Perverted Science

February 2002

Sexuality is a potent force in human interactions. Thus, regulating sexuality can be a powerful way to control human beings. It used to be that the Church claimed this right and invoked the authority of God (as interpreted by Church officials, of course) to narrowly proscribe acceptable sexual expression.

Today, the State has largely taken over the role of regulating sex. Fornication, adultery, sodomy, and a slew of other sexual behaviors formerly seen as sins have been recast as crimes. In our more secular age, science has replaced God as the new arbiter of what sex acts are acceptable, and which are deviant and thus in need of correction or punishment.

Like those priests who saw themselves as rescuing tempted souls from eternal damnation, today’s sex scientists are often motivated by good intentions. Sigmund Freud thought he was helping his “hysterical” female patients by demanding that they give up immature clitoral orgasms and progress to mature vaginal orgasms– a biological impossibility akin to asking that a man learn to come by scrotal stimulation only, never letting his penis become involved. Despite his ostensibly good intentions, Freud– by labeling women’s inherent physiology as “infantile”– contributed to the very anxieties and neuroses he professed to help.

Generations of doctors learned to “diagnose” homosexuality and steered patients so afflicted to “treatments” aimed at purging them of gay desire. Electric shocks and vomit-inducing poisons “helped” patients to attain a normal aversion to homosexuality.

Two decades ago, social workers, armed with the latest scientific techniques, “discovered” that horrific Satanic sexual abuse was rampant in our daycare centers. Not only did the crusading social scientists create witch hunts that led to the imprisonment of hundreds of innocent people, they also left the children they sought to help burdened with forever being branded victims of (non-existent) sexual abuse.

And today, scientists have been given a huge financial windfall as states set up federally mandated “treatment centers” and “hospitals” to warehouse the ever-increasing number of citizens judged “sexually dangerous.” Hundreds of millions of dollars are now being spent to “treat” not only those inmates who have committed violent crimes, but also those whose partners were too young, or whose play space was too public, or whose predilections were too kinky. Therapists in such institutions imagine themselves as helpers seeking to cure those with illegal (and thus presumptively “sick”) sexual urges.

There are two problems with the way science is invoked to regulate sexuality.

First, though science’s practitioners like to claim they are delivering objective facts immune from dispute, history demonstrates that science is imbedded in social constructs and often exploited to validate conventional prejudices. A 1998 study suggesting that teen boys who had sex with adult men were not invariably harmed was censured by Congress, a signal that scientists who want federal funding will make sure to reach different conclusions. Similarly, while the American Psychiatric Association’s 1973 decision to remove “homosexuality” from its catalog of sexual illnesses was welcome, we are not fooled into thinking that homosexuality is now okay only because medical experts have dropped their objections– should psychiatrists again decide that gay people are intrinsically sick, we would rightly deride them as tools of social prejudice, not dispassionate observers of human behavior.

And second, science can attempt to describe and explain observed phenomena, but cannot assess the morality of attitudes and actions. As we watch today’s hired-gun scientists defend the creation of gulags for non-violent sex “criminals,” it is clear that a truly moral approach to sex demands that we not defer to “expert” opinion. We must learn to trust our own hearts, bodies, and consciences, the lasting message of gay liberation.

Pasted from <http://guidemag.com/magcontent/invokemagcontent.cfm?ID=B9AEA919-DEFC-46DF-9C1DB86CE5D8E422>