invisibleman said:
Well, I think that maybe people don't want to be bullied or overshadowed. Every time, you have a marriage or take a girl out to the prom--it is a Straight Pride event. When you can hold your girlfriend's hand in public and kiss a girl without fear of getting shot by skinheads or black gangs or crazy youth--it is a Straight flag you fly.
I could not have said this better myself. What a perfect way to state it. Reminds me of a debate back at university about the private nature of sexuality.
Intercourse is an activity heavily regulated by law: Gods law in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, for instance, in a secular state, religious tribunals, tribal codes, customs and taboos. Communities of every description throughout time have had rules on intercourse, saying with some specifity that people will have intercourse in this way and not that way; with this person and not that person; under this circumstance and not under that. The rules are not benign homilies on the good life, nor are they abstract standards. Those who break the rules can be punished with death, exile or prison; the extreme of which has recently been seen in Iran. Society says, with the authority of its police power, how intercourse will and will not occur.
Any act so committed by the state, proscribed and prescribed in detail, cannot be private in the ordinary sense. Privacy is essentially a sphere of freedom immune from regulation by the state. In that sense, intercourse has never occurred in private. The society and its police have had too much to do with establishing the terms of the act itself, not just what people do and do not do; but also what people know, how consciousness and self-consciousness are formed, how acts are valued and devalued, how both the license to do and the stigma against doing are then expressed in actual sexual behaviour, dread, and longing. The society with police power behind it imposes both restrictions and obligations. It punishes forbidden behaviour but it also punishes failures to comply with mandated behaviour. Many laws about sex are laws demanding sexual compliance, especially from women.
Compliance can occur behind closed doors, out in public view; but it is not private at all it is a social act in conformity with a social requirement, the compliance itself is a building block of the society as a whole. Breaking the law is widely constructed to be antisocial; forbidden acts are said to hurt society as a whole; they are social, not private, from the point of view of the law.
Aside from the disingenuous use of so-called privacy as a means of protecting the active sexual dominance of men over others, intercourse is, in essence and reality, social, not private.
Inherently its just not a private act. This is why we fight, this is why we have parades. Untyil is becomes an entirely private affair, you will just have to deal with it.
