It's Time We Learned That Sexual Rights Are Human Rights
Every culture takes a stance on sex. There are no exemptions. What does your culture have to say about the most fundamental of human experiences?
Some people probably think I’m insane.
Okay, a lot of people probably think I’m insane, but that’s beside the point.
After years of writing everything from true crime to politics and doing it well, I launched The Science of Sex on Substack. The goal is to harness a greater understanding of human sexuality through the power of science.
I’m sure many readers and other creators thought to themselves, “Sex sells, duh.” It makes sense that a nerdy, infinitely curious guy like myself would dive into sexuality through a scientific lens to draw clicks and garner views.
But the truth is quite the opposite. Thanks to the blinders that have been forced upon us from centuries of cultures that have been openly hostile to erotic aspects of the human experience.
Religion, power, politics, and patriarchy have all combined to stifle sex and label it as evil, immoral, and wrong. Only now are we starting to wake up from the long slumber of the power structures that have constrained human desire for nearly 2,000 years.
This has produced incredible, inconceivable amounts of pain and shame that humans must carry with them every single day.
As science progresses, so does our understanding of the world, of ourselves, and of one another. We now know that homosexuality isn’t a sin but the result of a combination of various genes and environmental influences.
LGBT people aren’t “infested with demons,” as some religious interpretations would have, so much as functioning just as nature intended.
This is hard for many people to accept. They protest, “If sex is for procreation, how can LGBT sex be natural?”
We evolved a complex brain to help us harness our environment and solve necessary puzzles. We now use that brain to compose symphonies and create television drama series, so we can bask in the wonders of human emotion (on both counts).
We used our ingenuity to harness the power of agriculture, learning how to farm, herd livestock, and create an abundance of food.
Doubtful anyone would consider these things “unnatural” and demand we curtail the rights of farmers.
So why is it only sex?
This is a question I ponder often. For all the wonders of human attraction, humans seem to get painfully hung up on their sexuality with alarming regularity.
It seems to me that you cannot have a culture without sexuality. Sex is so deeply ingrained in the human condition that even anti-sex cultures take a stance on human sexuality.
And you can tell a lot about a culture by its stance on sexuality.
I’ll be traveling outside the country next month. When picking places to go, I realized that I could take a map of the countries where homosexuality is a crime and the countries where I want to go, and the two would be a perfect match.
I could do the same with women’s rights, especially when it comes to sexual relations. Where women aren’t free, I don’t want to be.
One sure sign society is still quite patriarchal is the fact that so many people look down on women for sex work, suggesting they’re using an unfair biological advantage, then they turn around and revere men for military prowess.
It’s obscenely hypocritical.
This idea that we can have anything resembling human rights where humans aren’t free to pursue harmless sociosexual relations as they wish with consenting adults is fraudulent.
From India to America, societies claim the people who live in them are free, even touting freedom as a cardinal virtue as America does. Yet, half of their population doesn’t have the right to do what they please with their own bodies.
They’re judged morally and, in many places, legally for engaging in harmless activities between consenting adults. In the U.S., the right to free association is granted in our constitution.
Yet, for more than a century, the U.S. criminalized condom use and birth control. We criminalized sexual media of all stripes, including sex education material, for nearly 100 years until Roe V. Wade, which was incidentally just overturned.
And even outside the legal system, these assaults on human rights persist.
The fact that sex is so often put on the same page as violence is telling. And even worse, in many places, sex is considered worse than violence.
On YouTube, you can watch someone get shot in the head and die. Yet, YouTube strictly polices sexual content. Care to make sense of that one for me?
YouTube’s parent company, Google, banned the polyamory dating app called Open from its Google Play Store.
Apparently, violence is perfectly okay, according to Google, but sexuality that doesn’t fit neatly within the antiquated religious view is striking to the point where it needs to be banned.
We allow violent terrorist groups to run roughshod in the streets, calling themselves “militias,” but we thwart attempts for humans to create and foster intimate connections.
The Open app wasn’t even risqué.
It was no Adult Friend Finder. At the time, the app’s description read:
Don’t change who or how you love — change your dating app! Over 100,000 people have joined #open to form authentic relationships with other open-minded humans, find friends based on their desires, and explore individually, with a partner, or both. #open is a dating app that allows you to focus on the kinds of relationships you want to have. Whether you’re ethically non-monogamous, consensually non-monogamous, or just monogamish, #open is the dating app you’ve been looking for.
That was enough to warrant shutting the app down.
All of this makes me wonder, who are we becoming? And who were we to begin with?
And don’t even get me started on Facebook and Instagram, where posts are regularly taken down because they show a little sideboob and where fights for LGBT rights are regularly misconstrued as “sex trafficking” and other forms of prostitution.
LGBT voices are stifled, and conspiratorial terrorists have their way with these platforms.
Got it.
This lets me know exactly what we value as a society.
Anthropologist James Prescott covered this in-depth in the 1970s, discovering that societies either trended toward more violent or more loving, but never both. His aptly titled book, Love or Violence, detailed his findings.
Between 1940 and 1944, when Paris was under the Nazi occupation, art and sexuality were both stifled. Hitler had an obvious bone to pick with art, but he considered the liberated, free art of Parisian society “homosexual” and “Jewish,” both of which he hated—and the Nazis hated them too.
It seems wherever there is repression and a strong constraint on human freedom, sexuality withers, and where there is free and open sexuality, love and tolerance, violence, and oppression begin to die out.
We see the same battle playing out now in the Culture Wars in America. Anti-sex and pro-punishment are two sides of the same coin. This is how you get the Jordan Peterson types who want to strictly enforce monogamy and control everyone’s sex lives, an idea I’ve refuted at length here.
Ask yourself: if given the choice, would you rather live in a sexual society or a violent one? Would you rather live in a loving society or a violent one?
Because this is a choice that we’re collectively in the process of making right now.
If you believe in what I’m doing here as I believe in what I’m doing here, subscribe below and let’s help foster a more loving society.