semiotic_pirate (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
semiotic_pirate) wrote2007-09-06 10:41 am
semiotic_pirate) wrote2007-09-06 10:41 am
Breastplate of Self-Righteousness
My interest in this isn't so much the "scandal" of the senator, but in the information provided via the dissertation (from 1970) of Laud Humphreys Tearoom Trade. The most interesting thing is that, although "taught as a primary example of unethical social research" this paper, because of its nature, had to be researched using "unorthodox methods" in order to get a true reading on the situation.
It is a shame that this subterfuge had to happen in the first place, never mind that it is still happening in a lot of places. I applaud men like![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sparkindarkness who lives true to himself and is a genuine upstanding citizen. Not that I am implying that sparky seeks public sex - I am more referring to the kind of man (described in the article) who either may be or are using the upstanding citizen front as a veneer to hide their proclivity behind. While lambasting people who don't hide whatever this particular person fears will ruin them in the eyes of society with self-righteous hate-mongering.
As long as it isn't something non-consensual, that it is between adults, where neither party is being abused, what do I care? Hell. I would prefer if no one cared what sexual orientation a person was, and that it didn't matter to society at large, or make any kind of impact in a person's professional life. I wish the same could also be said for gender preference or any kind of difference described by the words "minority."
Op-Ed Contributor
America’s Toe-Tapping Menace
By LAURA M. Mac DONALD
New York Times: Published: September 2, 2007
WHAT is shocking about Senator Larry Craig’s bathroom arrest is not what he may have been doing tapping his shoe in that stall, but that Minnesotans are still paying policemen to tap back. For almost 40 years most police departments have been aware of something that still escapes the general public: men who troll for sex in public places, gay or “not gay,” are, for the most part, upstanding citizens. Arresting them costs a lot and accomplishes little.
In 1970, Laud Humphreys published the groundbreaking dissertation he wrote as a doctoral candidate at Washington University called “Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places.” Because of his unorthodox methods — he did not get his subjects’ consent, he tracked down names and addresses through license plate numbers, he interviewed the men in their homes in disguise and under false pretenses — “Tearoom Trade” is now taught as a primary example of unethical social research.
That said, what results! In minute, choreographic detail, Mr. Humphreys (who died in 1988) illustrated that various signals — the foot tapping, the hand waving and the body positioning — are all parts of a delicate ritual of call and answer, an elaborate series of codes that require the proper response for the initiator to continue. Put simply, a straight man would be left alone after that first tap or cough or look went unanswered.
Why? The initiator does not want to be beaten up or arrested or chased by teenagers, so he engages in safeguards to ensure that any physical advance will be reciprocated. As Mr. Humphreys put it, “because of cautions built into the strategies of these encounters, no man need fear being molested in such facilities.”
Mr. Humphreys’s aim was not just academic: he was trying to illustrate to the public and the police that straight men would not be harassed in these bathrooms. His findings would seem to suggest the implausibility not only of Senator Craig’s denial — that it was all a misunderstanding — but also of the policeman’s assertion that he was a passive participant. If the code was being followed, it is likely that both men would have to have been acting consciously for the signals to continue.
Mr. Humphreys broke down these transactions into phases, which are remarkably similar to the description of Senator Craig’s behavior given by the police. First is the approach: Mr. Craig allegedly peeks into the stall. Then comes positioning: he takes the stall next to the policeman. Signaling: Senator Craig allegedly taps his foot and touches it to the officer’s shoe, which was positioned close to the divider, then slides his hand along the bottom of the stall. There are more phases in Mr. Humphreys’s full lexicon — maneuvering, contracting, foreplay and payoff — but Mr. Craig was arrested after the officer presumed he had “signaled.”
Clearly, whatever Mr. Craig’s intentions, the police entrapped him. If the police officer hadn’t met his stare, answered that tap or done something overt, there would be no news story. On this point, Mr. Humphreys was adamant and explicit: “On the basis of extensive and systematic observation, I doubt the veracity of any person (detective or otherwise) who claims to have been ‘molested’ in such a setting without first having ‘given his consent.’ ”
As for those who feel that a family man and a conservative senator would be unlikely to engage in such acts, Mr. Humphreys’s research says otherwise. As a former Episcopal priest and closeted gay man himself, he was surprised when he interviewed his subjects to learn that most of them were married; their houses were just a little bit nicer than most, their yards better kept. They were well educated, worked longer hours, tended to be active in the church and the community but, unexpectedly, were usually politically and socially conservative, and quite vocal about it.
In other words, not only did these men have nice families, they had nice families who seemed to believe what the fathers loudly preached about the sanctity of marriage. Mr. Humphreys called this paradox “the breastplate of righteousness.” The more a man had to lose by having a secret life, the more he acquired the trappings of respectability: “His armor has a particularly shiny quality, a refulgence, which tends to blind the audience to certain of his practices. To others in his everyday world, he is not only normal but righteous — an exemplar of good behavior and right thinking.”
Mr. Humphreys even anticipated the vehement denials of men who are outed: “The secret offender may well believe he is more righteous than the next man, hence his shock and outrage, his disbelieving indignation, when he is discovered and discredited.”
This last sentence brings to mind the hollow refutations of figures at the center of many recent public sex scandals, heterosexual and homosexual, notably Representative Mark Foley, the Rev. Ted Haggard, Senator David Vitter and now Senator Craig. The difference is that Larry Craig was arrested.
Public sex is certainly a public nuisance, but criminalizing consensual acts does not help. “The only harmful effects of these encounters, either direct or indirect, result from police activity,” Mr. Humphreys wrote. “Blackmail, payoffs, the destruction of reputations and families, all result from police intervention in the tearoom scene.” What community can afford to lose good citizens?
And for our part, let’s stop being so surprised when we discover that our public figures have their own complex sex lives, and start being more suspicious when they self-righteously denounce the sex lives of others.
It is a shame that this subterfuge had to happen in the first place, never mind that it is still happening in a lot of places. I applaud men like
sparkindarkness who lives true to himself and is a genuine upstanding citizen. Not that I am implying that sparky seeks public sex - I am more referring to the kind of man (described in the article) who either may be or are using the upstanding citizen front as a veneer to hide their proclivity behind. While lambasting people who don't hide whatever this particular person fears will ruin them in the eyes of society with self-righteous hate-mongering. As long as it isn't something non-consensual, that it is between adults, where neither party is being abused, what do I care? Hell. I would prefer if no one cared what sexual orientation a person was, and that it didn't matter to society at large, or make any kind of impact in a person's professional life. I wish the same could also be said for gender preference or any kind of difference described by the words "minority."
Op-Ed Contributor
America’s Toe-Tapping Menace
By LAURA M. Mac DONALD
New York Times: Published: September 2, 2007
WHAT is shocking about Senator Larry Craig’s bathroom arrest is not what he may have been doing tapping his shoe in that stall, but that Minnesotans are still paying policemen to tap back. For almost 40 years most police departments have been aware of something that still escapes the general public: men who troll for sex in public places, gay or “not gay,” are, for the most part, upstanding citizens. Arresting them costs a lot and accomplishes little.
In 1970, Laud Humphreys published the groundbreaking dissertation he wrote as a doctoral candidate at Washington University called “Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places.” Because of his unorthodox methods — he did not get his subjects’ consent, he tracked down names and addresses through license plate numbers, he interviewed the men in their homes in disguise and under false pretenses — “Tearoom Trade” is now taught as a primary example of unethical social research.
That said, what results! In minute, choreographic detail, Mr. Humphreys (who died in 1988) illustrated that various signals — the foot tapping, the hand waving and the body positioning — are all parts of a delicate ritual of call and answer, an elaborate series of codes that require the proper response for the initiator to continue. Put simply, a straight man would be left alone after that first tap or cough or look went unanswered.
Why? The initiator does not want to be beaten up or arrested or chased by teenagers, so he engages in safeguards to ensure that any physical advance will be reciprocated. As Mr. Humphreys put it, “because of cautions built into the strategies of these encounters, no man need fear being molested in such facilities.”
Mr. Humphreys’s aim was not just academic: he was trying to illustrate to the public and the police that straight men would not be harassed in these bathrooms. His findings would seem to suggest the implausibility not only of Senator Craig’s denial — that it was all a misunderstanding — but also of the policeman’s assertion that he was a passive participant. If the code was being followed, it is likely that both men would have to have been acting consciously for the signals to continue.
Mr. Humphreys broke down these transactions into phases, which are remarkably similar to the description of Senator Craig’s behavior given by the police. First is the approach: Mr. Craig allegedly peeks into the stall. Then comes positioning: he takes the stall next to the policeman. Signaling: Senator Craig allegedly taps his foot and touches it to the officer’s shoe, which was positioned close to the divider, then slides his hand along the bottom of the stall. There are more phases in Mr. Humphreys’s full lexicon — maneuvering, contracting, foreplay and payoff — but Mr. Craig was arrested after the officer presumed he had “signaled.”
Clearly, whatever Mr. Craig’s intentions, the police entrapped him. If the police officer hadn’t met his stare, answered that tap or done something overt, there would be no news story. On this point, Mr. Humphreys was adamant and explicit: “On the basis of extensive and systematic observation, I doubt the veracity of any person (detective or otherwise) who claims to have been ‘molested’ in such a setting without first having ‘given his consent.’ ”
As for those who feel that a family man and a conservative senator would be unlikely to engage in such acts, Mr. Humphreys’s research says otherwise. As a former Episcopal priest and closeted gay man himself, he was surprised when he interviewed his subjects to learn that most of them were married; their houses were just a little bit nicer than most, their yards better kept. They were well educated, worked longer hours, tended to be active in the church and the community but, unexpectedly, were usually politically and socially conservative, and quite vocal about it.
In other words, not only did these men have nice families, they had nice families who seemed to believe what the fathers loudly preached about the sanctity of marriage. Mr. Humphreys called this paradox “the breastplate of righteousness.” The more a man had to lose by having a secret life, the more he acquired the trappings of respectability: “His armor has a particularly shiny quality, a refulgence, which tends to blind the audience to certain of his practices. To others in his everyday world, he is not only normal but righteous — an exemplar of good behavior and right thinking.”
Mr. Humphreys even anticipated the vehement denials of men who are outed: “The secret offender may well believe he is more righteous than the next man, hence his shock and outrage, his disbelieving indignation, when he is discovered and discredited.”
This last sentence brings to mind the hollow refutations of figures at the center of many recent public sex scandals, heterosexual and homosexual, notably Representative Mark Foley, the Rev. Ted Haggard, Senator David Vitter and now Senator Craig. The difference is that Larry Craig was arrested.
Public sex is certainly a public nuisance, but criminalizing consensual acts does not help. “The only harmful effects of these encounters, either direct or indirect, result from police activity,” Mr. Humphreys wrote. “Blackmail, payoffs, the destruction of reputations and families, all result from police intervention in the tearoom scene.” What community can afford to lose good citizens?
And for our part, let’s stop being so surprised when we discover that our public figures have their own complex sex lives, and start being more suspicious when they self-righteously denounce the sex lives of others.
no subject
And I agree, it is a nuisance to be propositioned in extremely inappropriate places. However, a nuisance that borders on this degree of resources to stop it? The only; reason it gets so much police attention is because the "threat" of it is greatly inflated.
And there is only one way it will ever stop (well, reduce anyway) and that is if people like Larry Craig feel confident enough to be, well, like me. Very few people WANT to be reduced to looking for sex in public lavatories. But if they are so consumed by self-loathing and repression and a desperate need for secrecy that is what they are reduced to.
If the powers that be want this to stop, then it is homophobia they have to fight. Until homophobia is in full retreat, gays will remain closeted and feel the need to be closeted and it is the CLOSET that leads to sorry situations like this
no subject
Hope you didn't mind being pointed out as a paragon of society... You are, ya know.
Hhmmm
Of course, I’m speaking only in terms of American culture (or those that are closely aligned) and the social context changes with the culture, sometimes radically.
I guess what I am trying to say is that the guilt or innocence of what Larry Craig is accused of doing can be totally dependant on your viewpoint. Should he have been arrested? Probably not. Could men practicing that behavior pose a public nuisance? Yes, it is possible. Do the police have better things to do? No doubt about it. Should the Senator resign? Absolutely, but not for a sex crime involving an inappropriate gay tryst -- he should resign for committing an unacceptable political faux pas. This kind of hypocrisy should no longer be tolerated in our public officials. We should not tolerate a person in power who helps to enact laws condemning a behavior that they themselves engage in. A person should not get a free pass just because they have been elected. Lawmakers should be held to a higher standard. Accountability for their actions should be first and foremost.
Re: Hypocrisy
This is, I assume, why such an elaborate ritual of engaging the question of interest has evolved. And why bathroom stalls in public places have to be utilized in the ritual as the place where these questions can be posed - in the highly specific code that cannot be replied to coherently by anyone other than a person already versed in said code.
This being the case, I don't see these men posing a threat in any way. Not even as a possible public nuisance, because the only way the police could've been tipped off was if they were informed about the senator's activities (or at least the situation in that particular restroom) by someone who was versed in the code. Which is how the police officer who initially replied in the affirmative to the senator's query of "are you interested?" KNEW how to reply to, or even be aware of, that initial query.
We should be ashamed that our (yes, I am U.S. centric here on my blog when I choose to be) system is set up in such a way so that people are so ashamed of who they are as to need to design their entire lives around a lie to cover up what they are taught to believe must be kept a deep dark secret.
We should not tolerate a person in power who helps to enact laws condemning a behavior that they themselves engage in.
We should not tolerate the situation that set this man (among many others) on the path to publicly condemning, or making unlawful, said behaviors.