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rfmcdonaldEugene Volokh's argument last month that we non-heterosexuals really are trying to recruit people to our orientation amused me at the time, at least in part because he was wrong in an unusually simple way: When reactionaries of various kinds talk about "recruitment," they often aren't talking about people being allowed to make choices of their own free will, but rather of people--especially children--being assaulted, as graphically depicted in this Jack Chick tract. They don't consider the possibility of consent at all, perhaps because they believe that any sex or love expressed outside of a heterosexual context is such an atrocity that informed consent is categorically impossible. Besides, the use of "recruitment" seems to imply the existence of formalized and centralized processes of recruitment, cf. military recruitment. Trust me, this isn't the case.
That said, Volokh does make a few good points. Will the normalization of non-heterosexual orientations will make it easier for anyone to experiment sexually across orientations? Yes; lessened stigma and increased opportunity will do this. Are there more people who are interested in experimenting right now who aren't? Certainly; again, consider the problems of stigma and lack of opportunity. If gay rights continue to progress, will anything keep potentially interested heterosexuals from experimenting in gay sex other than lack of interest and/or opportunity? Inevitably. By analogy, imagine a society where anti-Semitism was frowned upon but Gentiles who practiced Kabbalah were shunned by the non-Jewish majority. If this society claims that there's no moral difference between practitioners of the majority religion and practitioners of Judaism, I'd argue such a society isn't being consistent. If the preference of most of society's members isn't given a privileged position, why be worried? As I said in my previous post, the 21st century is going to be interesting.
It's only towards the end of his post that Volokh's argument, ill-founded as it is, becomes problematic when he argues that heterosexual men interested in gay sex should be discouraged from doing so on the grounds of high HIV rates. Never mind that Volokh commits the fallacy of equating all gay sex with anal intercourse (more particularly, with unprotected anal intercourse), and that his assumption that curious heterosexuals will immediately and automatically go for anal intercourse doesn't seem entirely credible. Consider that the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Stockholm seems to have been only two years behind San Francisco's. One would assume that the Swedish HIV/AIDS epidemic would follow American precedents. One would be wrong: As John Newmeyer noted in 1999, Sweden's cumulative AIDS caseload for gay men per million population was a tenth that of the United States'. Going to the CIA World Factbook, it seems as if the percentage of Swedes living with HIV and AIDS is only a sixth that of the comparable American figure. The United States's substantially higher rate of HIV infection is only one way in which the United States consistently does a bad job sexual health, with rates of teenage abortion and pregnancy substantially higher than those found in almost every other industrialized country, with rates of STDs to match. It seems almost as if being American places one at a high-risk category for contracting HIV.
Why? Observers point to the poor state of sexual education of sexual education in the United States as a root cause for this unfortunate American lead. Adopting abstinence-only programs inspired by religious dogma or simply banning all publicly-administered sex education, it turns out, does very little to teach young people how to have safer sex. I remember being surprised at how almost difficult it would be for me to contract HIV so long as I practiced safer sex. If I hadn't known, of course I'd be at a higher risk at contracting HIV and other STDs. As it happened, the sex ed that I received in junior high on Prince Edward Island in the early 1990s was woefully inadequate. Had I not educated myself, I wouldn't like to imagine the risks that I'd have run.
Going back to Volokh's original point, do heterosexual males experimenting in gay sex place themselves at serious risk? They do only if they don't know how to protect themselves. In the United States' case, the experimentation isn't the problem so much as the broader social climate that hinders an accurate and useful discussion. Pretending that problems won't exist if they're ignored is what helped HIV/AIDS get off the ground in the first place. I'd think that now, at long last, we should stop dusting these attitudes off and start trying approaches that might actually work.
That said, Volokh does make a few good points. Will the normalization of non-heterosexual orientations will make it easier for anyone to experiment sexually across orientations? Yes; lessened stigma and increased opportunity will do this. Are there more people who are interested in experimenting right now who aren't? Certainly; again, consider the problems of stigma and lack of opportunity. If gay rights continue to progress, will anything keep potentially interested heterosexuals from experimenting in gay sex other than lack of interest and/or opportunity? Inevitably. By analogy, imagine a society where anti-Semitism was frowned upon but Gentiles who practiced Kabbalah were shunned by the non-Jewish majority. If this society claims that there's no moral difference between practitioners of the majority religion and practitioners of Judaism, I'd argue such a society isn't being consistent. If the preference of most of society's members isn't given a privileged position, why be worried? As I said in my previous post, the 21st century is going to be interesting.
It's only towards the end of his post that Volokh's argument, ill-founded as it is, becomes problematic when he argues that heterosexual men interested in gay sex should be discouraged from doing so on the grounds of high HIV rates. Never mind that Volokh commits the fallacy of equating all gay sex with anal intercourse (more particularly, with unprotected anal intercourse), and that his assumption that curious heterosexuals will immediately and automatically go for anal intercourse doesn't seem entirely credible. Consider that the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Stockholm seems to have been only two years behind San Francisco's. One would assume that the Swedish HIV/AIDS epidemic would follow American precedents. One would be wrong: As John Newmeyer noted in 1999, Sweden's cumulative AIDS caseload for gay men per million population was a tenth that of the United States'. Going to the CIA World Factbook, it seems as if the percentage of Swedes living with HIV and AIDS is only a sixth that of the comparable American figure. The United States's substantially higher rate of HIV infection is only one way in which the United States consistently does a bad job sexual health, with rates of teenage abortion and pregnancy substantially higher than those found in almost every other industrialized country, with rates of STDs to match. It seems almost as if being American places one at a high-risk category for contracting HIV.
Why? Observers point to the poor state of sexual education of sexual education in the United States as a root cause for this unfortunate American lead. Adopting abstinence-only programs inspired by religious dogma or simply banning all publicly-administered sex education, it turns out, does very little to teach young people how to have safer sex. I remember being surprised at how almost difficult it would be for me to contract HIV so long as I practiced safer sex. If I hadn't known, of course I'd be at a higher risk at contracting HIV and other STDs. As it happened, the sex ed that I received in junior high on Prince Edward Island in the early 1990s was woefully inadequate. Had I not educated myself, I wouldn't like to imagine the risks that I'd have run.
Going back to Volokh's original point, do heterosexual males experimenting in gay sex place themselves at serious risk? They do only if they don't know how to protect themselves. In the United States' case, the experimentation isn't the problem so much as the broader social climate that hinders an accurate and useful discussion. Pretending that problems won't exist if they're ignored is what helped HIV/AIDS get off the ground in the first place. I'd think that now, at long last, we should stop dusting these attitudes off and start trying approaches that might actually work.
