Human Sexuality is Complicated

From my previous post, you can tell that the topic of gender roles is one of my favorite things to discuss. However, a lot of times we (myself included) are still in the mindset of only discussing how culturally constructed gender roles effect heterosexual women and men. When really, as we’ve hit on in class, sexuality and gender should be put on a spectrum. I love the idea of one day being able to identify our gender the way we currently identify our cultural background, such as “I’m 50% German” – perhaps one day we will say, “I’m 80% female.” Our discussion of Caster Semenya kept me thinking beyond class, and I happened upon this video by one of my favorite YouTubers, the Vlogbrothers:

In the video, Hank relates gender roles to two “shiny boxes,” and he talks about how those boxes shouldn’t even exist. Instead, he creates a graph. I love this graph, and his explanation of it, because it makes it easier to understand (as a heterosexual female) how someone who does not identify in one of the world’s “shiny boxes” might feel. Another great point that Hank makes is that people move across these spectrums. Most of society right now tends to find that weird or cannot accept that someone could identify as one gender and then switch, or be attracted to one type of person and then change. I think this is a huge gap in our society’s stream of consciousness. It, like when we see someone who we can’t place into one of those shiny boxes based on their appearance, confuses us, so we just ignore it and pretend like they don't exist in order to protect ourselves from feeling uncomfortable.

All of this discussion on gender roles, both in and out of class, got me thinking. One day, will future generations look back on this time like we look back on when our ancestors owned slaves, or when women did not have nearly the same rights as men? Will it then be completely obvious to everyone that equality is the “right” and moral thing to do? I think we are headed in that direction, but we still have an incredibly long way to go. Tolerance isn’t created overnight. Strides are made – such as the first election of an openly gay person to the Senate and the legalization of same-sex marriage in three states last night – but, as with racism and gender equality, it is a slow moving machine.