From: topp8564-AT-mail.usyd.edu.au
Date: Sat,  5 Apr 2003 19:11:39 +1000
Subject: Re: AUT: AGAINST CONSERVATISM--FOR COMMUNISM


On 4/4/2003 4:19 PM, "Ilan Shalif" <gshalif-AT-netvision.net.il> wrote:

> Homosexuality and other deviations in the sexual domain
> are a deviation that is of entirely different domain.
> 
> It is of the same processes of "mental imprinting" like
> these that cause the new born duckling to follow any thing
> of the correct size and speed encountered in few hours
> after it get out of the eeg.
> 
> The same process (though a bit milder) that cause people to 
> look for intimate partners who resemble the parent of the 
> opposite sex.
> 
> Even the reactionary establishment of mental health re-labled
> the homosexuality as personality disturbance and no more
> as illness.


*GASP* 

You cannot be serious - homosexuality isn't listed as a 'disturbance' even in 
the DSM, which IS orthodoxy. None of the anthropologists and psychologists   
that I know  believes this mental imprinting story - the hard core positivist 
explanation these days is that homosexuality, at last male homosexuality, is 
due to brain physiology. The case for that is looking stronger and stronger 
every day, though I used to be highly sceptical of it. The other theory, that 
certain events in your childhood would make you into a queen has been 
essentially booted out of the psychology establishment, or at least the 
reputable part of it. I guess some people who have an axe to grind push the 
idea that child abuse or overbearing mothers makes you gay, though these ideas 
have either not been tested credibly - what's an overbearing mother? - or have 
been statistically mauled. 

I am surprised to hear these terms "dysfunction" and "disturbance" in this 
context, specially in the present forum. Homosexuality is about as 
dysfunctional as blond hair and light skin, and as disturbed as liking peaches 
rather than plums. 

At any rate, I'd like to know what this has to do with autonomism. 

Thiago 


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