Social norms in a homosexual world

(Update on 8-Sep-18 — Made a few edits to make a few sentences clear and add some references, like the Google memo. No change in content otherwise)

In a remarkably short period of time, the world has moved from being homophobic to being liberal. When I mean “world”, I mean the mainstream thinking on homosexuals and what socially acceptable/desirable behaviors are.

While one might (continue to) have very despicable thoughts towards homosexuals, in the last half-a-decade or so, it has become socially undesirable to convey those thoughts in any form or fashion. It is actually fashionable to say that you are open, have no uneasiness around LGBTQ and display profile pics in social networks supporting their cause. It did help that people like Tim Cook opened up, and even ‘arranged marriage advertisements’ have started coming in from parents of homosexuals.

This is all definitely good. But…

It is not just about despicable thoughts, right? When is the world going to learn about social norms of being with homosexuals, in everyday interactions, even if they do not have bad opinions of them? The quick answer is — Nothing changes, why would you behave differently at all? Fair enough — But hear me out when I list out instances where we may have a thing or two to learn. Or at least think about.

Personally, I have never had ‘homophobia’. But until about a decade back, the worldview and mental model was only about associating homosexuals with transgenders and in funny conversations. Only with age (& hopefully some maturity), not to mention the mainstream thought changing, did my thoughts on homosexuality change, from it being about transgenders to being about people of all kinds.

Still, it was about “other people” that existed elsewhere and not in my social circles.

Until recently, that is.

A few months back, an acquaintance of mine, with whom I have spent a few hours every day for years together as part of a large group (not adding more details here about education/work etc. since I really want it to be anonymous) shared photos of his wedding to the group. Even as an asocial person, I respond to such posts of ‘life-events’ by people.

I congratulated him and was lazily swiping through the photos. And after a few swipes, I realized that there was no ‘bride’ in it at all. Every photo had this acquaintance and another man — And then it struck me! I started reading the comments from others and realized it was actually a different kind of wedding — something I have not come across before in my circles.

Recently, I read about Republican Party senators (in the US) changing opinions once they find someone in their immediate family is gay. This was sort-of my moment in similar lines — though not in the family or close circles, it was enough to set me thinking: I had known this person for a few years and had no clue about this!

It is not socially desirable to say it now, but I should say I was slightly unnerved. Unnerved, not in a homophobic sense but uneasy. As I tried to uncover my thoughts on why I felt uneasy, I found that the uneasiness was not something to condemn but become more aware of. And that we need to evolve our societal norms.

A lot of what I write below would likely be very specific about India & Indians, but I believe the same thoughts & questions apply anywhere, irrespective of which culture it is. Many young people (even in India) will find a few things I say irrelevant — after all, I am a conservative person in my mid-30s — but still, it IS relevant to you too, trust me.

• From the time we are born & definitely by the time we go to school, there is a “girl-boy” thing instilled in us. As we grow older, even in the best of the cosmopolitan cultures and joint-education systems, there is typically a ‘boys’ group and a ‘girls’ group in school classrooms, residential complexes and so on. We are accustomed to certain things considered OK if boys do, but not so OK if girls do. And the other way too. It could be about dressing, about weeping, about the games one shows interests in, about time spent outside the house and so on. These are changing and for good, sure, but there still exist some difference between ‘being a boy’ and ‘being a girl’, that, I think, will continue forever in some form or the other. It need not be something against women or against men — it would just be a difference, that is all. We can extend this all the way to the James Damore memo or stop something in the middle, but the debate is going to go on.
• As we grow further into adult life, the differences only increase. In any culture, I am sure there are separate restrooms (& trial rooms in outlets selling clothes) for men & women.
• Certain things you would normally do in front of a male colleague/friend/relative would not be acceptable in front of a female c/f/r. Let us take an example: You go on a picnic with several colleagues to a beautiful beach. You have a very dingy room to change your clothes. You need to rush to go watch the sunset, so it cannot happen one by one. How would you handle it? All (or some) men would go in and change their clothes together. And then the women. It is very unlikely that you will have some men & women going in together for this. It simply is socially unacceptable & awkward. Isn’t it?
• Even in 2016, when meetings happen at offices and there are men & women, I notice feeble handshakes between a man & woman. This handshake thing is definitely decreasing according to my own empirical data from 2000 to 2016, but it still exists. In many social occasions (outside the office), men would shake hands with other men, women with other women but prefer a ‘namaste’ or a ‘hello’ when it comes to people of the other gender.
• When you find two people working on a thing (say code review while debugging it) in a common computer, see how it is, when there are two male/female doing it and there are one male and one female. When it is people of the same gender, you will find that people are comfortable sitting very close to each other with their knees touching the others’. Would that happen when there is a male/female? Well, even among the younger generation, I notice a ‘healthy’ distance! (Well, these are casual observations — not that I keep looking for such things, ha!).
• While that is between acquaintances or strangers, even between friends, your behavior would not exactly be the same between male and female friends. You would not really find two friends walking with one’s arm on another’s shoulder unless they are from the same gender or are romantically involved.

Crudely put, there is likely a ‘tension of sex’ lurking underneath when a male & a female person interact — Or at least an effort is made to dispel an impression of such a thing. The degree of it is high when it comes to strangers and progressively decreases as the degree of familiarity increases. It probably never reaches zero, as would be, when there are two people of the same gender interacting, everything else being similar. This, of course, excludes interaction between couples.

I was not really someone who had many (actually, Er — any) friend that was a female but have had friends who had at least some girls as friends. In some cases, the boys (my friends) would be nice to the girl in front of her but not hesitate to talk dirty even about her when she is not around. Thankfully, these have been rare. But in ALL cases, the boys have had to constantly explain to others that he is not romantically involved, and it is only friendship. It would take a while for any new person in his life (a new colleague/classmate/friend) to understand it.

Well, this is likely how the world has operated for several generations across cultures— sometimes more open than others.

Then, what is special now?

My question is — How should all these change when it comes to homosexuals? When are we going to devise the social rules? Let us take these cases above:

• Should the same restrooms be used by both heterosexuals and homosexuals? If the restrooms for male & female are different because one may not feel comfortable with the other gender (forget things about molestation etc.), does that not apply to homosexuals? Is it about ‘gender’ or ‘sexual orientation’ now? These can simply be dismissed just the gender — physiological differences if you will — but that may not be fully right. Beyond the biological elements with X/Y chromosomes, is ‘gender’ anything beyond sexual orientation, for practical purposes? I am aware that there are bisexuals in LGBTQ, who might be comfortable/uncomfortable in either situation. But that is another discussion. Let us resolve this first.
• When I go on a picnic and have the same situation as above — How would a male colleague (who is a homosexual) feel if I tell him that we should go inside that dingy room together? Would he feel comfortable seeing me half-naked? Or being half-naked in front of me?
• What if a homosexual man I meet at a conference wants to actually say ‘Hello’ with a wave of the hand, but I extend my arm to shake hands? If it were a woman, given my social conditioning, I would judge that she is uncomfortable. With a man, how would I know? Incidentally, when I have visited places outside India, I have had female colleagues hugging me to welcome or say Bye-Bye. After a few instances, they would stop it because they sensed that I was uncomfortable. Some have simply insisted that I do not feel uncomfortable — “Come, give a hug, man”, has been their response to my feeble handshake. This happened after working together for a while, so I could just laugh it off. It would have spooked me otherwise.
• In the code review example, I might move closer to the homosexual male colleague and touch his knees/thighs because of MY orientation AND social conditioning. But it might make him extremely uncomfortable or worse, even aroused, just as it may if a female colleague does it to me. (Thanks for reminding me that I am not physically endowed to arouse someone else of either gender, at a gentle touch, but that is not what we are speaking now! Also: I don’t like you.)

About this acquaintance whose photos I saw — It is likely that I or some of our common friends have made fun of gays in front of him. It now sounds very silly. For the future, that is the easy part, I just stop doing it from now anywhere, in front of anyone. But during one of the code reviews or common work we have done, have I accidentally touched his shoulders? Have I patted him on his back to just grab his attention for something? Or even with many of my fairly close friends (who might be homosexuals), have I tickled them on their waist? How have they felt all along? I, of course, did all those things inadvertently, but what if they had felt uncomfortable?

And more importantly, how am I supposed to behave from now, with anyone? The difference in my behavior towards male & female is learned since childhood through social norms, and that has helped me so far. But that is not enough in the new scheme of things. Regarding just male-female interactions, you knew who was male and who was female and acted accordingly. In the aspect of sexual orientation, that is not known beforehand.

In a way, it is good to not know it beforehand — If we do, we will likely apply all sorts of stereotypes and make their life even more miserable. We are, in fact, yet to get out of it, even between male-female.

Well, this problem (for the homosexuals) has existed all along, and it is good that we as a society have started accepting them and are aware of this. But that is not enough. We also need to update our social rules accordingly. It may sound like — No rules & changes for a small minority — but it may be not a small minority. We may get to know how many of us are homosexuals only in the next decade or two. If the social norms do not evolve, their cause would not have been completely met.

Social norms are not something that a few people should sit in a room and decide. It would evolve in the society on its own — through casual discussions — like what this blog post does. If this sets you thinking even a bit in this aspect, it serves its purpose.

For starters, I think what would help is, for us to be aware of these and try to modify our behavior without making anyone feel awkward in the process. And the next step in the awareness would be to make sure that no biases/stereotypes get formed around those.

I understand that some people would have felt uncomfortable reading it thus far. What I am going to write next will be fundamentally uncomfortable to most people. I am myself uncomfortable.

Like many people, I was very disturbed when the news about children being molested in a Bangalore school came to light a couple of years back. But I did not feel like participating in the online/offline protests that many were undertaking and simply ordering the ‘execution’ of the guilty. I wondered what went in the minds of those people who were molesting little children — Was it just a case of just extreme lust. Did deprivation of sex cause it? Were they maniacs? In which case, why target children? If it is just about sex, they could do many things, including visiting brothels. Are children targeted because they were unsuspecting, helpless victims? Or is there something more?

And I came across this article:

You’re 16. You’re a Pedophile. You Don’t Want to Hurt Anyone. What Do You Do Now?

If you did not have time to read it, here is the story in a nutshell — Pedophilia may not be just lust or a mental disorder — it could just be the way some people are wired. They derive sexual pleasure only with children, whether they consciously like it or not. We can indeed classify it as a mental disorder, but then, so could many other not-normal behaviors of people. Remember, we even called homosexuality a mental disorder until recently.

So, are we then dealing with several people who have a fundamentally different sexual orientation? How do you handle them? It is easy to make homosexuality mainstream. After all, you could ensure there is a consensual relationship wherever it happens. Only when the society was not accepting them did some of them indulge in molesting others. If the society is all liberal, even the few who indulged in molesting others may not. Few people will do, just like a few heterosexual people indulge in rape. The regular judicial system can handle that with the same effectiveness as in the case of heterosexuals.

But with pedophiles? Will we become liberal enough and accept attraction towards children as another sexual orientation? Even if we do, how exactly do we help such people so that they do not become criminals, molesting unsuspecting children? After all, you do not want innocent children to be affected in any way. Should they be ostracized? Or be made impotent by modifying their genes? Is that not cruel to them? How would the sexual desires of pedophiles be satiated? Toys? Maybe one of the answers.

But let me tell you — it is very scary and disturbing.

And I shall leave you with just that.