The comparison with the gays...

adrian, 04 Nov 2005 00:27:28

...is worth drawing.

The position of the document is very similar to the official view of
male homosexuality of about a hundred years ago.

In the nineteenth century the concept of 'a homosexual' was not one
that was recognised. It was not something you were, it was something
that people did, because they were jaded and amoral types after a new
and illicit thrill. It was not inborn, or determined in infancy,
though perhaps the streak of innate viciousness was inborn that made
them choose to do it.

It followed therefore that people could be corrupted. A homosexual
would infect an innocent young man, one who, but for that, would have
become a normal upstanding husband and father.

It could possibly be cured - by means of vigorous repression.

Many decades' worth of pro-homosexual apologetics were written,
arguing among other things that the propensity was inborn or fixed at
an early age, that what might be unnatural and repellent for a
heterosexual was not for a homosexual, and vice versa. That less than
50 years ago such arguments needed to be made would probably astound
young people today, so thoroughly have the assumptions been
discredited.

We need to show that the proposal makes exactly the same assumptions
as the Victorian anti-gay position, and that they are just as likely
to be accepted as false.

It's an amusing exercise to decide 'where bdsm is' in the timescale of
the gradual acceptance of gays. We may have had a (very)
mini-Stonewall in the Spanner case but we're mostly not out and public
misconceptions are still common. On the 'gay timeline', we seem to me
to be defending ourselves against a proposal of circa 1900, to a
government which is maybe somewhere in the 1950s, in a society which
represents a range throughout the 20th century.


demolitionred, 04 Nov 2005 07:59:18

I agree. this is a sexuality that has not yet been recognised. It is only slightly smaler than the 1 in 10 figure quoted for homosexuality and deserves the same representation. Its a point I will be making often.