Sexuality is not a Choice REEEE
I remember an anecdote told by one of the people I met in college. Her mom was an alcoholic, and she told the story of how, one night, when she was in highschool, her mom got as drunk as ever. On this night, certain that her mother would not remember a thing in the morning, my friend took the risk of telling her a secret: she was gay. Her drug-influenced mind, then, rambled something about how my friend should “fly like a bird” and “be who she wants to be.”
Of course, in the morning, she did remember. No words were spoken about it, there was just a knowing glance across the silent kitchen as they made breakfast before school and work. By late afternoon, my friend decided to break the silence. She sheepishly approached the living room couch and asked in a small voice: “are you gonna send me to straight camp?” The mother just smiled and replied: “no, I will not send you to a summer camp filled with other gay girls and expect you to come back straight.”
Nowadays, more people than not subscribe to the belief that sexual attraction is not a choice, it is pre wired into our brains. Thus, ideas such as straight camp and the belief that gays should just turn themselves straight through force of will have been largely rejected as not only a threat to individual freedom, but a proposal which will never reach its desired outcome. This is one of the ways that the left-wing of the previous generation has improved society; by asserting that one’s sexual preferences matter less than if they try to be good person, and what consenting adults do in their own bedroom should not be anyone else’s business. These are the stories of societal improvement that the millennials of the social-justice left have grown up hearing, and they aspire to follow along this type of path.
While intending well, I think that many of these people have abandoned their principle of sexual preference not being a choice in order to score political points. I am led to this belief by the fact that the same people who heard that story and started complaining about straight camps afterword went on to hold a #FreeTheNipple event at my school in 2015.
For those unfamiliar, FTN is a movement attempting to end “gender discrimination” by adapting public nudity laws to allow women to go completely shirtless in public, just like men do. One of the frequently asked questions at this campus event, of course, was how they would justify children seeing sexual body parts in public. The standard response was a rehearsed speech on why the female breast was not a sexual organ.
Yet for all their rehearsal, the fact remains, I am sexually attracted to the female breast. Upon seeing female breasts, I get sexually aroused. Seeing female breasts in public until it becomes “normal” will not change my level of sexual attraction to them, and if a conscious decision to not be attracted to female breasts could be made, millions of gay men killed throughout all of human history would have lived a full life and died of natural causes.
I reject the #FreeTheNipple movement for the same reason I reject straight camps: societal definitions of which body parts are sexual and who may be attracted to them will not change no matter how much we want them to.
This opinion of mine has been on the backburner of my mind since that event happened in 2015. Enter Blaire White: conservative trans woman.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV_YzLHF_1w&t=56s
In this video, she brings up a different aspect of social justice that is likewise trying to alter what people are allowed to find attractive. She points out trans people and people of minority races stating that x person not wanting to date someone in their group means that x person is bigoted. In a mark of beauty that shows me there’s still some good in the world, Blaire called it out: “In this particular instance (deciding who to sleep with) it is absolutely okay to discriminate, in fact, it’s your prerogative.” Nobody should be forced or shamed into sleeping with someone they do not want to be with. In my case, I especially don’t want to sleep with anyone who earnestly believes refusal to be intimate with a certain group of people is bigotry.
The social justice left has abandoned the principles that made all the left-wing movements with libertarian streaks in the 20th century great; specifically in this instance, that people should be able to sleep with whoever they are attracted to and avoid whoever they are not attracted to. In their actions but not their words, they have abandoned the idea that sexuality is not a choice. This is one of the many grains of sand that have built up to breaking the camel’s back when I abandoned social justice. I will not return unless they change this, and many other authoritarian principles that they now hold.