A little bit of everything...

I was slightly relieved while reading the first chapter of Sexing the Body. After my initial “wtf” reaction to A Billion Wicked Thoughts, I am very happy to say that I had a much more positive reaction to the writings of Anne Fausto-Sterling. In contrast to the matter-of-fact arrogance in presenting porn statistics and using them to deduce the differences between the genders, I am much more comfortable with Fausto-Sterling’s academic based focus (and perhaps her 200 page Notes and Bibliography): simply because of the broader source material and the fact that her subject also includes those that do not watch porn or read slash fiction on the internet. Her flexibility with discussing the complex topic of sexuality is much more in tune with my own opinions and experiences than the drastic binary presented by Ogaddam.

What I find so appealing is Fausto-Sterling’s openness to consider several conflicting areas of her life that could influence her opinion on gender identity and sexuality. As a biologist, I think that biological pathways have some say in gender and sexual identity, just as biology ultimately determines the physical sex of an organism. However, like Anne Fausto-Sterling, I will not deny that there are social and environmental factors that play a role as well. On that note, she even brings up a notion previously discussed in class: the fact that naming something, changes the thing itself (“By helping to give large numbers of people an identity and a name, medicine also helped to shape these people’s experiences and change their behavior, creating not just a new disease [not that I think homosexuality is a disease of any kind], but a new species of person, ‘the modern homosexual’” (14)). This notion just adds to the argument that, while there is a biological mechanism for sex determination in an organism, it is much less clear-cut how one becomes a gender psychologically or determines one's sexual orientation. By considering all of these different viewpoints, I feel like Fausto-Sterling will be able to come to a better, more consistent and more versatile conclusion than Ogaddam can by simply analyzing what people search for in pornography.