XXIII.  A POPE, 'POLITICAL CORRECTNESS' and STORKS:  YET WHAT ABOUT EMBODIED HETEROSEXUAL PROCREATION?

      In The Meaning of the Body (University of Chicago Press, 2008), Mark Johnson, explicitly following on Dewey, James, Damasio and his earlier co-author, George Lakoff, cogently describes the process of a neonate engaging in a process of body-mind self-structuring and self-programming as it notices (i) how its body moves and feels and (ii) how interactions with other people and objects in its environment work.

     Johnson ingeniously explains how non-propositional 'analogies' (my term) or "schemas"  (his term) are perceived and 'computed' (my term) by the living and interacting BODY of the organism - resulting in what we think of as MIND.

     Yet in the index of The Meaning of the Body, there is no listing for "sex", "heterosexual interaction" or "procreation". It would seem that Johnson's neonate lacks genitalia as part of its embodied mind to use to understand and interact with the world - either presently or in the future!

      Such omission is reminiscent of the Pope who ordered that the genitalia of the Vatican statuary be chipped away.

     Apparently, Johnson (and Damasio) are in thrall to the sameness doctrine of 'Political Correctness' which teaches that there is no such thing as "sexual" difference related to physical anatomical differences between male and female - only "gender" related to a free-standing (disembodied ?) mind.

     But without heterosexual anatomical interaction between male and female bodies (or heroic modern medical techniques), one must fall back on the Stork Theory of an infant's provenance.