Society's Effect on Gender and Sexuality

Do you ever pick up on odd coincidences? For instance, a few weeks ago I was sitting in my rhetorical theory class and we were discussing the value of images over words in digital spaces. Later that night I went to a Sturgill Simpson concert (a country music artist) and the lyrics to one of the songs went, "A picture's worth a thousand words but a word ain't worth a dime". Some would simply label these odd occurrences serendipity. Regardless, things like this happen to us more often than not and many times we just fail to notice. Another one of these occurrences hit me this week. I was having a conversation with one of my friends about sexual preferences yesterday and she brought up that one her close friends hardly goes out on dates and is simply not interested in sexual relationships. She mentioned that they had a conversation about it and the friend claimed to be asexual. Her friend is completely content with having many close friends and does not develop physical feelings like many of us do towards others. My friend and I continued our conversation and discussed how we all, as humans, have different preferences when it comes to sexuality and that it is absolutely justifiable. Unbeknownst to my friend, we are studying gender and sexuality in my Philosophy of Film course this week.

While going through the reading material for this week's class, Perfomative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory by Judith Butler, I couldn't help but think of the conversation I had with my friend. Specifically, I was exploring the idea of 'action theory', which Butler points out is "a domain of moral philosophy [that] seeks to understand what is 'to do' prior to any claim of what one ought to do". I thought of it this way: what would the world be like without social norms? In other words, if it was more 'normal', for lack of a better term, to be homosexual in the 90s as it is now (with the legalization of same-sex marriage nation wide), would there be more people interested in same-sex marriage today? In this case, the social norms before the legalization of same-sex marriage could be perceived as insinuating that we ought to be heterosexual. Butler further explores the nature of sexuality and gender by discussing the phenomenology theory of 'acts' that "seeks to explain the mundane way in which social agents constitute social reality through language, gesture, and all manner of symbolic social sign". This offered all new clarity on the conversation I had with my friend. Her friend simply ignored the social norms that society will forever continue to plant in our system and chose to undertake what he felt was comfortable instead. He did what he wanted 'to do' instead of what society says he ought 'to do'. This, if anything, should be lauded as courageous, should it not? I, for one, wish that I did not so easily bend to society's normative push on a daily basis. As with serendipity, we often do this without realizing it. 

This brings me to a quote from a movie I watched this week, Friends with Benefits. 

Jamie: "I really have to stop buying into this bullshit Hollywood cliché of true love."
Jamie: "Shutup, Katherine Heigl, you stupid, little liar!"

Why do we buy into the Hollywood clichés so easily? Rarely are these clichés actually applicable to our lives, yet we are so easily angered when they don't. We are often drawn to films that are relatable to our everyday lives, but, as Jamie and Dylan point out in Friends with Benefits, we are also too often looking for a Hollywood cliché that will never come. We dream of the Titanic scene between Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. My argument is that perhaps if you don't focus on the social norms created by films, media, celebrities, music, etc., that perhaps your own original, magical fairytale ending will occur. We can't all fit the stereotype. After all, films remain relevant by coming up with new, original fairytales. Films are made about the people that ignore the influence of such clichés.

Judith Butler's words seemed to lean in this direction. I believe that she is trying to strip away society's overbearing effect on our personal lives and in turn she demonstrates that sexuality and gender is in actuality not determined by these things. I've come to find that this world is much more serendipitous than it seems and that if we ignore certain ideas that society deems normal, we can write our own fairytale.