Sexual Diversity
I suspect most of us, including myself, would rather not deal with sexual diversity, and the greater the diversity, the less we want to address it. There is so little rational about varied sexual orientations and sexual acts, with so much feeling involved, that we only manage to make fools out of ourselves trying to be rational. This country, and the rest of the world, is now going through a transition where everyone is forced to at least accept the existence of gays, but what kind of existence becomes heated. Actually, the sexual lives of heterosexual couples also varies beyond comprehension. If we go to a ‘straight’ porn site there are probably 30 categories of sexual activities we can choose from. If we go to a ‘gay’ porn site their are probably an equal number of categories of sexual activities to choose from. Now really, how can one be rational about all this? With sexual acts, if that is what turns you on, that is what turns you on. Why it turns you on is unexplainable. Good luck explaining to someone why you have a foot fetish. Suddenly I wonder if it is just male feet or female feet which turn into a fetish. Some people don’t find sex of any kind all that appealing—messy and unpleasant. If they want children I guess they ‘close their eyes, spread their legs, and think of England”—or some such noble thoughts they do like to think about.
I reckon most people, at some point, envy most other animals: when the hormones appear, animals have sex, in a prescribed, usually quick fashion, and it is over. They can then get on with their lives. They don’t have to think about it, it is a programmed behavior. Of course, we humans are ‘advanced’, bring the cerebral cortex into the process, and just like that, all this diversity appears, encapsulated in all kinds of emotional feelings at varied levels making human sexual activities a genuine three ring circus. There are seldom serious social discussions about particular sex acts simply because what facts are there to discuss? What religious prophet ever discussed, for example, oral sex? The latest studies in the U.S. show “among women aged 18-19, 58.5% reported that they had performed oral sex on a male partner in the previous year and 58.0% reported that they had received it from a male partner during the same time period.” Exactly how could there be any logical or factual debate over this practice? I never see it on the menu in a restaurant where most oral ingestion occurs. When is the last time someone discussed an exciting oral sex adventure the next day with you? Sex acts are something we want to do (or at least one of the partners wants to do), but explaining why we want to do a particular sex act is pure feeling, not rational thought. Good luck having a masochist rationally explain needing pain to provide ‘good sex’. I don’t think masochists ever get beheaded by ISIS. No one seems to die with an erection.
Essentially we are reduced to throwing up our hands and mostly concluding “well, as long as it is consensual between adults ‘I don’t care what a couple does as long as they don’t do it in the streets and scare the horses’.” Of course we talk about sex a lot: via endless jokes and those who get caught doing some sort of ‘kinky’ sex or having any kind of sex with someone else’s spouse or significant other. How many people have their life ruined because of sexual adventures they simply can’t control? It’s really tragic, at least to them. What would drive a well known public figure to pay a prostitute $5000 an hour for sex? Or a priest to start molesting children? Or a famous athlete to send pictures of his private part to women he is not dating (or even dating for that matter)? Emotions override common sense in these cases, even those with normally a lot of common sense.
Now that societies are beginning to think gays can be allowed to openly exist, and even marry each other, we look forward to a period of calm. Then, ready to willingly or begrudgingly adjust to all this—BAM, an Olympic Champion male swimmer decides he is a female and starts dressing up like a sexy female. Is this ok? Is there anything which is not ok when it comes to consensual sex or what gender we can say we are? When we try to figure out answers, at best, we often end up with: “There ain’t no answers. There ain’t going to be any answers. There never has been any answers. That’s the Answer.” And at worst, it is often an adamant certainty: “Over my dead body, this is outrageous, God is furious.” My sense is that if God is furious, then I don’t wish to get in the way, or snatch away His choice of punishment.
If someone has a foot fetish, or swings from a chandelier while having anal sex, at least it is out of sight—well, maybe for now, until American Idol is replaced on TV by American Sex Olympics. But transgenders are not out of sight. Then again, in all my years of teaching college students I don’t recall ever having had a transgender in class. Perhaps I just didn’t know. Actually, I can’t recall ever having had a personal conversation with a transgender. For me, if someone is not hurting others by their behavior I tend to think they should be whatever they really are. I have enough trouble dealing with my own realities and feelings, so ‘live and let live’ pretty much governs my judgement of other peoples sex lives.
Then this week, suddenly there is this turmoil about whether a transgender boy who identifies himself as a female, can use the girls bathroom in a high school. The school says no, the government says yes. And I say ‘enough already’. Clearly a lot of girls are not going to like that. Then I happened to read the following article and once again, I found a need to rethink the whole thing. Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone was on the same page with sex stuff? Loving someone is hard enough without having to turn ourselves into a pretzel to make the match sexually compatible. Maybe evolution took a wrong turn. It would be easier if we could fall in love with someone, and love really be perfect if our love made them fall in love with us, and then——poof, when the hormones periodically kicked in, we would then have prescribed sex with no variation. No one would be filing for divorce over sexual incompatibility. Hormones would be in control. That would certainly solve debates about infidelity. “Why are you late getting home?” Well, I was standing next to Robert Redford on the train when his hormones kicked in”
The following article helped me come to some sort of conclusion:
The article got me to focus on the child, not me and my feelings. If half these transgender kids commit suicide, that doesn’t seem good at all. I guess, if we can’t correct who somebody is, and if they are good citizens, then we all, collectively, have the obligation to make life easier for them. That is the Golden Rule, and that is the Christian way also. There are many people, for example, who really don’t feel comfortable in public showers, and for differing reasons. We always need to separate nudity from sexual behaviors and personal hang-ups. Nudity, per se, is not sexual. I suppose, if airlines required everyone to sit in the plane nude most of us, not centerfold material, would be unhappy. The days of kids being protected from nude pictures or videos of the opposite sex are long gone. And really, going to a public bathroom is not really up-in-our faces nudity or anything sexual. What do we really think is going to happen if this transgender girl, in that high school, is allowed to use the girl’s bathroom? My guess is that most young people will deal with it very quickly, and those that don’t, need some counseling as to why they are so upset. Live, and let live, is something worth striving for in our formative years. It just makes the world a better place for everyone. Feelings too often produce mountains out of molehills. Once I read this article and there was a particular person focused, my mindset changed. No one in their right mind would ever wish to be a boy with a girls body or a girl with a boy’s body. Such people obviously exist and I, for one, would not wish to make their life any more difficult than it is. There is something really good about love, one person for another, in the various ways love can manifest itself. The mother in this article appears to be a very loving mother and is handling a difficult situation well. Why should any of us want to make a difficult situation harder? Diversity is a fact of God’s evolutionary process. Whenever we have difficulty accepting this, in these situations where no one else is being hurt by someone’s uniqueness, then we are the ones who need help. Why the hell would I want to make some fellow classmates life more difficult without a good reason for doing so? When my feelings are making life difficult for someone else, who is a good citizen and bothering no one else, then I reckon I need to adjust my feelings. Fair is fair. Sexual minorities are feeling on a roll now, and what possibly could be next? Maybe there is someone out there with a penis and a vagina. Now what public bathroom do they use? I’m a semi hermit, let the rest of you figure it all out. I suspect Penelope might change his name in a few years. Too much like a boy named Sue. Maybe Penington.
P.S. I no sooner got through writing this but the news hit that some Colorado High School cancelled the last football game because the police are investigating a student contest in which the winner has collected the most nude pictures of classmates. The article said so far hundreds of students are involved. It kind of makes the anger over a single student with a sex identity problem gaining access to the bathroom of his choice a bit silly. Maybe today we don’t even need separate bathrooms and certainly not solid walls, but windows to make the lighting right for the nude photos. Huh? Perhaps if normal sex-identity students no longer care that much about nude photos of themselves being collected, my generation shouldn’t care either. EXCEPT: this is certainly predatory on the ugly since here is a contest they would be ashamed to participate in, and their photo probably worth the most money for the grossness of it all. I always opposed letting students casually hug each other in hallways between classes as a greeting. Not because I am at all offended by it since I would rather see students hug each other than shoot or knife each other, BUT, once again, the less attractive students have to walk down the hallway with no one hugging them. It is like with every change of classes there is an instant replay of the popularity totem pole. Now that I am older I cringe when thinking of certain girls back in my youth totally ostracized because of their looks. I don’t know how they ever made it through the school day. Teachers hesitated to ever call on them for the callous, even if muffled, belittling noises generated. Kids can be mindlessly cruel, and we should never miss a chance to make them appreciate diversity, and the need for all kids to gain some respect, even when different in harmless enough ways.
I sure hope this nude picture contest doesn’t spread to older citizens. Everyone would be afraid to open Grandma’s photo Christmas card. But at least all my acquaintances would be thankfully delighted that I don’t even send Christmas cards. I did once get a photo Christmas card where a friend had his head up his ass. Of course I could not be certain it was him with the head buried. My uncle got one too and complained that it wasn’t very Christmascy. Who the hell would send out such a Christmas card to others? Never mind, best for me to close the book on the origin of such a tasteless act. Someone once claimed I could write a serious essay and then turn it on a dime into nonsense. That is true since, on most serious topics, after all is said and done, with more said than done, humor is a necessity to preserve our sanity. Perhaps God’s evolutionary process created humor to help us survive this experience called life. I do laugh a lot, not always appropriately, and hardest at my own jokes, but then again—I am still alive, albeit some say miraculously. I kind of suspect that when I stop laughing, death will follow rather quickly.
