Opinions - Is Truth Relative
--You can't disagree with an opinion, because they're just people's opinion. For this reason everyone is always right because everyone has their own truths. For this reason you should never criticise or judge a person's point of view--
I'm going to have to be blunt: The above is some of the most cancerous nonsense I have ever heard. Anyone that truly believes it is not just mistaken but demented. Fortunately, most people who say the above things are just repeating what they've heard others say, usually because they are encountered disagreement or perhaps have even been proven to be incorrect, and hence the above line is a nice way to avoid admitting intellectual defeat. For someone who wasn't mentally ill to say the above would have to be if they didn't really understand what they had just said.
There is a huge difference between what is true, and what we believe to be true. I will have a picture of the world which I use to make judgements about what is true and false, someone else may have a different picture of the world and come to different conclusions. It may be that both me and this other person are both intelligent and fully rational people, but if that's true we're both know that one of us is right, and the other is wrong, further, the person we believe right will necessarily be ourselves - this last point follows from the concept of 'a belief' itself, as a belief is something you believe to be true, hence one can't believe one's own beliefs to be false and someone else's beliefs to be true without being incoherent.
The vital part of the above is we are talking about our beliefs about the world. Our internal pictures of the world. Our pictures of the world vary, but the world itself? No. The whole concept of 'true' and 'false' come about by whether or not our picture of the world corresponds accurately to the world itself.
The idea that we all contain our own truths is self-refuting. Some people like to hold that when people believed the Earth was flat it 'was true for them', but what does that mean? It's actually just a misuse of the term 'truth'. 'The True' is external, not internal. Of course, one absurdity of this is that if I truly believed that all the people that read my profile are 'Space Elves spying on me from another dimension' it would be 'true for me' that you, the reader, are a space elf that is spying on me from another dimension. Could any sane person be willing to admit the truth of this statement? Could any intelligent reader reading my words here admit that in some sense it is true that they, the reader, are a space elf spying on me?
But it gets worse. I believe that truth is objective. Say my friend that is talking this kind of rubbish tells me that I'm wrong and truth is relative to the individual, things are 'true for individual persons'. Let's see if this bears out.
If I'm right then truth is objective and I am right. If they are right then truth is relative and thus for me I'm still right, although paradoxically the statement 'Truth is objective' is only true relative to me. In any case, my friend has no right to tell me I'm wrong that truth is objective, because it's true for me. Note that it also follows that if a person takes seriously this madness they'd lose the right to ever call anyone wrong again, hence when a person like me disagrees with them they'd have no right to ever challenge me and say I believe falsely (as everything I believe is 'true for me'). Anyone who holds this position and ever says that someone else is wrong would be an intellectual hypocrite.
Hopefully this illustrates the absurdity of this position, which I call 'Epistemological Relativism'.
Opinions - Being Judgemental
--You shouldn't judge people. Don't criticise me because it's judgemental, you don't even know me! How can you judge someone without knowing them?--
This sentiment is another case of people misunderstanding what is a good sentiment. We shouldn't judge people on irrelevant issues, like the colour of their skin. Assuming that someone is criminal, or less intelligent, based on the colour of their skin would be bad judgement. Assuming that women need protection because you're a man and they're a woman is bad judgement. There are a million other ways a person can judge badly, just because that person listens to the same bands as a person or looks like a person you don't like doesn't mean you should conclude they are like those people, nor should you if they happen to look facially similar.
But just because there is 'bad judgement' doesn't mean there isn't such a thing as 'good judgement'. Judgement is an essential part of living well and we all need to learn to judge well, we need to learn to be good judges of character so we can pick friends, we need to be good judges of what people are feeling and thinking to predict their actions and to know how to comfort them, or otherwise act around them. If we find ourselves picking an employer for a job we need to be good judges of what kind of person the are in order to know if they are right for the job. There's nothing wrong with this, being judgemental is not a bad thing in itself, being too hasty or arrogant in your judgements might be, judging irrationally certainly is.
Well, what about prejudice? Judging before you know someone. Is that wrong? In some cases, sure, racial prejudice obviously is. But what about other types of prejudice? Say if you meet two people during the course of a day, one has chosen to wear a suit and a tie, the other is dressed in old clothes, is it wrong to start making judgements to what kind of person they are? By no means is it.
If I'm at a bar and looking for someone to talk to I will make a judgement on who is most likely to be the most interesting to talk to, and who will most likely want to talk. I may judge one person as unapproachable, I may judge one person as looking as if they want someone to talk to, I may judge one person as probably not sharing my interests.... the only thing that is important here is whether I'm making accurate judgements or not, anyone can go wrong, but do I succeed more often than not? Or are my judgements baseless?
If I'm talking to people online I will judge them. I will come up with a picture of who I think they are, based on the way they present themselves, the way they write, their interests, their hobbies, and generally the information they choose to share with me. I will make a judgement on what type of person they are, and whether I like them or not. Sometimes I will make a mistake, it happens, but if I never make that judgement then I can never like or dislike them. So, yes, I judge people I've never met, I'll even make some judgements without even talking to them online but just by reading their profile... is this person likely to be worth my time in responding to them? If I do talk to them what kinds of things do I think they will find interesting? Do I think I'm going to like this person? Sometimes I contact people and turn out not to like them, undoubtedly there have been people I've not contacted and would have liked, but that's life, you play the averages, after all, I can't contact everyone!
And I can't treat everyone the same. To treat my friends the same as strangers would be bizarre wouldn't it? Or my friends like my lovers? Or *shudder* my parents like my lovers? People are different, my relationships with them need to be different. To know those differences I have to make judgements about what those differences are, and to do that I need to make judgements about what kinds of people the people I interact with are. Is this person introverted or extroverted? Intellectual or unintellectual? Intelligent or stupid? Do they have good taste or bad taste? These will all effect my relationship with a person, and so they should!
Free Speech - What it isn't
--How dare you disagree with me! I have a right to my opinion so leave me alone! You're just oppressing me and trying to remove my free speech by trying to force your opinions on everyone else!--
Also nonsense.
Let me first remind you that I am in no position to force opinions on anyone here. Here I am behind my computer with no physical contact with you, quite possibly in a different nation, often a different continent, and all I can do is write words that you choose to read. If that's all I need to do to break your freedom and courage to believe what I want, I think you're a pretty spineless person. If you had a spine there is no way you could talk of me 'forcing' anyone to do anything. Tell me, why is it I can force you to believe something but yet you have no power over me?
Secondly, the freedom of choice comment is really what I like to call 'the war cry of the moron'. Finding him or herself in the position of not being able to defend their position rationally, they skip straight to shouting out loud clich�s they've never really thought about regarding freedom of speech. Well, I'm sorry, you haven't thought it through. Freedom of expression is not freedom from criticism; it's the freedom to express. The freedom you have to express your opinion is the same freedom I have to criticise your opinions, that's the whole point of freedom of expression! Just because I disagree with you and think you're a moron in no ways takes away your freedom to express your moronic thoughts, it is indeed an exercise of that same freedom on my part.
Oh, and for a final point, censorship on sites like this is not an attack on your freedom of expression. Freedom of expression does not mean you have the right to say whatever you want on other people's websites. If you were in my home and I told you I didn't want to hear any racist expressions, I'd had every right to throw you out of my home when you start saying racist things anyway. This is Jet's website, and he lets you come in here for free, but he's told us that he wants us to obey certain rules. Don't like it? Get the hell out of his website.
National Identity - Americans are not British
--Hello, I'm British as well! I live in, and was born in America, I've never been to Britain, nor do I know the first thing about British or English society, culture, government, or just about anything. In fact, if asked to, I probably couldn't find the United Kingdom on a map, but my grandparents are British so I'm going to leave you an inane comment declaring how we're both English--
Comments like the above insult me. Now, I don't want to get too patriotic, and I'm extremely quick to criticise my nation when I think it's necessary (although one might argue that is every true patriots duty), but there are some things I am very fond of in regards to British Culture. One of them is how there is a strong tradition of national identity being independent of ethnic descent (who you're ancestors were)
When an American tells me that they are British because they are descended from people who are British what they are doing is projecting American racial segregation onto the British nationality. I�m not saying that Britain has no racism, there are indeed some serious issues here, and there are even a few moronic and quite literally National Socialist parties who would agree with these Americans, but on the whole, we still have that strong tradition of ethnic descent and national identity being separate. In short, National identity is not about whose blood runs in your veins and it is not inherited from your parents.
A person is not British because their parents are British; they are certainly not British because their great grandparents are. It wouldn�t make any sense to claim that people could be British on basis of ethnic descent because the British Isles, and England in particular, are ethnically mongrel. The British Isles have seen constant waves of invasion and immigration for millennium. There is not a single person on the isle that is of the same ethnicity as the original Britons, we�ve gone through waves of immigration and invasion from the Celts, the Romances, the Norse, the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, the Normans, and in the post-war period we�ve seen a lot of Asian immigration (encouraged by the British government in fact), and more besides. English and British culture has been forged by cultural import, our national meal is fish and chips, with the latter made from a vegetable brought back from the American colonies, and our national drink is an oriental drink called tea. Our national identity and character is forged through immigration and the influx of outside culture. English bloodlines go into just about every part of Europe, and across the world.
I can be fairly sure of my Anglo-Saxon ethnic descent, but that�s not what makes me British. Even if I was descended from the original Britons who first made their homes on these isles that would not make me any more or less British. A person can be black, or of Asian descent and be just as British as I am. If I discovered tomorrow that in fact all my bloodlines traced back to Germany within the last eight generations, I would not consider myself any less British for knowing that.
And I find it staggering to think that Americans could find this so confusing, and that the popular American sense of national identity is so primitive compared to ours. You�re American, you live in a nation where the vast majority of you have no real blood connection to the land your in past the last piffling couple of centuries, but if someone asked you if you were American would you say �No�? Do you consider yourself less American simply because your ancestors didn�t live in America?
Being British has nothing to do with your ancestors, so what does being British mean? Well, the British are the people of Britain, no more, no less. Who are the people of Britain? Well, come to Britain and find out. But don't try to claim to be a person of Britain when you've never even been here, never mind lived here, been raised here, worked here. If you're not part of our society, our community, our culture, then you don't get to tout our identity.
In the simplest sense anyone with legal British citizenship can be said to be British, anyone without it can be said to not be British. Of course, British people also have a culture, a culture created by British people. Now, in actual fact the people determine what the culture constitutes, the culture does not determine who is British, so I don't want to see any foreigners claiming to be British because of cultural heritage either, though to be honest most of the people I see claiming to be British on cultural grounds don't seem to have any British cultural heritage anyway. Am I to believe that these Americans are more civilised than the standard American due to exposure to British culture? Do they queue in shops more? Are they more polite? Do they have more emotional self-control? Do they share the shared identity British people of being people of a nation that has gone through countless terrorist attacks and still managed to hold itself together as a nation (without going through the utter silliness and emotional panic of the United States)? I somehow doubt it.
But if you�re an American, and you�ve never been to England, you�ve not grown up in English culture and you�ve not internalized our way of doing things, if you�re not a part of our society anyway, so how can you dream of calling yourself English? I�m sorry, but you�re just not English, nor do you have English heritage. English heritage is for the English, if you want heritage look to your own shared American heritage, and for Christ�s sake stop with the racial segregation. We Europeans don�t care much for what area of Europe we descend from, if we descend from Europe at all! Why is it you�re so bothered about working out what nations you�re ancestors came from? It shouldn�t be important for who you are, you are not your ancestors, you are American, now hurry up and develop a shared identity because you�re all over there together anyway.
I really do struggle to accept that so many Americans truly think this way, but I have received these kinds of comments so many times, here for example, please bear this in mind, you�re not English, you�re not British, you gave that up when you declared independence.
Goth - What It is
---"Goth isn't about music, music isn't important. Goth is about a lifestyle, a culture, and a state of mind. There are more important things about Goth than music, and hence someone can not listen to Goth genre music and still be Goth. Who cares about music? Music isn't important to who you are!"---
The above tries to suggest that Goth must not be about just music or else Goth isn't very important. How can we base out identity around being 'Goth' if all we're talking about is a music preference? What a silly thing to base your identity around!
I think I can easily resolve the apparent conflict between the opinion that Goth is essentially about music (over-simplistically) and yet music isn't all that important fairly easily. Goth isn't that important. If you base your identity around being Goth you are silly.
Goth is identification with a music genre. Goths are to the Goth music genre as Trekkies are to Star Trek. For many people it's a big part of their lives, you get the hardcore trekkies, the less hardcore trekkies, and you get people who watch Star Trek but don't consider themselves Trekkies at all. Equally, you get 'hardcore' Goths, less 'hardcore' Goths, and people that listen to Goth but don't consider themselves Goths at all.
Me? I guess I'm Goth, I listen to the music, I'm partly involved with that kind of community, I go to Goth clubs and dance to Goth music, and I dance in the way that has arisen as a cultural norm within Goth culture, and I have the sense of aesthetics that corresponds to the music, so, yea, I guess I'm a Goth if we want to insist on it (although most true Goths are too pretentious to admit to being Goth).
I will happily tell a person that doesn't listen to the music and is not involved with the scene that they're not Goth, but it's not an insult, or meant to be derogatory. For instance, whilst I might be Goth, I'm not a Punk. Does that make me less of a person? Nah, it just means I'm not very connected with Punk culture and music. I know a few Punk bands (doesn't everyone?) but I'm blatantly not Punk. If someone called me Punk then they'd be wrong, if I was to walk around claiming to be Punk I'd be wrong, and if they had to list reasons why I wasn't Punk they'd start with my lack of knowledge about Punk music, my lack of an outward identity as a Punk, and my lack of true identification with the music.
But why would I claim to be Punk if I didn't like the music? Why would someone claim to be Goth if they didn't like the music?
If you're not Goth, deal with it. Find a more appropriate less contested label to describe yourself. So you're 'dark-minded', call yourself 'dark-minded'. So you're apparently 'Evil', if you must insist on referring to yourself such then go ahead, don't use Goth as some strange synonym for 'evil' when it blatantly isn't any such thing. So you like to wear black clothes, well, don't bother with a label at all, labelling yourself on fashion is just entirely pointless, at least labelling yourself on basis of musical tastes lets people know what clubs and gigs you're likely to be found at. So you listen to Metal, call yourself a bloody Metaller then! If you're a huge fan of Marilyn Manson call yourself a Mansonite. Do not call yourself a Goth!
Goths listen to Goth primarily, they identify with Goth music. You can't identify with the genre if you don't listen to it. If you're in love with Bauhaus, then sure, Goth is applicable. If you're in love with Marilyn Manson then -no it isn't-
Goth - 'Culturally Goth'
-- "I don't listen to Goth Rock, or take part in the Goth scene or community, but I am culturally Goth. I like dark macabre things, I like Gothic architecture and literature, therefore I am Goth" --
I often hear this kind of statement from people that want to identify as Goth, but yet don't actually enjoy Goth itself. Instead they simply want to affiliate themselves with Goth because they like some things that Goths typically like. It fails essentially because it does not understand the concepts it plays with.
So let's start with looking at what the term 'culture' actually means. A culture is a group of shared norms, values and ways of living across a community Note that a culture is thus defined by the community it is attached to. In short, the community pre-exists the culture, or rather, the community defines the culture. Who is in the community defines what the culture is, the culture does not define who is in the community.
To illustrate in a fairly simple way, take 'Black Culture'. Black culture is a term meant to refer to shared norms, values and lifestyles that many black people have. The general populace of black people define what 'black culture' is. A person who identifies with black culture, who may be heavily involved with and a part of black culture, is not black. Black is purely about skin colour, a white person will never be black no matter how much he likes or 'fits into' black culture.
It is similar with the term 'Goth'. Goths are not people that fit into Goth culture, they are the community of people that define Goth culture. Goths themselves are simply not a lot more than fanbase around the Goth genre of music. You can like Goth culture, you can live up to all Goth culture is, but that alone will not make you a Goth.
I wouldn't like to end here though. Another problem is people get confused by different uses of the term 'Goth' and 'Gothic'. The problem is that the word has a long history before the Goth scene even existed, so I will want to talk about that a little.
'Goth' first appears in use before people even talked the English language. The original Goths were a Germanic tribe of barbarians, famous for invading Rome. Come later years the term 'gothic' would arise to mean 'Like the Goths', and thus the term 'Gothic' meant 'Barbaric, Crude, Violent'.
This definition and usage persisted until an interesting application arose. The people of the early renaissance had a system of architecture they thought beautiful, and they considered the earlier medieval architecture to be ugly. Finding medieval architecture to be ugly and crude, they called such architecture 'gothic'. Hence medieval architecture would come to be known as 'Gothic Architecture'. What the people of the early Renaissance didn't know is that soon people would change their mind and start to think the architecture of the Renaissance was over-indulged and overdone, and the simpler styles of the medieval era, that being 'Gothic Architecture' was actually more beautiful, and this would create a 'Gothic Revival' in architecture. Suddenly the term 'Gothic' was no longer an insult, it had different connotations.
In subsequent years the term 'Gothic' would be applied to various other things than architecture, such as literature. 'Gothic' isn't a word that is owned by the Goth community, it's also a standard English word, just like Punk also means 'young, foolish person'. Hence it's possible to call something 'Gothic' without connecting it at all to the Goth scene. It would be silly to think that just because someone called a young child a punk in the older sense of 'young, foolish person' that they meant that the young person was actually a member of the Punk music scene, equally, calling someone 'Gothic' would not at all mean that they were a 'Goth'.
However, what we see happening in the 1980's is a developing music scene starting with a handful of Post-Punk bands who would forge an entire genre that music journalists would call 'Gothic Rock'. This doesn't necessarily mean that it was connected to Gothic art or architecture, and certainly not any Germanic tribes, it was just a couple of music journalist's choice of word for a scene. In some ways it's not even an appropriate term any more, the Goths of today's Goth scene often adopt aesthetics more reminiscent of the Romantic period of the Renaissance that hated 'Gothic' aesthetics rather than any traditionally 'Gothic' style.
However, here is an important point: When the fans of 'Gothic Rock' looked for a quick and easy name to describe themselves as, 'Goth' arose as an acceptable term. For the first time since the Goths of the Roman era people walked the Earth calling themselves 'Goths'.
This is why we can now use the term 'Goth culture' again. Some academics may describe certain subcultures in the Victorian period as being a 'Gothic culture', but they don't call it a 'Goth culture'. The reason is quite simple, a 'Goth culture' would be a 'culture of the Goths', whilst a 'gothic culture' is merely a culture that happened to be gothic. People can be a part of a culture that happens to be 'gothic', yet not be Goths. A culture that was based around horror movie fans might be 'gothic', but that doesn't mean the people that created the culture were 'Goths'.
'Goth culture' then is the culture that is based around Goths. Goth culture does not define who Goths are, Goths define what Goth culture is. Goths are just people that are a part of and identify with the Goth music scene. We now live in an age where most of the time if we hear the term 'Gothic' what is meant is 'like the Goths (of the Goth music scene)' rather than the standard English term which descends from 'like the Goths (of the Germanic tribe)'. Both are acceptable uses, but it only takes a small amount of common sense to work out which is being referred to.
All I hope to illustrate here though is the importance of this difference in usage though. Goth does have a culture, a very nice one I personally think, but being Goth is not about living up the cultural norms of Goths. Actually being a Goth is a very simply thing, it's being a fan of the Goth genre (to the extent of personal identification). A Goth that does not like Goth music is akin to a Metaller that does not like Metaller, or a Punk that does not like Punk, in short, a Goth that does not like Goth music just isn't a Goth.
Fashion - Beauty Judgements
--You shouldn't wear that! It's ugly! It's hideous! I don't like it when people wear those things, and hence you shouldn't dress like that.--
If we look through VF we find a number of odd occurrences. One of them is the phenomenon of beauty judgements. I see it on profiles, on comments, and that rather waste-of-space area known as the VF Fashion forums. Why am I so contemptuous of that forum? Because it's mostly populated with people who treat their word as gospel on matters of beauty.
Now I'm not saying that if you believe something to be true you should be hesitant of stating the fact. If you have an opinion by all means share it, I don't care about you sharing your opinion. I care about whether your opinion is stupid or not, and put plainly, trying to hold one's own preferences as somehow objectively true is absurd.
With Art, maybe there is and maybe there aren't criteria that passes for objective. With sexual attraction and the like? No, there just isn't. Maybe you don't like something, but outright declarations that certain fashion style are ugly are not justified by the former. I despair sometimes when people take their petty preferences and think that that's enough for them to make objective declarations about beauty and fashion. Not everyone likes the same things as you, get over it.
That's not to say the fashion forums are without use. Many people can't quite capture the fashion styles they want, or do honestly want advice on how they could achieve a look they are more happy with. Making suggestions that may help them with that seems entirely a good and productive use of one's time. Using such a forum to try and ridicule or pressure people into accepting your personal preferences? No, sorry, not good enough, and you lose respect points from me for doing so.
It's just unbelievably arrogant, and that's quite a statement coming from someone like me who very nearly turns some forms of arrogance into a virtue. It's similar to when I get comments from people who think I shouldn't dress so feminine or cross-dress because they don't find it sexually attractive, as if I'm going to be altering my sense of style in order to please their eyes. It amazes me because most of these people aren't people I find sexually attractive either, I just don't make a point of telling them such (why would I? If they have any sense they wouldn't care much what I find attractive right?)
If you don't like feminine guys, boo-hoo for you. Fact is that probably means you buy into traditional gender relationships anyway and the idea of being in one of those outright repulses me, so I'm sorry hun, but it was never going to work out anyway. Go find someone who cares what your unattractive selves thinks.
Go ahead and state what you do and don't like. I have on my profile. What I haven't done is made statements like 'Boys with short hair are unattractive' or 'Bland people are ugly', I've stated that I like and dislike these things, that I have these preferences. This is a very long way away from telling people that certain things are ugly or beautiful.
Fashion - Tight Jeans
--Tight jeans are so emos, and I hate them. They look terrible and no one should wear them. It's dumb and selfish to wear tight jeans because it makes you sterile, only an idiot puts fashion before their ability to have children!--
Since tight jeans have become associated with 'Emo' there have been a lot of complaints about them, presumably just as part of some bizarre collective 'emo hate'. I suppose it makes people feel like more of a community if there's someone to oppose and mock, which to my mind is one of the more primitive and barbaric parts of human nature. In any case, there's a rather prevalent trend of disliking tight jeans. 'It looks bad' they tell me. 'It will reduce your sperm count' they tell me.
I like tight jeans; you just need to get over it. I'm not the only one to like tight jeans, and I'm most certainly not the only one to like me wearing in tight jeans. Maybe I'd be a bit more concerned if everywhere I went people were revolted at me in my tight jeans, but a lot of people like it, a lot of girls and boys think I should wear tight jeans more often, so if you personally don't like it, well, get over yourself. So you don't like tight jeans? Well, I guess I won't be dating you then will I? Yes, that's right isn't it, it's not like we're fucking one another, so get over it, there's no reason for you to care what I wear around my legs.
No, I am not worried about my sperm count. Even if I did intend to have children, which I don't, there are no irreversible effects on sperm count from wearing tight jeans, I don't have the slightest clue why anyone would believe it would. You think anyone would have themselves sterilised if they could just don a pair of tight jeans on a warm day and solve it that way?
It is true that enough heat can cause temporary sterilisation, and it's been used throughout time as a contraceptive. Indeed, there are (not very popular) forms of contraception one can use today that involve keeping the testes within the body cavities from which they descended, and it creates complete sterility, but.... it's completely reversible within a matter of months. If keeping one's testicles internal to the body for maximum heat can be reversed in a few months I'm not worried about my sperm count for owning a few pair of tight jeans.
Fashion - Cross-Dressing
I get asked a lot why I cross-dress. The question always strikes me as a little odd.
If you see a female in a dress do you ask her why she wears it? What do you think she'd say if you did ask? Might not the intuitive reply be 'because I like it!'. If I'm wearing clothes it's because I like the clothes, I like the way they look, and I feel comfortable in them, just like everyone else does (that has a mind of their own that is). Yes, I don't let arbitrary gender norms get in the way of what clothes I do and do not wear, or what make-up I use, nor in any other part of my life. I may be male but that's -what- I am, not -who- I am.
It is true that I like the female body more, I like how women like more, and that would be accounted for by being heterosexual now wouldn't it? It's true that if I died and has a choice of bodies to be reincarnated in I would quite possibly choose female, but it's no big issue and the decision would be entirely aesthetic and superficial. I'm not going to be getting a sex change because it's not worth the bother, and who cares what genitals I've got anyway? I'm still the same person regardless of what body I am in.
Sexuality - Sexual Confusion
--I'm very confused about what I am. I sometimes fancy the same sex, does that mean I'm gay? Or am I bi? I just need to know!--
People confuse sexuality issues way too much. If I'm going out to dinner I order whatever seems the most appetising at the time, I don't have to think very hard about whether I like the food or not. Somedays I may have a taste for a certain food, on others a different food, maybe I like one food once in a while but largely prefer a different food, why think about it so much?
If hunger is so simply why is lust? If I see food and am hungry for it then I just know, there's no intellectual discussion to be had, nor can I sit down and intellectually work out whether I want to eat it, I either just want to eat it or I don't, I can -feel- whether I want to eat it or not. Equally, if I look at someone I am either attracted to them, or I'm not attracted to them, sometimes I'm attracted more or less, but in any case my knowledge of whether I'm attracted is just like my knowledge of whether I'm hungry for a certain piece of food in front of me.
If someone asks me whether I prefer ice cream or chocolate, I may or may not need to think about it. However, if you have a specific ice cream in front of me and a specific chocolate and I decide which I want, or if I want both or neither, then the decision usually becomes easy.
Of course, we don't have labels for food preferences so it's a lot easier. Who needs labels for food preference anyway? Why is it important? It's not. Now ask yourself why it's important to know whether you're gay, straight or bisexual? Is it that useful? I suppose one could say it lets people know whether you're possibly interested or not, but it doesn't really. It can be useful in order to exclude a wide variety of people from even bothering to enquire whether you're interested, but most of us have all sorts of people we're not attracted to. I'm not attracted to stupid people but do I need a label for that to let people know this? Nah, I'll judge it as it comes, is easier that way!
So, if you're unsure of what sexual label you ought to use for whatever reason, relax and don't worry about it. Be interested in who you are interested in, kiss who you want to kiss, fuck who you want to fuck, date who you want to date, and judge it on a case by case basis, there's no need to make it any more complicated than that.
Sexuality - Polyamory
--Poly? You mean where couples sleep with other people? That's just wrong and it's cheating, why don't you have any self-respect?--
Polyamory isn�t about cheating on your partners. Polyamory is when you�re the kind of person that is capable of feeling romantic love for more than one person and you seek relationships where expressing that love, including in sexual ways, is not forbidden. To put it another way it�s when a person has multiple responsible loving relationships, and where everyone involves knows about it and agrees to it. Another word for polyamory is �responsible non-monogamy�.
Polyamory is a separate idea from �open relationships�. Open relationships is where one romantically monogamous couple have sex with other people, usually this sex is meaningless (or at least in theory). Most polyamorous people however do not try to separate love and emotion from sex, to most polyamory people sex is an emotionally intimate act, and most polyamory people I know are very picky about who they do and don�t sleep with, often to the point of having sex less than monogamous people, and often being less promiscuous than most people.
Many people find that monogamy works best for them, and that is fine. Most polyamorous people are not interested in forcing their lifestyle on anyone else, no more than bisexual want everyone to be bisexual. Polyamory requires a certain kind of way of thinking, feeling and dealing with emotions. A polyamoryous person must either not feel jealousy, or else be able to cope and manage that feeling. Equally, posseiveness is often not very healthy in polyamory relationships. Some polyamory people experience the opposite of jealousy, called compersion, and this is where a person feels happy when their partners are romantically successful with other people.
Some people find this very hard to understand, and that�s understandable in itself, it can be very hard to work out how people can feel so differently to yourself (but please bear in mind this doesn�t mean they don�t!). It may help to realize that some people out there get jealous when their friends get other friends, never mind their lovers other lovers! This is because jealousy comes down to �fear of loss�, and if someone suffers from emotional insecurity they may see a friend�s other friends as a threat to the relationship they have with their friend, how does this person know their friend doesn�t like their other friends more? Or they won�t stop spending time with them in favour of spending time with other friends?
Similarly, I can understand completely how a person can see their partner flirting with someone else and feel threatened, I�ve been there myself. After all, typically, such a thing represents a great threat to your own relationship, they may want to be with them and leave you. This is not the case in polyamory relationships, although specifics vary amongst polyandrous people (there are not hard and fast rules). That a partner has found a new partner does not mean they are going to leave you or love you less, no more than when a mother has a second child that means they love their first child less, or if a friend find a new friend he or she likes his or her other friends less.
So, its important to realise that polyamory is an entirely different way of running a relationship than most people realise, and for this reason it is not cheating. Polyamory is not like agreeing to the rules of a relationship and then breaking them, which is the essence of cheating (breaking the rules). Polyamory relationships have their own set of rules which everyone agrees to at the start of a relationship. Please do bear in mind that this is true of most relationships, different monogamous relationships have different rules, in some monogamous relationships its been agreed that neither partner is allowed to lust after other people in pornography and thus �porn is cheating�, in biblical Christianity Jesus of Nazareth talks of how a man that lusts after other women is cheating in his heart. Some monogamous relationships allow light flirting, some allow heavy flirting, some allow kisses on the mouth, some don�t, and there is no right or wrong, only what the people involved agree to, and the only thing that matters to me personally is that these rules make people in the relationships happy. In polyamorous relationships having other partners is not against the rules, and thus not cheating
Nor is it any less of a commitment, making relationship commitments to multiple people requires more commitment than a monogamous relationship where you have only one relationship to look after. Polyamory people have to be capable of a lot of love and willing to spend a lot of their time and energy on their relationships, it�s not some easy way to have lots of sex. After all, if sex is all a person wants, then they should sleep around, go to a sex club, have one night stands, heck even serial monogamy would probably result in more sex than many polyamory lifestyles
Polyamory is a very complex subject, so I would like to direct you to some various links on the subject, here for instance is the wikipedia article on polyamory and here is one written by polyamory people themselves
Society - Sexism
-- Women are just different from men, its part of the biology, isn't that obvious? We have different hormones, different minds, different bodies... we just think and feel different!--
In order to be able to justify sexism we'd need to isolate important, relevant universal differences between the sexes. For instance, if we decided that all men should go to work and all women should stay at home to look after the children that many people assume they will have, we must assume that all women are great child-carers and all women are better at child-caring then men, and that all men are better at working than women.
There may or may not be trends amongst males and females, there may be trends like this present in ethnic groups as well. But this isn't strong enough for prejudice. Take physical strength for instance, males as a whole are stronger than women. Some of this strength difference will be due to culture; males are encouraged to build muscles more, whilst women with six-packs are regarded by many to be unattractive. Some of it may be due to innate biology.
However, it should be blatantly obvious that not all men are stronger than women, and we shouldn't assume they are so. We shouldn't assume that any one man we meet will be stronger than any one woman we meet. We shouldn't just assume that if we see a fight between a male and a female that the female will lose, that the male started it, that we should all jump to the rescue of the female because it's obviously the female that needs rescuing. Some women are more strong, more aggressive, better fighters than not only some men, but most men. This means we should be very wary of trying to group all men and women together.
And that's with strength where there does seem a potential for a significant biological trend. What about with intelligence? Empathy? Social Skills? Money-handling? Child-Rearing? None of these things are nearly as simple as mere strength, even the above example with mere strength ended up including aggression and martial arts skills.
So, let's say you oppose the above kind of sexism. That surely means that you oppose the idea of women and men being forced into certain roles in society, in work, in the home, and in romance, based on their gender right? You in short oppose gender roles? Because what sense does it have to say that males should only go into these specific roles and women should only go into these specific roles? Shouldn't we say that people shouldn't feel pressured to go into the traditional gender roles society lays out for them? Shouldn't males and females have the right to try and find what role in life is comfortable for them for themselves?
If you think this you are a feminist. Ignore all the myths of what feminism is, the above is a feminist attitude. You might also want to call yourself a 'gender equalist' if you want, but feminism is just a movement that is gender equalist.
Society - 'Chivalry'
-- It's okay to treat women different and men in regards to romance. It's not about them being less capable, it's about respecting the as women. What's wrong with being nice? What's wrong with flowers and holding doors open for women?--
Chivalry is not about 'being nice'. A person can be nice without being chivalrous. I'm a nice person, I buy my friends drinks, I open the door for strangers (male or female), I even treat people I'm romantically interested in nicer than people I'm not, that's just obvious behaviour (how is a potential romantic partner to know I am becoming interested in them if I don't show it. What I do not do is treat women nicer just because they are women. That's not 'nice', that's sexist
Chivalry is not just about being nice, it's all about gender roles. A chivalrous man is a man that needs to be the provider, the protector, the dominant party. If you're a woman you can't be chivalrous towards men by buying them lunch or protecting them, that wouldn't be you being chivalrous, that would be the man failing to be chivalrous; the entire concept is tied up in how males treat females in romantic relationships
The notion of Chivalry comes from days where sexism was alive and very strict; it comes from notions of 'courtly love' and how men should treat women. To prove this note this example, a man brings out a woman to dinner and intends to pay for her, after all he's the man and he wants to be respectful to her the woman. The woman then offers to pay at the end of the meal and he is insulted, he feels like his manhood has been insulted and that something is wrong, he is the man he should pay. Notice how when the man pays for the woman it's chivalrous, when the woman pays for the man it's insulting, can you be more sexist?
The above example is very real and I've heard it described by friends, and I know males who feel that way. The reason is because a lot of 'chivalrous' acts rely on power. Men have money, so they pay. Men are stronger, so they protect. Men throw their coats over a puddle in order to keep a woman's shows dry because women require that sort of protection and men don't. If you treat a man that way many will feel you doubt their ability to look after themselves, after all, it's a matter of pride to make your own way in life right? I'm a man, I can pay my own way, buy my own meals, fight my own fights, but you're a woman, you're too weak to do that, how could you survive without men to protect you? You need someone male like me to pay your way, buy your meals, and fight your fights, heaven forbid you stand up to a male yourself!
There is nothing wrong with being nice as long as it's mutual. I open a door for you, you open it for me. It has nothing to do with you're being a woman and me being a man, it's nothing to do with you being weak and me strong, it's all very equal However, when we suggest that women should have doors opened for them but men shouldn't we have moved on to blatant sexism
There are cultures were chivalry is still alive. In some cultures women do still get treated as queens when they are being romantically pursued, and you can hear women that have flirted with these people whilst on holiday talk about how nice they are and how they wish English men would behave that way. Then you talk to women who have married these people and you get a different picture, you get chauvinists who treat their wives as property. I've heard it say that before you are married men in Korea treat their women as queens, but they best enjoy it because it's over after the marriage. You want to start the relationship playing a submissive traditional role? Be prepared to end it that way. This people will respect you as a man should respect a woman as long as you respect them as a woman should respect a man.
On the vampirefreaks forum I have heard from males that defend chivalry. And it starts off very nice, and they talk of opening doors and such things, and it seems all very romantic. Then they talk of traditional gender roles, nothing wrong with being a housewife right? It all sounds so very reasonable. Then they talk about how career women are all feminazies 'no sensible women would want to marry'. They say about how they would not accept -their woman- working, after all, 'no woman should have to do anything as nasty as working'. Of course, I'm sure they expect her to cook, clean and raise children, but they don't mean domestic work, that's not 'real work' anyway right?
By all means be nice to your partners and its fab if they are nice to you, you should demand that they are nice to you! But if you have any self-respect, be wary of sexists, you're freedom to be a strong woman with a spine who doesn't need to be 'protected' is valuable. As I said early, I'm a male that likes to be nice to my romantic partners, and those have always thus far been women, but I'm not a man that wants women under my thumb, I'm not a man that thinks women need special treatment, and I'm not a sexist. In short, I'm not a 'chivalrous man'
For anyone that doesn't think that 'Chivalry' is not sexist, one more question: 'How does Chivalry apply to same-sex relationships?' If it isn't a case of allotting arbitrary roles according to gender, we should be able to apply the same standards to two men or two women who are dating, indeed, it shouldn't even matter what the genders of the people involved are
