In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela said that “Freedom is indivisible.” (scroll down for full quote and attribution)
The concept has been embraced and echoed around the globe by all people struggling for their human rights: either there is equal freedom for all or no one is free. The LGBTQ Marriage Rights fight’s slogan echoes the idea in different words, “No one is equal until we are all equal.”
We all know it is true. Any society that grants more rights to one group and fewer to another based on religious beliefs is not a democracy. Despite the hand-wringing of anti-sex forces that the U.S. is too sexually free, there is no real sexual freedom here. We are among a tiny handful of countries — all of the others openly Theocratic — who kowtow to religious beliefs when it comes to our reproductive rights, our schools, our laws, and our cultural mores on the whole.
Yes, “separation of Church and State” is given lip service in the USA. So is free speech. In truth, we are downright Theocratic about sex. No separation. Lots of censorship.
And in such a system, it’s invariable that non-kinky, non-queer binary heterosexuals get all the social advantages. Everything is so heteronormative and binary, from tv ads to family expectations, it looks like it’s just great to be heterosexual. Or so it seems on the surface.
Through a sexologist’s lens, absolutely no one benefits by a religious-based system of laws about sex — except, perhaps, for the people who make their fame and fortune by peddling dogma.
No One is Free
Heterosexuals may believe they have sexual freedom but, ironically, while they have the social freedom to declare their love in public without fear of getting harassed or harmed, and get affirmed in social settings, they are often mentally imprisoned by the culture they live in.
I have worked with hundreds of vanilla/straight/conformative adults whose sex lives are breathtakingly narrow. Wives who have never seen their husband fully nude or dare to look closely at his genitals. Husbands who crave a variety and passion their wives will not provide. Sexless marriages. Marriages between virgins who discover they are sexually incompatible. Wives who never had an orgasm with their husband. No mutual masturbation, no masturbation in front of each other, no anal, no oral, no toys. People who believe that a blow-job is kinky if not downright perverted. Who believe that the only normal sex is missionary position sex. These are all people who choose irrational dogma over self-actualization.
Of course, there are happy couples, traditional binary monogamous heterosexuals who explore every last thing. But they seem to be a minority. Or perhaps they are the majority, and the people who have worked with me are the ones who are deeply unhappy living by an incredibly narrow, almost inhuman, set of rules. From a therapist’s vantage it’s hard to know, but statistics have shown that, on the whole, BDSMers and gay people generally have more satisfying sex lives with their partners than traditional heterosexuals.
So what kind of freedom do they really have? Certainly not the freedom to fully experience the joys of creative sex. Not the right to be fully alive in their bodies.
You don’t need to be an alien from another planet to see it as bizarre. It’s as plain as day to the rest of us.
Sexual Inequality = Human Trauma
That rest of us — we outliers, sex radicals, we folks who like what we like and pay little attention to people who try to dictate what we can and cannot do in bed — pay a price for defying social norms.
Where should I start to explain the price people like us have paid historically? With the way our culture has demonized homosexuality, a normal, harmless variation? With a system that criminalizes sex work, a job found throughout the world and which harms none when it’s between consenting adults? I could write volumes on how society has cruelly destroyed the lives of fetishists. And gay/lesbian people. Or how transgendered people have been vilified simply for being themselves!
There are no rational explanations: our victimization comes at the hands of people who value their belief system over human lives. Their “normal” is a deal with the devil, not an angel. They can’t see it, either. They would rather pretend that Aunt Sally’s “roommate” is asexual and that Uncle Bob’s feminine affect is “just Bob” rather than accept that homosexuality and transgenderism are so normal that almost every biological family includes people like us. Sex and gender diversity is biologically normal. They can’t see that either.
Such a massive denial of reality creates trauma for nonconformist sex/gender communities. It forces us to hide and to fear for our lives if anyone finds out our true identity. It makes some of us emotionally unstable, taking risks we shouldn’t. It makes others of us ashamed, in perpetual fear that someone will find our porn or web searches. And that kind pressure is mentally agonizing. So agonizing that youngsters who don’t fit the binary heterosexual norm are driven to suicide at an alarming rate. So depressing that adults who feel trapped into sacrificing their needs suffer self-doubt and self-loathing. And for WHAT? WHY?
Where did this come from?
At some point in ancient times, before we had any kind of science or reliable study of sexuality, rulers, philosophers, and religious leaders declared that people can only have a very specific kind of sex. And what did these ancients really know about sex? About as much as alchemists knew about turning lead into gold. IOW, nothing honey.
And where does it get us?
We have to wonder – what are the repercussions of those absurdly outdated ideas about sex? SO. MUCH. DAMAGE. To straights, to queers, to everyone.
For people like us, it means major TRAUMA. The trauma of being outcast, mocked, scorned, and discriminated against. The trauma of social inequality. The trauma of being told time and again that you’re sick, ungodly, and otherwise unequal to those who live by unquestioned rules and unrealistic models.
An ignorant ancient system still rules us, continuously fueled by people who themselves are trapped and dehumanized by its sexual tyranny.
Sexual Freedom is Indivisible
No one is sexually free until everyone is sexually free.
No one can be free under a system that dictates your sex life or imposes gender rules. No one is free when a belief system dictates what you do in bed, who you love, or how you engage in private sexual activity. No matter your orientation, the so-called norm demands cult-like compliance with “the way it should be” instead of the way people really are. We are diverse. Different. Beautiful in our own unique ways. We are a splendid species, held captive by a primitive ideology that treats us like clones.
Until the system changes, none of us will ever be free.
If we want to consider ourselves free, that heartless and injust system must bow to reason. The system must address its cruelties, the millions of lives it’s destroyed, the millions more it has driven to mental unrest. The system must confront the lies it’s dispensed in the name of righteousness. There is nothing righteous about uneducated, fact-rejecting idiots who ruin lives for no purpose other than because they can.
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“Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me.” Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela with Connections.
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