depending on many factors. One I alluded to in the film “If” was the public boarding school, in which some boys, deprived of female company, may have formed homoerotic attachments which they left behind when heterosexual relationships become possible. There’s a whole field of study on this described as “situational homosexuality” which also occurs in armies, prisons and other same sex environments, and has been described as early as the commentary by Josiah Flynt, published in 1899.
That is not to say that all homoerotic attachments are of this sort, and among gay people they persist. Nevertheless, in the sealed unit of a male boarding school, where adolescent boys go through the hormonal changes and emergence of sexual characteristics, it is hardly unlikely that some transient same sex attractions will result because of the lack of female company. Certainly the Victorians were aware of this with their emphasis on “Mens sana in corpore sano”.
What is interesting about situational homosexuality is that it can also cease to be transient and lead to a change in sexual attraction. In this respect a 2013 study is most interesting
“A 2013 study found that male inmates who once identified as heterosexual were 52 times more likely to change their sexual orientation after engaging in homosexual behavior.1 Conversely, even the most extreme forms of deprivation do not motivate other heterosexual males to engage in homosexual activity. Similarly, many homosexual males who are repressing their sexuality will still refuse to engage in heterosexual behaviour for their entire lives. This phenomenon gives credibility to the understanding of sexual orientation on a continuum rather than being binary.”
An interesting book on this subject is “The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World and Us” by Richard Prum (William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology at Yale).
Prum makes exactly this point – that the human desire to make rigid categories simply does not work in the natural world:
"The idea that sexual behaviour is a marker or definition of a person's identity is actually a quite modern, cultural invention--perhaps only 150 years old. Because we live in a society that is accustomed to conceiving of sexual behaviour in terms of sexual identity, we tend to think that sexual identity categories are biologically real and, therefore, require scientific explanation."
Prum sees the origins of sexual behaviour in the evolution of human beings from the lineage of African apes where the females look for a mate rather than the male, a pattern of female dispersal among social groups. Within such a situation, females are at a disadvantage, “because of the lack of social support of developed social networks to help them resist male sexual coercion and social intimidation.”
He sees female same sex relations as part of mutually supportive bulwark against this, which makes up for the alliances lost “when the females left their original, natal social groups."
Meanwhile, female mate choice has selected not only on male physical features but also by social traits, “"in such a way as to remodel male behaviour and, secondarily, to transform male-male social relationships."
So in selecting this way, the male population was changed by the female population and this also gave rise to a propensity for male same sex preferences -“ selection for the aesthetic, pro-social personality features that females preferred in their mates also contributed, incidentally, to the evolution of broader male sexual desires, including male same-sex preferences and behaviour."
This means that all these potential traits became, by sexual selection, part of the male population, regardless of the individual’s actual heterosexual or homosexual practice:
“The aesthetic theory of the evolution of male same-sex behaviour does not imply that men with a predominantly same-sex orientation have any physical or social personality traits that differ from those of other males. Exactly the contrary, in fact. The hypothesis maintains that there is nothing distinctive about such men, because the features that evolved along with same-sex preferences have become a typical component of human maleness in general. Therefore, individuals with exclusively same-sex sexual preferences are distinctive only in the exclusivity, not in the existence, of their same-sex desires.”
By placing this within a framework of evolutionary theory, Prum’s hypothesis shows a much more complex human biology than can be easily constrained within rigid demarcations, and it is the breakdown of these – that the term gay represents an area mapped out on a surface (to use a geometric metaphor).
As a shorthand for sexual preferences, and self-identification by individuals, it is useful however, because of the prejudice in society, in which markers can be useful, to turn from being scapegoated to being accepted.
That sexual identity is more fluid that previously believed seems to be the case. That much of Gavin Ashenden’s thesis, I would accept. That it is somehow a distortion of what makes us human beings, however, is manifestly untrue, and the idea that being gay – as Gavin Ashenden states elsewhere – is “a perversion which becomes more prevalent in an idolatrous society and undermines the teaching of the Gospel” is to introduce morality and religious prejudice into an area where it has no place to be.
I was reading Gavin Ashenden in the JEP, which is something I generally try to avoid doing, as he seems obsessed with telling everyone the world is obsessed with sex, and I read this:
“I was careless the other day and glanced at a letter in which my critic found himself bemused. He had met me once, at a funeral I had taken, and found me apparently reasonably humane. He just couldn’t square the experience of meeting me in person with the person who expresses the ideas I do, in print.”
Actually that does not surprise me at all. People writing, at a distance from the people they are writing about, are generally more outspoken than they might be if they met someone, for example, for a coffee and a chat. That’s certainly true of myself, and probably true of Gavin Ashenden. I suspect that even the late Ian Paisley would not conduct a conversation over coffee in the same strident way he made his speeches for the media.
But just because people are reasonably humane if met in person, doesn’t mean they may not hold values which can be seemingly at odds with the pleasant person you might meet.
As an example of Godwin’s law, I cite (of course) Adolf Hitler. There are home movies of Hitler in his mountain retreat, drinking cups of tea, being kind to his dog, and generally behaving in what seems like a very affable way. People like Lloyd George or Neville Chamberlain, who met Hitler face to face, remarked on his charm and charisma. But that does not mean that Hitler, in full rant, at Nuremberg, was a very different kind of person.
Now I’m not suggesting that Gavin Ashenden is in the slightest bit like Hitler. All I am doing is giving an example of an extreme case to illustrate a general truth. How we behave depends a lot on the social context and who, and how, we are interacting.
So it is quite possible for someone like Gavin to express his views forcibly in the medium of a newspaper to an unseen readership, than it might be if he was meeting someone face to face. For one thing, it is not likely he would push the same views at a funeral, because there is a certain standard of decency in behaviour at funerals which most people adhere to.
Meanwhile in his JEP article, we have:
“Sexual appetite is one of our least noble and most basic, and almost animalistic of our appetites and activities; however fun, captivating and sometimes almost addictive it might be.”
I could not help but think how different a position (and so much more positive) was taken by C.S. Lewis in “The Four Loves” about human sexuality:
“It has been widely held in the past, and is perhaps held by many unsophisticated people to-day, that the spiritual danger of Eros arises almost entirely from the carnal element within it; that Eros is "noblest" or "purest" when Venus is reduced to the minimum. The older moral theologians certainly seem to have thought that the danger we chiefly had to guard against in marriage was that of a soul-destroying surrender to the senses. It will be noticed, however, that this is not the Scriptural approach. St. Paul, dissuading his converts from marriage, says nothing about that side of the matter except to discourage prolonged abstinence from Venus (i Cor. VII, 5)”
“With all proper respect to the medieval guides, I cannot help remembering that they were all celibates, and probably did not know what Eros does to our sexuality; how, far from aggravating, he reduces the nagging and addictive character of mere appetite”
I do detect a hint of asceticism and disapproval of sexuality in Gavin Ashenden’s piece. The only time he mentions “love” in the entire piece is in the context of an anecdote in which he decries the use of it:
“I remember a friend of mine whose hand I held as she ‘came out’ to her parents and grandparents when she was 21. I wiped her tears and helped her be brave, and encouraged them, to love her enough to hear the truth. Which is why I was so taken aback when she told me when she was 30, that she was in love and marrying a man.”
He find he cannot understand the modern “gender fluidity” and this is an example, and also explains why he says: “One practical problem for me is that I have found sexuality so complex, variable and fluid, that don’t see how anyone can sensibly use the clumsy term ‘gay’. “
I think part of the trouble is that the modern changes in how we view gender is largely cultural rather than biological, and we get muddled because we are trying to bring together rather different things which may overlap, but do not necessarily do so.
Biologically, gender is very simple, it is denoted by what are termed secondary sexual characteristics, which are markers of someone being male, or female, or in rare instances both – while hermaphrodites occur, they are rare among human beings. Nevertheless, they do happen in nature, and this shows us that biology cannot be constrained into a simply binary system, and Darwin’s own observations suggested that origin of separate sexes came from an ancestral hermaphroditic organism.
But gender as a cultural and fluid phenomenon seems to resemble far more a language, where words may appear the same, but the underlying meaning and usages changes over time. There is nothing right or wrong about linguistic changes, they are simply how language functions.
The problem with language is when you try to impose artificial grammatical rules on it, to make it fixed according to some basic system, when language is not like that. The Victorian grammarians and the French Académie française (which speaks of “linguistic treason”) both try to make language behave in ways that it was never meant to behave. A grammarian is often bewildered by the change in the English language over the last century or two, and the preponderance of books telling people how language should be used properly is testimony to the rearguard action of non-linguistics confronted with a breakdown in what they saw as eternal verities.
“Gay” was one of the earliest terms for colloquially describing homosexuality. Both homosexuality and bisexuality have a long history, and Freudians would have a field day with both monastic communities of the Middle Ages and public schools. For illustration, grounded in basic historicity albeit fictionalised, I would look at Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose”, and the Lindsay Anderson film “If”.
Terminology can be scientific in tone – “homosexual” being an example of what is essentially a description of certain markers in sexual attraction, while a term like “Queer” tended to be used in a more insulting fashion, as did “a queen”. When “gay” began to be used and rose to become dominant, sometime during the 1970s and 1980s, it was very much a term adopted by homosexuals themselves, taken over the dominant meaning of the word “gay” which had been extant, and which still can be seen in words like “gaiety”. It provided a non-derogatory term which therefore fulfilled a need.
Gavin Ashenden is surely being disingenuous when he claims not to understand this, and also how gender attraction can change depending on many factors. One I alluded to in the film “If” was the public boarding school, in which some boys, deprived of female company, may have formed homoerotic attachments which they left behind when heterosexual relationships become possible. There’s a whole field of study on this described as “situational homosexuality” which also occurs in armies, prisons and other same sex environments, and has been described as early as the commentary by Josiah Flynt, published in 1899.
That is not to say that all homoerotic attachments are of this sort, and among gay people they persist. Nevertheless, in the sealed unit of a male boarding school, where adolescent boys go through the hormonal changes and emergence of sexual characteristics, it is hardly unlikely that some transient same sex attractions will result because of the lack of female company. Certainly the Victorians were aware of this with their emphasis on “Mens sana in corpore sano”.
What is interesting about situational homosexuality is that it can also cease to be transient and lead to a change in sexual attraction. In this respect a 2013 study is most interesting
“A 2013 study found that male inmates who once identified as heterosexual were 52 times more likely to change their sexual orientation after engaging in homosexual behavior.1 Conversely, even the most extreme forms of deprivation do not motivate other heterosexual males to engage in homosexual activity. Similarly, many homosexual males who are repressing their sexuality will still refuse to engage in heterosexual behaviour for their entire lives. This phenomenon gives credibility to the understanding of sexual orientation on a continuum rather than being binary.”
An interesting book on this subject is “The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World and Us” by Richard Prum (William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology at Yale).
Prum makes exactly this point – that the human desire to make rigid categories simply does not work in the natural world:
"The idea that sexual behaviour is a marker or definition of a person's identity is actually a quite modern, cultural invention--perhaps only 150 years old. Because we live in a society that is accustomed to conceiving of sexual behaviour in terms of sexual identity, we tend to think that sexual identity categories are biologically real and, therefore, require scientific explanation."
Prum sees the origins of sexual behaviour in the evolution of human beings from the lineage of African apes where the females look for a mate rather than the male, a pattern of female dispersal among social groups. Within such a situation, females are at a disadvantage, “because of the lack of social support of developed social networks to help them resist male sexual coercion and social intimidation.”
He sees female same sex relations as part of mutually supportive bulwark against this, which makes up for the alliances lost “when the females left their original, natal social groups."
Meanwhile, female mate choice has selected not only on male physical features but also by social traits, “"in such a way as to remodel male behaviour and, secondarily, to transform male-male social relationships."
So in selecting this way, the male population was changed by the female population and this also gave rise to a propensity for male same sex preferences -“ selection for the aesthetic, pro-social personality features that females preferred in their mates also contributed, incidentally, to the evolution of broader male sexual desires, including male same-sex preferences and behaviour."
This means that all these potential traits became, by sexual selection, part of the male population, regardless of the individual’s actual heterosexual or homosexual practice:
“The aesthetic theory of the evolution of male same-sex behaviour does not imply that men with a predominantly same-sex orientation have any physical or social personality traits that differ from those of other males. Exactly the contrary, in fact. The hypothesis maintains that there is nothing distinctive about such men, because the features that evolved along with same-sex preferences have become a typical component of human maleness in general. Therefore, individuals with exclusively same-sex sexual preferences are distinctive only in the exclusivity, not in the existence, of their same-sex desires.”
By placing this within a framework of evolutionary theory, Prum’s hypothesis shows a much more complex human biology than can be easily constrained within rigid demarcations, and it is the breakdown of these – that the term gay represents an area mapped out on a surface (to use a geometric metaphor).
As a shorthand for sexual preferences, and self-identification by individuals, it is useful however, because of the prejudice in society, in which markers can be useful, to turn from being scapegoated to being accepted.
That sexual identity is more fluid that previously believed seems to be the case. That much of Gavin Ashenden’s thesis, I would accept. That it is somehow a distortion of what makes us human beings, however, is manifestly untrue, and the idea that being gay – as Gavin Ashenden states elsewhere – is “a perversion which becomes more prevalent in an idolatrous society and undermines the teaching of the Gospel” is to introduce morality and religious prejudice into an area where it has no place to be.
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