on sexually separated bathrooms

This topic has been rolling around in my brain for ages now.  I think it was probably triggered by one of those idiotic "we can't accept transgendered people because then some guy is going to put on a dress and walk into a women's bathroom and rape some little girl" arguments.  I don't really care to deal too much with that argument, but it lead to an interesting chain of thought.

This gets complicated pretty quickly, but let's deal with the basics.  I am still honestly a little iffy on the whole transgender issue, I'd like to get a chance to have a bit of a discussion with some transgender advocates to be able to try to work a few conflicts out.  But the basics are simple.  If someone was born a man but feels that she is a woman, then that says nothing about whether she is attracted to men or women.  So a man who identifies as a woman might still be sexually attracted to women, or might not be.

But this is where I hit the problem with this whole thing.  We no longer live in a world where we can assume that all men are attracted only to women and vice versa anyway.  The dude standing at the urinal next to you?  Yeah, he might be sexually attracted to you.

So I have to step back and ask, why do we sexually segregate bathrooms?  I'm serious.  Presumably the idea is that it's a function that involves things coming out of various body parts that are considered sexual, so we mustn't let ourselves see the sex that we're attracted to doing that because that would be inappropriate.  But wait, for a hetero man standing at a urinal in a public bathroom, what's worse?  Having a gay man standing next to you taking care of the same business you are, or a lesbian woman in the stall behind you?  I'm serious.  Because of social conditioning I might find the lesbian's presence to be uncomfortable, but if I'm honest with myself and ask why, I have no good answer.

There is one factor that I usually don't consider.  There's been a lot of discussion about "rape culture" lately, and it's been suggested that maybe women need a safe space to take care of such personal functions where they're safe from unwanted male attention.  Maybe that's a legitimate point, maybe that completely derails this train of thought.

But beyond that one point, the conclusion I can't avoid coming to is that sexually segregated bathrooms make no sense.  It seems that the entire idea is to keep men and women apart because of sexual reasons, that it's okay for a man to stand next to another man at the urinal because they're not interested in each other's naughty bits.  But that's not an assumption we can make anymore.  Whether they know it or not, straight people are already sharing bathrooms with people that are sexually attracted to their gender.

I offer this up more as a mental exercise than anything at this point.  Just a point of discussion.  I'd genuinely like to know if anyone has any good arguments against this.  I'm not sure I'm ready to advocate for unisex bathrooms at this point, but if I'm honest about it I can't honestly come up with any decent reasons why we shouldn't, aside from the fact that we're used to doing it the way it is now, and perhaps the argument of women needing it to be a safe space.

Mostly though I just find it interesting to consider the implications of living in a post hetero normative society.

but what of marriage?

I wrote about my high school sex education teacher telling my entire class not to have sex until they got married, and how offensive I find that now.

But I wanted to say a few words about marriage itself now.  This is a huge can of worms, but it's undeniable that, contrary to the words of the anti gay marriage people, marriage is a constantly evolving social construct.  There is no single, fixed concept of "traditional marriage", there is only the societal normality of marriage for a chosen age and society.  And while I'm aware that it can be quite different things in different parts of the world even today, I'm focusing mostly on what it is in the USA now since I live there and am part of that culture.

One other aspect of that teacher's belief that a couple should only have sex once they're married was the assumption that all relationships should eventually progress to marriage.  I have nothing against marriage, but I'm one of those people that isn't entirely certain if it's relevant anymore.  I have no problem with formally recognizing a relationship, and the legal benefits of marriage are one of the reasons that gay marriage is such an important issue.  However, what if a couple wants to just stay a committed couple?

I say good for them.  I'm aware that we have rather a significant schism in modern society regarding sexuality, but quite honestly I have no time for people who prefer the shame based philosophy of sexuality.  If they want to feel dirty about their own private parts in the privacy of their own homes then it's no concern of mine, but for the discussion of society in general I prefer to focus on the ramifications of a sex positive approach.  Once you take that step you're forced to view marriage in a different light.  It is no longer some kind of ritual that gives you the right to engage in sexual intercourse.  While some, sadly even in this country, still view it as a process of taking ownership of the woman, literally passing her from father to husband (and if you think I'm exaggerating consider yourself lucky), that view no longer enjoys unquestioned acceptance.

If a couple just wants to spend their life together without getting married then what concern is it of mine?  But let's examine this further.  What if two people want to get together and have sex sometimes for pleasure without the committed relationship part?  Once again, what concern is it of mine?

I feel the need to at least acknowledge polyamory while I'm at it.  I've encountered this before, I've had more than one chance to attend a talk given by some poly people, but for various reasons missed out.  Just to be clear, polyamory is similar to polygamy, which means sex with more than one partner, but it implies a romantic, not just sexual, relationship.  I don't want to get into the idea of three or more people getting married because I'm uncertain how that would work or what the repercussions would be, it's something I'd want to see planned out with some serious thought into how a legal arrangement between two people could be made to work with more than that.  But about poly relationships themselves, all I can say is that I'm convinced that there is no single ideal human relationship model.

Humans are remarkably flexible and even among people living within a single society different approaches can still be appropriate for different people.  I believe that marriage should be accessible for as may people in as many situations as is practical, but even then I don't believe that everyone should be expected to get married.

not until you're married?

A while ago Illinois passed a law banning abstinence only education.  This is largely a good thing, abstinence only education doesn’t work.  The research has been done.  You limit your sex education to saying “don’t do it!” and the result is teenagers doing it.  And doing it with less protection than if they’d have had a more comprehensive sex education program.

But I’m feeling a little nostalgic here.  The school system that I attended clearly had a comprehensive sex education policy.  They started on us early, I have vague memories of going on a bus ride during the school day in grade school to some kind of sex education center.  All I remember is sitting in a kind of small theater room and having someone give us the bare bones description of the human reproductive system.

But it’s in high school when the wheels fell off the process for me.  In my high school, our sex education program was combined with a general health class.  So one part of the class focused on sex, the rest on other things, probably everything from drug use to heart disease to how to give oneself a testicular self exam to check for cancer.

My teacher was great for everything else.  But when the sex education part started, he began by informing us that his religion was opposed to having sex before marriage.  He then explained that he was going to tell us not to have sex before marriage, but that he wasn’t doing that because of his religious beliefs..

And then he started to lie to us.  The only thing I remember was giving us grossly inflated condom failure rates to try to convince us that condoms weren’t reliable.

Now that’s bad enough, you dissuade kids from using birth control and, well, they don’t use birth control.  But they still have sex.  But as I’ve thought about it through the years, something else has started to anger me as well.

Where the hell did he get off telling an entire class not to have sex before marriage?  Delaying sexual activity until, well, at least after high school isn’t that bad an idea.  Learning to treat the sex act with an appropriate amount of respect is also a decent idea.  Perhaps being taught to treat your partner with respect would be a good idea too, but somehow that’s never covered.

But avoiding all sex before marriage is risky, not virtuous.  Sexual compatibility is a real thing, people are into different things and sometimes it just doesn’t work out between two people.  To head into marriage completely blind to that, having no idea what you’re into or what the other person is into and just assuming that it’ll all work out is not smart.  Nor, incidentally, is using sex as a motivation to get married.

And there’s one other thing.  I wish I’d thought to challenge that teacher and ask him what a homosexual individual was supposed to do.  This was before gay marriage was legalized anywhere in the United States.  Of course, given that his religion was big on abstinence only then there’s a decent chance it wasn’t big on homosexuality, so his reaction could have been interesting in more than one way.