Why Sexual Orientation Is Abnormality

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“Sexual orientation is a term frequently used to describe a person’s romantic, emotional or sexual attraction orientation to another person”. If a person is appealed to another one of the same sex, he has a homosexual orientation and is called gay or lesbian. On the other hand, a person who is attracted to a person of the opposite sex has a heterosexual orientation. People who have an attraction for both men and women are called bisexual. Sexual orientation is not the same with gender identity; since the second one is an individual’s inner feeling of either he is a male or a female. Sexual orientation is quite a new notion because the concept of a homosexual personal identity or a homosexual person is just 100 years old despite the fact that…show more content…
Oscar Wilde, who himself was a homosexual, was imprisoned- same sex attraction wasn’t socially accepted. However, later on, DSM- III (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd edn, 1980) denoted that only if the individual has negative sentiments towards his sexual orientation, can homosexuality be considered as abnormal. In DSM- IV (1994) it is also stated that it can be considered as a sexual disorder if an individual has “persistent and marked distress about one’s sexual orientation”. Until the 1960s in the UK homosexuality was illegal between assented adults. Luckily, people do not have the same attitudes towards homosexuality nowadays. It cannot be viewed as abnormal and it is not anymore categorized as…show more content…
However, it is a behavior which has marked its existence in almost all cultures . In Pacific island communities (e.g. Tahiti and Hawaii), homosexuality was a common behavior to Western affect (Gunson, 1964 , Morris, 1990). Furthermore, both in native South and North America homosexuality was a common factor, as well as in Africa (Sweet 1996), Asia (e.g. Hinsch, 1990 and Leupp, 1995) and pre-modern Europe (e.g. Dover, 1984) . In 1935, Freud stated that “Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness”. He emphasized that “many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime and as a cruelty, too” . However, until the 1970s homosexuality was thought as a “psychiatric disorder” . The ways of changing someone’s sexual orientation those days were cruel and torturing. The “treatments” varied from long-time psychotherapy courses to electro-shock and even prefrontal lobotomies were performed in order to minimize homosexual drive
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