This is most of the body of a long email I sent to a professor whose free online lectures on corpus linguistics methods applied to discourse analysis deeply affected me. It seemed worthy of sharing on this blog since it documents my learning about this interesting field. However, I really don't want to offend; this post is not about personal feelings of what acceptable sexual behavior should/shouldn't be. Please don't tell me about your sexuality. It isn't for me to know about - or even think about - on such an individual level. I live in a world of humans and we are all innately sexual creatures. This is me writing about trying to understand the world, which I think is perfectly acceptable to do.
I don't know how or if it's possible to study that ratio exactly, which is why I always previously dismissed whatever estimates I'd heard as impossibly wrong, with a far too large skew towards too high numbers of homosexual people, likely fabricated by loud voices with a specific political agenda.
What makes sense to me is that LGBTQ-ness (both sexual acts and unacted-on tendencies) is probably some mix of both cultural and biological. I can't believe that human sexuality is 100% a social construct because that doesn't make sense with evolution. From a strictly evolutionary, emotionless point of view, homosexuality doesn't make much sense to me.
On the other hand, our very dear friend who is a corn breeder who owned cows told us that the cows were like, the most super horniest animals, not caring at all the gender (or state of living-ness) of whatever it was they were screwing, or attempting to screw.
But with what I know and believe about how evolution works, it has always seemed to me that the numbers I kept hearing about while growing up were wrong. I think I heard it was ~30% - though I really couldn't tell you where that figure comes from, like even if I tried! It's like Mark Twain says, there are three kinds of lies: lies, d*** lies, and statistics! I thought this figure must be either hugely inflated by people trying to sell an LGBTQ political agenda...
OR...
...there are a lot more people who are gay now than there have been in the past, suggesting that LGBTQ-ness is mostly a cultural construct.
I found the first idea to be pretty negative and difficult to believe and the second idea to be even more negative and difficult to believe; all the gay people I knew personally were normal, nice people who didn't want to push their political opinions on others any more (or less) than my straight friends, but from their point of view mostly just wanted to be recognized and accepted in society.
And it didn't really make sense to me that the number of gay people should shift so dramatically from one century to the next. Like, shouldn't these numbers be pretty stable over time?
So I did what I normally do in such scenarios: I just shrugged and decided I didn't understand yet, so oh well. I also had no way of knowing how to search for this. Yeah, I'll google for answers about human sexuality, said the smart, prudish, religious woman - never!
I went to high school at a private prep school in New England down the street from Northampton, which has been the town where social change has been born in the United States since at least the days of the first Great Awakening. Gay marriage was legal in MA for ~a decade before it was legal anywhere else. I had openly gay teachers and friends. I still do.
I went to high school at a private prep school in New England down the street from Northampton, which has been the town where social change has been born in the United States since at least the days of the first Great Awakening. Gay marriage was legal in MA for ~a decade before it was legal anywhere else. I had openly gay teachers and friends. I still do.
I am also an active latter-day saint.
I say this to point out that the gay people I knew might have had a lot of opportunities to vigilantly push an agenda on me. I was a minority, they weren't. But they didn't. They were kind, normal people and mostly their sexual choices/feelings didn't matter at all in our relationship. It seemed that the voices telling me that openly gay people were angry social justice warriors didn't actual know IRL gay people. Or maybe I was lucky? Or maybe when gayness isn't so taboo, gay people are more free to act less flamboyantly or less...zealously (for lack of a better word) defend their lifestyle? I don't know.
But how could ~30% of the human population possibly be gay without it being talked about much before the end of the 20th century?! I mean, basically all the contexts in which I'd seen references to homosexuality before the 21st century were distinctly negative, and I just can't accept that was because I wasn't well read enough that I didn't see more references. How could 30% of the population tolerate such negativity? And beyond negativity - it seemed to be totally taboo to talk about at all! Shouldn't public discourse about homosexuality have reflected this number?
But how could ~30% of the human population possibly be gay without it being talked about much before the end of the 20th century?! I mean, basically all the contexts in which I'd seen references to homosexuality before the 21st century were distinctly negative, and I just can't accept that was because I wasn't well read enough that I didn't see more references. How could 30% of the population tolerate such negativity? And beyond negativity - it seemed to be totally taboo to talk about at all! Shouldn't public discourse about homosexuality have reflected this number?
I assumed that we (humans) must talk (write) about our identities.
Suddenly after these lectures it occurred to me that my assumption could be wrong, allowing for a third option.
Suddenly after these lectures it occurred to me that my assumption could be wrong, allowing for a third option.
Maybe the absence of open discourse about homosexuality isn't at all because there were fewer homosexual people in the past. Maybe it has a lot more to do with the strength of the negative social/religious stigma. Suddenly I was given some kind of mental permission to feel large amounts of compassion and pity towards this group of people; what must it have been like to have been a gay person in the 17th and 18th centuries, living in a world where it must've been impossible to talk (write) about identity and deeply personally held feelings and beliefs?!
That sounds terrible.
It's probably really stupid that I had never really imagined/considered this before those lectures. I should have. I'm a woman, and women have been omitted from history books since well, forever. I suppose it was very difficult for me to believe or accept that there could have even existed very many gay people at all in the 17th and 18th centuries, certainly far, faaar less than 30%, so...so I guess my heartless conclusion became, "why spend time considering that perspective very much at all?"
It's probably really stupid that I had never really imagined/considered this before those lectures. I should have. I'm a woman, and women have been omitted from history books since well, forever. I suppose it was very difficult for me to believe or accept that there could have even existed very many gay people at all in the 17th and 18th centuries, certainly far, faaar less than 30%, so...so I guess my heartless conclusion became, "why spend time considering that perspective very much at all?"
I was wrong.
Those lectures gave me some kind of ability to accept what I had intuitively known from my actual, real-life interactions with homosexual people: they're likely pretty much the same as heterosexual people in how much they want to push an agenda on me - some probably do, most probably don't and just want to live in peace, living their lifestyle of choice in peace.
In October 2018 the entire lexicon of my world was changed when the president of my church essentially told us that we should not ever use the words "LDS" or "Mormon" because they were offensive to God because they removed Jesus Christ from his church. The discourse in my social circles has changed dramatically. The discourse about us has not.
In October 2018 the entire lexicon of my world was changed when the president of my church essentially told us that we should not ever use the words "LDS" or "Mormon" because they were offensive to God because they removed Jesus Christ from his church. The discourse in my social circles has changed dramatically. The discourse about us has not.
I really want to study this - to quantify it. It would be so interesting to be able to use CL to show that this thing I observe on a daily basis in my own language is real. Perhaps it would go a step towards encouraging the world to call us how we want to be called in public spaces. Wikipedia is going to be the last source on earth to adopt a change like that, since it bases (tries to at least, fails often) it's text off of published sources. Until people start talking (publishing) about this weird linguistic phenomenon, it "doesn't exist."
Except it very, very much does!
I probably wouldn't be able to emotionally handle wading through the kinds of discourse it would take to study this topic. I don't like conflict. I don't like reading the nasty things people say about members of my church, about my most personal beliefs. In this way, I can feel huge amounts of compassion and empathy to homosexual people who have endured centuries (millennia?) of negative public discourse.
I probably wouldn't be able to emotionally handle wading through the kinds of discourse it would take to study this topic. I don't like conflict. I don't like reading the nasty things people say about members of my church, about my most personal beliefs. In this way, I can feel huge amounts of compassion and empathy to homosexual people who have endured centuries (millennia?) of negative public discourse.
It's my deep, heartfelt desire that the way I talk accurately reflects my own feelings of faith that all humans everywhere are children of loving heavenly parents; regardless of what they do and how they believe, I have a responsibility to be loving and compassionate at all times to everyone, period. I want to always strive to do better, be better, and make this world better.
It's far more likely that I'll use CL methods to study Czech as a second language and the 16th-19th century Czech lands of my ancestors. That's where my heart - and head - really are, and besides, it's a topic I can definitely handle emotionally.
It's far more likely that I'll use CL methods to study Czech as a second language and the 16th-19th century Czech lands of my ancestors. That's where my heart - and head - really are, and besides, it's a topic I can definitely handle emotionally.
It's too bad that topics like sexual orientation, gender, religion, etc. are so emotionally loaded because they are also so interesting, even if also a bit trendy these days.
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