Hadrian's Rage (2 page)

A Plague of Prejudice Threatens to
Undermine Hadrian’s Society

Submitted to Professor Cora Politis
Sociology 100
By Tara May Fowler

What is the greatest evil that befalls Hadrian today? Some have suggested our inability to curtail wild climate change that has besieged our planet for nearly two hundred years. Many would suggest it is the constant threat of insurgents battering against our walls due to the outside world’s inability to curtail the plague of human population. Underlying each of these theories is one that many of Hadrian’s citizens believe (perhaps even the majority): all the evils of this world, from those we suffer inside Hadrian to those suffered by the supposedly barbarian masses outside our walls, land firmly on the shoulders of heterosexuals—the strai—“knives” as we like to call those males and “stabs,” our preferred insult slung against the females. And yet, all of these theories would be wrong. The real ill that sickens Hadrian to its very core is prejudice, plain and simple.

What form of prejudice, one might ask? It is the overwhelming hatred Hadrian holds against heterosexuals. Bigotry will be our country’s undoing. We must, as a nation of enlightened people, find a way to reconcile and accept all forms of human sexual expression by consenting adults. Without this basic understanding and acceptance of humanity, Hadrian will never be able to develop and grow as a healthy society for all its citizens.

Let us begin first with climate change. How is it that we have managed to create the misconception that it is the result of heterosexuality? Some say that overpopulation lent itself to industrialization. As humanity’s numbers grew, so too did the need to mine for the materials required to create
energy. Not only must we keep ourselves sheltered and warm, but we need to eat. Thus began the excessive raping of the land for agriculture and stock. There is no doubt that as the human population grew, man’s respect for nature diminished at an equal, if not exponential, rate. But why must heterosexuals be blamed for all of this? Is it not wiser to consider man’s greed as the greater ill? The need for power, money, control—these were, and
still are
, the greater motivators for man’s abuses of this earth. Yes, the human population must be restrained, but history has proven that, with the use of proper birth control, a heterosexual family need not exceed that of the expected size dictated by Hadrian’s government.

Then there are the outsider barbarians trying to break through our front line of defense: Hadrian’s Wall. As much as Melissa Eagleton, propagandist extraordinaire for Hadrian’s National News (HNN), would like us to think, not all of these people are heterosexual. In fact, I will go so far as to say they are no different than us. They, too, can be seen in light of the Kinsey scale. Kinsey was, after all, a part of this outside society some two hundred years ago. According to Kinsey, over 10 percent (14 percent based on my calculations of his point scale of 0 to 6) of the human population across the globe is heterosexual. Another 10 to 14 percent or so are homosexual. For the purpose of this essay, I leave out transgendered individuals, accepting their unique status and assuming each to hold his or her own sexual orientation according to his or her true gender. Everyone else, therefore, is somewhere in between, identifying at varying degrees of bisexuality.

Now, Hadrian’s scientists claim to have eradicated 14 percent of the human gene that is heterosexual, but those citizens, like Todd Middleton, who only experience opposite sex attraction, know this propaganda to be sheer nonsense. Hadrian’s citizens have been fooled into believing any opposite sex attraction is merely a teenage phase or limited to bisexual tendencies that are to be repressed and ignored.

Every Hadrian citizen knows full well what to think of heterosexuals. We hear the expression, “That’s so strai,” daily. A day doesn’t pass when someone doesn’t jokingly, or seriously, insult a friend by saying, “You’re acting strai.” If a man gets too friendly with a female friend, even just the simple
act of falling against her by accident while laughing, he will be accused of being a “cunt-hammer”—an insult verging on bad porn! That is certainly not one of our kinder put-downs. A woman perceived to be straight is condemned as “a breeder.” She is also called a “sagging hole” or a “flapping vagina.” I don’t think there is another community of people in Hadrian that suffers as much extreme verbal abuse.

Let me give you an example. As a youth attending junior high school at the Virginia Woolf Children’s Academy, my peers ruthlessly pushed me into the coat stalls of my seventh grade classroom. Tauntingly, I was asked whether I was strai. Not having heard the word before and unsure of its meaning, I declined to answer. When I enquired as to the meaning of this word, fearing somehow it wasn’t meant to be nice, my classmates insisted I answer the question first. “Just say, ‘Yes,’” they insisted. “Just say, ‘Yes.’” Finally, I caved to their aggression and replied in the positive, which resulted in one of the most negative moments of my early life. I quickly learned what a strai was, and from then on, I was identified as such amongst my classmates. That they had cajoled this so called confession out of me made no difference at all in their minds. I had admitted to being a strai, so it was now open season on little Tara Fowler.

Proof actual was given the day our seventh grade art teacher told us we could draw any animal we wanted. Earlier that week, my mothers had taken my little brother and me to Hadrian’s Zoo. I had watched with fascination as Lucy the elephant sucked water into her great trunk and then sprayed it all over her body. In retro art class, we were given pencil crayons and paper to draw. It was always exciting to be able to work with our hands, so it was a class I especially looked forward to. On one particular day, shortly after our family’s visit to the zoo, I decided to draw Lucy just as I remembered her with water spraying all over her back. I began with the trunk lifted high in the air with water spraying up. Before I was able to draw any more, Colin McMasters saw my picture and starting screaming, “She’s drawing a dick! She’s drawing a hard dick, and it’s squirting!” He then began laughing while all the other children gathered round to peer down at my elephant’s trunk deemed penis. Mr. Walton soon arrived at the desk and shooed the other children back to their desks. He glanced at my drawing, took a voc shot, and then grabbed my elbow and led me into
the principal’s office. My mothers were contacted, the image of a “penis ejaculating” was immediately sent to them, and home life proved unbearable thereafter. Not even my own mothers would believe I was drawing a picture of Lucy the elephant!

Verbal abuse soon escalates into physical abuse. We’ve all heard the horror stories of what happens at reeducation camps. Frank Hunter’s trial for the death of his lover, Todd Middleton, revealed the extreme depths of this cruelty. The bloodstained paddle wielded against this youth and numerous other items hang in the main hall of the Ministry of Education as a stark reminder of our hatred of strais. I, too, suffered cruelly from the violent abuses of my peers: chases home, being bumped into, pushed aside as well as being laughed at. I watched boys believed to be straight picked on and attacked by gangs of boys and girls. It seems like there is nothing more disgusting in the minds of Hadrian’s citizens than the heterosexual male. I feel this is truly unfortunate because I am lucky enough to have befriended a heterosexual man. He is loving, generous, kind, and defies all of the stereotypes we have placed on straight men of being dirty, violent, and sexually aggressive. My friend shows no signs of being a sexual psychopath roaming the alleys of our good country to find women to rape or little girls to abuse. He is simply a hardworking man who wants to be accepted for who he is in this world. Instead, we mock, berate, and bully men like him as well as any women sexually attracted to men. I was saddened by the news the other day when, on HNN, Melissa Eagleton reported how a middle-aged man, a detritus fisherman, was beaten to death and then had his body set on fire after he admitted to having never been successfully reeducated. And although there was no evidence of his being sexually active, he was sought out and murdered.
3
Even though heterosexuality was decriminalized shortly after Gideon Weller’s trial, the hatred of heterosexuals continues.

It is this extreme abuse that I see as Hadrian’s illness. Not only is 14 percent of our population condemned simply for being born—and no, being straight is not a choice—but at least 72 percent of all of Hadrian is bisexual. These figures come from Kinsey’s 0 to 6 point scale,
4
which has created
the most demeaning of insults, “Heterosexuals are ZEROES.” Parents are the worst for using this slur. I can’t tell you how many times I heard my parents and the parents of friends utter the phrase, “There are no Zeroes in my family.” I wonder whether it has ever occurred to these people how many of their own children, or their children’s friends, they are hurting with such a trite dismissal of at least 14 percent of our population. And what about those children who are a 1 or a 2? They, no doubt, identify more with heterosexuals than they do with homosexuals. Should we not be cognizant of how we make our children feel whenever we unwittingly and blatantly abuse the heterosexual population?

It isn’t just those on the scale from 0 to 2 that I worry about. The 3s, 4s, and, on rare occasion, even 5s will experience opposite sex attraction. Each person who feels this sexual energy feels the stigma of hate our society has cast upon the damnable het’ros. As a nation, we place up to 86 percent of our population at risk of psychological stress due to this deeply imbedded hate. And, ironically, it is those who have experienced opposite sex attraction who are most likely to repress those feelings and convert them into hate. Thus, Hadrian citizens lash out against one another in a desperate attempt to deflect any suggestion of their own opposite sex attractions.

So how do we end the hate? By ending Hadrian’s official stance that heterosexuals are a danger to society. By closing reeducation camps that do more damage than good, and most importantly, by no longer denying heterosexuals access to higher education. Parents need to accept their children regardless of whom they love, and, most importantly, bisexuals should not be forced to “pick a side,” but, rather, be allowed to love whomever they fall in love with regardless of gender.

3
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/06/03/uk-russia
-killing-gay-idUKBRE9520A120130603

4
Kinsey, Alfred Charles et al.
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
. W. B. Saunders, 1948.

THINGS FALL APART

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