Analysis Of The Book 'Shame Isn T Normal'

Shame Isn’t Normal

As someone who is asexual, this book was very hard for me to read and process because all of his main points revolve around societal pressures surrounding sex and how it encompasses every aspect of queer people’s lives. The author Michael Warner talks extensively about sexual shame and uses it as his framework to analyze those who want to fit into society, those who are less sexual and especially those who “apologize” for the push to legalize gay marriage.

Our country has one of the most sexualized cultures in the world, yet our views on sex are very poor. Our laws criminalize and penalize those who dare to be open with their sex lives, especially those who don’t fit into societies narrow norms. Many people in the United

His point is that the marriage campaign is assimilation into straight culture and it’s a rejection of non-traditional queer lifestyles which is a very radical view to take. The heterosexual people who reject gay marriage are, in his framework, protecting the sanctity of their marriage by wanting their marriage to be holy and without shame at the expense of others. There are so many rights that fall under marriage itself that every person who wants to get marriage deserves to have no matter who what their identity that it’s interesting as a whole how against it he is. However, he does say that “pursuing same sex marriage as a strategy fails to address the privilege of spousal status that is the core of the problem” because marriage “reinforces all of the other damaging hierarchies of shame around sex.” Marriage does allow the government system to regulate relationships and justifies the enforcement of sexual relationships by requiring certain steps to legitimize the relationship. He argues that if (when) gay marriage becomes legalized, those whose relationships had become legitimized would become less shameful and the shame would get worse for unmarried or untraditional