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Social critics are people who entered college thinking they could change the world, only to graduate and discover that none of the employers visiting campus listed a bachelor's degree in philosophy or English as a job requirement, thus leaving them with one of the following options: Serenade gas station customers with Immanuel Kant and D.H. Lawrence quotes; or obtain an advanced degree to pontificate on matters far beyond their limited body of expertise.
Camille Paglia graces us with this pseudo-intellectual sciolism as she explains the origins of homosexuality using long-discredited Freudian theories. She writes, "[T]he intricate family dynamic of every single gay person I've ever known seems to have played some kind of role in his or her developing sexual orientation," but this is a presumption and judgment she is making on the basis of anecdotal evidence, not a scientific hypothesis.
She then claims, "When a gay adult claims to have been gay since early childhood, what he or she is actually remembering is the sense of being different for some reason, which in boys often registers as shyness or super-sensitivity, leading to a failure to bond with bumptious peers." This is a wrong and insulting generalization. When I claim to have been gay since early childhood, it's because I had a noticeable attraction to other boys and no interest in girls, though I didn't start feeling "different" until puberty, when classmates noticed my tendency to flirt with boys without even thinking about it and my effeminate behavior.
Her claim that the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of psychological disorders due to political pressure is either ignorant or dishonest. Yes, political pressure played a part, but so did years of scientific research by people like Alfred Kinsey and Evelyn Hooker, the latter of whom used standard psychiatric tests to show that gay men were no more pathological than straight men, and whose results were independently repeated by other researchers. Not to mention that the very idea of homosexuality as a disorder originated in the 1800s, not from scientific research but from cultural stigmatization of homosexuality stemming ultimately from Christianity.
Perhaps Paglia would be better off sticking to literary criticism rather than offering ignorant and simplistic challenges to the consensus of credible experts.
