NOVEMBER 2015!? Jeez, I knew it had been a long time but crikey. I'd like to say I've been busy since my last post but truly I've been lacking subjects and I'm a very lazy person. Now luckily (depends on your opinion of my writing but anyway) I'm back and have an all new topic to shout at the internet!
Recently I've been partaking in a Sexology course (ooh err missus!) and I can say with much confidence that it's been fascinating, eye-opening and really very informative. One of the most interesting things about the course has been fellow student's reactions to certain topics. The class is made up of people from all over the globe, mostly Swedish and Swedish-speaking Finns but also Finnish-speaking Finns, Russians, Eastern Europeans and people from almost every corner of Africa. This diverse mix of people and backgrounds has led to quite the clash of cultures on occasion (although it's remained really quite civil which I have to say came as a surprise, I was expecting full on World War III, especially considering how strongly people believe in certain aspects of sexuality and gender) and it's been fascinating to hear other people's experiences and get to hear about cultural beliefs first hand.
I could well do an entire post (Hell, multiple posts spanning several years) on the discussions and debates we've had already (keep in mind we have currently had two lectures...) but I'm actually going to focus on one very, very specific argument and actually open up this argument past sexology and look at it generally as an argument. And then I'm going to explain why I think it's stupid. Let's get into it! (I feel I haven't put enough sex jokes in this but I've written the sexology bit now and don't want to go back and add stuff.)
More conservative thinking members of the class when confronted with the phenomenon of transgender, non-binary and gender fluid individuals (sorry I'm not explaining all of those terms I simply don't have the time to go into it right now so Google it or something) as well as other subjects that fall under the banner of sexology such as homosexuality and certain sex acts put forward the question of whether these things are actually natural, implying that they believed them to be unnatural and therefore wrong and/or immoral and/or sinful implying that people who identify as those things or do those things are wrong and/or immoral and/or sinful and/or mentally ill. In this post I am not going to go into whether those things above such as being transgender or homosexual are natural or not (THOUGH THEY BLATANTLY ARE AND ALWAYS HAVE BEEN) what I am going to focus on is that specific part of the argument where it's implied that things that are natural trump those things that are unnatural.
To quote myself (Wow the ego on this one...), as I stated in the class in response to someone suggesting that being transgender was something unnatural:
"This pen is unnatural (Note: I was holding a pen of at the time just in case you didn't guess), this table isn't natural (I was sat at a... do you know what just go with it), my clothes are not natural, the food I eat isn't natural, this building isn't natural, planes aren't natural, my laptop isn't natural. Cancer. That's natural. Volcanoes are natural. Famine is natural."
Everyone in the class quickly got my point and I hope you have too.
It seems so pervasive in society this idea that "natural=best" and "natural=healthy" and frankly it's just not true in any way shape or form. Also half the time the label "natural" isn't even accurate. Take health foods. I still find the irony of "natural" foods being sold in cardboard and plastic hilarious and that's not even taking into consideration the fact that the vast majority of foods are made out of ingredients that have been selectively bred over thousands of years and that's just to get them even halfway to tasting nice. Bananas are not "meant" to be yellow and sweet and large, their natural counterpart is green, bitter and a third the size. Also carrots. Carrots are only orange because particularly patriotic Dutch farmers bred them to be orange and it caught on elsewhere. Carrots weren't even originally grown for their roots, so dinky and insubstantial they originally were. What you are eating is not natural. At all.
Before you start protesting outside your local supermarket, please take to heart my argument that just because something is not natural does not in any way mean it's bad for you. Thanks to very artificial plants that have been developed in labs, crops that can survive arid conditions have been created and brought food to millions that would have starved. Thanks to all those artificial things I mentioned in class, we live and thrive in a modern society that gives us the opportunity to write, to have something to write on, to keep warm and covered, to keep sheltered, to allow us to travel the world at speeds deemed unthinkable by our ancestors, to access information of all types from any and every corner of the globe and communicate with people we've never even met face to face instantaneously.
In short, natural is great but it's not by definition the best. Plenty has been achieved by creating and using unnatural things. Of course there is also the argument that as humans beings are "natural", we have grown and evolved just like every other living thing, then whatever we create is also natural. Think on this: we never say ant hills or beaver dams are unnatural.
If this long (not even that long compared to a lot of my rambling posts...) blog post has failed to convince you of the flawed logic of the "natural is best" argument then all I ask is for you to be consistent in your logic. Leave all of your earthly possessions behind, undress yourself, remove your glasses if you have them, take off your shoes, throw your phone and computer and electronic devices away, go and live in the depths of nature (good luck finding a forest or natural environment that hasn't been influenced by humanity by the way) and then see how you fare. No cheating and making wood or stone tools either! That would be hideously unnatural...
