Great Intentions and My Fickle Focus.

It's another Friday night here, and I am sitting down at the end of a long week and as I seem to be making somewhat of a habit of doing, composing a blog post and wondering what the hell I am going to write about.  I don't feel appreciably like I am an anything approaching a journalist or professional writer, but I like to think I can empathise with those required to produce a number of words for an editorial on a regular basis.  I do seem to recall from the study I have done that living with constant deadlines is its own special form of hell, albeit one which can teach the virtue of discipline and help build character, helping force the often chaotic mass of thoughts to emerge in a reasonably orderly fashion.

I had planned in honour of the State of Origin rugby league series that we are inflicted with at this time of the year to write a long discourse on what I perceive as the homoerotic aspects of football and the way that men who would recoil in horror from the thought of actually being gay, will nevertheless publicly engage in full body contact, then afterwards shower naked together and in some cases, engage in group sex with one woman and a room full of naked footballers or manage to take naked photographs of each other.  In all of this their only expression of outrage coming when they are found out and embarrassed, rather than it seems, showing any genuine contrition for the people they manage to hurt along the way.  I was going to write at some length my thoughts on the shadow that seems to haunt many men in Australia, the fear of being gay or being attracted to another man.  I think it is the fear of this shadow that drives many men to be so aggressively heterosexual, along with the fear that being labelled gay will cause them to lose social standing and power amongst their peers.  Many moralists would say that pornography and prostitution drive men to be aggressively sexual, whereas I believe that men making use of pornography and prostitution may instead be a response to fear and an attemt at reassurance. 

Let me say in the midst of all this that I am a heterosexual male who has come to terms the fact that sexuality is a spectrum of behaviour and preference.  Very few are either exclusively at one extreme or the other, a person can be gay or straight, be bi-sexual or merely bi-affective.  Some people cannot meed their needs exclusively from a relationship with one gender while for some friendship can have a certain intimate aspect that may not become sexual in nature.

It seems to me in thinking about all this that human sexuality is, and has always been a more complex issue than has been set out in the laws of religion and the state, and that homosexual relationships have always taken place, in every society around the world, even though those who chose to express who they were often risked death and ostracism from their communities.  We here in Australia, are currently debating whether gay people should be allowed to marry, and to achieve the full legal rights that come with the institution of marriage.  It seem that the time is now right for us a society to not just think about taking this step, but to take this step and recognise that how people express their sexuality is biological, and not something that can be regulated away through law or through threat of damnation, but is for a section of society, as much a part of being human as being left-handed or having red hair is for others.