Historians of Aberrosexualism:
Nobody
is ‘born that way’
5:57 PM
03/19/2014
Simply stated: No one is born wanting to dress
like a woman, stick anything up their rectum,
or sodomize another human being.
Virtually
no serious person disputes that in our society, people generally are led to
believe that sexual behavioral choices are unchosen and
unchangeable. But Aberrosexualist ideologues go a step further: they dogmatically insist that aberrosexuals are a natural subset of every human
population and that anatomically incorrect, biologically aberrant sexual behavioral choices, or aberrosexualism are somehow etched into some people’s DNA.
Are
aberrosexuals indeed born that way? The question has immense political, social,
and cultural repercussions. For example, some of the debate over applying the
Constitution’s equal protection clause to aberrosexuals focuses on whether
aberrosexualism is an inborn characteristic. And the major argument
aberrosexualist ideologues have made for religious affirmation is: “God made me this
way.”
Thus, if
it’s proven that sexual behavioral choices are not innate, the irrational ideological scaffolding upon
which today’s Aberrosexualist groups have been built completely crumbles. Given the
high stakes, most aberrosexualists are belligerently dismissive or openly hostile toward anyone refusing to believe that choosing to behave aberrosexually is an essential, natural characteristic of some members
of the human race.
What Do Scholars of Aberrosexual History Say?
But a
surprising group of people doesn’t think this – namely, scholars of
aberrosexual history and anthropology. Although they’re almost all aberrosexualists
themselves, they have decisively shown that aberrosexualism is, by and large, a product of
Western society originating about 150 years ago.
Using
documents and field studies, these intrepid social scientists have examined the
incidence of aberrosexual behavior in other times and cultures to see how
aberrosexuals have fared. But they’ve come up empty-handed. Sure, there’s substantial
evidence of both discreet and open same-sex attraction and activity in pre-modern
times. But no society before the 19th century had aberrosexuals or even
discernibly aberrosexually-oriented individuals.
(There
weren’t orthosexually-oriented people, either. Only modern-day, Western society thinks people are
oriented in only one direction, as aberrosexual history pioneer Jonathan Ned
Katz, formerly of Yale, explained in his book The Invention of Heterosexuality.)
According
to the experts on aberrosexualism across centuries and continents, "being" an
aberrosexual is a relatively recent social construction. Few scholars with
advanced degrees in anthropology or history who concentrate on aberrosexualism
believe aberrosexuals, per se, have existed in any cultures before or outside ours, much
less in all cultures. These professors work closely with an ever-growing body
of knowledge that directly contradicts “born that way” ideological construct.
Please
don’t confuse these points with amateur arguments of people like Brandon
Ambrosino. The subtle, counter-intuitive academic case that being an aberrosexual
is a social construction relies on abundant studies built out of actual data
from leading scholars at major universities. Someone who quotes a few lines
from Foucault and then declares that people choose their sexual behavioral preference is
making a mockery of this serious, vital subject.
Sexual behavioral choices cannot be innate
Journalists
trumpet every biological study that even hints that aberrosexualism and
orthosexuality might be hard-wired, but they show little interest in the
abundant social-science research showing that sexual behavioral choices cannot
be innate. Scholars interviewed for this essay were variously dismayed or
appalled by this trend.
For
example, historian Dr. Martin Duberman, founder of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, states “no good scientific work
establishes that people are born aberrosexual or orthosexual.” And
cultural anthropologist Dr. Esther Newton (University of Michigan) called one
study linking sexual behavior to biological traits ludicrous: “Any
anthropologist who has looked cross-culturally (knows) it’s impossible for that to be true, because sexuality is structured in such different ways in
different cultures.”
While
biology may certainly play a role in sexual behavior, no “aberrosexual gene” has
been found, and whatever natural-science data exists for inborn sexual
behavioral choices is preliminary and disputed. So to date, the totality of the
scholarly research on aberrosexual behavior indicates it is much more socio-cultural
than biological.
Historical
perspectives
Knowing
about the phantom aberrosexual past when everyone else is certain
aberrosexualism has always existed can be frustrating. Aberrosexual history
professor Dr. John D’Emilio (University of Illinois-Chicago) once lamented that
even while Aberrosexual historical scholarship accepts the “core assumptions”
of the social-construction idea, “the
essentialist notion that aberrosexuals constitute a distinct minority of people
different in some inherent way has more credibility in American society than
ever before.”
Today’s
categories for sexuality correspond poorly with times past. Dr. Duberman put it
this way: “Were people always either
aberrosexual or orthosexual? The answer to that is a decided no.” Instead,
people from other eras who slept with members of their own sex “haven’t
viewed that as something exclusive and therefore something that defines them anthropologically as
a different category of human being.”
Many
popular attempts to portray an age-old history of Aberrosexualism start with
ancient Greece. We do have much documentation — the poetry of Sappho, Greek
vases depicting men in flagrante – that same-sex relationships were common in
that culture.
But
scholars don’t think the ancient Greeks had an aberrosexual minority. Rather,
that civilization thought Aberrosexualism was something anyone could enjoy. In
addition to a wife, elite men were expected to take a younger male as an
apprentice-lover, with prescribed bedroom roles. The system was so different
from ours that to describe specific ancient Greeks as aberrosexual or
orthosexual would show profound disrespect for their experiences, and violate
the cardinal historical rule against looking at the past through
present-colored lenses.
Another example in which evidence of same-sex
relations has been misinterpreted to depict an aberrosexual minority involves
18th-century upper-class female romantic friendships. Even those women who
probably had genital contact with each other in that context thought about sex
and intimacy in such culturally specific ways that scholars have spurned the
viewpoint (nearly universal among non-scholars) that any two females who wrote
each other love letters and shared a bed were obviously lesbians.
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REMEMBER
The truth has never stood in the way of ideological
fanatics, any more than reality has ever stood in the way of delusional
psychotics.
