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man-man

Avatar: 156485 2010-01-24 16:36:14 -0500
24

[Harem and Sushi Bar]

Level 69 Hacker

Selfish fine upstanding member of society

elenaratelimit Posted:

a bunch ‘o stuff

It’s really much easier than you’re making it – words like homosexual, bisexual, hermaphrodite, they all have fairly clear meanings, it only gets complicated when you try and load them down with more meaning than they ought to have (which leads to confusion when a person only fits half of the elaborate structure of meaning you’ve built).

When you start saying “Is homosexual a social construction of a specific act or is it also the identity of the person or is it both” you’re muddying the water. Homosexual, as a word, means nothing more than sexual attraction to members of the same sex. It’s right there in the word – homo = same, sexual… you figure it out. When you start attaching identity to it you’re inevitably going to find 2 people who both want to **** people of the same sex, but have polar opposites of character/identity in every other conceivable way. No need to complicate things, it’s just a description of what you want to have sex with.

Same goes for hetero or bi – hetero = different, bi = 2. Chromosomal anomalies and intersex/transexual are not sexual orientations with regards what people are attracted to, they refer to the physical or genetic makeup of a person.

Really the only part of what you said that I think is all that useful is about sexuality being a spectrum – some people are clear cut homo- or hetero- sexual, others sit in the middle or have differing amounts of attraction to either sex, and drawing lines between hetero and homo and bi is going to be difficult, but that only matters if you feel the need to clbumify people and want to draw extra meaning from their clbumification than just the bare truth of what the word means; if it really doesn’t matter to you then everyone can just clbumify themselves according to what they feel is right and then we can have done with it

Returning to a point… “what people do in their bedrooms and who they love has no real rhyme or reason, can’t be labeled or put into a box, and it ultimately shouldn’t matter”. What a person is attracted to might change or be inconsistent, but I think more often people know what they like, and then we’re going to need some word to describe common preferences. It’s not putting a person “in a box” to say that they’re heterosexual unless you then start adding all kinds of things to the definition of heterosexual other than the bit about what they’re attracted to. Or I suppose if you said they weren’t allowed to be “mostly hetero but…” then it’d be unnecessary pigeonholing…

Posted:

Everything can be labeled and categorized. It bothers me when people try to avoid doing it.

This. Trying to say we shouldn’t have a word for something just because the definitions aren’t absolute is a cop-out. There are a lot of useful concepts that couldn’t be exhaustively defined in a million years.

man-man edited this message on 09/20/2009 7:56PM
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