"That's the rankest psychologism, and was conclusively shown to be hogwash by Gottlob Frege in the 1890s!"-- Sheldon Cooper denying the power of neurobiology to subsume theoretical physics on THE BIG BANG THEORY
At the risk of committing an oxymoron, I recently finished reading a light-hearted work of academia, authored by one Alex Vernon, which book goes by the none too prepossessing title ON TARZAN. I may do a deeper review of the book itself in a future essay, but in this one I want to address only one assertion by Mr. Vernon, which should provide a concrete example of "the perils of overstatement" I mentioned in the essay THE EMPIRICIST OF DREAMS.
In Chapter Six, titled "Monkey Business," Vernon principally addresses the application of modern academic concepts of homoeroticism to Tarzan. Vernon's project covers not only the original Burroughs canon but a wide variety of Tarzan-adaptations, and the one assertion with which I take issue concerns a 1957 Tarzfilm starring Gordon Scott, TARZAN AND THE LOST SAFARI.
On page 109 Vernon starts out by describing a subversively erotic moment in the film "when two female characters ogle at Tarzan bathing in a small waterfall. 'I like the way it ripples,' one of them says as water rolls over [Tarzan's] torso."
So far so good. I don't know when I originally saw SAFARI but on a re-viewing in recent years I thought this was a nice bit of covert sexiness. As Tarzan was in those days family entertainment the hero naturally doesn't get to have actual sex with either of the onlooking damsels, though he does get to swim around with one in a manner recalling the erotic aqua-ballets between Weismuller and O'Sullivan.
However, like many academics overinvested in "psychologism" (knew I'd find a use for that BIG BANG quote), Vernon has to stretch things a little too far:
"The tactic backfires: looking through these women's eyes we occupy their feminized position and, if we are men, a homoerotically charged one."
To deliberately misquote Tonto, "Whattya mean 'we,' homoerotically inclined man?"
I'm not claiming that it's impossible for some male viewers, even dominantly straight ones, to have some erotic response to Gordon Scott's pecs.
But I am claiming that it's impossible for ALL male viewers to have that response, with or without supposedly identifying with the owners of the "female gazes." And because it's impossible, it's silly for academics like Vernon to take this "feminization by the gaze" concept so seriously. It was a weak concept when Laura Mulvey proposed it in the 1970s. Thirty years later, it still represents the psychologism of academic wishful thinking.
Without doling out "too much information," I don't mind saying that I enjoyed a response to the SAFARI scene, but I suspect that I, and any male hetero viewers who took the scene as it was written, did not conceive of themselves as somehow separate from the hero-figure of Tarzan. I rather imagine the scene was titillating for most male heteros because they identified with Tarzan getting the admiring female gazes, not with the women doing the gazing.
Of course, that's not to say that the gazes are not important. They are, but not in an identificatory way for the male viewer. They're rather signifiers that communicate, "The hero can get lucky if he plays his cards right."
I'll deal with some of the other pains and pleasures attendant upon my reading of Vernon's ON TARZAN in a future essay.
I suspect there's a continuum of attraction, that men find other men attractive, enjoy looking at them, but don't always want to fuck them. At what point is this attraction properly called "sexual" I don't know. Even so, there's nothing impossible about all men finding some other men sexually attractive. Even if it ain't true, it's not impossible.
ReplyDeleteI think "all" is impossible by virtue of the nature of the beast. Discounting any individuals who simply don't have any access to the opposite sex-- which condition would throw even the most hard-wired instincts into chaos-- if you survey "all" heteros you're going to get some who register as neutral toward their own sex. By the same token a survey of "all" homosexuals would surely find some who registered as neutral toward the opposite sex.
ReplyDeleteUnless one can demonstrate some compelling reason to disbelieve those testimonies-- which, as I argued on another thread, would ideally be tested by empirical means rather than by falsifiable personal claims-- then those strong possibilities make the contrary position, as stated, impossible.
My point was that impossibility is a modal claim. Even if you found every hetero on earth wasn't attracted to the same sex, that doesn't make it impossible that all could be.
ReplyDeleteBut if the mode under discussion involves biological systems, and the primary purpose of the system in question is to do X, it stands to reason that the variable that makes it do Y as well as X shouldn't be found in *all* the systems.
ReplyDeleteI call that impossible under the circumstances, though I imagine some would opt for "extremely improbable."
What's the primary purpose?
ReplyDeleteAnd why is this primary purpose mutually exclusive to any secondary purposes, desires, etc.? Being attracted to women doesn't exclude attraction to men, for example, even if one attraction is primary.
ReplyDeleteThe primary purpose of sexual attraction is to get big humans to spawn little ones. Side-developments of that primary process are certainly not without cultural significance, but they should be judged as supernumerary from the biological standpoint.
ReplyDeleteIn literary studies I often see critics rushing to embrace any idea that seems to subvert the dominant, no matter how stupid it is. A forthcoming essay will develop this theme further.