Yepyep, we hope all goes well!
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Yepyep, we hope all goes well!
And if it doesn't, we'll be here to help you back on your feet. Never fear that.
Thank you all :smallredface:
haha, well we did have a polite and calm face to face conversation - and he did suggest we sat down to talk some more - just have to keep things relaxed
so anyone any advice? pointers? The more kind-hearted, informed people floating round in the world, the better as far as im concerned
In my opinion, you have been doing great in the conversation you described earlier. I didn't manage to properly understand what were his reactions to your arguments, though - did he dismiss them, or did he take them into consideration?
Anyway, it seems to me that he mostly has misconceptions about gay people, and not some kind of anti-gay sentiment. I think that correcting these misconceptions, and giving him a little time to think about them, will solve the problem.
I'm sorry I can't be more helpful, as I'm still new to being partially "out", and I'm struggling myself with the "how to make people understand" issue. I must wholeheartedly thank you, though, for making the world a better place. :smallsmile:
I resent that!
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I only bite when I'm told to.
Well, he seems pretty reasonable. So, make sure you keep reasonable too, and above all try to keep that way if he stops. If he yells or spouts stupidity and you just yell back, that's over. But if you can stay calm, you stand a chance.
Raises hand? I'm a guy, always been into gals. Guys turn me off. End of story. Now I don't have a problem with people who are different than me, but I do have a problem with the above generalization.
With that out of the way, one might wonder why someone like myself, completely heterosexual with no interest in LGBT, would even be here. Well, first off I'd like to show my support for those who are LGBT. Not that I particularly care about the sexuality of strangers on the internet, but I know how hard it can be and hopefully some encouragement will help. Remember, people do care. In fact, if anyone wants to chat or something PM me. I don't claim to be able to help, but I'm a pretty good listener.
Secondly I find the topic of interest because of the massive cultural and political effect various LGBT groups and subcultures have, both in my home in the United States and around the world. In particular I have a hypothesis that relates to LGBT. Specifically, I've come to wonder whether labels such as LGBT aren't damaging.
Ok, what I mean is a little hard to explain, but earlier in the thread there was discussion of the difference between gender and sex. That is, that sex is biological and somehow immutable (although I have yet to see a consistent definition of what sex is, is it the chromosomes, the genitalia, role in reproduction, what?) while gender is socially constructed. It would then be my argument that not only is gender socially constructed, but the concepts of heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, and, depending on how you define biological sex, transexuality/transgender are all socially constructed rather than somehow based on our biology or our state of mind. It would further be my argument that the very act of creating these artificial boundaries and forcing people to "choose" which one they fall into is damaging to society. That is, maybe certain people are attracted, romantically or sexually, to people of the same/opposite/both/other genders. My argument is the very act of classifying these individuals creates a "normal" and an "aberrant", made all the worse by the fact that some individuals don't fall neatly into one of these classifications, which can lead to such people being shunned even by those of the other "aberrant" classifications (for example, gays not being accepting of bisexuals). Yet further I would claim that the concept of gender, that is, the idea that there are certain things girls do and certain things boys do, beyond of course the obvious biological differences (eg guys don't give birth) is not only artificial with no basis in fact but actively damaging, not only to those individuals that do not fit the stereotype, but to society as a whole.
To sum up, I suppose my hypothesis is that labeling people based on their actions (whom they are attracted to, whether they like sports or wear makeup, etc.) is inherently damaging to society. This hypothesis would of course not apply only to LGBT issues (one could argue that labels such as "geek" or "jock" are inherently damaging to society) but affects LGBT issues, if not more strongly, at least more obviously than anywhere else in our society.
Lix can bite me if she wants. :smallsmile:
Sounds like your friend really is open to learning about "the other side," so to speak. My best advice? What kind of books (or movies, or tv shows, etc.) does he like? I find that an excellent way to get something comfortable with an idea is to expose that person to it as often as possible, and a really easy way to do this (which would remove the potential discomfort of someone flirting with him) is to read books that have gay characters. I'd be happy to recommend some if you think he'd be open to that (of it you'd just like something to read yourself).
Welcome! :smallbiggrin: I'm glad that you're more comfortable with yourself now, and I'm so glad that the people you've come out to seem to be supportive of you. I hope everything goes well with your dad.
Silly Lix, that's why little black books were invented.
Using their name in the flirtation can heighten the impact from time to time.
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Nah, not buying it. I realize a bunch of people have responded to that. I realize it's part of the narrative. But the number of people who so closely follow their favorite stars, plus the looks I've seen pubescent children giving those around them?
I'm not saying such things are indicative of sexual preference. Quite the opposite, in fact. Just that pretty much everyone has been attracted to something disparate from their standard preferences at some point, usually earlier in their life, but not always.
Or you can try to convince me that all of the teenagers obsessing over the popular kids/some star/their best friend, or undergoing spontaneous arousal under suspicious circumstances are either not crushing or are repressing something. You may find that a harder pitch than you think. I have years of correlated data and observations on human behavior and haven't trusted self reporting on matters of self image for decades.
Also, why would you need a little black book, or memory, to flirt on a forum? The names you'd be using on the forum are right there.
"Attracted to" does not mean the same thing as "sexually attracted to", Golentan. Even "romantically attracted to" is potentially distinct, especially among the younger set.
Biology tends to be messy. Few things fall into clean categories; most edges are fuzzy. That in no way can be ascribed as meaning the categories and descriptions are not useful. Unabsolute correlations are still data, and that's a good thing, or else very little could ever be said about any biological entity at all.
Tiny overlaps is no excuse for throwing out enormous trends.
I'll say only that I've never been interested in "popular kids", "stars", or anything like that. That may be attributed to my Autism; I am compassionate and find other people interesting, but I have never cared enough to "obsess" about another person. Also I have never felt arousal except around attractive females.
Good point.Quote:
Also, why would you need a little black book, or memory, to flirt on a forum? The names you'd be using on the forum are right there.
Yeah, I've never obsessed over anyone, celebrity or friend. Basically, what Drolyt said.
I know that. I'm just saying that because the edges are overwhelmingly fuzzy even for individuals, it would be more convenient not to specify at all, even when you can generalize trends. "I don't like men" is overly categorical, and in my experience rarely ever true. Whereas "I vastly/almost exclusively prefer women" is more accurate and less potentially painful in many ways. Or so it seems to me. ???. Pengvin.
I don't know. I'm an outsider in all this.
It may or may not be more accurate to say "vastly/almost exclusively prefer women". I don't know. All I have is my experience, which tells me that "exclusively prefer women" is the correct description. True, our experiences and preconceptions may be wrong, but without evidence that such is the case it is best to err on the side of our experiences being accurate, otherwise we have no basis whatsoever on which to ground our beliefs. At any rate my objection to your statement was simply that it generalized too broadly. Even if your observations were correct for a significant portion of the human population or even most or near all, you can't make such sweeping generalizations. As I said I object to classification based on sexual preference anyways. I don't think there is anything physiologically or psychologically different between hetero/homo/bisexuals other than their sexual preferences.
"I don't like men" would be incorrect in my case. However, "I am not sexually or romantically attracted to men" would be correct.
And I'm not really seeing the difference between "bisexuals don't exist" and "non-bisexuals don't exist" in terms of telling people what they are or aren't attracted to.
Agreed, unless you can read minds or at the very least are a super genius that has studied biochemistry, psychology, sociology, philosophy, neurobiology, and genetics to a level beyond the common knowledge you shouldn't really tell people what's going on inside their own hearts and minds. I'm still partial to my hypothesis that even having terms for different sexual preferences and classifying people based on their preferences is damaging, particularly to those who don't happen to fit the classifications neatly but really to society as a whole.
I think gender (as social construct) is totally obsolete, and though categories of sexuality are really pretty arbitrary and meaningless they are still useful yet.
As a digression, if this really is Lady Gaga, she makes a beautiful man.
That isn't what I'm saying at all. At all.
And, I cannot emphasize this enough, At. All.
Specificity is the soul of good communication. But good communication is the bane of a soul.
Okay, not really. But specifity and categorization of other people based on physical traits is. It bugs me that romance and sexuality get all tangled up. And it bugs me that people place categorical imperatives on themselves, or categorical declaratives on others, particularly when, as has been pointed out, the edges are fuzzy.
You're straight/gay. Fine. Great, in fact. Nosce te Ipsum, and all that jazz. I like cucumbers, personally. I don't generally like carrots. In fact, given a choice between cucumbers and carrots of equivalent freshness I will probably (99.99%) always select the cucumber.
I'm not going to declare that my love of cucumbers precludes the possibility for enjoying a really, really good carrot, nor loudly deny ever appreciating a carrot or having a craving for one if pressed on it because it doesn't fit my normal and accurate self image as a cucumber lover. Neither shall I proclaim my preferences on every visit to the salad bar, but rather glance over all the options and generally load up on the cucumbers while giving only the most cursory examination to the carrots. And it doesn't make me like carrots to have wanted specific ones on occasion.
It just means I'm a person. That the edges of my preferences are a little fuzzy, and a little subjective, because I'm a person and subject to the inherent fuzziness thereof.
No means no. (How's that for terse communication as the death of the soul? :smallyuk:)
"Peek" is one thing. Photocopying the original page-by-page, and then handing back the photocopies instead of the original, with a photocopy of your ass in lieu of the title page, is another thing entirely! :smalltongue: