A/N: This isn’t really a gay rights essay, per se.  It touches more on how much emphasis we put on sex without realizing it, and how this can make us callous towards those who are “wrong.”  We’re shooting ourselves in the foot when we don’t realize the impact sexuality has on our world and how it can be our biggest mental stumbling block.

Have you ever realized how much our culture is based on sex?

I’m not talking about the entertainment industry or even Janet Jackson’s little striptease at the Super Bowl.  I’m talking high culture, societal underpinnings, even the ways we interact with each other.

I think it’s hard for us, as part of society, to realize how much sex impacts our daily lives, or at the least, the idealized version of sex we call “romance.”  It really takes stepping out of society for a moment and taking a long, hard look at our behavior.  Or, barring that, you could just be gay.

It’s only been in the past year that I’ve realized my bisexuality, and in that amount of time I’ve had a few epiphanies about mainstream society.  I’ve realized faults in myself and my own world view.  Not moral faults – just strict assumptions that proved to be mental stumbling blocks.  These assumptions mainly lie in the areas of gender roles and heterosexual love, and they enforce on our minds a manufactured, simplistic view of the world.  They keep us from seeing people as themselves and substitute preconceived notions for real understanding.

The worst part about these assumptions, about this code of sexual love, is that we take it for granted.  We don’t even realize that we are being fed a philosophy instead of a reality.  That is what fuels my urgency – because most of you probably answered “no” to my first question.

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First off, humans are highly emotional creatures.  Though we have the ability to reason, we are still swayed by passion and by our animal instincts.  And most times, we’re more likely to give a stronger response to something highly emotional than something highly logical.  Picture yourself in a movie theater, watching the climax of the newest action/romance flick.  The gallant hero has fought his life’s final battle, defeating evil once and for all.  His beloved female sidekick, who is probably sporting a few artfully-placed rips in her clothing and perhaps a lower neckline than she started out with, finds him amid the rubble.  She falls to her knees beside him, gasping in horror, and

a) she says, “Oh, *insert macho name here*, you are dying!  There is severe damage to your lungs and you are most likely bleeding internally.  You were very brave and you saved my life and the lives of many others.  Therefore I mourn you, for this incalculable loss to our safety and for the affection I have felt growing inside me for you since halfway through the movie!”  He dies.

b) she says, “Oh, *insert macho name here*, you can’t die!  No!  NO!”  She collapses, sobbing, as the music swells into powerful minor chords and the camera probably lifts to show the entire scene, dying man, sobbing woman, and destruction from the final battle, all splayed out below.

Did you pick the right answer?  It’s “b” – good job!  “A” sets out the reasons for mourning the guy, but “b” skips right to the emotion.  “B” will get the audience sobbing, if it’s handled correctly.  “A” won’t. 

Anyway, the point is, emotion is what touches us most deeply as humans, what we define ourselves by.  If you look at all of the qualities we find admirable, you’ll find that they have some strong emotion behind them.  Bravery is the ability to overcome fear.  Anger – either the ability to release it constructively or the ability to overcome it – is often a major point of character development in stories.  And among the most powerful of our emotions, of our basic instincts, is sexuality. 

My argument isn’t with the emphasis we place on our emotions.  It’s not even on the emphasis we place on sexuality.  Art deals with what moves us, what touches us deeply, and sexuality certainly does that.  It’s also a fact that at least ninety percent of humans on Earth are heterosexual, so it makes sense that heterosexual love should be emphasized.  My beef is with the fact that we have raised the idea of male/female love to almost mythical proportions, and that we don’t even realize it.  We exclude any other form of love because we have programmed ourselves to believe they don’t exist.

Heterosexuality, even the properties of maleness and femaleness, have been raised from mere circumstances of reality to fundamental truths of life.  The male and the female are often seen as a duality of nature – where there is male influence, female influence is needed to balance the scales.  Where the female stands alone, she needs a male to complete her and balance the world again.  Men and women are commonly understood to complete each other. 

When God created humans, according to Christian tradition, he created Adam out of “the dust of the ground” and then created Eve from one of Adam’s rib bones.  For this reason, a man and his wife were thought to become, upon their union, “one flesh.”  They were inextricably linked in body and spirit.  According to ancient Chinese thought, the world is made up of two forces, the yin and the yang.  The forces are opposites in all regards, and the interaction between them influences our world.  The yang represents warmth, creation, and maleness, among other things, while the yin represents coldness, completion, and femaleness.  Here the idea of male/female as a duality of nature is most clear-cut.

The idea of love as a “truth of life” is evident in much of Western culture for the past few centuries.  In medieval times, a knight would fixate his attentions upon one “lady,” whom he would pledge to serve in heart and strive to win her honor.  Often she was a lady far above him in social standing, or already married.  Though there was no chance of consummating their affections, this platonic love between man and woman was believed to improve the knight.  Poetry from across the world since the dawn of time has heralded love as truth and deified it. 

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Don’t get me wrong – love is a wonderful thing, powerful and mysterious.  But as a species we’ve gone off the deep end, so much so that we don’t even realize we’re off the deep end.  From this early idea of heterosexual love we’ve grown up sexual roles and gender stereotypes which have held women (and gays, for that matter) back for millennia.  We’ve developed strict rules for love which are alternately heralded and discarded over the centuries.  In all, we’ve set up a man-made system of rules for the love between two people, for the nature of gender.  And there’s really nothing wrong with having a system like this.

It’s having the system and acting like you don’t have a system that gets you in trouble.  It’s the belief that people who rebel against this love-system are not flouting your superficial rules, but the very laws of nature, that gets you in trouble.

When we get down to the heart of the matter, “love” is made up of chemical reactions within our bodies.  Sexuality is an evolutionary advancement that allowed early organisms to facilitate greater genetic diversity.  On the more material level, our own sexuality, however much we deify it and regale it as a beautiful, spiritual thing, is a product of our own biochemistry and genes.  Sure, look at love as a wonderful spiritual experience.  I’ve written too much mushy poetry to my crushes to tell you otherwise.  But also, be conscious of the way our ideas of love and sex cloud your worldview.

George Orwell coined a term called “bellyfeel” which I believe sums up this sexual worldview.  “Bellyfeel” refers to a totally visceral reaction, not thought-out at all, yet incredibly strong.  It’s bellyfeel that makes you feel proud when you hear your national anthem belted out over the loudspeaker.  It’s probably bellyfeel that fuels your religion.  Bellyfeel has its place, but it is also incredibly dangerous.  And unfortunately, it is bellyfeel that makes us support so strongly, to feel the naturalness and rightness of, our system of sexuality.  Bellyfeel is responsible for a lot of anti-gay hate crimes, a lot of anti-gay rhetoric from the churches, a lot of anti-feminist rhetoric, and even a lot of our beliefs about the respective roles of the man and woman. 

A person isn’t “male” or “female” primarily; a person is an individual mind and personality that happens to be in a body with a certain configuration of chromosomes.  A person isn’t “gay” or “straight” primarily; he is an individual whose biochemistry makes him become attracted to a certain sex. 

Breaking out of gender roles, even out of heterosexuality, isn’t unnatural.  Rather, it’s the rejection of a system of rules that is itself unnatural.  It’s the ignoring of a code that seeks to place restrictions on our instincts, our emotions, and our individuality.  That code, to me, is the epitome of unnatural.