Sleeping Hermaphroditus, ancient marble sculpture at Louvre Museum
It's
more uncomfortable to talk about sexuality than about wars, diseases
or even death, it's a subject so broad and controversial. Way more often I've heard people talking about their sexual acts, than about their sexuality (feelings, thoughts, attractions,
behaviours).
Sexuality
goes to strange places that few people feel fine to share
about.
Rage, fear and reproductive drive come all from the same command center, the reptilian brain. But we're not lizards anymore, we got much fancier and complicated, we experience and express our sexuality not only biologically, but also erotically, emotionally, socially and spiritually. As if it wasn't already crazy enough, we flamed this cocktail with morality and religion for hundreds of years, trying to distillate it into a plain drink, vanilla sex. It's true that a vast majority of individuals are sexually predisposed exclusively to the other sex, but the modern heterosexual behaviour has been experiencing way behind vaginal intercourse, marital relationship, monogamy, or conventional sex. The numbers about the LGBTQIA+ community are as random as they can be, depending on quite a lot of conditions like country, religion, social environment, culture, education, age groups, type of questionnaire, etc. Hence we only know it's a minority who dares more or less (or at all) to go public with its stories. The first gay pride was only 50 years ago. The sexual revolution started in the US in the '60, but it still didn't arrive in all countries.
The newcomers to the democracy have already been facing a great challenge to understand and contain the deviations from their long-established norms. The pandemic came on the top of it with the power talk. Since it started, we're witnessing flare-ups around the human rights - they're getting undermined by dominant parties or rulers in some countries, or upgraded in others where the activism is strong and the public opinion, progressive. Of course sexuality couldn't miss this party. Gay rights gained ground in many countries, legalizing same-sex marriage or decriminalizing the homosexuality, but suffered a setback (together with women rights) in few others like Poland, Hungary, Russia, losing gender recognition, banning the same-sex marriage, forbidding abortions, reiterating violence against women.
The Pope Francis set up a confusing paradigm, on one hand, he said, Homosexual people have a right to be in a family. They are children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out or be made miserable over it. Afterwards he came with a clarification, he was referring to the right to be accepted by their own families as children and siblings, but not that they had a right to have a family.
In other words, be gays, but not happily wedded.
In 2020 we heard about gender like never before. Ellen Page came out as a transgender, changing his name into Elliot Page. Eddie Izzard came out as a gender fluid, with the gender identity she. I applaud them both for being so gutsy and honest. Coming out only to family and friends is already a long and painful trip, I know it from my own experience. Anyway, nowadays the gayness is almost boring next to the other sex and gender categories in the spotlight (intersex, non-binary, pangender, two-spirit, spectrasexual, demisexual, etc.). It's great we talk about all of it, it's great we strengthen the rights to protect everyone. But it gets problematic when it comes to changing lifetime habits to accommodate a great diversity that represents a small minority. A hospital in UK (BSUH) went public into supporting the transgender parents using gender-neutral language: chestfeeding, human milk, co-parent, second biological parent etc. A list dedicated to gender identity and expression put together 64 terms: https://www.healthline.com/health/different-genders#why-it-matters
Vocabularies have inflated to represent the whole sexual & gender spectrum. It gets intimidating. It's
a lot to digest at once.
The right to define one's self should definitely be on the list of the human rights. So we can get over it. It's always like this, once we get a right, we recall it less and less. Now it's about words, words, words. When we start chocking with them, maybe we'll create a new way to simplify our dialogue, one that keeps everyone safe and respected. I found out about the sexual vocabulary much later than my erotical experiences. I didn't need any terms, the body language always did the trick better than any explanation. Only our minds are made of words, if we obsess on them, we'll miss everything else.
I'm going with what Luis Buñuel said: If I had to define myself? I’d walk out the door without a word. I don’t define myself.
