Given that this Sunday, May 17, is the International Day Against Homophobia, it's interesting that I was recently called out for being heterosexist. To my face, by a lesbian. I was pretty embarrassed. (Not that it would be any better to have this pointed out in another way, but I felt pretty careless.)
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Details and some discussion ahead... )
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The date is actually the date the World Health Organization removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses.
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Expecting people to go out of their way to make sure that everything they do depicts some percentage of (insert minority here) is just overwhelming PC bullshit. That's doubly true when it comes to a situation wherein the person in question is working with someone else's source material. If anyone out there is 'heterosexist' (and how I hate that term, let me tell you), it's the makers of the clip art...
...but like it or not, heterosexuality is the norm. That's what you call it when a large majority is one way and not the other. And that means that if you're depicting a small group or working with other people's source material or doing something on the fly, it's quite likely that you just aren't going to get a diverse group for that particular depiction.
If it were a pattern in someone's behavior (always white always straight always pretty whatever) then calling them on it is one thing. But as a one-time thing? My reaction would be to tell the person to stop being so sensitive ( ... )
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It's easy to roll your eye at things like spelling womyn with a y, but without those actions to that extreme, we'd probably still be calling it mankind instead of humankind. I don't think I should have to make everything inclusive to absolutely everyone all the time, but it's more about harm reduction for me. It's just as easy for me to ask someone if they are dating "anyone" than to ask if they have a boy/girlfriend, so I do think behaviour like that can (and should) be easily changed.
I've also gotten myself tangled up when it comes to trans people once or twice, and I'm very much someone who's not down with gendered thinking. It can be hard to always be perfectly inclusive. Overall, though, I think it's worth being aware of it and doing what you can do to be
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XD I did that when I was younger! I don't anymore because it doesn't matter to me and if it matters to you well... oh well.
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I agree.
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The conflict-avoidance is strong in me, but I often think I should leave a comment saying something like, "I hope you're going to warn for heterosexual sims, too,"
Oh man, that makes me want to write something quick and stupid purely so I can have a warning like:
WARNING: Sims having heterosexual sex in the missonary position on a bed with the lights off.
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Other things that are not normal: genius+ IQs, extreme height, AB- blood. Nothing wrong with any of those things, but they do all fall outside the norm. I know precisely one person with AB- blood (that I know of). He's not normal in that regard; he is quite unusual. I know someone who has an IQ over 180; he is not normal in that regard. I know someone who is 7'1". He is not normal, except perhaps in a group of basketball players. (He does not, btw, play basketball.)
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Your "abnormal" examples are better than most because there is a non-arbitrary constant to measure them against. This is harder if not impossible to do with socialisms (let's pretend it's a word, because I can't think of the real one); you can't "force" a culture to be 7'1" (without eugenics), you *can* pressure/force a culture to "be" straight.
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My point stands, however. It doesn't really matter why the norm is currently heterosexuality... social, biological, some mix of the two, whatever the reasons are. It's still the norm at this time, because that's measured on observation, not cause. You could argue that self-reporting may be somewhat unreliable but it's the only way to measure something like this, and based on those standards, a large majority of people identify as heterosexual... hence, the norm ( ... )
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