"Eris" <vithant@nospamgmail.com> wrote in message
news:h6aua1lnv6enkjfrodppjhbsmojs1gi9bc@4ax.com...

A gay man said once that there was no such thing as bisexuality, just
homosexuals who are willing to have hetero sex to get homo sex.
Is there such a thing as bisexuality. I am addressing the rightards
who are mocking the young homosexual teenage man whose parents are
sending him to a religious camp to be forced into heterosexuality.

In our last episode,
<h6aua1lnv6enkjfrodppjhbsmojs1gi9bc@4ax.com>, the lovely and
talented Eris broadcast on alt.atheism:

A gay man said once that there was no such thing as bisexuality, just
homosexuals who are willing to have hetero sex to get homo sex.
Is there such a thing as bisexuality.

The fundamental problem with issues of sexuality is how you
define sexuality. Is it what you want or what you do? (Those
are the two most common ways of coming at it.)

The appeal of "it's what you do" is that such an approach makes
things much easier to define. It is difficult to get people to
be entirely frank about sexual matters, but the theory is that
people can be certain, at least, about what they do, and
therefore you can learn something if you convince them to tell
the truth. The theory here doesn't entirely work out because
there is a great capacity for denial, and some people just
aren't capable of telling the truth even when they are committed
to do so. People are capable of convincing themselves that
things which did happen, somehow did not count and so in someway
did not "really" happen. But let's take the "it's what you do"
at face value for present purposes.

In our society, heterosexuality is highly promoted and complete
avoidance of homosexual experiences is the ideal. Yet, some
small, single digit percentage of the population have only
homosexual experiences their entire lives. In other societies,
some homosexual experiences are expected and encouraged, yet
some small, single digit percentage of the population has only
heterosexual experiences their whole lives. Pretty clearly,
something like 90% of the population has some capacity to have
at least some sexual experiences of both kinds. Bisexuality is,
in other words, very widespread and general in human beings, if
you go by "what you do."

Saying "bisexual" really sells human sexuality short. Looking
at the species as a whole, human being have the ability to
respond sexually to many things: music, art, a variety of
inanimate objects, and so forth. Human beings are sexual in a
very general way that is not done justice by the word "bisexual."

Going by "what you do," many people would be bisexual if they
have a same-sex experience in prison, in boarding school, in a
military encampment or another situation in which only same-sex
experiences are possible, even if they never have same-sex
experiences when they have a choice of partners.

If we look at sexuality as "what you want" a very different
picture emerges. The claim that there is no bisexuality comes
from the "what you want" view. It is rather like the claim that
you cannot really like chocolate ice cream exactly as much as
you like vanilla ice cream. You may not prefer one or the other
by much, but if everything else is equal, you will like one at
least a little bit more than the other. You might not prefer
chocolate over vanilla enough to go to the store if you have
vanilla in the freezer, but if you have both in the freezer, and
the consequences of eating one or the other are the same, maybe
you will tend to eat the chocolate more often than the vanilla.

Well, that isn't entirely nonsense, but in real life there
seldom - if ever - are situations in which "everything else is
equal." And that's close to the problem with "it's what you
want." People don't always know what they want. Wanting is
very abstract and hard to get a handle on.

What do I want for dinner? Well, world peace and a nice tender
steak. That is a kind of "want" in a fantasy world that has
nothing to do with anything. In the real world it is between
red beans and rice or a smoothie. In the real world the choice
for most people isn't between Brad Pitt or Jessica Simpson, so
"what do you want" has a kind of unreality.

I am addressing the rightards who are mocking the young
homosexual teenage man whose parents are sending him to a
religious camp to be forced into heterosexuality.

This is pretty near perfect nonsense. While you could
deliberately encourage homosexual experience by having a camp in
which everyone is of the same sex, thereby eliminating
heterosexual possibilities, you cannot have a camp in which
everyone is of the opposite sex. Where there are three people,
at least two of them will be of the same sex (it's the pick
socks out of a drawer in the dark problem: if you have only two
colors of socks in a drawer, you can pick three out of it in the
dark and still be sure of getting a pair that match in color).

The hetero camp clearly is an idea that has not been thought
through. Not everyone is going to hetero camp. Only those who
are suspected of having homosexual tendancies. So the hetero
camp isn't bringing boys and girls together, but rather those
most likely to be homosexuals. The predictable result: the gay
kids will have a much better chance of hooking up in the hetero
camp, where there will be lots of gay kids of the same sex, than
they would in an ordinary camp that had both boys and girls in
it, but only a minority of gay kids or even in an ordinary camp
with only one sex, but still only a minority of gay kids. You
couldn't come up with a better opportunity for gay kids to
hookup than hetero camp if you tried. But then, the sort of
people who might organize a hetero camp are not intellectual
giants.

They claim that bisexuality is sheik in high school and middle school
and there are a lot of support groups in the school for gay and
lesbian children and hetero children are emulating them.

Then why in the decades and decades and decades in which *all*
school activities were directed at encouraging heterosexuality
didn't gay children emulate the straights? Well, of course,
they did. They dated people of the opposite sex and even had
heterosexual relations - but it didn't make them straight, did
it?

--
Rev. Lars Eighner ULC Atheist #1965