Today’s post is at the Stream: No, Half of British Youths Aren’t “Bisexual”.
A survey by YouGov in Great Britain recently announced that “1 in 2 young people say they are not 100 percent heterosexual.” This headline betrays an enormous confusion in our culture’s understanding of human nature, and the language we use to refer to ourselves.
The survey makers asked respondents “to plot themselves on a ‘sexuality scale’,” a pseudo-scientific quantification of desire invented by the disturbing and unreliable Alfred Kinsey. The results were that “23 percent of British people choose something other than 100 percent heterosexual– and the figure rises to 49 percent among 18-24 year olds.”
But there is a difference between human sexuality and human desires and behavior. As I hope to demonstrate, confusing one for the other has been, and increasingly will be, a source of much grief in our society.
Human Nature
The nature or essence of a human being is to be sexually reproductive…
Another in a long series of consequences of abandoning Christianity.
Great post. It said a lot of things that had been bothering me, especially in terms of the language of ‘sexuality’.
There was a post on First Things: We’re all sadists now that I think pairs nicely with yours. Here is the key quote:
Consider what this means. People identify wholly (think of the mathematical root of ‘identity’) with something that they fundamentally consider meaningless.
There is not, and there cannot be, a “continuum” of human sexes. Biology does not work this way.
Any NATURALIST would recognize this as true.
The sex a person is born with is the sex that person is his or her entire life.
Any NATURALIST would recognize this as true.
The word “abnormality” is apt, though some say it is “hurtful.” //Sarcasm follows
A NATURALIST naturally imbues Nature with MORALITY and whatever Nature does to advance the species through genetic mutations is morally correct and calling such mutations abnormal is morally wrong //End Sarcasm
James:
Great comment
(Math needs to obviate the Identity , Associative and Distributive Laws and Properties – they are amoral intrusions on the Progressive will)
An odd evolutionary abnormality is in play. Somehow in the dim past of ourselves as creatures, the procreation act generated a sense of pleasure that drove us into doing it again. If it hadn’t done that then most likely no creature would have evolved past cellular division to reproduce. Viruses would have won and negated the potential for extremely complex life forms such as ourselves. Without the enwined twins of sex and pleasure why would anyone indulge in such a ridiculous activity. Two sexes wouldn’t have been necessary. It’s strange that in the current scientific rational western culture we’ve accepted the anti-rational separation of sexualy generated pleasure from procreation as though the pleasure is the reason for sex and the results of the sex act can be considered as an inconvenient abnormality.
Gee, I hope someone can understand what this little rave of mine means.
Haven’t you seen the “How gay are you test” that will score you anywhere from 0% to 100% gay? By this metric nearly everyone is just a little bit gay. Or, everyone is some shade of bisexual.
http://www.functionalneurology.com/materiale_cic/389_XXIV_1/3373_sexual/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3296090/
can you be 200% heterosexual then? And if not, why not? The 200% rule works for everything else, doesn’t it?
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Excellent article. Personally, I’ve never considered myself heterosexual because:
1: I was never forced to think about it before I had the scientific, political, and philosophical wisdom to identify the fallacy in the idea itself.
2: Now the left is forcing the argument, I simply call myself normal. For as you rightfully point out, I am normal.
I feel sorry for the children in our education system who are being forced to consider these idiocies without the wisdom needed to see past them.
I suppose the article is as correct as it can be, if you accept without question Dr Brigg’s bizarre definition of sexuality as the sexual act between a man and woman in the act of procreation. All other activities therefore being ‘disordered’ and not actual ‘sexual’ acts after all.
Or one can dismiss this idiosyncratic definition and use one that is not so… perverse? I.e., you’re engaging in sexual activity when you are receiving or giving sexual stimulation.
I wonder who first made the grand mistake of assuming that sex has anything to do with procreation. What an abominable error. Doesn’t everyone know that the primary purpose of sex is for self indulgent pleasure. Any resultant cellular conglomerate when, by accident, the self-pleasure involves heterosexual coupling is really just a minor irritant. Some weird people who subscribe to ideas of universal mysteries treat the cells as something precious when it’s obvious it doesn’t have clothes or pockets yet, and definitely can’t tie its own shoelaces.
Sadly Gary, I can’t subscribe Dr Brigg’s subtext here, which is the belief in Natural Law. A concept that carried some intellectual weight circa 1300-1890. But since then is now only retained by dogmatists of various stripes. Human sexuality is about precreation, pleasure, interpersonal relationships, even (sadly) these days, politics. It’s not just what you want it to be because you say so. That sort of attitude even most small children grow out of, eventually.
All said, the jump from the general population down to the young people is disturbing, a result of the intense indoctrination.
And this is why such people will have their heads removed by the soldiers of the black flag with relative ease. Apart from the Nordic countries, the UK is perhaps the most pathetic example of a society rotting from the inside out. So tell us, are these the “men” who will form tomorrow’s police force, army, special responders?
At this point, it’s no longer a question of whether or not some European countries beyond Albania will be politically controlled by Muslims at the end of the century, but how far east will they be able to push this dominion.
Possibly it is the opposite, the absence of centuries and then decades of “intense [Christian] indoctrination” – which has made people more honest in expressing their real feelings and desires. With regard to the elephant in the room, which is the unstated premise that human behaviour is in conflict with Natural Law, in my view the following deconstruction by Nietzsche of the concept of Natural Law, was the final nail in the coffin of this dogmatic metaphysic. The idea of Natural Law never had much standing after this, except among, of course, Ecclesiastic intellectuals. (This was published, BTW, in 1886.)
You desire to LIVE “according to Nature”? Oh, you noble Stoics, what
fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly
extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration,
without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain:
imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power–how COULD you live
in accordance with such indifference? To live–is not that just
endeavouring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing,
preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different?
And granted that your imperative, “living according to Nature,” means
actually the same as “living according to life”–how could you do
DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves
are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you:
while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature,
you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players
and self-deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and
ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein;
you insist that it shall be Nature “according to the Stoa,” and would
like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal
glorification and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for truth,
you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such
hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY…
just doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation, if half of British males are bi-sexual, does this mean that British males in toto are quarter-sexual? Or is my averaging wrong?
Bob, you’re supposed to integrate, not divide. You’re wrong if you’re right.
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