The nameless kind

Sometimes the words that people use in everyday speech are wonderful clues to the way they think. That is surely a truism, but I am going to explore here one small snippet of a conversation I had recently and the implications that came from it.

A young heterosexual woman emailed me for information for her class project. Since she did not introduce herself in her first message, I had no idea whatsoever that she was a she. The name was not indicative one way or the other. It was only in the second message, that she clarified that she was female. I then asked a further question,

"OK, but are you homosexual?"

She replied, "No, absolutely not.....(and my) boyfriend whose (email) account which I am currently using, is entirely male."

I wonder how many gay readers pounced as quickly as I did on the words that she used: "Absolutely not", "Entirely male".

She didn't really mean it, and she was contrite when I pointed it out to her. So this piece is not a criticism of the young woman, who meant well. It's an exploration of a fairly typical (I believe) heterosexual mind.

Let's start with the simple one: "Absolutely not". I pointed out to her that "absolutely" was not essential. By inadvertently including it, she betrayed her frame of mind. It indicated a certain revulsion at the thought of being homosexual herself. She was recoiling from my question. More generally, would her instincts be to recoil from us all?

Now move on to the 2 words: "entirely male". For those of us who have thought long and hard about being gay, straight and everything in between, it's a strange way to describe the sexual orientation of her boyfriend. What has maleness got to do with it? Are gay males not equally and entirely male?

But calm down for a moment and see it for what it is. She was trying to say that her boyfriend was heterosexual. But somehow she didn't use the word. She didn't even say "straight". Either she didn't know the words, or if she did, they were far from the forefront of her mind.

Her words gave me a clue to what I would call her "mindmap". I would describe it like this: There is this central plain, sunlit and bounteous. Inhabiting it are people similar to her and her boyfriend. Surrounding the plain are dark forested hills and mountains, in which lurk those who are not like her or her boyfriend. They are not homogenous though. There are different tribes in the hills, and depending on which group they are, they could be dangerous, diseased, untouchable or merely exotic.

In such a mindmap, they have names for the outcasts in the hills, because they need to refer to them in speech once in a while. They are "homosexuals", "lesbians", "transvestites" or "bisexuals". The young lady knew all these words and could define them fairly accurately. But within her "civilisation", she didn't seem to have a ready name for those of her own kind.

This is actually a rather common observation in anthropology. Isolated or insular communities sometimes have no name for themselves, only for outsiders. When pressed by the researcher, "how would you call your own group?" they finally come up with a native word that is just "the people". It's not a name. They don't have a name. They just take their own group for granted.

The best example is how the Chinese -- and they're not a small isolated community! -- call their own country and themselves. They don't have a proper name for their country. No term like "La France" or "Polska" or "Vietnam". All they can do is to refer to their location on the maps they themselves have drawn. Like all cultures, they put themselves in the centre of the map. Their space is therefore the Middle Kingdom. Doesn't this sound terribly similar to the central plain in the mindmap?

Anyway, my point is that when you find people at a loss for a word to describe their own kind, you can safely surmise that they probably operate with a thoughtless presumption that everybody else is alike. That they are the world. They rarely consider the possibility of other kinds, and when occasionally they do, they do not consider them equal. So if, God forbid, you are given a name, then you know you are outsiders.

Such a mindmap does not only apply to how people call themselves. It can apply to other concepts which are similarly taken for granted. Suppose, for example, a community lives in a place where there is sunshine every day. It never rains, narry a cloud. Do you think they will have a word or phrase equivalent to "sunny day". Of course not. When will they ever need to refer to a sunny day as opposed to a not sunny day?

So heterosexuals who don't give much thought to non-heterosexuality will not have any need for the word "heterosexual". It'll be so little used that when they finally need it, it fails to come to mind.

I was pushing the young woman to describe her sexual orientation. I didn't ask about her boyfriend. She offered it up unprompted, almost defensively. I'm sure you can read a lot into that too, but let's not digress, shall we?

Now let's take the analysis a bit further. On being pressed to describe sexual orientation, for which she didn't have a ready word, she used the nearest available concept, and that was the concept of sex. She said he was "entirely male". But sex and sexual orientation are two different things. In fact there are at least three:

Firstly, biological sex. Very crudely, the equipment you have, which is closely linked to your chromosomal sex. XX or XY, that kind of thing.

Secondly, sexual identification. Whether you feel you are male or female. There is a small minority who have the sex organs of one sex but feel they belong to the other sex. For example, a person could be biologically male, but identify as female. The term is "transgender".

Thirdly, sexual orientation, which is not concerned with what you are, but what you are sexually and erotically attracted to.

Most homosexual males are (a) biologically male, (b) identify as male (they feel male -- and are just as prone to male chauvinism as heterosexual males), but (c) attracted to others of the same sex. By the way, these homosexual males often find transgenders bewilderingly strange, just like the reaction of heterosexual males.

With at least three dimensions, the subject of sex and sexuality is very complicated indeed. Those who think a fair bit about this issue have a different way of seeing things in their mind. They don't have a central plain with outlaw-infested hills around. Instead they see many clusters of people with the clusters floating in different directions. Some clusters are bigger, some smaller perhaps, but no cluster is inherently the norm.

There are words to describe each cluster, and the meanings of words have evolved and sharpened considerably to aid analysis. For example, I used terms above like "chromosomal sex", as distinct from "biological sex". "Sexual identification" is a different thing from "sexual orientation". Even the simple words "sex" and "gender" have bifurcated. "Sex" is still Male and Female, but "Gender" to the more theoretical ones today means the combination of all sexual and sexuality factors. There are not two genders, but many many different genders. Like I described above -- many distinct clusters of people.

I sometimes wonder whether it would be a useful tactic to try to get more people to learn the vocabulary, particularly, to get the heterosexuals to describe themselves as such. Get them out of their nameless complacency. Words have a certain egalitarianism. You are one label, I am another. What makes your label superior to mine?

So here's an idea: as a first step to equality for us, teach the poor dears the vocabulary. Lead them out of their nameless magnificence.

© Yawning Bread 

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