An article on the BBC posited that heterosexuality is a mythology invented to preserve a way of life which helped us survive, but isn’t really necessary any longer. The author concludes:
The line between heterosexuality and homosexuality isn’t just blurry, as some take Kinsey’s research to imply – it’s an invention, a myth, and an outdated one. Men and women will continue to have different-genital sex with each other until the human species is no more. But heterosexuality – as a social marker, as a way of life, as an identity – may well die out long before then.
It’s funny how sexual intercourse or just sex is re-expressed as “different-genital sex” as though it weren’t biologically inherent in our species. The author, Ambrosino, makes one good point:
Debates about sexual orientation have tended to focus on a badly defined concept of “nature.” Because different sex intercourse generally results in the propagation of the species, we award it a special moral status. But “nature” doesn’t reveal to us our moral obligations – we are responsible for determining those, even when we aren’t aware we’re doing so. To leap from an observation of how nature is to a prescription of nature ought to be is, as philosopher David Hume noted, to commit a logical fallacy.
Nature, in many arguments of a moral sort, has been badly defined. There are Aristotelian definitions of nature to which we often hold as presuppositions when it comes to scientific investigation but which we apparently abandon when it comes to ethics.
The main point is that heterosexuality isn’t an invention, it’s a necessity. There would be no us to say stupid things about heterosexuality if there were not any such thing.
Taking ethics or religion out of the equation (you never really can), non-heterosexual sex of any sort is, by necessity, a deviation entertained by the smallest segment of the human population.
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