Sometimes you will hear conservatives complain that 'it seems like there are SO MANY LGBTQIA+ people now' and how it didn't use to be that way. Wait, actually they would never dignify other people with letters. They usually use some pejorative or say the first few letters in exasperation and then fling their hands in the air as if repeating letters is just too much for them.
It's annoying. It's also wrong.
My grandmother, I am relatively sure, given many things she said, was probably aromantic. I'm guessing she was asexual too. Marriage was an obligation to her. She tolerated it at best and hated it most of the time. My grandfather was a decent husband, but that really doesn't matter if she wasn't interested in any of that in the first place.
But she still married and had children because her society (very rural Arkansas post-WWII) wouldn't have allowed much of anything else. Her job prospects as a single woman weren't great. It wasn't exactly safe for women to be on their own. Most significantly, there was the shame aspect.
If she didn't marry and have children, she would be viewed as a failure. She would be viewed as suspect. She would be the subject of gossip and rumors and pity. If she didn't marry, she would have been expected to stay home and tend to her parents as they aged to tend to the children of siblings when they needed it. If she didn't limit her availability to one man, she would have been expected to give her time and effort to the rest of her family.
My grandmother had already skipped a year of school to tend to younger brothers and her parents after her mother's mental health crashed. The idea of spending the rest of her life serving her family while being the subject of people's speculation was intolerable. So she married. And hated every moment of it.
My grandmother's story is common. Our history is full of people who married despite a lack of desire (for various reasons) or married despite a want or willingness for monogamy. They were miserable.
Our history is also full of people who didn't marry, but instead were shamed into service. They would take care of aging family members or join restrictive religious organizations or join the military as a way to both hide who they were and perhaps find a way to better fit in. And these people were miserable.
Society loves to be able to shame people. Society loves to find ways to make people believe their natural inclinations are wrong. And sometimes this is actually good because some people's natural inclinations harm others.
But most of the time, our natural inclinations harm no one. They would do nothing to harm society. So why does society still try to shame everyone who doesn't fit the little cishet bubble? Because shame has value. If you can shame people into taking the shit jobs and the shit tasks and marrying just to fit in, then all the better.
People against the LGBTQIA+ community, more than anything else, are reluctant to give up their power. They love the cushy self-righteousness that comes from being 'normal' and the ability to control others by shaming them.
And no, I'm not trying to shame anyone for being cishet. YKINMKATO. But I will take you to task for believing that your limited ideas about love or what is normal or your parasocial relationship with people who lived thousands of years give you the right to make other people miserable. Let people be free. Let people make their own decisions about their bodies and minds and hearts.
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