Sexual and Gender Activism

"...our era is not one that has learnt to express sexuality and discuss it freely. Instead it has made sexuality infinitely important -- even desperate -- not merely as a site of pleasure and emotion, but as a source of meaning, anxiety and identity." (Mansfield, Kindle 1971)

Assuming that in our safe spaces that we are open to discuss and label ourselves under whatever terms we feel fit our "identity", this is a great example of how obsessed we are with labels and sexuality in our contemporary circles. We have labels for every identity and I don't believe that it's necessarily a bad thing but it's definitively a symptom of humanism.

"Lesbian", "Gay", "Bisexual", "Transgender", "Questioning": we even have a transitional label. Questioning, bi-curious, these are labels for people who don't fit into our new labeling system as if by an effort to redefine humanism to encapsulate more individuals. Even as we try to expand our labels and terms to make sexuality more open, we are still subjecting ourselves to it by making sure that everyone has a place and every thing has a name.

Humanism organizes and labels people to ease their placement into the hierarchy. By pushing harder to identify ourselves, we reestablish humanism.