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Identity Politics and Paraphilias: LGBT Is Not a Color & Fetishism

Last fall Breakpoint’s John Stonestreet posted an op ed titled and subtitled, “LGBT Is not a Color: Stop Hijacking Civil Rights,” and here was the introduction: “Are sexual orientation and gender identity the same as race? That message is being snuck in all over the place.”

He writes about the “conflation between skin color and sexual orientation”:

Nobody wants to be on the wrong side of today’s equivalent of the Civil Rights struggle, or to be viewed like racists by future generations.

But the fact remains, the two issues are just not the same. And black leaders—many of whom fought for the right to be treated as equal human beings decades ago—keep telling us this.

Writing at the Charlotte Observer last summer, Clarence Henderson, the chairman of the North Carolina Martin Luther King, Jr., Commission, called it “insulting to liken African Americans’ continuing struggle for equality” to the LGBT movement.

“The language of ‘civil rights’ shouldn’t be hijacked to give privileges to the politically vocal while taking away freedoms” for everyone else, said Bishop Patrick Wooden at a gathering of black faith leaders in Raleigh. And Pastor Leon Threatt of Christian Faith Assembly in Charlotte, agreed: “Restrooms and showers separated by biological sex is common sense.”

. . .

The Civil Rights comparison will continue to crop up, but we’ve got to vocally and repeatedly point out why it’s false. Sexual urges don’t determine who we are, and recognizing the fact that God created us male and female isn’t racism. It’s reality.

“Sexual urges don’t determine who we are” isn’t difficult to understand; no one should be confused. Yet the advance of the “LGBT agenda” owes its success in promoting identity politics to just that kind of lack of understanding.

The premise of this series is that one important way to breakthrough to the confused is to make it clear how many possible “identities” there are, and thus just how many letters follow the first four — “LGBT.” It’s time for our next paraphilia — today let us focus on “fetishism.”

As previously noted, this investigation into the many paraphilias is a remedial education effort to put the discussion of so-called “gay rights” in its proper perspective. Experiencing and acting upon same-sex attraction is not comparable to race, but rather is comparable to the myriad and many ways people experience sexual arousal outside of natural sex between men and women.

Here is the Wikipedia page on fetishism as this article goes to press:

Sexual fetishism or erotic fetishism is a sexual fixation on a nonliving object or nongenital body part. The object of interest is called the fetish; the person who has a fetish for that object is a fetishist. A sexual fetish may be regarded as a non-pathological aid to sexual excitement, or as a mental disorder if it causes significant psychosocial distress for the person or has detrimental effects on important areas of their life. Sexual arousal from a particular body part can be further classified as partialism.

One more note of interest that actually increases our list of possible letters to follow “LGBT” — here is Wikipedia’s paragraph on types of fetishes:

In a review of 48 cases of clinical fetishism, fetishes included clothing (58.3%), rubber and rubber items (22.9%), footwear (14.6%), body parts (14.6%), leather (10.4%), and soft materials or fabrics (6.3%). A 2007 study counted members of Internet discussion groups with the word “fetish” in their name. Of the groups about body parts or features, 47% belonged to groups about feet (foot fetishism), 9% about body fluids, 9% about body size, 7% about hair (hair fetish), and 5% about muscles (muscle worship). Less popular groups focused on navels (navel fetishism), legs, body hair, mouth, and nails, among other things. Of the groups about objects, 33% belonged to groups about clothes worn on the legs or buttocks (such as stockings or skirts), 32% about footwear (shoe fetishism), 12% about underwear (underwear fetishism), and 9% about whole-body wear such as jackets. Less popular object groups focused on headwear, stethoscopes, wristwear, and diapers (diaper fetishism).

Are you overwhelmed with what the future holds as all these categories demand their rights and equality and recognition?

Let’s close with our next question in our long list of questions regarding all the various paraphilias: How will schools respond to requests to start pro-fetishism clubs to support students who experience such feelings and who seek to come out of the closet? Will the Day of Silence expand to include fetishism?

Up next: Leftists Can’t Navigate it Either.

Image credit: Breakpoint.

Articles in this series, from oldest to newest:

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Introducing a Series

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Incest

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Body Integrity Identity Disorder

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Impact & Transgenders

Transgenderism a Choice or Disorder?

Why the Term “Sexual Orientation” is Nonsense

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Man’s Search for Meaning


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Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Man’s Search for Meaning

One of the best books I ever read is Man’s Search for Meaning by World War II concentration camp survivor Victor Frankl. First published in 1946, the book chronicles his experience in the camp and his struggle to find meaning — and thus a purpose to keep living as many around him died after giving up. Part of what makes the book so fascinating is that Frankl was already a trained psychiatrist when he entered the camp.

Borrowing his title for this piece is done for a couple of reasons. First, to recommend the book. Second, because I have never before connected identity politics with man’s search for meaning. Last December at Public Discourse, Professor Anthony Esolen connected the two in an article titled, “Love, Liberal Education, and the Secret of Human Identity.”

Esolen explains that this identity politics thing didn’t come out of nowhere. This might not be news to the more intellectual types out there — but if that’s the case, why haven’t we heard the case being made? Identity politics is one of the gravest threats to Western culture — and the intellectuals have a duty to help the rest of us grapple with it.

In a nutshell, when people reject Western culture and Christianity (or the Judeo-Christian ethic), they are left in a vaccum. The result is that they seek to find both meaning and community through a childish array of self-identities. Those are my words, not professor Esolen’s.

Before going further, let me say that for the second time in a row in this series we will deviate from our two-part structure and focus on one outside source — in this case, get ready to go deep (in my view, anyway).

Professor Anthony Esolen’s article (noted above) is, like so much of his writing, fantastic. Fans of Professor Esolen are familiar with his intellect and writing style that combines (in my view, anyway) brilliance and humility. In the piece he discusses “how the politics of identity bears on a Catholic liberal arts education.”

To give you a sense of the weight of his topic (in my view, anyway), he touches on a few names you may or may not be familiar with: “Dante and Virgil and their newfound friend, the ancient Roman poet Statius…”

Esolen believes that “a truly Catholic or Christian education in the liberal arts can raise the soul to see a glimmer of what Dante wishes for us to see”:

I have become painfully aware of the chasm between those who love the liberal arts, what I have called the free-making arts, and those whose utilitarianism or whose inverted religion has taken the form of identity politics.

Professor Esolen laments that many of his students “have no such grounding” in the liberal arts, and thus their “self” is “nourished by culture” where the topsoil has been “stripped bare.”

Young people have been starved of beauty: the great majority of them do not even recognize the names of the greatest of English poets, of Milton and Wordsworth and Tennyson, let alone know their songs. They have been taught almost nothing of our nearly three-thousand-year-old heritage of art, no classical or sacred music, no folk music, and no popular music older than a generation. Even many of those who regularly attend Mass on Sunday show no deep familiarity with Scripture. For those who do not darken the church doors, the gospels themselves may as well have come from another planet.

Under the subheading “The Desperate Quest to Fashion One’s Self,” Esolen writes that without that grounding, a person is left to fashion himself “from his own necessarily poor resources, without genuine culture, to bridge the chasm between unmeaning and meaning…”:

This is the source of the desperation with which so many young people, and the teachers and politicians and mass-entertainers who mislead them, hang onto some marker of identity, some sense that they exist, that they belong to a community, even if the community is abstract and notional, no more than an oval in a Venn diagram, designating the collective of people who self-identify in a certain way because of their race or their ethnicity or their sexual desires.

Under the subheading “The Secret of Human Identity,” Esolen writes:

But here is the thing: we must not raise up our young people to be in that condition in the first place. The faith is not something we do, like fly-fishing or playing chess. It is meant to inform every motion of our lives. It is like a royal dye that is to penetrate to the heart of every fiber of our souls. If someone should object that this is but a far-off ideal, I reply that all of our loves are imperfect; we do not therefore cease to believe that love is essentially the total gift of self. The secret of human identity that the politicians seek in the wrong places is the secret of faith and hope and love. We do not only give ourselves away: we become ourselves by the gift. We become who we are by forgetting to think about who we are. So it is that a truly liberal education, a free-making education, is in accord with what Jesus says, that he who humbles himself shall be exalted, and with what Saint Paul says, that it is he who acts, but also not he, rather Christ in him, and with what Saint John says, that “what we will be has not yet been revealed, but we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.”

Identity politics is a popular topic these days, and as I noted in an earlier article, there are a lot of ways to approach and discuss the phenomenon. One way to see it, clearly, is a search for meaning in the “post modern” world where absolutes are rejected. Without “genuine culture” and faith as a guide, the search for identity is conducted in all the wrong places. (In my view, anyway.)

With Dante, his teacher and authority Virgil, and Statius, Professor Ensolen writes:

We are standing in a history of poetry that spans the centuries. To place yourself among those men, thinking of poetry and of love, with gratitude and manly acknowledgment of one’s superior, is to be lifted beyond yourself.

Click here to read Esolen’s entire article.

Click here to watch Esolen’s keynote address at the 2015 IFI annual banquet.

The text of Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is available in PDF form here.


Up next: Back to the Crazy World of Paraphilias.

Articles in this series, from oldest to newest:

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Introducing a Series

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Incest

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Body Integrity Identity Disorder

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Impact & Transgenders

Transgenderism a Choice or Disorder?

Why the Term “Sexual Orientation” is Nonsense

COMING SOON: Identity Politics and Paraphilias: LGBT is Not a Color



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Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Incest

Mike Miller at the Independent Journal Review posted a Tweet from Fox News’ Brit Hume about the University of Kansas Gender “pronoun buttons” — Hume Tweeted, “Is there no end to this foolishness?”

What foolishness? Miller reports that “Signs in the university’s various libraries explain the purpose of the buttons”:

Because gender is, itself, fluid and up to the individual. Each person has the right to identify their own pronouns, and we encourage you to ask before assuming someone’s gender. Pronouns matter!

Misgendering someone can have lasting consequences, and using the incorrect pronoun can be hurtful, disrespectful, and invalidate someone’s identity.

Misgendering. That’s a first for me — I hadn’t heard that word before. My vocabulary has expanded a lot in recent years.

More and more of the people who considered themselves “enlightened” and “open minded” about the LGBT “agenda” (Brit Hume might even be one of them) are now being pushed to their tolerance limits by the growing list of “identities” that we are all supposed to not discriminate against.

I wonder if Hume has bumped into the list of paraphilias. There is a short list and a longer list. I have not been able to find the entire 549 yet but I will keep looking.

When it comes to “identity politics,” as I noted last time, the list of possibilities are endless. The most common ones are race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, and the bogus “sexual orientation” (more on that in a later post). In recent years, the letters following LGBT have begun to come out of the closet, and as noted above, the group wanting to expand the list of “genders,” such as at the University of Kansas — represent even more letters!

Two years ago when I discussed this series of articles with the Illinois Family Institute’s Laurie Higgins, she had this to say:

To your question about whether we should iterate and reiterate what distinguishes natural sex between men and women from perversity in all its protean forms, I say, absolutely. As often as the Left says homoeroticism is akin to skin color, we have to say, no, it’s akin to paraphilias, incest, and polyamory.

In this effort to lay out the range of possibilities in identity politics, let us turn to our first paraphilia: incest.

Wikipedia deserves much of the criticism it receives from political conservatives, but I like to refer to it when useful. Here is an excerpt from their page on incest:

Incest is sexual activity between family members or close relatives. This typically includes sexual activity between people in a consanguineous relationship (blood relations), and sometimes those related by affinity, such as individuals of the same household, step relatives, those related by adoption or marriage, or members of the same clan or lineage.

The incest taboo is and has been one of the most widespread of all cultural taboos, both in present and in many past societies. Most modern societies have laws regarding incest or social restrictions on closely consanguineous marriages. In societies where it is illegal, consensual adult incest is seen by some as a victimless crime.

This series will ask a lot of questions — here is our first: How will society respond when those who practice incest start self-identifying as such and begin clamoring for their “rights”?

Up next: Frightening the horses.




Identity Politics and Paraphilias: A Series

Identity Politics gets a lot of press — both conservative and liberal. The topic permeates nearly every area of life in the America of today. Yet for all the attention, not nearly enough people understand the most basic aspect of the conservation.

The advance of so-called “gay rights” and normalization of the lifestyles of the LGBTers has made huge (what its supporters call) “advances.” Supporters of Judeo-Christian morality call it, simply, a return to paganism. More on that (paganism) as the series unfolds.

It is my contention that identity politics is childish and succeeds only when thinking people decide to accept faulty premises. If that doesn’t sound “intellectual” to you, think for a bit about how common sense often sounds: common. My goal with these articles is to take a look at just how many potential “identities” are possible. That survey, I believe, cries for common sense to finally become a bigger part of this national discussion.

I’m a white guy — yes, one of those — but I’m no WASP. I’m not a member of the elite or the establishment. I wasn’t born into money. I have worked many blue collar and white collar jobs, both in the private and public and political sectors. My bio on my website reads simply: I am a Christian, an American citizen, and I work in the arena of applied political science.

So let’s list what I am (some of my “identities”):

  • I am biologically a male.
  • I am of white European extraction.
  • I am a Christian.
  • I am an American citizen.
  • I am a heterosexual.
  • I am both a social and economic conservative (I realize those are general headings).
  • I guess in the age of ageism I should note I am well into middle age.
  • I am a student of the Bible, of history, and a nominal sports fan (though you should know I swing both ways — I’m both a Cubs and Sox fan, a Bears and Packers fan…and yes, that’s possible).

No doubt there are other categories I fit into, but that’s enough for now. To be honest, though, I’ve never thought in terms of my “identities.” For all of my life they have been a side issue to what I am at my core: I am a human being with God-given rights — and I happen to believe in that very same God.

But let’s say you meet someone who is a man but wants to be identified as a woman? Or a white girl who wants to be identified as a black girl? Let’s say you meet someone who claims to be the person that was the inspiration of the Jason Bourne character from the novels and movies. That’s how they self-identify. It’s deep in their soul. It’s how they see themselves. What if I have severe doubts about the legitimacy of their claims? Am I a hateful intolerant bigot for not buying it?

The list of identities of all sorts is actually endless. Obviously not all “identities” involve sexual arousal, but since we have so many of them to cover, most of my focus will be on the paraphilias.

For the record, I look to those I consider the well-versed or even experts on the topic of identity politics, which includes the LGBT issue. The substance of this series will depend primarily on the words of others.

Back in 2014 I penned a series called “The Paraphilia of the Day,” which ran on BarbWire.com and my own website. What is a “paraphilia”? This intro to the Wikipedia page on the topic is good enough:

Paraphilia (also known as sexual perversion and sexual deviation) is the experience of intense sexual arousal to atypical objects, fetishes, situations, fantasies, behaviors, or individuals. No consensus has been found for any precise border between unusual sexual interests and paraphilic ones. There is debate over which, if any, of the paraphilias should be listed in diagnostic manuals, such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) or the International Classification of Diseases (ICD).

The number and taxonomy of paraphilias is under debate; one source lists as many as 549 types of paraphilias. The DSM-5 has specific listings for eight paraphilic disorders. Several sub-classifications of the paraphilias have been proposed, and some argue that a fully dimensional, spectrum or complaint-oriented approach would better reflect the evidence.

By the way, when I first cited that page, there were 547 types of paraphilias.

Too few Americans actually talk about what we’re really talking about when the subject of the “LGBT community”/identity politics comes up. LGBT represents only four letters — thus, 4 identities.

For the past couple of years the “T” in LGBT has been getting a lot of attention. A biological male can become a female, don’t ya know. Well, that’s not the worst of it. Get ready because a lot of letters follow that “T.”

You have probably seen a Q added on, or a Q, I, and A as well. From what I can gather, there is currently a great debate over which letters should be officially added next — and what those letters should stand for. Here are just a couple of variants currently discussed:

LGBTTQQIAAP
LGBTQQIP2SAA
LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM

I kid you not.

Up next: Wading into the alphabet soup of paraphilia identities.




Why Political Correctness Is Political Cowardice

Written by Alexander Zubatov

If you spend any time online, whether on mass media or social media, you might be forgiven for believing that an overwhelming majority of Americans believes in political correctness, affirmative action, and identity politics.

But the reality is that most Americans have a very different view of these issues, even though they do not voice that view. They stay silent.

Well, take this as my appeal to all of you: it’s high time for your voices to be heard.

I live in New York City—the place Ted Cruz famously denounced as having “New York values.” I don’t know exactly what that means, but I have a sneaking suspicion it means “liberal.” As is typical in this diverse melting pot of a city, I have friends who are white, black, Asian, and Hispanic … and most of them are, indeed, “liberal.”

But here’s the thing: among all my friends, acquaintances, family members, and extended family members living in this notorious bastion of liberalism, I can think of a grand total of one person who is a fan of so-called “political correctness” and identity politics. Again, in case you missed it, that number was one.

We Aren’t As Politically Correct As We Pretend To Be

I know that isn’t exactly a scientific survey. You want science? Here’s science. According to a Pew Survey on the topic of political correctness, 59 percent of Americans believe “too many people are easily offended these days over the language that others use,” while only 39 percent think “people need to be more careful about the language they use to avoid offending people with different backgrounds.”

Among whites, those numbers are 67 percent versus 32 percent respectively, while among blacks, the numbers are more or less reversed (30 percent versus 67 percent). Older people are actually more likely to support political correctness than their younger peers: Seventy percent of Democrats 65 and older “think people should take greater care to avoid offending others”—compared to 58 percent of 30 to 49-year-olds, and 56 percent of Democrats under 30. Meanwhile, “a majority of Republicans across age categories say people today are too easily offended by language.”

Now let’s consider race-based preferences. Surely, now that even the Supreme Court has come down squarely on the side of permitting race-based university admissions, it must reflect the beliefs of most Americans, right?

Not only is that dead wrong—it’s wrong for Americans of all races. According to a Gallup poll, 65 percent of Americans disapproved of that 2016 Supreme Court decision (Fisher v. University of Texas), with only 31 percent approving. According to the same poll, 70 percent of Americans believe college admissions should be based solely on merit (with 76 percent of whites, 50 percent of blacks, and 61 percent of Hispanics sharing that view). Sixty-seven percent of whites, 57 percent of blacks, and 47 percent of Hispanics said race or ethnicity should not factor into college admissions at all.

We Aren’t Huge Fans of ‘Multiculturalism,’ Either

What about multiculturalism? Haven’t most Americans embraced the party line that says we ought to accentuate our vibrant racial and ethnic identities, focusing on what makes us unique?

If you believe that, here’s another Pew Survey to disillusion you: “Among whites, more than twice as many say that in order to improve race relations, it’s more important to focus on what different racial and ethnic groups have in common (57 percent) as say the focus should be on what makes each group unique (26 percent).” Even among blacks, a slightly higher percentage (45 percent) believes the focus should be on “commonalities” rather than on “differences” (44 percent).

So what gives? If popular opinion leans so clearly in one direction on these issues, why does public dialogue lean so clearly the other way?

The dispiriting answer is that political correctness is succeeding in its objective: it’s shutting people up. Political correctness bullies, shames, and silences those who have dissenting views on various sensitive issues—even if those with dissenting views represent a majority.

Prominent moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt believes that in “liberal” environments—elite East- and West-Coast schools and universities, academic institutions and think-tanks, major coastal cities such as New York and San Francisco, left-leaning media organizations, etc.—whites, conservatives, men, straight people, and others who were way too historically oppressive feel like they are “walking on eggshells.” They don’t feel they can discuss topics such as race, gender, or homosexuality, and tend to stay silent.

Opposing Political Correctness Poses A Huge Risk

This should not be surprising. The consequences of not staying silent can be devastating. Making racially insensitive remarks in private conversation, using the N-word during a decade-old sex tape, admitting to using the N-word at some point in the past, using a word that sounds like the N-word but has nothing to do with it, writing an e-mail telling university students not to be so politically correct, or writing a single misinterpreted tweet with racial overtones: these things can get you fired and ostracized. In such an environment, why would it shock anyone if people choose not to speak out?

Once again, I can furnish some anecdotal support for this suggestion. A Pew Survey has revealed, for instance, that white people tend not to talk about race on social media: “Among black social media users, 28% say most or some of what they post is about race or race relations; 8% of whites say the same. On the other hand, roughly two-thirds (67%) of whites who use social media say that none of [the] things they post or share pertain to race.”

It could be that this racial gap reflects the fact that race matters more to blacks than it does to whites—and surely this is part of the picture. But with our media’s 24-7 focus on racial issues in America, I do not believe only eight percent of white people have thoughts on the subject. Clearly, something else is going on—and political correctness is the number one candidate for that “something else.” These white people are afraid to say what they really think.

Why You Shouldn’t Stay Silent

Consistent with this conclusion, among all my family, friends, and acquaintances — among whom, again, only one is generally supportive of identity politics — no one, other than that one (and he is black), speaks publicly on this topic. Many of those same people have advised me to stop sharing my views about these issues, for fear something I say will come back to bite me.

This is my response to them, and to all of you who stay silent: if political correctness is a toxin to the health of our body politic, then political cowardice is the auto-immune disorder through which it spreads. By refusing to be bullied, by defying intolerance, by standing up to this new illiberal McCarthyism, by opposing those who want to divide and judge us based on the color of our skin, by choosing a real diversity of ideas over a superficial diversity of pigments, by rejecting the principle that there is anyone here entitled to stifle the speech of those with whom they disagree, we join the proud tradition of Americans and others worldwide and throughout history who have had the courage to oppose injustice.

Let this be a rallying cry. Don’t toe the line. Don’t hide on your silent island. Feel the wind at your back. Come sail on the rising tide that will carry us all forward into the more open waters that lie ahead.


Alexander Zubatov is a practicing attorney specializing in general commercial litigation. He is also a practicing writer specializing in general non-commercial poetry, fiction, drama and polemics that have appeared in The Hedgehog Review, PopMatters, Acculurated, MercatorNet, The Montreal Review, The Fortnightly Review, New English Review, and Culture Wars, among others. He makes occasional, unscheduled appearances on Twitter.
This article was originally posted at TheFederalist.com