Rampant lesbianism

This quote is too good not to post on my blog, even though I've seen it in a couple other places:

"You know, Josh Burkeen is our rep down here in the southeast area. . . . He was telling me lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they'll only let one girl go to the bathroom. Now think about it. Think about that issue. How is it that that's happened to us?"

-- Tom Coburn, the Republican Senate candidate in Oklahoma, at a town meeting Aug. 31 in Hugo.

My excuse, beside the ha ha factor, is that I am all too familiar with this sort of backwards thinking, having lived my whole life in the shadow of the Bible Belt. Also, it pertains to the post below.

The breadth and depth of ignorance that can be found emanating from Bible Belters like Coburn and his ilk is breath-taking. I wish I could say that homophobic comments like that are just the product of hate, they are just as much the product of misinformation. Some mistaken beliefs about sex that float around date clean back to pre-Freudian "scientific" musings like the ones I document below. It makes sense, of course. As much as we'd like to believe, for instance, that we're way past Lombroso's theories on inborn criminality, the traces of those beliefs are stamped all over the culture--a good example being the way the sloped forehead is still iconic of evil intentions.

I find that a good amount of the ignorant bullshit that comes pouring out of the mouths of cultural conservatives makes a good deal more sense if you read the some of the symbolic thinking that passed for scientific reasoning in the days leading up to Freud. It's particularly useful when trying to decipher some of the more ludicrious assumptions about the sexual natures of gays and lesbians (and straight women, actually). For instance, if you understand that Victorians thought that adult women were mentally closer to children than to adult men, the stereotype that gay men are "childish" or "immature" makes a lot more sense. By Victorian thinking, gay men are pseudo-women, and women are pseudo-children, so therefore gay men are pseudo-children! Everyone that's not a straight adult male is pretty much suspect by this type of thinking--it's fun for the whole family!

(Of course, when concocting a "logical" explanation for a stereotype, it's very important to make sure to ignore potentially positive ramifications from your "reasoning". Women are closer to children than men, so the logic goes, so they are better adapted to raising them. Ignore the fact that means gay men, as pseudo-women, would make good moms.)

From a symbolic vantage, this statement by Coburn is absolutely fascinating. Unfolding the assumptions behind it, it's hard to find an ignorant stereotype about female sexuality that isn't lurking underneath. (You have to admire his persistent ignorance of female sexuality in the face of years working as an OB/GYN.) There's so many, I'm forced against my will to use the bullet function.

• Lesbianism is "nymphomania". This is an old myth and a popular one. (The porn industry isn't letting go of it anytime soon, for instance.) Lesbians, it's assumed, cannot even go to the bathroom without getting it on.
• Sexuality is a male trait—therefore lesbians think like men. Women are supposed to resist sex and men are supposed to pursue. Women’s supposed disinclination to have sex is what civilizes us. But since lesbians sleep with women, they must think like stereotypical men and have no ability to say no.
• Female sexual desire is a sickness. That’s why they invented the word “nymphomania”! You can see how the metaphor of female sexual desire breaks into two separate metaphors.
• Female sexual desire infects like the flu. You don’t just sort of get the flu—once those germs are in you, your entire body is handed over to the disease. He’s drawing on the belief that once a woman has got sex in her system, it completely consumes her.
• Female sexual desire/lesbianism is contagious. Clearly the girls that he’s referencing are giving the disease to each other in the bathroom.

Obviously, this statement is a bit of folklore that is passed around because it reinforces these stereotypes and symbols. This kind of folklore can tell you a lot about the political climate. It's tempting to laugh stuff like this off, but this is serious stuff--Coburn is getting votes. Statements like this play on some of our deepest, mostly unacknowledged beliefs and symbols and therefore wield a great deal of danger. It's important, I think, to keep digging and keep confronting the unspoken assumptions behind stories like this.