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Why I chose to promote heterosexuality
“Sexuality is what your mind allows you to do.”
It wasn’t until year eight of my schooling, or thereabouts, that I started to visualize girls sexually. In fact as late as year ten of my schooling, my classmates would struggle to imagine me even getting excited at the thought of girls. I was a joker, a philosopher, or naughty, but one thing that I never was; I was never a charmer or charmed! Lucky for me I was growing up in India where gay culture was, and potentially still isn’t, strong. Else my classmates could have very naturally assumed that I was gay, and potentially even convinced me the same. But that’s where the crux of this piece lies; right there in my childhood.
When one looks at all the young school girls with their highly inappropriate clothing for their age and activities, one could very well be drawn into age old arguments of moral policing and sexualisation of the female bodies. But hey, that’s not the most important thing at play here. One can deny nature because it suits their ideology (oops!), but nature is much more complex than that. Let me de-sex the situation and put it this way, basing my assertion on my own experience of being a child once; a 10 year old school girl or boy may not be interested in sex at all, even if they knew what it was, but a 14 year old girl or boy, or a 40 year old woman or man, are not in the same shoes. What makes paedophilia such a morally reprehensible wrong is that it involves the exploitation of someone who doesn’t even know what is involved until the moment their innocence is mostly slyly defrauded off them by someone who knows exactly what is involved. And that’s where the first aspect of sexuality comes in; it is about understanding what sex actually involves.
As we grow older we begin to confuse love and sex, thinking that the two are intertwined, conveniently forgetting that we could love more deeply even when we didn’t know what sex was. But of course, once the knowledge of sex adulterates our conscious thoughts, our viewpoint of love changes. We can no longer love someone without expecting to consummate our relationship at some point of time. But at the same time, we also consciously set up moral boundaries as to who we can have sex with and who we cannot. For example; irrespective of our sexualities, we all tell ourselves that sex with parents and siblings is wrong, even though friends may or may not make that list, or only some of them may. This is where the second aspect of sexuality comes in; the boundaries of what’s in and what’s not.
Now returning to my childhood, or rather young adulthood, or adolescence if you are language police; it was that impressionable age where I was to determine my life style choices. Heterosexuality, as already noted, was the only known lifestyle in my society, and therefore setting up boundaries of what’s in and what’s not, was very simple for me; it had to be girls only. But had I been a child growing in say US at that time, the story might have been different. I might have been labelled a freak by my classmates, and some others might have impressed upon me that I was probably gay. And since being gay, even though a disadvantage and source of discrimination in many a society, was still a normalized choice in US at that time, I could have very easily set up boundaries to exclude girls from my choice of sex partners. And this is where the second-last aspect of sexuality comes in; the reinforcement.
One tells oneself who is inside the sex circle, and then positively excludes the rest out of it, again and again until their choice becomes a second nature to them. Any person can be homosexual or heterosexual or even bisexual, the only determinant of the choice being what’s in and what’s out of the boundaries of sexuality. There is nothing unwomanly about a lesbian’s body, or unmanly about a gay’s body. They still produce the same hormones and have the same morphological features as their heterosexual counterparts. Yet their choice of what gives them sexual pleasure couldn’t be any more different. But what really is this sexual pleasure. Science would explain all the hormones human body will release at the culmination of the sexual act, which doesn’t even need to be an intercourse with another organism, leave alone another human. But that is not what sexual pleasure is about! One can indulge oneself without even thinking about what they are doing, and their body would still release the hormones it is designed to release, yet the satisfaction won’t be there. So what makes up this last aspect of sexuality; la satisfaction?
Let’s go back to the headline of this piece; what role is mind playing in sex, which is in addition to the body? The mind is at first instance limiting your choice of sexual partners, and then at the second instance, telling you how satisfied you are that you have done it with whom you wanted to do it with. Perhaps now everything written above would make a better sense. Once you know what sex is and how it is done, and your mind has determined whom you can have sex with, then the only thing left to do is to enjoy the act accordingly. Your mind knows what sex is, your mind tells you whom you can have it with, and your mind tells you that you are satisfied. So is it not all just in your mind?
Now let’s return to my young adulthood again and consider the role the social dynamics played in shaping up my sexuality. I am heterosexual because I have grown up to like girls. And I like girls as much because I like them, but equally because my mind has set boundaries to tell me that girls is what boys have sex with. Positive reinforcement of cultural values plays an important role in determining a person’s sexuality. It is really easy to hate girls, because they think differently than boys. And with the wild ride that feminism has been for many a girl in western society, their adamant posture at being a muse for boys further tests the boys liking for girls. It is really easy for boys to like boys and girls to like girls, and day by day it is becoming harder for the boys and girls to like each other. Day by day it is becoming easier to be gay! So is it not becoming apparently clear now as to why I chose to promote heterosexuality?
But let me assure you here; it is not the only reason. There is another big reason for me to promote heterosexuality. Since heterosexuality and homosexuality is all in mind, it is easy to promote either or both lifestyles, yet I chose heterosexuality because it is the only way humans can produce children, and children should preferably grow in a family made up of a father and a mother. Now I know there are gay icons who are lesbian mothers, and I also know they are going to argue there is nothing wrong with two women raising a child. Then given the fact that most relationships don’t last these days, and many kids end up growing with only one of their biological parents, their arguments do carry good weight. But is that all that is to be said? What about the child?
It is easy to say for a gay parent that their child is not being deprived of any love by being born to a homosexual parent, but isn’t it just pure selfishness, to assume what a child would like and then impose your choice of lifestyle and its consequences on a yet to be conceived individual? Just because many kids will likely grow with only one parent doesn’t mean that they will never have a relationship with the other, or wouldn’t want to have it. Promoting homosexual lifestyle would eventually lead to many such questions that would involve rights of individuals that are yet to be born. The discussions won’t just end at marriage equality.
I chose to promote heterosexuality because I know anyone can be heterosexual. I chose to promote heterosexuality because I don’t want to argue whether an unborn child has any rights tomorrow. I chose to promote heterosexuality because I am heterosexual and I want my kids to be heterosexual, which I know will be highly likely when heterosexuality is considered the normal way of life. No, I do not support any discrimination against anyone, least of all because of who they sleep with at night. But that does not mean I should promote sleeping with the same sex.
Fatal Urge Carefree Kiss,
Amanpreet Singh Rai
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