Not an LGBT’er, but I’ll throw in my opinion anyway. (This is IMHO, after all!)
Menstruation means that you are not pregnant! Yes, there are some ladies hoping for babies who are sad when The Red Spot appears. But, for the large numbers of us who have ever, in our long reproductive lives, engaged in activities not 100% protected, the same sign causes jubilation. (Is this inspired by Betty’s little talk to Sally in the last Mad Men?)
Can’t speak for the gentlemen, but I’m damn sure that most of them have other things than fatherhood on their minds when they come.
Repeating: Many straights don’t intend to reproduce; most do not intend to reproduce every time they have sex. And LGBT’s can & do have kids…
It may also be worth pointing out that both gays and straights can find themselves pursuing reproduction via technologically assisted means, in which the reproductively significant events are wholly separated from intercourse.
For heterosexuals conception is always a spectre during any hookup, every one night stand is a chance you take. I mean even in a committed relationship with contraception used there is always a tiny chance it can happen. As long as penis is going into vagina and both parties are fertile shit does and can happen.
But for a homosexual couple this isn’t true, accidents don’t happen. All reproduction is a big deliberate ordeal, not an oops accident. And do such couples ever go hey you know we can never accidentally get pregnant?
I think I know what’s he’s trying to say. Is this it?
For heterosexual people, reproduction is all mixed up with sexuality. Whether you are trying to conceive, trying to not conceive, or not even having sex, the reproductive aspect is part of it. When you learn about your own sexuality, it’s associated with reproduction.
It’s like if a culture only has sex in the living room on the sofa, never in the bedroom. I might be totally accepting of that, and understand it intellectually, but it would still be really weird for me to think that they had no associations between beds and sex. It’s not that I think of beds every time I have sex, or that I can’t have sex without a bed, or that I don’t use my bed for things besides sex, but the two are certainly linked in my head and it’s just odd that that connection might not exist for some people.
I think if he’s going to include the T when he asks a question like this, he ought to be mindful of the realities among that group.
And for some fertile people who are trans, PIV is gay sex. Gay sex that results in pregnancies sometimes. So.
edited to add: pretty much all of you who are using the term LGBT in this thread should do the same, and not as a blanket term for gay cisgendered people.
This turned into a shit show real quick. I even managed to get a warning for forgetting myself.
Mea culpa for not phrasing my question(s) in a way that the public can easily understand, but a few people did get the gist of my question. I do not give a flying fuck about that question anymore.
Some of the reactions here have in fact changed my way of thinking about the way I will interact with other communities though. The amount of “how dare you” type comments elicited by my (in my mind) innocuous question, is enough to really change my state of mind on this sort of issue.
Am I still for equal marriage rights? Yes. Am I as likely today to go out and vote for it? No. I’'m a bit indifferent now.
I remember when it was just the lesbian and gay community, then LGBT, now I really don’t know what to call anything in that realm anymore. Take a letter out, add another… it doesn’t affect me either way. But to paint me as an ignorant bigot because of my wording, just makes me want to give up support for anything of that nature.
I will likely never understand the intricacies of that culture because I am not a part of it, but giving me the benefit of the doubt seems to be off the table.
If “fighting ignorance” in regards to this matter will always result in such a backlash, then I will remain ignorant, because curiosity about it seems to result in nothing but misconstrued intentions.
Sorry for trying to be too inclusive, I’m clearly misguided. I’m also not going to stay current with the acronyms either, because that’s your thing.
It’s not logical to assume that I’ve been dissed by the homosexual community, yet it feels that way a bit. Odd how perceptions change on a whim.
Seriously, if the extremely mild chiding from mostly me (and Myrnalene, who is not part of the queer acronym at all) and a bunch of confusion from mostly straight people is enough to dim your shine in regard to gay rights, then I don’t even remotely see why you should be given the benefit of the doubt.
Though, for the record, I wasn’t calling you a bigot and I was trying to inform you. (Fight your ignorance, so to speak.) But clearly you’d rather stomp off in a huff because some people didn’t understand your frankly dumb question. Dude, it’s pretty easy to find out what an acronym means, and if you’re going to address a group of people oughtn’t you actually have a damn clue who you are addressing?
I look at it as a good way of knowing that 1> there’s nothing seriously wrong with my innards and 2> YAY, not pregnant. (BC that stopped my period would make me so damn paranoid that the BC might have failed and I wouldn’t know in time to have good options left for dealing with it.)
I’m queer, currently in an opposite-sex relationship, and don’t want kids. The YAY-not-pregnant thing is a pretty big deal, but other than that… well, come on. I’ve menstruated since puberty, it’s just biology. I don’t spare it a lot of mental real estate. It’s part of the routine, like washing my hair.
Only because you guys repeatedly attacked him about it. The OP made sense with even a few seconds thought to people who are not geared up to be offended by what he asks. Not that it doesn’t make sense that people in the child-free and LGBT community would be offended, as they are used to being treated poorly, and thus don’t give people the benefit of the doubt.
Thing is, the OP’s attack similarly deserves the benefit of the doubt that I’ve given the offended. He was also offended and lashed out at you. Because, to him, his question made perfect sense and the only reason to be objecting is to attack him. This is an inaccurate position, but it is both common and at least often correct.
You all could have just said, “No, I don’t, and the question seems odd to me. Did you perhaps mean something else?”
Nobody attacked anybody. Some people (like me) fumbled around attempting to wrestle some kind of meaning out of an ambiguous and confusing OP. Some people in the community the OP addressed the thread to expressed confusion as to why this was even addressed to them. He didn’t withdraw the question about ejaculation because people “attacked” him, he clarified that he basically meant, “are lesbians even aware their uteruses are for babies?” The answer, of course, is yes. LGBT people with wombs have babies all the time.
The OP’s response to this was, oddly, to basically whine about how mean LGBT people are, and to whine that people were calling him a bigot when no one had.
So because a few random people on an Internet message board seemed oppositional to a question you asked, you’re now suddenly not willing to back up a stated belief in supporting SSM by going to the polls, thus taking out your pique here on real life people in your state.
Please repeat out loud what you posted above in the quoted text, think about it. Then also consider that this whole thing might not just be a big old over-reaction spiral.
As a straight person, I rarely equate “Aunt Flo” with OMG cute babbies!
I mean, well, yeah, duh - that’s what it’s FOR, but then my toenails are also FOR protecting the ends of my toes, not decorating with carcinogenic lacquer every month or so. That doesn’t mean that whenever I paint them I spend a few moments thinking about how nice it is that my toes are protected. It just doesn’t come up.
Just because something biological is intended for a specific purpose, doesn’t mean that’s the only (or even the primary) association any person would have with it. Contrariwise, even if a hypothetical lesbian couple was childfree by choice, they would obviously know and occasionally think about how periods are related to how babby is formed, but that wouldn’t necessarily be anything that was an ongoing thought exercise.
In my totally humble opinion, the original question seemed to labor under the impression that lesbian or gay couples are fundamentally different from straight couples in their outlook towards biological families and reproduction-related biological functions, and it was answered when it was made clear that isn’t actually the case, and that there are most likely more fundamental differences between child-desiring and child-free-by-choice couples, regardless of sexual orientation.
I think this is by far the most reasoned post in this thread.
This is putting words in my mouth and is inaccurate.
Long story short: my opinions haven’t changed a bit, but my feelings have. Just like creationist Christians, you’ll get a lot of emotion, and almost no facts. I’ll try to keep my thoughts to myself as much as possible from now on.
Look, this is the SDMB, you’ve been here a few years, right? It’s not anywhere near close to real life. You can get flamed on here for posting “I like kittens.” What I was saying is don’t let what happens here change things IRL.