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“To believe that one is heterosexual is an illusion.”
Rael, conferences in Asia, Europe and America
Like a shower of autumn leaves gently falling, various readings, broadcasts and human contact lead me, these days, to question myself and to discover the history of the sexual diversities of the human race.
Heterosexuality, a 12th-century occidental invention?
Over the centuries, morals and sexual practices have changed according to religions and governments. In ancient Greece and Rome, homosexual practice seemed just as normal as the heterosexual act.
It was during the Middle Ages that the Church, obsessed between chastity and the need to procreate, decided that the sexual act could only be permitted for the purpose of engendering life. Any other named sexual acts had to be condemned and therefore forbidden, by this was meant: sodomy, masturbation, fellatio, cunnilingus, etc. There was no reference to any specification of human gender such as homosexuality or heterosexuality. No, only the sexual act.
Thus the historian Louis-Georges Tin developed the idea that heterosexuality, far from being a “fact of nature”, is indeed a “fact of culture”: The invention of heterosexual culture,
Louis-Georges Tin, Autrement, 2008.
By colonizing the continents, Europeans brought this heterosexual culture to peoples resisting this unique and sclerotic conception. Colonial religious pressure imposed its heterosexual vision, but also denigrated and flouted the existence of the widely respected “3rd gender” among the Pawnees and other indigenous peoples. Some peoples with as many as five different genders https://positivr.fr/amerindiens-comptaient-5-genres-differents/. The white people, supported by anthropologists, have accused these people of being deviant or mentally ill, based on their own Christian beliefs.
The excellent Quebec series “Fragile” introduces us to the world of hermaphrodites, more specifically referred to as “intersex” today. The actor plays the role of a character in a male body with female genitalia. He confides for the first time to a friend, “I’m lucky to have two sexes, I don’t feel like giving up my femininity. Why should I be just a girl or just a guy?”
Young adults, not brought up with Judeo-Christian guilt, seem to choose a sexuality that is more focused on possible encounters than a definite choice between heterosexual, homosexual or other.
I first heard about pansexuality and the binary gender by my little girl in her early teens. Many young people are emotionally and/or sexually attracted to each other without concern for the sex or gender of the other. They care about being attracted to each other first. They consider themselves non-binary by rejecting male and female stereotypes. They define themselves outside of the duality between men and women. This is where we understand that believing oneself to be exclusively heterosexual is an illusion.
The Raelian religion is the only religion to talk about freely lived sexuality and of the importance of the right to dispose of one’s body as one sees fit. “Each person must live an harmonious sexual life corresponding to tastes and natural tendencies… to condemn a homosexual because he is a homosexual is as stupid as to condemn a man for being a man or a cat for being a cat.” Maitreya, Let’s Welcome the Extra-Terrestrials, p. 73
“A fulfilled sexuality is sexuality that gives us pleasure, a free, autonomous pleasure, which goes along with freedom of thought and consciousness. For this to happen, we need to go beyond religious and social taboos; if we want to attain this, we need to become an imagination machine. Be aware that the human being is made for that…” Rael, Words of Maitreya, p. 83.
The diversity of bodies and sexual diversities are infinite and fulfilling.
Lyliane Jolly
Columnist for the Raelian Movement