‘Unintentionally Heteronormative’!

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Readers will please pardon my long silence this evening, but I was doing deep research on (yet another) long post about feminism, the completion of which will have to wait because . . . this:

Emily Nagoski is a Ph.D. “college health educator in Massachusetts.” Both an atheist and a progressive, Nagoski has “worked for well over a decade in the field of sexuality education and has grown into an impassioned advocate for social justice through sexual fulfillment.”

All of which is to say, no one could accuse Professor Nagoski of being a homophobic right-wing Christofascist. (Like us.)

So, in the fall semester of 2010, Professor Nagoski was eight weeks into teaching an entry-level course in Women’s Sexuality when she gave her lecture on the subject of “gender”:

After it, I received an email that, among a great deal else, described my curriculum — the entire curriculum, mark you — as “unintentionally heteronormative.”
Which made me stare, with one eyelid twitching, at my computer, because it means that for the last 8 weeks I have been failing, for two hours each week, over and over again, to make the most fundamental point of the class.
Because my class is neither unintentional nor heteronormative.

What’s the problem? In a word, science:

I’m, like, SO active in not assuming that anyone has any particular sexual orientation or gender identity and in teaching students not to make assumptions, to think critically about the science and the politics that live in the science. And of course I have an entire lecture on gender variation and another entire lecture on sexual orientation and identity (that’s next week).
But I AM teaching that humans are a sexually reproducing species wherein some have sperm (males) and some have eggs (females).

(Oops. Is it still legal to say that in Massachusetts?)

I suppose I’ve been relying on students to find their own way to embracing biology as a valuable way to think about sex. But this point of view is so foreign to many of them, many of them Sociology or Women’s Studies majors who have never thought about sex in terms of biology or reproduction, many politically active around these issues without ever having studied them academically. And I suppose it was too much to ask that they get there on their own.
I wanted them to find their way to the notion that it’s not “heteronormative” to recognize that sex is an evolutionarily adaptive reproduction strategy that, in humans, involves males and females; it’s just our biology, and there’s a complex, mutually interacting relationship between the biological and the social. I’ve been working toward that all semester. But they have not gotten there.

You see where the advocates of Progress and Equality have led us: The basic biology of sex is now politically incorrect, so that even an avowed progressive cannot escape condemnation for the unforgivable Thought Crime of preferring facts to theory.

Professor Nagoski might want to invite me up as a Women’s Sexuality guest lecturer. My daughters have been instructed in the subjects of “Boys Have Cooties” and “Keep Your Britches On,” which I would argue are the most valuable lessons of all.

“Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.”
— Matthew 19:4-6 (KJV)

 

110 comments

  1. I keep seeing this whole “social justice” thing being thrown about.

    Maybe we Social Cons need to infiltrate and subvert this “social justice” movement and bring it around. Just sayin’

  4. Obviously, to be a feminist you must be antisocial. This isn’t a live and let live ideology.

  5. I suppose I’ve been relying on students to find their own way to
    embracing biology as a valuable way to think about sex. But this point
    of view is so foreign to many of them, many of them Sociology or Women’s
    Studies majors who have never thought about sex in terms of biology or
    reproduction, many politically active around these issues without ever
    having studied them academically.

    Many of them have never thought about sex in terms of biology or reproduction? Is she talking about grade schoolers or college students?

  7. “…that, in Humans, involves males and females…”

    Kinda late to the party, hon. I guarantee that sex predates humans by quite a spell. On the order of 2 billion years.

  8. Despite it being from 2010, it shows the schizophrenic nature of portions of the left.

    Anti-theists who believe in “Science” but don’t understand the purpose of sex is to make children, and that men and women’s physiological differences don’t mean a thing.

  9. My marker for the beginning of the fall of civilization is the creation of the word “sexuality.”

    Previous to that, it had been just “sex.” People did it. “Hey, honey, you wanna have sex?” “Sure, OK.”

    Then along came “sexuality,” which 1.) provided intellectuals with an income that is apparently based on a by-the-syllable scale; and 2.) the notion that a person who derives his jollies by getting spanked with a toilet brush is “showing the infinite innovation that humans have in expressing themselves.”

    Destroying the concept of college and normalizing lunatics since its creation: the word “sexuality.”

  12. Whenever anyone claims to be promoting “social” justice, what they really want is injustice against individuals.

  13. Anyone else having trouble replying to other folks’ comments?

    I can enter a new comment, but the reply/edit buttons aren’t being displayed for me.

    Weird.

  14. I’ve been google mapping and the old NTC San Diego is nearly unrecognizable now. By that I mean parking lots.

    Boot Camp. USNSCC too. You can’t figure out where even with the landmarks left.

    Memories, ah.

  16. Freaking hilarious.

    Brainwashed not to even think about basic biological differences between sexes. Are they robots or feminists?

    Nevermind, rhetorical question.

  17. Seeing the word science used like that makes me want to put on a white lab coat and run around with my hands in the air, shouting “Science!”

  21. Discus gets really hinky sometimes.

    Say, you weren’t unintentionally heteronormative or anything just before it happened, were you?

  22. It is very sad to witness this. I believe it is in the interests of all of us to adopt a fundamentally respectful manner towards all matters of the sexual/gender nature, so as to allow all people here (men, women, weirdos like me) to feel okay about being here.

    As soon as somebody here starts talking in a filthy way, aggressively, they are manipulating latent aggression that lies about waiting to be activated. They are derailing, they are avoiding the real issue, and, worse, they bore me!

  23. Gender roles and sexuality have been changing for quite some time. Some people no doubt feel a lack of boundaries and safety and confusion, as the rules change and fall away, yet are still driven by some concrete paradigms—–>conflicted.

  24. Some of us are more comfortable with our various genders and sexualities than others, but collectively we have at last (hooray!) come to a very peaceful place about it. Those whose gender identity matches the way the body is perceived are more comfortable in some ways, but do have to deal with the experience of allowing others, of other gender identity, access to the body. I don’t know how hard this would be in a gentle world where this stuff wasn’t entangled with shame and fear and guilt, but I suspect it would still be challenging even without all those complications.

  26. Possibly. I did discover Disqus made everything work with Chrome, just not Firefox. I’m starting to wonder about the dev crew at Disqus.

    I think we’re all going to need someone to develop an App to determine exactly when we’re being heteronormative, It should inform us as to our intentions, as well.

  27. Taking sex seriously, not getting obsessed over it or letting it rule your life, and finding better things to do as a hobby does not equal “shame, fear and guilt.”

    People who can’t get enough sex and have to “make it more interesting” have done a hell of a lot more damage to civilization (several civilizations) than people who simply behave themselves.

  30. I think we could just repurpose the app that tells us when we’re being raaaaacist by changing some of the text. It’s pretty trivial, really, because the answer is always, “Yes.”

  31. The public schools have been teaching that particular part of biology for a generation now; you’d have to be pretty fornicating stupid not to have learned it.

    The left cheered the esteemed Sandra Fluke and the Obama Administration’s push for mandatory contraception coverage in health care; if you know what contraception is, you have to be aware of what you are trying to contra!

  32. It’s clear that they have thought about reproduction (FREE birth control 4ever!), but to them it’s an unintended, even worst case, consequence.

  33. I wanted them to find their way to the notion that it’s not “heteronormative” to recognize that sex is an evolutionarily adaptive reproduction strategy that, in humans, involves males and females; it’s just our biology, and there’s a complex, mutually interacting relationship between the biological and the social.

    If this isn’t heteronormative, then what is? I think she’s trying to say it’s not heteronormative-heteronormativity, which is bad, but just sciency-heteronormativity, which just is.

    But I guess you have to be careful (if you’re a prog) how you dance around “born this way” once you start talking about evolution and survival, or someone’s special snowflake might melt.

  36. But Biology is of course the discussion that the gay movement cannot tolerate in public. Discussing biology leads to the inescapable conclusion that biology matters — and it matters in an important way. The gay agenda is all about distracting us from biology — only by ignoring the biology of the act, can they convince us that homosexual acts are just as good.

    I continue to be baffled that those arguing for one-woman/one-man marriage laws do not commonly argue that biology matters, and that gender complementarity matters in the family structure, and that this constitutes a rational basis for excluding same-sex marriage. We’ve got thousands of years of data to back up that basic concept.

  38. Anamika wrote:

    I believe it is in the interests of all of us to adopt a fundamentally respectful manner towards all matters of the sexual/gender nature, so as to allow all people here (men, women, weirdos like me) to feel okay about being here.

    Why?

    Our esteemed host’s article points out what most of us thought should have been obvious, so obvious we didn’t always express it explicitly: heterosexuality is what is both normal and required for our species. We can certainly tolerate having some people who aren’t normal, as long as they aren’t causing any harm, but we are lying to both them and to ourselves if we pretend that anything other than heterosexuality is normal.

    We can be polite, and try to avoid the direct answer to the “Does this dress make me look fat” type of questions, but flat out lying does nobody any good.

  39. How has “sexuality” been changing? You could certainly make a case for gender roles changing, because those are basically functions of society, but sexuality is a function of biology.

  40. Anamika wrote:

    Those whose gender identity matches the way the body is perceived are more comfortable in some ways, but do have to deal with the experience of allowing others, of other gender identity, access to the body.

    Huh? What the heck does that mean?

  42. To put it into language progressives like to use (except in this case the sentiment is true):

    Reality has a heteronormative bias.

  46. Many of us take pride in being “odds”… or as they sometimes say in the sci-fi community “try not to frighten the mundanes,” but… BUT… saying (as I do) that I don’t fit in to the Real World all that well, does not require insisting that the Real World does not exist.

    Normative means what it means… if someone has a problem with not being just like the majority of humanity, then it’s their problem, not the problem of “normal”.

  47. Though occasionally, freaking the mundanes does become a moral imperative, like when college football fans get hotel rooms in the DragonCon hotels then get obnoxious about it.

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