SEXUAL ORIENTATION: WHAT IS IT?
In a lifetime there are many landmarks that force you to confront your attitudes to sex. One of the most powerful catalysts is discovering an attraction to a person of the same sex. It’s a situation that invokes powerful emotions because it makes -you question yourself, and impacts on your relationships to family and to society. The implications of a same-sex attraction can be far-reaching.
Many of you will go through life and never have the slightest physical attraction to your own gender, not even in your dreams or fantasies, but it’s very likely that sooner or later someone close to you will … a brother, a sister, a child, a parent, a cousin, a close friend … and you may well find yourself in a dilemma between your love or friendship for that person and what you thought were your attitudes to homosexuality.
We have become used to hearing about sexism, racism and more recently agism. They are terms that help us to recognize and understand some of the attitudes we have grown up with; attitudes that are more than just benign intolerance. They have caused fear, anguish, despair and even death. They have the power to isolate and destroy. These words describe prejudice. A glance at my Collins dictionary tells me that ‘prejudice’ means ‘An opinion formed beforehand, esp. an unfavourable one based on inadequate facts …’, and it strikes me that this definition could well apply to conventional attitudes to homosexuality and bisexuality. Could it be that society’s traditional ‘unfavorable opinion’ is the result of ‘inadequate facts’? As we learn more about the diversity of other cultures or the thoughts and feelings of the other gender, we gain the understanding we need to overcome the prejudices of racism and sexism. So what about sexual orientation?
It’s twenty years since the American Psychiatric Association struck homosexuality from its list of psychiatric disorders, yet despite this official declaration many people in the general community continue to see a same-sex orientation as some sort of disease or abnormality.
It reminds me of the way we used to treat lefthandedness when everyone was ‘supposed’ to be righthanded. I know of one man who was so strongly lefthanded that he could barely even hold a pencil in his right. As a child, his parents finally got the teachers to stop punishing him for writing with his left hand when he became such a nervous wreck that he started pulling his hair out by the roots and refusing to go to school at all. At least we have stopped trying to turn lefthanders into righthanders and are willing to accept that there is room in the world for both. Nowadays, some people are even happily ambidextrous.
*38\17\9*
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March 23, 2009 - 5:47 AM