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Re: Celibacy: Everyday Presentations
Donna M. Lanclos (lanclos@GARNET.BERKELEY.EDU)
Thu, 14 Dec 1995 08:56:54 -0800
I'm having some difficulty with these suggestions that lesbians are with
other women simply as a "protest" against patriarchy. It would be fairly
silly to suggest that heterosexuals are with members of the opposite sex
as a "protest" against homosexuality, or even "matriarchy,"--each
suggestion unfairly reduces human motives to one core cause. It seems to
me that an (at least) equally important component of self-identifying as
lesbian is an attraction to women--definitions in terms of what they *do*
as opposed to what they *don't do* (this may be a useful distinction when
discussing celibacy as well--as has, I think, been mentioned in previous
postings).
I would be very careful about discussing homosexuality as a
sub-category of celibacy--that betrays a deep hetero bias, and a denial
of the varieties of sexual behavior available to we humans. Perhaps the
dictionary definitions of celibacy are similarly flawed??
Donna Lanclos
UC Berkeley Dept. of Anthropology
lanclos@garnet.berkeley.edu
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