Only if the reason you avoid having sex with them is their ethnicity.
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Well, if an anonymous person asks whether I’ll have sex with them, and states their ethnicity, I’ll reply ‘no’ – unless it’s my wife’s ethnicity, to which I’ll say ‘maybe’.
No, they are simply biologically compelled to be attracted to women, and not to men. You’ve overlooked the biological basis for sexuality, which has led you to false conclusions.
This is why I hope the Swedish Democrats come to power in the OP’s country.
Perhaps you should realize that my definitions fall very well within the parameters of how we normally define things. Your inability to switch perspectives and your emotional resentment of me (for whatever reason) seems to cloud your ability to reason intelligently. Perhaps you should cool off and come back later with fresh eyes, or just stay away if you don’t feel like the discussion is fresh or entertaining.
What’s the advantage of your analysis, Stoneburg? How is it better than “conventional” thinking?
My eyes are fresh enough-it’s your reasoning, or lack thereof, that is faulty. It is a silly mishmash of amateur self-psychoanalysis and projection, untainted by any research.
Actually I have not overlooked it, I believe that your explanation is a simplification of the genetic imperatives involved. Men are programmed for regular sexual release because it invariably leads to more sexual intercourse, which in turn leads to higher likelihood that the gene will be carried forwards, but that is itself a rationalization. On a pure biological level the programming is not self-aware and thus do not “know” that is what they are doing. My sperms don’t know why they are swimming, it’s just the simplest biological function that allows it to perpetuate itself.
Basically my attraction to sex comes before my attraction to sex-with-a-specific-subject/object. Only with some sort of cognitive function does my libido learn to separate and develop preferences.
That only works if one truly is the negation of the other. But that’s not the case here: there are people self-identifying as asexual, who are, by your proposed definition, both heterosexual and homosexual. And of course, it’s long known that there’s no dichotomic relation between the two—most people don’t fall on either extreme point on the Kinsey scale, but somewhere in between.
That would only follow if the only reason to avoid something was out of fear. That’s not the case. People also avoid things they don’t enjoy. I don’t like tomatoes, and avoid eating them, but I’m not a tomatophobe. Likewise, many men avoid sexual contact with other men because they are simply not sexually attracted to other men.
Additionally, homophobia is not a fear of men, but a fear of homosexuals and homosexual behavior. So even if the only reason for avoidance were fear, avoiding men would not be homophobia, but androphobia. In that case, a heterosexual man would then be an androphobe, hot a homophobe.
The rest of your argument, I’m afraid, makes even less sense.
I read that whole thing and I think I am brain damaged now.
If what you say is 100% correct, I am guilty of trying to initiate a discussion about a thing I thought of that I judged interesting. You have done nothing but try to insult me and avoid the discussion that I have invited people to. As such hereby disinvite you from the discussion. If you simply wish to insult me I would suggest you start a thread for me to ignore in the Pit. Thank you.
Have you taken any courses in human sexuality at all?
My suggestion for a definition is only for this argument to make sense. Rather than to explicitly write ”a person who seeks intimacy with his own gender and avoids intimacy of certain kinds with the other gender” every time I say that ”This is how I define homosexual for the sake of this argument”. If you prefer another definition I have no quarrel with that, I am not suggesting a universal definition of a word, I am attempting to look at the underlying motivations for certain social behavior.
The difference here, logically, as far as I can see it is that you claim that there is a ”lagrange” point here where people are neither attracted nor repelled. I accept that as a theoretical equilibrium, but I’m not sure that reality reflects that. When I imagine touching a pair of breasts that will cause a sense of arousal and an attraction to the idea, when I imagine touching another mans penis, that causes a sense of disgust that acts as a repellant. So it would be fair to say that I am attracted to breasts and repelled by penises. As far as I can say your argument is simply that there is such a thing as ”no attraction” which does not necessarily translate into being repelled. I think this can be easily tested by a thought experiment. Can you think of a person and be completely neutral about whether you’d like to have sex with her/him, or does everyone fall into either a yes or a no?
As I said, I’m not really looking for a semantic revolution here where we go through all the concepts, but rather to look at the underlying motivations for the behaviors and strategies that the different concepts represent.
You’re going to have to convince me of that, I can see it making sense.
Yes. And no, I am not interested in having a discussion with you about my credentials. In fact I have made it clear that as long as you are only interested in trading insults and trying to provoke, I have no interest in discussing with you at all. If you wish you can take that as an expression of your intellectual superiority, whatever it takes to get you to stop trolling me.
If attraction to sex came before attraction to sex with certain characteristics, the vast array of courtship displays we see would not exist, and animals (humans included) wouldn’t reliably seek out certain traits in their partners. The natural world doesn’t line up with your theory.
I have it on good authority he was in the Boy Scouts, in the Catholic Church, and might be a Muslim.
But then you’re just talking about something else than everybody else when you use the word ‘homosexual’. I mean, there’s nothing barring you from doing that (aside from a desire to communicate), but it also means that your conclusion carries no force for anybody not accepting your definition.
Sure, but again, disgust isn’t fear. I’m disgusted by tomatoes. I’m not afraid of them.
You’re awfully quick to try and turn everything into a simple dichotomy, but that’s not how most things work. It’s nice and simple to imagine they did, but as you demonstrate, one ends up painting oneself into ludicrous corners. The conclusion you draw, that ‘all heterosexual males are homophobes’ then just reflects that, amounting to a reductio of your premises.
But you still need to make contact to how words are used by other people, if you want to convince anybody of your argument. And in point of fact, ‘homophobia’ simply doesn’t mean what you take it to mean.
Again, you can, of course, define words anyway you like. Define ‘green cheese’ to mean ‘lunar rock’, and ‘the moon is made of green cheese’. Define ‘homophobia’ as being afraid of men, define ‘being afraid’ as being anything that causes avoidance behaviour, and yes, everybody avoiding sexual contact with men will be a homophobe; but by that, you won’t have uncovered underlying motivations for some behavior—you’re not saying something about the world, but merely about your usage of words.
That’s not really how arguments work. You’re the one trying to establish a conclusion; you have to show how it follows. As it is, your premises are simply false, and your reasoning fallacious, so your conclusion fails to be established. Maybe you can ‘see that it makes sense’ that the moon is made of green cheese, but that doesn’t mean the moon is made of green cheese.
May we conclude from your OP that the “cure” for homosexuality(as you see it to exist), and perhaps the “cure” for heterosexuality(as you see it to exist), is for people to choose to be bisexual?
You misunderstood what I was saying. I am saying that the urge to have sex comes first, not that the differentiation does not exist, but that the urge itself begins as undifferentiated before it becomes differentiated. Actually anything else would be completely impossible from a logical viewpoint, because without the initial undifferentiated urge there would be nothing to differentiate.
This is how the whole cognitive process works. Psychologically the “operating system” looks like this:
sensation
perception
impulse
emotion
symbols
concepts
concrete operational
formal operational
Formal operational is the cognitive system that allows for reason and rationality, but as most people who are interested in psychology knows, the formal operational or rational mind is not in complete control of the process. A lot of our behavior is formed by subconscious memes in the lower operating systems, and most of our psychological pathologies come from unresolved issues in those areas.
My point is that you are horny before you rationally understand what sex even is, because the impulse to pro-create is almost as important as the impulse to survive, so it is a necessary “hard code” of every gene that wants to pro-create.
And that leads to universal bisexuality being natural and ideal how, exactly? The actual expression of the, er, “horniness” isn’t randomly directed at whatever willing orifice is closest.
“We” have no such thing. You made up some crazy new definition for some unknown reason that only makes things more complicated, not less so. There are virtually an infinite number of thing I don’t want to have sex with, so there is no reason to look at things from that perspective.