In a recent post, Dualism And You, I discussed what dualism means and how it impacts contemporary Western ideas about sex and gender. I’m sure nobody will be surprised that I have more to say on this topic, specifically about sexuality.
In that last post, I touched on ideas like mind-body dualism (which is super-inflected by gender) and the slut/stud dichotomy, which describes women’s and men’s sexual behavior in diametrically opposed terms. Yet there’s another huge way in which dualism impacts our ideas about sexuality: the very notion of heterosexuality vs. homosexuality.
Think about it. Mainstream Western culture operates on the assumption that everyone is straight. If, goodness forbid, you’re not straight, then you must be gay. The heterosexual/homosexual dichotomy used to be the prevailing paradigm, even in normally forward-thinking sex research (which is one reason the Kinsey scale is so interesting – it works on the assumption that there is a spectrum of sexuality, though the two poles, heterosexuality and homosexuality, are still the main terms of discussion).
This bias toward the gay/straight paradigm explains why bisexuality is often so invisible, not to mention how confused many people are by transgendered and transsexual people, who often step out of dualistic categories in multiple ways. In a world where we’re taught to think in terms of black and white, male and female, gay and straight, anything that upsets or confounds those categories can be, at best, difficult to understand, and at worst, seen as threatening the “normal” folks and provoking violence. So it’s worth thinking outside dualistic sexual categories not only as a fun intellectual exercise, but also because it can help understand how biases and stereotypes blind people into stigmatizing alternative sexualities.
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