A hypothesis about the origins of homophobia

Here is a hypothesis that, if correct, would explain many instances of male homophobia. Heterosexual men often objectify women, and they believe (often correctly) that other straight men do likewise. Consequently, they believe that men generally objectify those persons to whom they are sexually attracted. Therefore, such a man may believe that homosexually oriented persons objectify men, and in particular are apt to objectify him. But he has an aversion to being objectified, or at least to being objectified by persons he is not himself sexually interested in. Therefore, such a man exhibits a certain kind of aversion or even fear of men who are sexually attracted to men—he does not want to be lusted at.

The hypothesis would suggest the following predictions:

1. Homophobia is more often directed at men by men than at men by women, women by men, or women by women.
2. The incidence of homophobia is correlated with the incidence of the objectification of women (both individually and in a social circle; thus, even if x does not himself objectify women, if his friends do, this may correlate with increased homophobia).
3. Homophobic heterosexual men are likely to be averse to having a very unattractive women being sexually interested in them.
4. A significant amount of homophobia is also directed at sexually abstinent homosexual men.

I don't know if the predictions are true. I suspect on anecdotal grounds that (1) and (4) are true. I do not know if (2) and (3) are.

I should note that I do not equate homophobia with a moral disapproval of homosexual activity or with a disgust at homosexual actions, and hence I can consistently say that homophobia is irrational (or even that some homosexual actions are disgusting—just as some unnatural heterosexual actions are), while still holding that homosexual activity is wrong. It is, after all, possible to strongly disapprove of an action, but to have no aversion or fear towards the persons who perform the action. Thus, orthodox Catholics strongly disapprove of contraception, but I think are unlikely to feel an aversion or fear towards the large majority of fellow citizens who contracept. (The case is chosen carefully: The Christian tradition classifies homosexual activity and the heterosexual use of condoms in the same moral category of "unnatural acts", and both Catholics and Protestants traditionally called both sets of acts "sodomy".) Nor can one identify disgust at an action with an aversion to the person who does it. Thus, everyone on a daily basis does disgusting and morally unexceptionable things in private, but being disgusted at these actions is not equivalent to aversion to oneself and one's fellow man. Disgust at an action can sometimes give rise to an aversion to the doer, but the disgust and the aversion are still distinct.

The `Aqedah and the male-only priesthood

It seems to me it would have been less appropriate for God to ask Sarah to sacrifice a daughter than to ask Abraham to sacrifice a son. I don't have an argument for this—that's just how it seems to me. But if this is right, then it is not an accident that in the `Aqedah (the binding of Isaac) the two persons involved are male. But the `Aqedah is a foreshadowing of Christ's sacrifice on the cross. While with respect to the Incarnation as such, Christ's maleness might be reasonably argued to be incidental, if my intuition about the `Aqedah is right, then it is plausible that with respect to the sacrifice of Christ, the maleness is not incidental. And if so, then since what is central to the priesthood is the offering, in persona Christi and in an unbloody way, of the one sacrifice of the Cross[note 1], it seems quite appropriate that the priest be male, since he represents one whose maleness is not accidental in this context, and participates in Christ's sacrificial activity to which activity Christ's maleness is not accidental.

Is this sexist? Here is a way of thinking about this. Suppose that part of the reason God asked Abraham to sacrifice a son rather than asking Sarah to sacrifice a daughter had to do with Abraham and Isaac's maleness (leave aside the accidental fact that Sarah perhaps didn't have a daughter, since God could easily have fixed that). Would it follow that God discriminated against Sarah in asking Abraham to make the sacrifice? Surely not: one can at least equally well say that it was Abraham who was discriminated against by being asked to make the sacrifice.[note 2] The restriction of conscription to males does not discriminate against women, but against men, since it is upon men that it imposes a duty that it does not impose on women. Similarly, if God restricted who he requires to become priests to men, it is not obvious that this would be a form of discrimination against women.

Men and women are one species

I've always been puzzled by the following problem. The setting for it is the metaphysical Aristotelian concept of a "species", not the biological one (in the biological sense this is easy). How do we know that women and men are the same species? I.e., how do we know that the species that we belong to is human rather than there being two species, woman and man?

I think a partial answer can be given by taking into account the following observation (I've learned it from David Alexander here who attributes it Peter Geach, though neither may endorse my application): In general, from the fact that x is a good F and x is a G, one cannot infer that x is a good G.

Here, I intend "is a good F" to mean something like "flourishes at F-ness" or "is good at being an F". Moreover, I am thinking here in the context of Greek notions, so that to be a good human includes both having the virtues of the intellect and will, as well as the excellences of the body. This is at times a somewhat awkward use of "good", but I shall adopt it.

I shall be rough here. I know what I say is not exactly right. For full precision, one needs to work not with the coarse tools of entailment and necessity, but with more finegrained tools of explanation and truthmaking. But what I shall say seems approximately right.

Despite what I said above, sometimes inferences like the ones questioned above seem exactly right:
(1) If x is a good lieutenant in a military force, then x is a good officer in the same force.
(The "in the same force" condition is needed, because a spy might be an officer in more than one army, but is unlikely to be a good officer in more than one.) The converse I am less sure of, but it is also plausible:
(2) If x is a good officer in some military force and x is a lieutenant, then x is a good lieutenant in the same force.

Suppose, now, that F and G are kinds such that, necessarily, all Fs are Gs but not conversely, and necessarily x is a good F if and only if x is a G and x is a good G. I shall say that "F is normatively subordinated to G".

Conjecture 1: If F is a species and G is a higher genus, then F is not normatively subordinated to G.

Conjecture 1 embodies an Aristotelian notion of the primacy of species, in the normative realm. And I think the normative aspect of species-hood is central for Aristotelians (I would like read the characterization of the essence as to ti ên einai as normative, though it may be stretching the Greek: what [the thing] was [supposed] to be). The species encodes the normative properties for the individuals of that kind. If we can explain the normative properties of an x insofar as it is an F in terms of its aptness at fulling G-ness, then F-ness is not the normatively basic property here. F-ness specifies the x further, but does not add any nomrative force. For reasons of explanatory power, we should try to find as general a kind as we can without sacrificing any normativity when we are searching for. To be a good human is more than just being human and being a good mammal. One can be really good at mammality while being far from human flourishing. The converse, I think, is false, though: if we fully flourish at humanity, we also flourish at mammality.

Now one is a good woman if and only if one is a woman and a good human; similarly for a man. This is a controversial claim, but I think correct. Therefore woman and man are normatively subordinated to human. If woman and man were species, then human would be a higher genus, and hence Conjecture 1 would be violated. Hence, if Conjecture 1 holds, woman and man are not species.

An interesting question is whether one can come up with a full characterization of species in similar normative terms. Here is something that might come close.

Conjecture 2: A natural kind G is a species iff both (a) G is not normatively subordinated to any larger natural kind, and (b) if F is a proper natural subkind of G such that any good F is necessarily a good G, then F is normatively subordinated to G.

(The "F is normatively subordinated to G" condition in (b) can be replaced by "necessarily a good G who is an F is a good F", because more than half of the definition of normative subordination is implied by the antecedent of the conditional in (b).)

For instance, mammal is not a species. For human is a proper natural subkind of mammal such that to flourish at being a human entails flourishing at being a mammal, but human is not normatively subordinated to mammal. One can be really good at mammality while a miserable failure at all other dimensions of humanity. But one cannot be really good at humanity and a woman while being a failure at being a woman.

A different way to look at the above is to note that the flourishing of a man or a woman as such is basically no different--it is just a particular form of the flourishing of a human.