Gender

7 Secret Lives

Gerhard Kleinhans — Mon, 09 May 2011 13:14:00 GMT

It is now more than a week since I've finished Galileo's Dream, and I am still contemplating the wisdom of this passage:

We all have seven secret lives. The life of excretion; the world of inappropriate sexual fantasies; our real hopes; our terror of death; our experience of shame; the world of pain; and our dreams. No one else ever knows these lives. Consciousness is solitary. Each person lives in that bubble universe that rests under the skull, alone.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo´s Dream, 2009, p. 307

Respect

Gerhard Kleinhans — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 17:43:00 GMT

In the Prop 8 trail currently underway in California, a whole day of argumentation was spent on whether we really are persecuted and victimized. As if there could be any doubt.

This clip from de Volkskrant Online that shows that, even if we live in an enlightened country and have prominent and respected gay and lesbian politicians, we are never really safe.

Guys, marriage equality is important, but don’t mistake it for respect.

Bad Boys Revisited

Gerhard Kleinhans — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 13:07:00 GMT

The news about testosterone being more benign than previously assumed was widely reported yesterday. As I always blamed testosterone for practically all the ills of society, the item really surprised me, and in the course of the day I became increasingly suspicious – not about the science and research involved, but rather the interpretation of the results and especially the reporting of the study.

To summarize: women who received one dose of testosterone act more cooperative as long as they are unaware of having received the hormone. In contrast, women who thought they received testosterone, whether true or false, exhibited more aggression. They only studied the effects on women, but the scientists believe that it will have the same effect on men. Based on this the authors of the study suggest that “[t]estosterone induces anti-social behavior in humans, but only because of our own prejudices about its effect rather than its biological activity”.

Wait a minute, are we not jumping to conclusions here, sexy and media-friendly as they are? For starters, I need more explanations of why they expect men and women to react similarly to testosterone. And could the effect of testosterone change with longer exposure to the hormone, such as from puberty onwards? For that matter, does testosterone effect adult men and women in the same way it mixes up teenage boys? Something has to explain bad boy behavior, and I am reluctant to ignore the effect of hormones.

Cooperation is the culturally dominant attitude (or gender role) for women, while men are expected to be more aggressive. In the study testosterone promoted the culturally dominant attitude in women. Does it then not follow that it would make men more aggressive, even if they are unaware of having received an extra dosage? And anyway, the gender system may be largely cultural rather than biological, but it’s effect on personality and behavior exceeds that of mere ‘prejudice’ by far. Maybe a better conclusion would be that the aggression enhancing effect of testosterone is caused by our system of gender differentiation.

Sexual Deviancy And The Fear Factor

Gerhard Kleinhans — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 10:25:00 GMT

When I arrived in Amsterdam in 1986, the COC (gay advocacy organization) still had a support group for pedophiles. A few years later one of the group’s members found a programming job at the company I was working at, and over the next months I got to know Dirk as a kind and gentle soul. Dirk was overly sensitive, and was totally incapable of aggression. Within a few days however, the information from his personnel file had made it’s debut in the office gossip circuit. Colleagues refused to talk to him, our incompetent manager was picking on him and being even more abusive than was his normal routine. Dirk did not last long, and soon left Amsterdam completely in an attempt to flee his reputation –a reputation based solely on his membership of a support organization.

Since then the fear of sexual deviancy has been stoked to Salem-like proportions. Because some pedophiles do abuse children the whole category has now become criminalized. Following the logic of the witch-hunt one could just as easily maintain that because some heterosexuals abuse women, all heterosexual men are rapists. However, as more and more behavior is defined as a ‘sex offence’ the awful side-effects are becoming clearer. Sex offenders are pursued relentlessly by the media and irrational heterosexual family bigots, and can no longer lay claim to the same human rights and protections as their ‘normal’ neighbors. The difficulty of the Silver Sage Girl Scouts in Twin Falls, Idaho, in moving their headquarters gives another example, funny at least, of how ridiculous the situation has become. (For even more laughs read General J.C. Christian’s take on this story.)

But of course this is no laughing matter. I cannot think a single case of child abuse has been prevented by all the media attention and political fear mongering, but innocent people are being persecuted long after they have paid their dues to society. This is a disgusting resurgence of the medieval mindset.

Vampires Dissected

Gerhard Kleinhans — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:57:00 GMT

When in the vicinity I always drop into my local bookstore to check the new SF&F arrivals, and frequently have to suppress an instinctive revulsion when skimming through the truckloads of vampire and undead pulp the publishers see fit to unleash on us. In this article Hal Duncan dissects the vampire trope and graciously clarifies my own reaction to the subgenre for me. His analysis ranges from the religious roots of the vampire trope, to its development from Stoker through Rice and the whole Goth/Emo Thing, before dealing with contemporary examples.

Duncan here confirms what I have always suspected: though the undead drivel itself is indeed offensive, it presents a grateful subject for gender based analysis. By likening the contemporary vampire to the ‘reformed’ homosexual, he also explains the position this fad occupies in the current political landscape. The vampire trope often is repressive poison, but it can be interesting if not swallowed.