Woo hoo! Entry number 200!

Conservative Christians are up in arms (as they always are) about SpongeBob Squarepants, the lovable children’s cartoon character who may or may not be gay. In January, songwriter Nile Rodgers created a video featuring several children’s cartoon characters singing “We Are Family” in a message of tolerance. Conservative Christians are fine with tolerance – as long as they don’t have to tolerate people that are different from them. The tolerance pledge on Rodgers’ website includes a reference to sexual tolerance, and there’s nothing more that Conservative Christians hate than dirty sodomites. SpongeBob Squarepants was one of the cartoon characters featured in the video, adding credence to some claims that he is gay. (Read all about this at CNN.com.) Stephen Hillenburg, SpongeBob’s creator, says that he thinks of all the characters on the show as asexual.

Of course this is true. Children have no concept of sex. The concept of gender and sex is wholly foreign to them. Sex is defined as what kind of genitals you have. You can be male, female, or hermaphroditic (if you have the genitals of both sexes). Your sex is wholly natural. It is not determined by you, your parents, your government, your customs, or anyone else. Gender, on the other hand, is determined by one or more of those things. A person’s gender is the social role he plays according to the genitals he has. Someone with a penis we call a man (or male), and someone with a vagina we call a woman (or female). These social roles – created by a culture based on a person’s genitalia – can be occupational, as in, “I’m a woman; therefore, I cannot be a firefighter,” or they can refer to social habits, as in, “I’m a woman; therefore, I must wear a dress.” Gender affects every aspect of our culture.

Children have no concept of gender until it is taught to them. Billy has a penis; therefore, he can be a firefighter and Sally cannot. Sally has a vagina; therefore, she must wear a dress and Billy cannot. If Freud were still in vogue (and you can thank your lucky stars that he isn’t), we would say that gender – for the male – is assigned when the father “threatens the male child’s Oedipal desire for the mother with the punishment of ‘castration.’ The repression of desire makes it possible for the male child to identify with the place of the father and with a ‘masculine’ role” (Raman Selden and Peter Widdowson, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, 3rd ed. [Lexington, Ky.: UP of Kentucky, 1993], 138). The gendering of the female is more convoluted and has been heavily criticized.

In any case, no one believes Freud anymore. Jacques Lacan provides a better explanation without the rampant misogyny. According to Lacan, the child enters into a world ruled by a language system, and eventually, he begins to understand this language. The child only truly develops a sense of “self” in what Lacan calls the “mirror stage”: when a child looks into a mirror and sees himself as a separate entity from his mother. Through this system of language, we also begin to learn that we are either “female” or “male” according to our genitals, and we become conditioned to be either “male” or “female.”

There are times, though, when gender is not based on sex. Gender can be assigned based on perceived physical characteristics which correlate with particular genitalia. Or they can be assigned completely arbitrarily, as in the case of SpongeBob. We use male pronouns with SpongeBob because, for one, his name is SpongeBob. “Bob” is a male name, assigned to people with male genitalia. Second, we use male pronouns for SpongeBob because, within the cartoon (the text), he is referred to in a male way. The text tells us that SpongeBob is male. Why is this so? Could it be because SpongeBob has male genitalia? The text also tells us that SpongeBob does not have any genitalia. Cartoon characters are neuter. They cannot have sex with each other because they have no genitalia. Therefore, sex is unimportant. Gender, on the other hand, is important, since the world of cartoons mimics our own world. We see people every day without seeing what’s inside their pants; we assume that the gender we assign to them matches their sex, and for the most part, we’re right. We have learned to match particular physical characteristics to sexualities that correspond to those characteristics. Therefore, we can bypass the genitals – and sex – altogether in determining gender. We do this with SpongeBob and other cartoons. Minnie Mouse has a bow in her hair; therefore, she is female.

What does this have to do with SpongeBob? Well, he has no sex and neither do other cartoon characters because children have no concept of sex. They have genitalia, to be sure, but they have no idea what it’s for. “During the earliest phases of infanthood the libidinal drives have no definite sexual object but play around the various erotogenic zones of the body (oral, anal, ‘phallic’),” says Selden. “Before gender or identity are established there is only the rule of the ‘pleasure principle’” (138). By the time they are old enough to watch SpongeBob, children understand gender, but they don’t necessarily understand sex. They understand that SpongeBob is male, his friend Patrick is male, and his friend Sandy is female. But they don’t understand why.

Sexuality is about who you want to have sex with. It is also socially constructed, but with good reason, which I will explain momentarily. A person who wants to have sex with someone who has different genitals is heterosexual. A person who wants to have sex with someone who has the same genitals is homosexual. Bisexual people “swing either way”; they will have sex with persons who have genitals that are similar and different to their own. While sexuality is socially constructed based on genitalia, it is done so with good reason: a homosexual society would die out after the first generation, as homosexuals cannot procreate! Thus while gendering may not serve a prosaic purpose, sexualizing serves to allow procreation of the species.

Since SpongeBob has no genitals, he has no sex. Since he has no sex, he can have no sexuality. Elizabeth offered as evidence for his homosexuality an episode where he dresses like a woman and plays wife to Patrick, who acts as his husband. SpongeBob’s cross-dressing, cross-dressing though it may be, is not tantamount to homosexuality. Being effeminate is not tantamount to homosexuality. SpongeBob has no sexuality; therefore, he cannot be heterosexual or homosexual. The text and its author simply do not care about who SpongeBob wants to have sex with. It’s not important, and any attempt to make it important must necessarily result in a misreading of the text. There is no support for the claim that SpongeBob is a homosexual.

As I was writing this, Matt asked me about Pepe Le Peu, the famous French skunk. Clearly, Pepe Le Peu likes female skunks (although in every episode, he ends up chasing a black cat who, through some accident, has ended up with a white stripe down her back). What happens when cartoon characters have attractions to other cartoon characters? Well, since sexuality is culturally assigned, and children bypass the genitals when determining gender, children can only surmise that people who look like men have feelings for (the word "sex" isn't part of a child's vocabulary) people who look like women. Dad looks like a man and he has some relationship with Mom, who looks like a woman. Pepe Le Peu is gendered male; thus, according to a child, he must be attracted to female skunks. As long as cartoon characters don't actually engage in sex, they have no sexuality, and everything about their relationships with other cartoon characters rides on a culturally-assigned level.