A L S O_ T O D A Y

The reluctant accuser
By Alexandra Robbins
When faced with quasi-assault from a friend, a young student finds neither college counselors nor handbooks have an answer

T A B L E_ T A L K

Do women's studies departments further marginalize women from mainstream academic debate? Weigh in on the purpose of gender studies in Table Talk's Education area

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Check out books by Camille Paglia at BarnesandNoble.com
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R E C E N T L Y

Pact with the CEO
By James C. Luh
As technology licensing programs gain more currency in American universities, universities will surely gain more American currency, but will research suffer?
(02/05/99)

Death wishes
By Daren Fonda
George Minois' exhaustive study traces the long, strange history of suicide
(02/05/99)

Stalking Kurt Vonnegut
By Dan Stern
A young writer attempts to turn his literary hero into a neighborhood
(02/03/99)

Barhopping with the Bud Girls
By James Hibberd
Salon Exclusive: After five years of hand-wringing about binge drinking, an investigation reveals just how low some beer distributors will go to saturate the college market
(02/01/99)

Think fast and lie
By Katy Shrout
One recent graduate offers advice for confused college seniors facing the end
(01/29/99)

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CAMILLE ON CAMPUS: GENDER WHORES | PAGE 1, 2
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"Gender" used to mean the natural division into male and female in the animal and therefore human worlds. But no, in the last quarter century of mandarin theorizing, "gender" has been revised to mean society's "inscription" on the human mind and body, conceived as a passive tabula rasa. Simplistic Rousseauist environmentalism has triumphed: According to trendy postmodernists (like Berkeley's slick, super-careerist Foucault flunky, Judith Butler), human beings are born neither male nor female -- or rather maleness and femaleness are minor matters compared to the fascist pressure on us by homophobic society to conform to false gender norms.

The psychology of gender has been one of the inspirations of my work, dating from the earliest gender dysphoria of my childhood. I began accumulating research materials and recording my own observations and reflections on the subject while I was still in high school in the early 1960s. In college and graduate school, I ransacked the libraries to survey changing definitions of gender in world culture from prehistory to modern times. Hence I was well-positioned to see how full of crap feminist theory was from the moment it hardened itself against science in the early 1970s -- a situation worsened by the anti-science bias of poststructuralism, which flowed in from France at the same time via Johns Hopkins and Yale universities.

The overwhelming majority of today's gender theorists belong to humanities departments and have made little or no effort to inform themselves about anatomy, physiology, endocrinology or evolutionary biology, without which their social constructionist dogma is baseless. I have constantly argued that science courses should be required for anyone credentialed to teach gender issues at the college level. Right now, there are no prerequisites at all for faculty positions in this field: Just wave a gay or feminist flag, and voilà, you're an instant expert!

Most students who take a psychology of gender course simply want their thinking expanded at a time when their own identities are in flux. In my "Women and Sex Roles" course, which I have been offering since 1986, I stress that, no matter what my strong opinions might be, there is no party line in the class. That such freedom of choice is not standard -- despite what professors like to claim -- I know from the huge volume of letters of complaint I have gotten in this decade from graduates of colleges and universities all over North America.

The subject of homosexuality should be subordinated to and integrated with broader courses about gender. Free-standing courses in the psychology of gays and lesbians will inevitably become blatant boondoggles taught by partisans or zealots rather than by disinterested scholars. Gay studies is presently a deplorable hash of mingled fact and fiction. I have repeatedly criticized the methods and conclusions, for example, of prominent figures like the late John Boswell, a Yale historian, or Anne Fausto-Sterling, a Brown geneticist, who rose to power during the PC era. (Fausto-Sterling has pushed the cockamamie idea that there are "five" sexes.)

The only solution to this intellectual mess is for concerned teachers like you to steer psychology of gender courses back toward scientific and historical rigor. Over the past 90 years, the major European and American schools of psychology produced an enormous body of fascinating material on sex and identity that is still relevant. Right now, there is far too much myopic focus on glitzy work of the past two decades that has been generated by linguistic wordplay or political posturing rather than by empirical study.

The subject of sex is central to our century. But college courses must have scholarly detachment and never overtly aim for social change -- or we slide back to the Nazi and Stalinist vision of education as an instrument of ideology. Students need facts, not flattery. And professors need to recover their ethical compass.

Postscript: Glory be to Apollo: Under the headline "The fading 'gay gene,'" the Feb. 7 Boston Globe admits the weakness of wildly overpublicized studies of the early 1990s claiming that gayness is genetically determined. I have been inveighing against those small and poorly designed studies since I saw the horrifying political self-interest of their authors and proponents at a March 1993 symposium on homosexuality and biology at the Harvard Medical School, where I had been invited to speak.

My own view, as presented in my essays, is that homosexuality is a complex adaptation, not a discrete genetic trait, and that family dynamics as well as cultural milieu must be fully explored. An ideal sexual analysis balances the biological with the social: The very first page of my first book calls sexuality "the intricate intersection of nature and culture." That's no dizzy Massachusetts highway rotary but the haunted crossroads ruled by Hecate, goddess of the night.
SALON | Feb. 10, 1999

Having gender identity problems? Or any other kind? Send a letter to Camille on Campus.