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[slammerkinbabe]

Salon has an interesting article on the ex-gay movement. (Yeah, you need to watch a few seconds of an ad to see the article, but it's worth it if you're at all interested in the subject, really.) It treats it both in depth and more fairly than most coverage that I've seen has done. I think it's flawed, but for all that, it's pretty well done

Comments

[slammerkinbabe]

See, I see sexuality as a spectrum rather than a binary switch, and if you are in the gay area of the spectrum but have extremely strong motivations for moving to the VERY VERY HETEROSEXUAL part of the spectrum, I don't see how anyone else can say 'but you can't do that'. Yeah, ITA. I got in a large pile of shit earlier this week when I posited in a comment thread in someone else's journal that a. sexuality was a continuum rather than a dichotomy and b. some people do have a choice in their sexuality. It seems to be a fundamental difference of opinion, but it seems to me that a lot of the people who argue that choice is never ever possible do so because they feel that they personally do not and never have had a choice, and so it's both threatening and offensive to them when other people do

[lietya]

I've never understood this black-and-white approach to what's a massively nebulous issue. *some* people don't have a choice; some do. *some* people exist on a "continuum" of sexuality such that they can decide to focus on one end of it or the other; some don't. (which is to say, I do believe there are people who are 100% born straight or gay and cannot ever contemplate edging even a tiny bit off of that farthest point of the spectrum. They're probably not as common as society makes it look by penalizing gray-area choices, but I do think they exist

[slammerkinbabe]

To be fair WRT (AHAHAHAHA) the shitpile conversation I reference above, I said at the time that I thought virtually everyone was bisexual to some degree. And, honestly, I do believe that if we lived in a different culture, one where bisexuality was the expected norm, almost everyone *would* be bi to some degree. Now, what degree are we talking about here? Some people may be like .00000001% bi. I think the whole question of sexual orientation is pretty confusing anyway because I think there's more crossover between what our society considers "nonsexual" attration and what we consider "sexual" attraction than we like to admit. We like to draw this hard-and-fast line between platonic and sexual attraction, and I really don't think that line needs to be as hard and fast as we make it. Which is not to say that if we were all completely uninhibited we'd be comfortable fucking all of our friends... Maybe I think platonic and sexual attraction also exist on a continuum, rather than being completely separate things. Anyway, I think my

[lietya]

Most of it did make perfect sense, actually. I think the thing to bear in mind is that the "everybody is bi" phrasing is likely to bring to mind a particular subset of person who emphatically believes that, and said subset-person is a jerk. :) So you have to be very very careful to explain thoroughly if you're going to say it, and even then, some knee-jerk readers will misunderstand

[slammerkinbabe]

Really? Wow, I guess I've never encountered that particular subset. I was first exposed to the theory when I was in college and I had a professor teaching a class called "On Love", who stated from the lectern that she believed everyone was bisexual, and she wished more people agreed with her because then she would get more dates. :) I really liked said prof and she had a good theoretical grounding for what she was saying, so I guess I never realized that most people who agree with her are in an obnoxious subset!

[lietya]

Ah-ha! Now I see how you stepped into that land-mine. :)

Yes, there's a subset (which almost certainly does not include your professor, and *definitely* does not include you) of bisexuals whose response to being [or perceiving themselves as, I'm not living their life so I only know what they say] marginalized by both sides is to run about shrieking that being bisexual is More Highly Evolved and Superior and Everyone Really Is Bisexual but won't admit it unlike Supremely Self-Aware Me Over Here.... and so on. And anyone who's met one of *those* is going to twitch when you say "everybody is bi."

(Plus, in practice, unless you hedge about with a zillion disclaimers - which, knowing you, you DO - "everybody is bi" translates into "and those of you who think you aren't are WRONG, ha-ha!")

[slammerkinbabe]

Also ACK. The thing I was going to say before I got distracted on musing about sexual vs. nonsexual attraction was that in practice, yeah, a lot of people are 100% homosexual or 100% heterosexual. I'm not comfortable saying they'd necessarily be so in a society where bisexuality, as opposed to heterosexuality-and-if-you-can't-get-that-at-least-give-me-a-comfortable-dichotomy-to-hang-my-hat-on, was the norm. But I am not exactly a preeminent social scientist WRT (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA I WILL NEVER STOP WRTing) this issue either.

[slammerkinbabe]

And "in practice" doesn't mean "in practice they have sex only with women or only with men" - I mean that in reality they only experience sexual attraction to one sex or the other. Anyway. ::toddles off::

[lietya]

WRT! WRT! ....ahem. moving on.

Yeah. Explained like that, I totally see what you're getting at; I can also, unfortunately, see how that'd be shitpile-worthy, as some people who are quite invested in believing they're a Kinsey 6 or 1 are going to throw a giant fit at the presumption that they might [in an alternate ideal universe that could never exist and/or a completely and utterly different society] be [perhaps the most teensily bit] interested in a member of the "wrong" sex [at least to the degree of once perhaps admiring a butt of a wrong-sex person].

[slammerkinbabe]

Yeah, it's a good time. :) But what are you gonna do? ::dramatically, throwing hand to forehead:: I CANNOT BE INTELLECTUALLY DISHONEST!

[fanboy_of_zeus]

I know exactly one person who I know for a fact is at one end or the other of the straight/bi/gay continuum. The vast majority of my friends are bi. I've also wondered where the frequently-quoted statistic that around 10% of the population is gay comes from - there's no way that's an honest number; there are too many people who are in denial, in the closet, or quite possibly just never considered *what* they are for anyone to be able to count who fits under which label (and that's even apart from my second quibble, that there are no labels that really work).

[slammerkinbabe]

I think that may be an old statistic that doesn't reflect the younger generation, which is increasingly accepting of homosexuality and is therefore less likely to shut down the temptation to experiment. Which helps out my theory that as bisexuality becomes more accepted, more people will be bisexual. :)

[fanboy_of_zeus]

My opinion on it is, what the statistic shows is the percentage of people who would admit to being gay - which says nothing about who they're attracted to and who they *could* be attracted to if they'd let themselves.

The younger generation is definitely more accepting and less label-centric, though. As I said above, most of my friends are bi - enough that I consider it to be the norm. Actually, among most of my friends, there's as much weight given to preferring blondes over brunettes as there is to preferring girls over guys or vice versa...

[slammerkinbabe]

Sometimes I have wondered why race, gender, and virtually every other external physical feature that differentiates one group of people from another has historically been given so much weight and been cause for so much prejudice and bloodshed, when hair color and eye color have never been a big deal, apart from a few silly and politically irrelevant conclusions about "blondes have more fun". Why has no one ever decided that brunettes are morally and socially inferior to blondes, for example?

That's nothing to do with anything. I think you're right on in your first paragraph.

[fanboy_of_zeus]

I hate to bring Hitler into it, but I'm bringing Hitler into it - there *was* someone who thought blondes were morally superior. And don't even get me started on "dumb blonde" jokes. It's not a major part of our collective set of social definitions and stereotypes, but it's there.