After posting Names for Sex Problems the other week, I got email from someone who said that they identified with many of the problems on the list. It touched my heart. The reason I got into studying sex on a professional level was to help shed some truth on a subject shrouded in myths and ignorance. I’m talking about S-E-X!
One of my research goals for Different Loving was unpacking why kink was viewed as “deviance” and “abnormal sexuality” in the first place. That had always been presented as a scientific fact in big, important-looking books written by renowned psychiatrists for over a century. What I found were male-centered assumptions and social constructs translated into scientific terminology. It was entirely theoretical, yet forwarded by white European men entrenched in Victorian and Judeo-Christian patriarchy as scientific fact. On a close read of the original texts, though, the science was out of date and their assertions were ludicrous. Worse, 20th-century doctors clung to that obsolete dross and made fortunes treating alleged sex and gender psychopathy.
Was it good science?
Put simply: it was terrible science. It wasn’t what we would ever consider science in 2022. The theories about homosexuality, transgenderism, kink, and every other form of non-heteronormative/reproductive-oriented sex — including masturbation and “female frigidity” — were trash. Yup, I’ve just said it: TRASH.
The old psychiatrists were patently wrong about normal variations in the human sex/gender gamut. Of course, they didn’t have the resources we have today. They were breaking all new ground. If they were alive today, they would be forced to correct their dangerous mistakes and apologize. Freud would be embarrassed about his “penis envy” and “Oedipal Complex” theories and Krafft-Ebbing would have to gut his theories on “paraphilias,” perhaps with the help of the BDSM communities. Sure, over time, the DSM has crept along and begun to change to present a more contemporary understanding of sexual diversity. But it isn’t enough! Their changes still don’t accurately reflect the depth and scope of the 21st-century science of sex and gender diversity.
The 21st century needs its “I was tormented for being who I am” ME TOO moment. All the LGBT people who were bullied, jailed, and murdered, all the hedonists, sex-workers, kinksters, and fetishists who were despised, publically disgraced, and imprisoned, they all deserve a massive apology from the entire medico/forensic/psychiatric communities for continuing to spread the kind of vicious stupidity that has brought us to a place where most cultures still view people like us as abnormal and charlatans continue to do aversion therapy (or “conversion,” as they call it).
The lies drag on and on, passed from one generation to the next.
What’s Really Abnormal Sexuality?
Stand back from the wide world of sex for a moment, and imagine a man and a woman doing the same sex act in the same exact position from the day they marry until the day they are laid to rest. Imagine that they have other fantasies, other desires, yet feel so controlled by their belief system that they dare not mention it to their partners. Is that normal? Are they not sex slaves to their belief system?
Yet it’s how most people in the West, and particularly in the U.S., view sex. You can only do this one thing over and over and over again. Masturbation is wrong. Blow jobs are wrong. Anal sex is wrong. Everything that isn’t vaginal penetration by a penis is wrong. Even contraception is wrong.
You know what’s wrong? Believing that living in sexual self-denial is right.
I’m not talking about a kink for mutually consensual orgasm control. That’s dandy. I’m talking about thinking it’s immoral to touch yourself between the legs. As if the Almighty drew a red circle around the sinful part of your body. It’s such a sad collective delusion.
The true hell for most people is internalized sexual repression. It warps their personality. It harms their relationships.
Sexual repression comes with a price
Last night, a snippet of news pinged my usually keen queerdar. Someone I perceived as a butch, trans or nonbinary person was talking about trans rights so I turned the volume up to listen to them. I was perplexed by their argument. I realized that they weren’t an advocate for trans rights. They were a cis-woman who opposed them. It reminded me of the clergymen who rail against Sodomites until they are caught with a choir boy.
You know what else sexual repression does to people? It makes them hate themselves. And often it makes them hate freer people, who accept themselves, with the hysteria of animals cruelly trapped in small cages. Because in a real sense they are trapped in cages. Cages of shame that are locked shut by toxic beliefs.
How The Lies About Abnormality Hurt Everyone
When you sip your first cup of coffee of the day, do you bask in the superiority of being part of a coffee cult? If you drink something else, do you worry that you are abnormal? When you go out to lunch, do you order the exact same meal as everyone in line? Do you feel ashamed for preferring roast beef to ham? Or the color green to the color blue? Do you put on sock/shoe sock/shoe, or sock/sock shoe/shoe, and what of it? Do these common differentials define you as a person or put your sanity into question??
Variations exist across every single human behavior, from choices in food to choices in cars, homes, pets, clothes, ad infinitum. There’s a reason manufacturers make thousands of colors and styles of shirts to choose from: they are cashing in on a universal human need for variety.
Tell me why, then, when it comes to sex and gender, someone might think there’s one true norm for all. I mean, who taught them to take a one-dimensional view of the single-most multi-dimensional creatures on the planet when it comes to sexual and gender behavior? It wasn’t someone who studied sex or gender, that is for sure. Nor was it someone who looked honestly at the world, shrugged, and said “different strokes for different folks.”
What is this doing to us?
Teaching people that sex and gender abnormality is a THING poisons the well of goodness within us and our cultures. Socially, it creates bogus elites who believe they’re superior to other people by virtue of their conformity to a belief system. It creates division and promotes the persecution of people for expressing sex and gender differences. It painfully silences people in public, in families, and, even worse, leads to self-denial, internalized repression, and the toxic fruit of self-hatred — self-annihilation.
How many more studies do we need to prove that growing up in a sexually repressed society leads to mental and physical health crises before societies accept that the best way to save lives is to save the living from dying of despair?
If we care about our friends, our kids, our families, and our societies, we have to stop the sloppy-stupid ignorance about human sexuality.
Us Too and We’re Tired of It
People like us need our “Me Too” moment. We need one that is loud and clear. No “well, you’re fucked up but we love you in spite of who you are.” We need a heartfelt apology for demonizing us in the first place. We need to hold doctors and court systems accountable for clinging to Victorian quackery and to demand they step up to modern science. Sex and gender diversity are biological norms for humans.
It’s time to retire the term “abnormal sexuality.” Abnormality implies rarity — for example when we find an anomaly we didn’t previously know existed. But since we now know that a significant percentage of people the world over don’t fit the binary heteronormative mold, that hundreds of millions of people are LGBQ, Transgender, or kinky, those identities must be accepted as normal variations.
Sex and gender differences are evolutionary features, not flaws, not aberrations, and certainly never a sin. Our natural diversity is good for the gene pool. That’s good for society. It’s good for the world. To accept that reality is good for us all.
banner credit: Scientists Behaving Badly
