Rothfeld: An Untenable Paradigm
By Becca Rothfeld, Staff Columnist
Published on Monday, February 18, 2013
Last week, the Associated Press released an internal memo advising its journalistic staff to refer to members of same-sex marriages as “partners” or “couples” rather than “husbands” or “wives.” Ensuing criticism from LGBTQ rights groups prompted the A.P.’s editorial board to issue a revisionary statement clarifying the publication’s stance: the terms “husband” and “wife” may be used to describe same-sex spouses only when “those involved have regularly used those terms,” reads the missive.
The A.P.’s decree is more than an isolated or publication-specific guideline. Rather, its unique status as a touchstone of editorial quality confers upon it notable power to influence the stylistic mores of publications worldwide. What began as an internal memo is bound to have widespread reverberations throughout the field of reporting — in effect, to set a new international standard regarding word choice.
And this standard is untenably homophobic. Although the A.P.’s defenders have been quick to point out that the controversial directive does not actually ban the terms “husband” and “wife,” I believe that it nonetheless serves to reinforce an inequitable norm — a norm that favors heterosexual couples, however insidiously.
Implicit in the A.P.’s mandate is the assumption that same-sex couples are responsible for taking the extra step of explicitly designating their significant others as “husbands” or “wives.” Given that it is unclear what, if anything, the likes of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have done to earn the privilege of automatic media recognition as a couple, it seems unfair to charge the LGBTQ community with the task of explaining themselves or their relationships to a bigoted and ignorant public. The A.P. asks far too much of homosexual couples and far too little of its readership.
It is society’s obligation to challenge and ultimately revise its expectation of straightness — not any given gay, lesbian or queer couple’s obligation to explicate its marriage. Grounding the A.P.’s linguistic decree is an ideology that presumes heterosexuality, a credo of “straight until proven queer” that further entrenches the notion that gayness is somehow out of the ordinary.
In his magnum opus, “The History of Sexuality,” philosopher and historian Michel Foucault writes about the tradition of sexual confession pervading medieval Christian communities, describing it as the mechanism by which sexual mores were manufactured, regulated and normalized. In Foucault’s view, the church encouraged its adherents to couch their own sexualities in broader religious terms — to describe themselves as governed by a Christian ethics and, in so doing, to recognize the truth of Christian value systems. Confession thus represented the total internalization of the Church’s conception of sex and gender.
The modern “coming out” ritual has taken on the same essential function: by forcing LGBTQ individuals to self-identify as different, the “coming out” process also forces them to characterize their sexual identities in terms of deviance. And by forcing LGBTQ couples to formally dub their spouses “husbands” or “wives,” the A.P. forces them also to acknowledge that their marriages are somehow different from straight marriages.
Such a paradigm is untenable. Queerness should require no special announcement, no “coming out” and no imperative to justify, proclaim or explain itself. Instead, society at large should abandon its conception of queerness as an occasional abnormality and learn to regard it as an inherent possibility, if not inevitable fixture, of all sexualities.
I think we would all do well to undergo a period of sexual soul-searching before fixing ourselves in any prefigured category — because it is not just straightness that is taken for granted. It is also a very vanilla brand of heterosexuality, a brand that favors a certain set of polite sex acts, eschews anything out of the rosy-cheeked and wholesome ordinary and takes buxom blondes to be the height of attractiveness. Because so much of our collective sexuality is foist upon us, we are freed from the burden of sexual self-realization and practically invited to fall back on a set of readily accessible assumptions.
The A.P.’s memo does much to validate this particular set. It sends a clear, though tacit, message: anyone who diverges from the dominant model of heterosexuality must explicitly disavow each of its component parts. Such a doctrine is ripe for rejection.
Bravo! Intelligent and well-argued.
By impressed on Feb 18 | 9:21 am
This is a fantastic piece. Very well articulated.
By ‘16 on Feb 18 | 12:35 pm
Dartmouth has a sexual freak contingent that would dearly love to be the half time show for The Big Green, perform on The Green for the “Prospies” and romp through Parkhurst demonstrating their “eschewing” of anything “rosy-cheeked” and “wholesome ordinary.” They would like to take the whole College on a sex trip to Southeast Asia to give everyone the opportunity to get into some hard core sex fetishes. (They support The NAMBLA, which is highly populated with members who are unionized public school teachers.) The College supports this, promotes it, recruits it and pays for it. This is sexual assault and it is all done for public consumption through the language which is the way they seek to control others. Your sex is your business. Keep it to yourself. I don’t want to pay for it, see it, or be forced to use whatever language you want me to use to describe it. You’d think some students are animals rubbing themselves on whatever is available. “Bravo! Intelligent and well-argued.”
By Robin on Feb 18 | 1:45 pm
Robin, I don’t know if you had your comment saved on your hard drive to copy and paste it on any article you see having anything remotely to do with sexuality, but your comments have absolutely nothing to do with Ms. Rothfeld’s article whatsoever. Let me try to summarize, to save you the trouble of reading so many words which you have already decided is garbage: This article discusses double-standard about language use involving lifelong commitment between two adult individuals. This article has nothing to do with “hard core fetishism” or “NAMBLA” style pedophilia, or about “sexual assault”. Perhaps Ms. Rothfeld is a part of this “freak contingent” you are so terrified of. But, if so, she is admirably keeping that to herself so that she can seriously discuss the way that systematically using “separate” language to refer to married couples of the same sex devalues those relationships.
By GayStudent’13 on Feb 18 | 8:43 pm
@GayStudent'13 “I think we would all do well to undergo a period of sexual soul-searching before fixing ourselves in any prefigured category because it is not just straightness that is taken for granted. It is also a very vanilla brand of heterosexuality, a brand that favors a certain set of polite sex acts, eschews anything out of the rosy-cheeked and wholesome ordinary and takes buxom blondes to be the height of attractiveness. Because so much of our collective sexuality is foist upon us, we are freed from the burden of sexual self-realization and practically invited to fall back on a set of readily accessible assumptions.” Sounds like you either don’t know what this means or you just want to ignore it, but the above paragraph makes all sorts of assumptions, none of which are demonstrably true. I’m not terrified of anything and there is nothing in my post that gives the slightest clue that I am. Using separate language for different sexual relationships isn’t discriminatory, it is descriptive. If you don’t like it, perhaps the words lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual, etc. should also be removed from the language because that devalues those sexual preferences. If making it clear that some married people are married to the same sex devalues it in your eyes, that’s your problem. Why does it devalue married same sex couples? Why do you think it does? How does Becca come to the conclusions she comes to regarding others sexuality? Looks like the two of you think that it is you who have the inside track, not only on cosmopolitan sex and soul-searching, but on what others sexual preferences are and how they are arrived at. Yours are the good ones because you soul-searched and do lots of unwholesome, non-rosy cheeked extraordinary stuff that doesn’t involve buxom blondes. The narrow and ignorant view that you have of heterosexuality and what is and is not permissible within heterosexuality shows a sexual arrogance and a self enforced otherness. You’re better than heterosexuals, but you want to be lumped in with them because it devalues your better sexuality to be labeled as different than those who are sexually inferior. Do you catch the inconsistency there? If a heterosexual wrote a column that in essence attacked homosexuals for being homosexuals the gay community wouldn’t tolerate it, but that is what Becca wrote. She wrote an attack on heterosexuals as unthinking conformists . You think you are self-evidently superior to dumb heterosexual vanilla, polite sex, wholesome ordinary, rosy cheeked, buxom blonde, height of attractiveness people. This is proof that you are so insular you think you can stereotypically lump people who aren’t like you into a thoughtless pile. This is victimhood converted into irrational stupidity.
By Robin That’s Funny on Feb 19 | 3:36 am
Finally, Miss Rothfeld, you write something worth reading. Good job.
By ‘14 on Feb 19 | 3:50 am
Lmfao this makes no sense
By lol on Feb 20 | 10:37 am
boom, robin right on
By rbc on Feb 25 | 7:17 am