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Modern Sexual Options Described as Ice Cream Flavors
And why social constraints around sexual identity exist in the first place.
Let’s say that vanilla is opposite gender attraction and chocolate is same gender attraction. Heterosexuals love vanilla. Homosexuals love chocolate. Bisexuals love both. Pansexuals don’t just love vanilla and chocolate, they’re into all the flavors. And asexuals prefer slushies. Reddit
Why do we define sex as an identity?
And as long as we are talking about sexual relations between consenting adults, why are there limits on what kinds of sex are considered ok and what kinds aren’t?
Isn’t sex something we do throughout our lifetimes? Not an indelible identity?
This is where we could all use a lesson from the horny, drunk, and often naked Ancient Greeks. Although same-sex relations were common among Ancient Greeks, they didn’t have a word for homosexuality. They viewed sex as an act, rather than an identity. People had sex because it was something they wanted to do — it didn’t define them. It didn’t limit them. Grace Ryan
The French philosopher Foucault wrote that legislating sex, sexual identity, and the definition of sexual archetypes was actually done as a method of social control.
Even today, labels and ideas about sexual identity are slapped on peoples’ private and consensual pleasures in the bedroom have been used for exactly those purposes. Shame and control.
- The attempt to rigidly define people. Aka “the closet.”
- The attempt to establish a high-ground of sexual morality based on one set of sexual rules.
- The attempt to disenfranchise people on the margins of society who don’t conform to the mainstream sexual rules.
- The attempt to cast self-doubt on individuals coming of age in a culture where breaking the rules is considered to be deviant, illegal, and sinful.
- And of course, the elitist attempt to divide and rule the masses based on division, competition, and scarcity.
