I’ve heard some US and UK political and religious figures state that the varied pallet of human sexual affects are “lifestyle choices”, and before today I had only arguments from a moral – what harm does come of this that you would be so against it?, science based – queerness in sexual endeavours seems to be present in many animals and not limited to humans that can make those choices, and reasoning – I’m not convinced that people would “choose” to be outside of the norm, perspectives.
Today we, Em and I, went to a museum in the model village of Port Sunlight, a place known for an eccentric capitalist who chose to treat his workers particularly well, giving them pension, healthcare, recreation, health & safety rules, and educating their children (what a guy). Then we went to the art gallery, it was here I saw a piece of art that made me think. The usual was on display, recreations of Roman and Greek statues and busts, hanging pictures, fine furniture, and tapestries. One piece stood out, a small statue of a boy with a penis and a pair of female breasts, very feminine looking, deliberately so.
This reproduction of an original recovered Roman statue dates from somewhere in the Roman Republic, so pre-dating the Christianity of the aforementioned political and social figures that so often cite their view of sexuality from their religiously founded perspective. Just think about that, the religion forms a truth long after art reflects the socially accepted perspective truth of the understanding of human sexuality, at least the view of it, that the Greeks had and the Romans adopted. What is more likely, that sexual ambiguity is a modern “choice” like the commentators contend, or that we as a species have always known that sexuality is fluid and that such knowledge is at odds with a religion that espouses falsehoods that we know are false? A quick search of the person in the statues yields the below explanation….
In ancient Greece, Hermaphroditus came to symbolize the fluidity of gender and desire, representing an ideal of harmony and wholeness that transcended binary opposites
Greeks and Romans practiced their sex lives without rigid definitions, they had pleasurable physical relations with both men and women, and unashamedly so. That fact, at least the artistic representation of it, is easy to identify. Isn’t history littered with such information, embedded in art? Granted that a lot of that is of course propaganda, but representation is also present, we just need to contextualise what the art says by correlating it with the written history and the literature of the same epoch. If we do this to Hellenistic output we find that this particular artistic representation of gender fluidity is not abnormal at all.
Bottom line, we need to understand where our views have been created as social constructs by motivated people, and then rally against them. In truth, the sexual practices of other people, if carried out by consenting persons, is something that we should have no judgement at all over. Just let them be, and do, whatever the fuck it is they need to do to get their jollies.
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