All About Sex And Gender.

When I was a grade school student I found this book entitled “BEING SEXUAL AND CELIBATE” in our house in the province. This book is written by Keith Clark. This was previously owned by my uncle who was a former seminarian back then. The first impression was, I did not grasp the whole thing about the book.  But I remember though that one of many things Keith discussed here was his philosophy about sexuality; and according to him human has three levels of sexuality. These are:

1. Biological level. The very easy way to know the gender of a person is based on the physiological manifestation of sex, the genital or the sex organ. It is considered as the “shallowest”  identification and it gives parent  a hint on how they will be treat their child later on. As shown in the photo below:

2. Psychological. Clark’s explanation in psychological level of sexuality is how a person feels about his soul. This is basically dealing with a persons perception of his sexuality.  If he feels his a man, then he is a man… same thing as being a woman. Gender identity disorder rises when there is the element of “discontent” to a person’s biological status. Status has two kinds: The ascribed and the achieved. Sex is an “ascribed status”  because sex  itself is a nature  assigned to a person without his/her interference. while the achieved status is the opposite.

In philosophizing this article I encountered a problem of how do we identify gender? Because gender possesses a higher or deeper sense of meaning since it embodies the range of a persons femininity and masculinity which entirely depends on sex, social roles, and sexual identity. My humble thesis here is “When a person decides for himself, anything around and between the process of making such decision forms part the totality of his achieved status.”  So i think this reconciles the conflict of identity of sex and gender as ascribed and achieved statuses.  Since psychological level of sexuality involves a persons decision, psychological sexuality gives rise to issues regarding human identification of gender which most of the time inconsistent to his assigned sex or what we call transexualism.

3.The Spiritual level of sexuality generally it is the intimate connection of a person to his God.  Specifically the persona of  the person each time he connects to his Deity, the way he presents himself to God, the Ethics of a person towards fulfilling his mission as a son or daughter of the Lord.

Homosexuality. Discontent. Deviation. 

I believe that there is such thing as discontent in sexuality. Discontent is a product of  a persons repression in his way of life. It  is the product of  repression of  freedom and the constriction of self in terms of gender expression. When a person cannot express his wholeness, when  freedom; suppose to be the feeling of “boundlessness” to do things which does not need to hide or seclude in order to stall self from social judgment is just a mere recitals of dreams and expectations.  Discontent is when people around are  “rationally  irrational” and “imperfectly perfect” which gives them the permission  and the posture of superiority  as a license to judge unevenly which will leads to a deeper sense of segregation in the society.

For example, homosexuality is still considered as deviation or disobedience to the conduct of  the society. According to my Sociology professor, homosexuality is a form of tolerable deviancy. Meaning, it disobeys  social norms and expectation but the society tolerated such deviation since the only difference is the “audience” or the people is now receiving this “feel” that homosexuality as nonprejudicial to collective good. Which I think is right! With my personal biases. Indeed, gays and lesbian are acknowledged and tolerated without any interference but are considered a normative violation.

THE WEST. SEX. CHURCH. TRADITIONAL AND LIBERTARIAN

The vast network of internet and its penetration to the whole society open windows for  Eastern people to see the western world on how they deals with homosexuality. Good thing we saw them that open. Thus influence our thinking of “today”. Until the modernization of “today”. . . still, religious people thinks and treated homosexuality as a sin. It is usual for the church to cling to their traditional way to view issues regarding our  morality. I believe that homosexuality is like sex out of marriage. They  carries the same weight. One thing I learned before was the Catholic line of teaching is greatly influenced by an Ancient Greek philosopher named Aristotle.

Applying Ethics by Olen & Berry states that St. Thomas Aquinas a mediaeval thinker incorporated Aristotle’s idea in Church Doctrine.

St Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle

First of the four doctrine adopted by the church from Aristotle is (1) nature has its purpose.  For the church, the purpose of sex is for reproduction. (Maybe God is too bored reproducing human by making a humanesque figure from mud. JOKE) —Beyond this purpose is immorality.

Immorality is the unacceptable conduct in a society. Since every society has there own gauge of what is moral and what is not, they put up an imaginary “column” to what is good and what is bad. The conflict here is when the society is influenced be a bigger body that influenced humanity for hundred of years from culture, tradition, beliefs, way of living up to way of thinking. Catholicism in the Philippine gains cultural and traditional significance and we are bored hearing this over and over again since grade school.

According to Aristotle, (2) everything has a feature that defines a characteristic. We human, our defining characteristic is we are rational and therefore has the capability to think and the capability to engage in fully human love. The third one is (3) everything in nature has its proper good. When a person is engaged in a fully human love he is also opening himself to a cycle.

In love, the church treated it this way:

That human love is not just a romantic love but a love that will be elevated to parental love. Parental love is when you produced children. Parental love is the completion or perfection of the cycle. So, true human love is not just romance and personal sexual pleasure. This builds a strong framework that sex in effect is for procreation and not just lust or any “platonic” reasons.

Church says, engaging into sex without love and to engage into sex not open to the concept of procreation violates human nature and therefore violates our dignity. Since it violates dignity, sex is a wrongful conduct that constitutes a “sin”.  This does not mean that unmarried sex with love and commitment is moral. Remember that everything in church has purpose, everything has characteristic, everything is proper good and (the last idea is) (4) those three are intimately related to each other. Here, the purpose of marriage takes place. Marriage is a union of two to become one so that they will be acceptable to the society and to God.  The church said, it’s immoral to have sex when there’s no sincerity and fidelity: Two elements of union that only marriage can provide and latter will justify that sex without marriage is immoral.  This is a very TRADITIONAL PERSPECTIVE about sex.

On the other hand, sex has a libertarian perspective.

Sexual revolution in 1960s to 1980s played important role to change the how sexuality is recognized as an existing reality.

This revolution is the “coming-out” of issues regarding premarital sex, masturbation, pornography, sexuality, and Erotic fantasy. It was rarely a view out of enlightenment when people see opportunity of “openness” in matters regarding sex.  One of its concepts is the idea of FREE LOVE.

Free love emerged as a sexual revolutionary concept in the mid 60’s that taught the hippies the concept of “power of love and the beauty of sex as part of student life.” Primarily a counter culture idea but its public manifestation was ended in the mid 80’s because of the public awareness of AIDS and other fatal sexual diseases. Other sexual revolutionary idea includes explicit sex on screen, the use of contraception and pills, premarital sex, and the normalization of pornography.

All of these are libertarian perspective about sex. Therefore, libertarian is synonymous to “freedom” or “openness” in sex. According to Sociologist/Anthropologist Margaret Meads who conducted a study about psychosexual development of adolescent in the island of Samoa, Sexual freedom experienced by teenagers is an easy transition from childhood to adulthood.

Aside from the reality that sexual revolution is coined with “freedom”, it is also a new form of capital exploitation in the form of pornography and other sexual acts that elicits and involves the monetary economy.

The general libertarian view about sex is like the usual conduct of human. Conducts like playing tennis, cooking, and other usual activities. So it does not give burden of eternal damnation or exacerbate such conduct as disobedience to God. Remember that in a libertarian perspective, as long as the manner of conduct of sex is not dishonest, done not in a manner of coercion, exploitation and does not violate obligation and fundamental rights of a person, this conduct is acceptable. Example of this is rape (insertion of any object to any orifice). The two elements of sex to be considered as rape are (1) force and (2) intimidation. If the act of sex is not coercive, then sex is just an acceptable conduct of two people.

 The mechanism of this view is often regards to ask “why not”. Why shouldn’t sex be treated like any other activities? Why we considered moral playing tennis with a person we don’t love but immoral to have sex in a person we don’t love? Why we say it’s moral to eat lunch with the same sex but immoral to have sex with the same person?

WHY?

As far as I know, sex is not just growling.