Gender Identity, Sexuality, and +5 to Sexterity

Look at this picture--what do you see?

I see a kid and his mother having some fun.  Dr. Keith Ablow sees something much, much more sinister."This is a dramatic example," he wrote, "of the way that our culture is being encouraged to abandon all trappings of gender identity--homogenizing males and females when the outcome of such 'psychological sterilization' ([his] word choice) is not known."  Dr. Keith Ablow argues in his Fox News Opinion Article:

Well, how about the fact that encouraging the choosing of gender identity, rather than suggesting our children become comfortable with the ones that they got at birth, can throw our species into real psychological turmoil—not to mention crowding operating rooms with procedures to grotesquely amputate body parts? Why not make race the next frontier? What would be so wrong with people deciding to tattoo themselves dark brown and claim African-American heritage? Why not bleach the skin of others so they can playact as Caucasians?

The "fallout" of such breaches of traditional gender identity, according to Dr. Ablow, is "already being seen."  Ablow points to girls showing "none of the reticence they once did to engage in early sexual relationships with boys [..., which] could be a bad thing since there is no longer the same typically 'feminine' brake on such behavior."  He then points to "girls beating up other girls on YouTube"  and the observation that "[y]oungmen primp and preen until their abdomens are washboards and their hair is perfect."   Sorry to be blunt: this guy is so full of crap that it makes me nauseous.

Dr. Ablow's arguments are full of logical fallacies, such as slippery slopes,  post hocs, and (ultimately) begs the question as to "feminine identity" and what it means to be a "boy" or a "girl."  However, his arguments illustrate an important concern.   How we respond to gender and sexual identity--regardless of the type--seems to have become more divisive today: an increasingly extreme split between the demand for sexual and gender identity (regardless of what it is) to the increasing disregard for any sort of sexual or gender identity.  

Those who argue for the ambiguous have grown more overt in their blatant ambiguity.  The recently published article, "Parents Keep Child's Gender Under Wraps" (Zachary Roth, The Lookout, 24 May 2011), is about a Toronto couple that has chosen not to reveal the gender identity of their baby, Storm, to anyone.  The father, David Stocker, justifies this choice: "If you really want to get to know someone, you don't ask what's between their legs." 

Those who clearly desire blatant bluntness might be best  illustrated by the below cut from a Blizzcon 2009 question-and-answer session.

ALTERNATE LINK

The questioner was referring to the below video, I think, if not the entire online web-series, The Guild, which parodies a lot of societal gaffs and goofs, particularly of the online gaming community.

 Do You Wanna Date My Avatar?

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So far,  The Guild has failed to do little more than recognize the broad spectrum of gender and sexual identities. While it is true that some of the "bad guys," members of the Axis of Anarchy, clearly have LGBT characteristics, but these characters are minor, underdeveloped.  In 2003, Justine Cassell wrote, "If the example of video games for girls has taught us anything, it is that there is no such thing as 'gender-free' software.  Because this is the case, we can only integrate the dynamic nature of gender construction--of self-construction--into the software itself."1   Janne Bromseth and Jenny Sudén observe:

A culture of profiling is one of point-and-click menus and ready-made identity options, of a coming together of mediated identities across scales, scores, and ratings.  It distinguishes itself from previous perhaps more subtle modes of self-making by spelling it all out in high-resolution graphics and sound.  In this shift from text-based interfaces to those based on images, it is possible to, anew, trace a desire for the authentic and the sincere.  If the inhabitants of MUDs and MOOs of the 1990s asked for a simple logic which linked specific gendered performances to sexually specific bodies ("Are you male or female?"), in certain cultures of profiling, there is a similar and possibly even more distinct demand for realism and authenticity now.  (274)2  

Clearly, the choices for sexual and gender identity are extremely limited in most video games, including the seemingly freeing MMORPGs.  However, games such as Rift, World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, and Dungeons and Dragons Online offer the gamer avatar choices that range widely in body shape, color, and size, the gamer the choices are still limited to male or female, even though androgynous-looking avatars exist within those two categories. These games, ironically, also rewrite medieval myths and legends into more contemporary fantasies, offering a great deal of potential in knowingly, purposefully (if not humorously) rewriting the medieval European Christian, Judaic, and Muslim doctrines of gender identity and sexuality--a form of neomedievalism.


I wonder, therefore, what Dr. Ablow would say then, to a "male" avatar in full armor wearing pink armor?  While Dr. Keith Ablow had an MD from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in psychiatry; his specialty is forensic psychiatry.  However, his article suggests a clear (unscientific) agenda in that he seems to be drawing more from his Morman faith than from the doctrines of clinical medicine.  So, actually, nevermind: I don't really care what he thinks.  He's just a blow-hard. 




1 Cassell, Justin.  "Genderizing Human-Computer Interaction."  Julie A. Jacko and Andrew Sears, eds. The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook; Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies and Emerging Applications.  Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2003: 401-412.

2 Bromseth, Janne and Jenny Sudén. "Queering Internet Studies: Intersections of Gender and Sexuality." The Handbook of Internet Studies. Mia Consalvo, Robert Burnett, and Charles Ess, eds. Handbooks in Communication and Media Series.  Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 2010.