Tuesday 3 February 2009

You do have a choice

A remark on rightwing pundit Peter Hitchens's blog recently really annoyed me.

Black is equivalent to homosexual in that neither is a choice. Hence, if this article had been written in such a way about black people, or any other ethnic group, no doubt there would be chants of "bigot" in a similar way.

Posted by: Daniel Gray 03 February 2009 at 02:22 PM
The reason why it annoyed me was that it's simply not true. And that's because homosexuality is a matter of choice, and just about anyone reading this blog should know that. As in the excellent film Minority Report, real choice is possible.

There is a natural attraction that exists between men. Unfortunately there can also be such a thing as sexual frustration, or the repression of a man's natural sexual feelings. Normally this is to do with a sense of personal inadequacy, arrested personal development, or moral immaturity. Boys can "go through phases" of homosexuality - that is until they come to a proper appreciation of themselves as sexual beings. Some such boys of course never make the transition from dirty jokes and (possibly) even sex-games with each other to proper sexual relations with members of the opposite sex. (And at this point I might say it's hard to see how using the criminal law to crack down on prepubescent boys playing with each other can really help them to make that transition - but perhaps that's a subject for another post!)

The reasons why men might choose, consciously or unconscioulsy, not to have sex with women and to fool around with each other instead, may include:

(i) there are no women around, or, for some reason, the men in question are unable to make adequate social contact with the women who are around - possibly for social reasons, possibly for psychological ones (e.g. because the men perceive themselves to be inadequate in some way - and often, as it happens, physical disability, whether genetic or otherwise, may well be a factor in this - or because they have some sort of ingrained taboo or phobia about women, such as misogyny or "gynophobia"*);

(ii) for reasons similar to those for (i), or for other reasons, these men may not wish to take on the responsibilities of proper marital relations and reproduction.
It is worth bearing in mind that there is a basic dichotomy here between these two types of homosexuals. Nor, just as importantly, do these types apply merely to homosexuals. There are indeed plenty of (i) misogynistic heterosexuals and, conversely, plenty of (ii) homosexuals who like children. Also, although these two types may broadly correspond in homosexuality to "queens" and "butches", or to "tops" and "bottoms" - though which is which I couldn't say - I personally prefer to divide gays into simply those that are pro- and anti-children - the paedophobic minority and the majority that is, whatever they may themselves claim, still thankfully paedophilic.

The first example I thought of by way of illustration was, somewhat unsurprisingly, Oscar Wilde. He is of course a problem for my thesis here because he wasn't actually a homosexual. He certainly wasn't according to the strict theological definition of the term (i.e. given that he enjoyed marital relations with his dear wife). In modern parlance, moreover, he was a "bi" rather than a "gay". He did, however, clearly have paedophilic tendencies, and as such he was very much in the modern homosexual mainstream.

The ambivalent attitude of the Sexual Revolutionaries to the idea of "choice" is one of those great mysteries of our age. On the one hand choice is lauded to the skies, especially where it's used as a sickening euphemism for killing unborn children. On the other hand, the idea that an individual may be able to choose, or at any rate indirectly form, at least a large part of his or her sexuality, is anathema to the overwhelming majority of moden, "liberated" people.

*OK, I'm not sure that that's actually a word, but if you can have "paedo-philes" then why not?

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