Final Exam Part II
Across all topics covered during the whole semester, I think the main theme of this class is appreciation for sexual variation in our society, the lack of which is mainly due to religious beliefs solidly built over hundreds of years and moral panics that have been created time and again. “Sexual Behaviors” (Vallin and Auleb, 2012) uncovers the history of harsh punishments for different sex behaviors than that for procreation only. “Sexual Orientation” (Dierst-Davies, 2007) reveals stigmatization for homosexuality and sodomy from century to century. “Sexuality and Disability: The Missing Discourse of Pleasure” presents the sexual disadvantages people with disabilities face and how the society does not understand that people with disabilities, just like non-disabled people, have their sexual desires and are sexual beings. These are merely some of the sample readings from the semester that illustrate the idea that our society has got to learn to welcome and value sexual variation, and to realize that it is the diversity, the individual dance that we do that makes us beautiful as we are.
One of Rubin’s five ideological formations – The absence of a concept of benign sexual variation – explains the root cause as to why our society may have accepted ethnic diversity but not sexual variation. “Benign sexual variation” means various kinds of favorable, propitious sexualities. “Variation is a fundamental property of all life, from the simplest biological organisms to the most complex human social formations. Yet sexuality is supposed to conform to a single standard . . . one need not to perform a particular sex act in order to recognize that someone else will, and that this difference does not indicate a lack of good taste, mental health, or intelligence in either party” (Rubin, 1989). Most people, as Rubin says, misperceive that sex preferences or sex behaviors should be a universal system widely applicable to everyone, and that is completely...