Free Straight by Hanne Blank

unshakable facts, the truth is that they aren’t. They change. But if what “everyone knows” can change, then how is it that everybody still seems to know it? How do we know what we know about sex? How do we arrive at our expectations, our interpretations of words and behaviors and appearances, our opinions of ourselves and of others where sexuality is concerned? Does it matter?
    KNOWING WHAT TO THINK
    When anthropologists talk about this “stuff everyone knows,” they use the term
doxa.
[ 3 ] Doxa comes from the Greek for “common knowledge,” and that’s a pretty good description of what it is: the understanding we absorb from our native culture that we use to make sense of the world. Doxa is, quite literally in most cases, the stuff that “goes without saying,” the assumptions and presumptions and “common sense”ideas we have about our world and how it works. Virtually everything we know about sexuality, and heterosexuality, we know—or think we know—because of doxa. Perhaps the best way for me to express the power of doxa is that it is the reason that, even as you read these words, some of you are probably secretly telling yourselves that it doesn’t matter what some silly historian says, those sentimental gentlemen sleeping in one another’s arms were
clearly
gay.
    Absorbing a culture’s doxa, very much including its doxa regarding sexuality, is an inescapable cultural process that starts at birth. Doxa influences virtually everything we do, including the ways in which we handle infants. For instance, the crying of baby boys is more likely to be perceived by caregivers as being “excessive,” whereas the crying of baby girls is more likely to be perceived as normal. Baby boys are therefore more likely to be punished for excessive crying, not because they actually cry excessively but because they are boys.[ 4 ]
    This is simultaneously an expression and a teaching of doxa. Baby boys do not know that they are learning doxa when they are punished for crying. The big brothers and sisters of those baby boys don’t know they are learning doxa when they see it happen. Caregivers are not necessarily aware that they are teaching doxa to children, or that they are treating boy children differently than girl children because doxa has taught them to. People don’t experience doxa as an external force; they experience it as internal knowledge: the stuff that “everyone knows.” Yet if what “everyone knows” is that “boys don’t cry,” then the likelihood that boys will be punished if they do cry becomes greater. And if “everyone knows” that boys who cry are punished, the likelihood is that boys won’t cry if they can possibly help it.
    â€œDoxa” may, in its unfamiliar Greek, sound like abstruse ivory-tower theory, but it’s just a name for a very real, mundane, routinely overlooked everyday process. “Boys don’t cry” is doxa. But it is not just an abstract belief; it is also a daily influence on how people think, speak, and act. This is precisely how doxa becomes seamless and invisible and, for better or worse, “just the way things are.” Knowingly and unknowingly, willingly and unwillingly, we participate in doxa because it is how we know what is desirable and undesirable to the people we deal with daily, what is acceptable and unacceptable, what will get us punished and what will get us praised. Doxa is made up ofall the things we need to know reflexively if we are to succeed in navigating the expectations of our culture.
    At the same time, doxa needs us. Doxa does not, and cannot, exist without people or culture. And as people change and cultures change, so, as we’ve seen with the example of bed sharing, does doxa. But doxa does not change because some top-down authority tells it to. Our big cultural authorities—organized religion, medicine, the sciences, the