I’ve been thinking a bit about arguments about the changeability of sexual preferences. Many social justice people make arguments along the lines of “you aren’t attracted to disabled people/people of color/trans people/whatever because you grew up in a society that presents those people as unattractive. You should question your attractions and hopefully stop finding them unattractive.” Other people respond with “fuck you, this is my sexuality, I can’t change it.”
I feel like both positions end up conflating a lot of different stuff into the same categories, so I’m going to try to differentiate.
Let’s start with the most uncontroversial. There are a lot of straight boys who are attracted to trans women and are very upset because they think that that means they’re secretly gay. I think everyone can agree that it is very good to enlighten those poor boys about how lots of straight men and basically no gay men are attracted to trans women, because trans women are women, and straight men are attracted to women and gay men are not. Those boys are, clearly, attracted to trans women; they’re just conflicted about what it means to be attracted to trans women, which makes it hard for them to express their attraction. So it helps both the straight boys and the trans women if those straight boys can fap to Bailey Jay with a clear conscience.
Depicted: a person many straight men are attracted to.
The straight boys are aware that they’re attracted to Bailey Jay. But a similar dynamic can happen on a subconscious level. My friend Molly Ren wrote an essay about their experiences being attracted to fat men. They are extremely attracted to fat guys; however, they had a hard time admitting it to themself, because of their internalized fatphobia. They were used to thinking of fat people as unattractive, and that made it hard for them to recognize their own attraction to a fat person. They sort of subconsciously shut it down.
A lot of times, we have cached thoughts like “people who look like X just aren’t sexy.” But do we actually think they aren’t sexy, or are we just repeating what we’ve been taught by society? Are we motivated by genuine lack of attraction or by a feeling that people might look down on us?
Just because attraction doesn’t exist right now, it doesn’t mean that it can’t exist. Like a lot of people, I used to desexualize little people. I didn’t interact with little people very much, so a lot of my impressions came from the media. And the media tends to portray little people as inherently ridiculous. And the concept of little people having sex? That’s a punchline.
And then Peter Dinklage.
It turns out I wasn’t unattracted to little people. It’s just that I hadn’t seen a little person presented respectfully, with dignity, and as a person. Tyrion Lannister– witty, cunning, bitter, wonderful Tyrion Lannister– is sexy as hell, and I don’t think I’m the only person who thinks so.
Now, I think an individualist solution to that problem is not going to work. What we really need is media that presents a variety of body types as potentially attractive in a matter-of-fact way, neither treating their sexuality as unthinkable or a joke nor focusing on marginalized traits in a voyeuristic and creepy way. But on an individual level, we can at least be open to the possibility that we might be attracted to people we don’t know we have the capability to be attracted to.
Finally, there are some people who are just unattracted to certain marginalized traits: they’re not repressing an attraction and they don’t have a potential to be attracted to those people that they haven’t reached.
Some of those people have incorrect ideas about the marginalized group in question. For instance, many people don’t want to fuck trans women, even trans women who are indistinguishable from cis women, because on a certain level they feel like trans women are men and they don’t want to fuck men. I think in that case the lack of attraction is symptomatic of a problem, but it’s not a problem in itself. Believing that trans women are men, even on a subconscious level, is wrong; not being attracted to some people is morally neutral.
Other people are not attracted to some traits correlated with membership in a marginalized group. For instance, some people are not attracted to people with kinky hair. Those people are much less likely to date black people. Of course, many black people have straight hair or straighten their hair to conform with Eurocentric beauty standards, so that wouldn’t be justification enough to rule out black people entirely, but that person is much less likely to date black people than someone who doesn’t care.
Is this a product of cultural influence? Probably. On one hand, it seems likely that the Hypothetical Post-Racist Utopia would include both people with a preference for kinky hair and people with a preference for straight hair. On the other hand, we don’t live in Hypothetical Post-Racist Utopia. We live in a world where even black women famous for their beauty usually have European facial features and straight hair. It would be bizarre to believe this had no effect whatsoever. In addition, while no one knows where sexual preferences come from, it seems likely that they’re influenced by who you interacted with as a kid and your early sexual experiences. If you mostly hung around white people, you’re more likely to end up attracted to traits associated with whiteness.
Still, it seems to me like a preference for straight hair is much, much harder to change than a preference based on a mistaken belief. It might be good for someone with an abnormally fluid sexuality to try to expand their sexual horizons, but many people are just stuck with the sexual preferences they have right now. In particular, I’m worried about people fucking members of marginalized groups for SJ Points, which is likely to make everyone involved feel gross.
Thing of Things 
I’m incredibly unhappy with Social justice discourse towards sexual preferences in general. I’ve definitely gotten the opposite message of what you wrote multiple times that you had better stay in your lane and don’t date somebody outside your race unless you have impeccable SJ credentials and even then you’re causing them constant pain through your micro-aggressions. On the otherhand if I were to not be attracted to various ethnic groups or disproportionately unattractted than I’m just supporting white supremacy. Similarly if I dated more than one visibly out trans person I would be attacked for fetishization whereas if I refuse, say out of fear of the attacks that’s transphobia.
I find saying fuck all of you trying to control my sexuality and fuck your politics, I’ll be romantic or sexual with people who are attracted to me, to whom I’m attracted to, and with whom we agree it’s unlikely to cause either of us to be especially bad if things don’t work out well a much, much, more agreeable state of being than the alternative “just date people with identical social justice statuses to you to avoid microagressions” bullshit.
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@J — Do you have links to this stuff? Cuz I’ve seen stuff like that, but the people saying it are generally pretty out in the weeds on a lot of issues, and there is a difference between “this is common social justice opinion” and “I can find social justice rage-fuel that says X.”
Personally I dislike much of the post-colonial style influence in social justice, for while I agree with some of the broad points, I think they make a similar mistake to the second wave: where the second wave saw everything as patriarchy, the post-colonials see everything as white supremacy, which, for example, does little to explain the conflicts between Japan and its neighbors. In short, white supremacy exists, but so do other things.
(And the idea that math and logic are “white” is literally idiotic. I hate when people say dumb shit like that.)
But anyway, yeah, that stuff is out there. I’ve seen it expressed in many clumsy ways. But so what?
If a thing is true, you should want to believe it. If a thing is false, you should want to not believe it. It should not matter what a bunch of over-eager ninnies say on Tumblr.
The point is, there are good reasons to look closely at your own attractions. This does not mean to *deny* your attractions. Nor does it mean you should feel guilty about them.
Right. Can we all agree this is not about guilt?
I DON’T CARE WHAT THOSE PEOPLE SAID ON TUMBLR. DON’T PAY ATTENTION TO PEOPLE WHO SAY SHIT LIKE THAT.
This is not about guilt.
But this is about virtue and self-improvement and justice and caring and trying to be the best you can.
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On guilt, I’m not really talking here about pedo attraction or rape fantasies or stuff like that. I mean, even then I don’t think *guilt* is helpful, provided the person in question has *done* nothing to feel guilty about. (But that’s a veeeery separate topic.) However, the person will have to control themselves. Anyway, let’s put that in the “complicated topic” bin and move on.
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Oh, and if you *are* attracted to some person, the only opinions that matter much are yours and theirs. Yeah, there may be some political bullshit to deal with. That’s life. People come with baggage. But that is between you and them. If you two (or three or however you roll) can work it out, then yay!
Be honest, have good faith, etc.
(I said recently on Tumblr, “Any politics that has no room for good faith won’t be very useful.”)
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Perhaps some of you will find a script helpful:
If they don’t back off, then they suck.
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http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/05/tips-first-date-trans-woman/
would be an example for trans women
For racial appropriation
My college confessions page has a white lesbian who was only interested in people who are east asian and had tried to expand it and failed who made a post being apologetic and saying
“I’ve made genuine efforts to be physically attracted to non-asian people but haven’t been able to. I’m not sure I fully control that. I REALLY have tried. But my sexual attraction doesn’t make any assumptions about your culture or dictate your social worth–it’s pretty much based ONLY on what you look like. And apparently, I’m not attracted to non-asian faces. I don’t understand why that’s necessarily racist. On the other hand, no one thinks I’m sexist for only liking girls.”
was responded to with “I know that this is racist and I’m fetishizing and generalizing a diverse group of people, but I’m totally not racist so people should stop calling me out on it” by a white girl.
The activist community that I’m aware of has a support group for “POC dating white people” to help deal with the special challenges that come from trans-racial dating.
Blackgirldangerous on the issue
http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2012/06/20121127desirability-or-why-that-white-ally-who-dates-all-the-brown-queers-needs-to-stop-it/
http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2015/03/choosing-black-love-why-im-unlikely-to-spend-my-life-with-a-white-person/
to be clear I’m somewhat sympathetic to both points in these essays, but their is explicitly a point of ‘don’t date too many non-white queers because they should be dating each other!” and the second is in response to a mixed race gay couple saying “actually we should consider the nuance of why its’ probably pretty reasonable to only date intra-racially’ in the second. I think it’s a reasonable interpretation of the combination of these as saying “stay in your lane”.
I don’t think having people think about the causes of their attraction is a bad thing. People should definitely do some of it however I think that who you’re attracted to is not something the public gets to decide and I distrust politically or social capital based request of people to reconsider there attractions as being in good faith. The white girl in question isn’t trying to gently help the person reconsider. She’s shaming her for being insufficiently ashamed and trying insufficiently hard.
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It’s obviously dumb to view logic and math are white,
Galois theory isn’t bad because it’s white, it’s bad because it’s patriarchal.
As luce irigay convincingly argues, the only reason we haven’t solved Navier Stokes is that fluid flow scares off men.
(I’m rather fond of Irigaray’s argument as a sort of Utopia, it would be a tremendously, tremendously better world if some of the biggest problems with Women in mathematics were that fluid dynamics was undervalued and that topologist focused too much on closed and open sets, rather than the large amount of bullshit Women in math have to go through in the real world.)
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Also, completely unrelated to anything but this is a blog comments and there is no other place to say it Veronica, in general you seem to be an awesome person (relevant clarification because text is hard and I’m paranoid: I’m absolutely not hitting on/flirting/ with you at all) although I might be biased because you seem to be a math nerd and I appreciate that you can defend various social justice norms reasonably eloquently without condescending or being a dick about it.
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Galois was a tool of the kyriarchy!
tee hee
Anyway, on that first link, about dating trans women, here is what I said on Tumblr:
That comic was really bad social justice, cuz it’s some busybody getting between an individual trans woman and her potential romantic partners, and putting a bunch of dumb rules on that which *she did not choose*. Fuck that.
Anyway, there is a lot of messed up stuff trans folks have to deal with in the world of dating, and many of us really don’t like “the men who admire us” much. They get called “chasers” and “trolls” (and indeed many of them are gross chaser trolls). But the point is, anyone paying attention to that comic is *already miles ahead of those guys*, and so basically anyone who would chose *not* to date a trans woman cuz that comic is probably decent enough already, at least worth engaging with, even if they aren’t perfect (as if anyone is).
So the real mega-creepoid fetishizers — they ain’t reading that article. So what good will that advice actually do?
In other words, the points that article raises are real points and worth thinking about, but if you’re HAWT for a trans person, and you want to date them, but if you recognize some problematic shit in your own thinking, talk to *them* about it!
Cuz they might *really like you* and be willing to work on it.
Which, this seems so obvious as to be a “duh” issue.
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I mean honestly, if some total hottie was like, veronica, I wanna fuck you stupid but I’m afraid I’m only seeking social justice points — well I mean seriously! When does the kissing start?
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Thanks for your kind words. Likewise.
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(I’m now exploring the irony contained in the statement “Galois was a tool of the kyriarchy,” cuz I kinda think he was the opposite of that.)
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I always thought the patterns of attraction sex-positive feminists are hostile to, and those they defend as beyond even questioning, to be rather arbitrary. Why is the guy who is vocal about not wanting to date fat women be attacked but the vocal bdsm submssive woman should just be accepted?
Ultimately I agree with you. Some preferences are rooted in unexamined assumptions or lack of experiences with a certain group, and these can be changed. Some are more deeply rooted, and the “cure” to change them is worse than the “disease”. Taken to its logical conclusion you get some radicals who say that everybody would be pansexual if there weren’t negative cultural influences, which strikes me as a suspect claim.
But there are more complicated cases. What about race fetishes? Some people really get off on having sex with people of different races specifically (it seems to go in both directions: whites to non-whites and visa-versa with certain pairings be more common). Usually these seem to not be mere aesthetic preferences but also involve stereotypes as well (e.g. the submissive east asian woman, the primal ravishing black man, the smooth but masculine latino man, the wild rich white sorority girl, etc.).
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Aaaaaand I just saw the link to another of Ozy’s post specifically on fetishization. I’ll have to read the post and subsequent discussion there.
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When the OP says this:
I can’t entirely agree with that characterization. My issue isn’t that many social justice people believe the quoted, as somewhat intentionally uncharitably paraphrased as it is. My issue is that it’s applied selectively.
When it comes to clear victims like trans people, I’ve heard people muster up the courage to say essentially the quoted.
When it comes to certain other groups like fat women, they are more circumspect, but the overall gist is undoubtedly that Things Must Change on a societal level (and not that each individual fat woman must undergo an individual journey of self-improvement), Men Must Change, or that Fat Women Should Be Getting Better than they are currently, in the entire world of dating, hooking up, and sex.
When it comes to groups like short men or shy, nervous men, saying exactly what was said for fat women above but with the nouns switched, is snarled at as “sexual redistribution” or “regulating sexuality” or “entitlement”.
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Getting personal about this kind of thing is wrong, but trying to exert a broad, general social pressure to change what society finds attractive or unattractive is neither wrong nor impinging on anyone’s “freedom”. Define it this way and all activism is anti-freedom. There is some murky area where the latter can bleed into the former, but this is the case everywhere and not unique to this issue.
I am generally sympathetic to those who feel excluded in this part of life, be they trans people/gender dysmorphic folk, fat women, short men, or what have you. I believe that you have the right to not sleep with or not date whomever you want. However, if you’re already currently not-sleeping-with or not-dating those you don’t want to, I have a hard time taking seriously your claims that you’re the victim here. You have the right to not sleep with whomever you don’t want to; you don’t have the right to police others or keep them in their place. And I don’t think many people are fucking others just to earn SJ points (err… maybe outside of a handful of very select, insular communities), so the real problem isn’t the former, as that right isn’t really under threat. What people are sore about is the latter being impinged – as it should be.
As an example,
I agree with most of what you wrote, but something about this opening paragraph seemed off to me.
I don’t see any reason why anyone should have to be “vocal” about not wanting to date a particular group of people. What happened to basic courtesy? Going around being vocal about who you find unattractive seems to me like policing others and keeping them in their place.
The vocal BDSM submissive woman should be accepted (assuming that you mean someone who likes talking about her sub proclivities) because she’s focusing on a positive, what gives pleasure to her, and is not dragging anyone else down. The guy being vocal about not wanting to date fat women is being purely negative. Positive and negative are not equal opposites. We don’t have the same social freedom or latitude to tell someone to “fuck off” as to give them a common greeting, nor should we.
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@pocketjacks — I think you have it right. This can’t be about *forcing* people to be attracted where they otherwise are not, nor about trying to use guilt, since that’s obviously not going to work. On the other hand, people often are outspoken about finding trans people (or fat people or whatever) unattractive, and really, just keep it to yourself. There’s no reason to rub it in.
One thing I think everyone can do to help is this: regardless of who YOU want to date, it is also about how you respond to who your friends want to date. Like, if you don’t want to date a fat girl, then don’t. But how do you treat your friend who dates a fat girl? Like, are there subtle ways you undermine that relationship? Do you talk really nice about other couples, but then get kinda quiet when their relationship is mentioned?
People are really good at noticing subtle status signals. This is messy.
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You’re correct that there is a double standard regarding nerdy guys, which this probably arises from the current nerd culture wars, alongside the history of the “nice guy” debate. But in any case, it’s worth noticing how the trans community has struggled with good ways to articulate this issue, since in the past done we’ve a very bad job. However, I think we’re finding the right structure and vocabulary to talk about this.
Anyway, I hope that nerdy men learn from this and adopt a similar vocabulary, cuz saying “woman only date bad boys and they’re stupid and deserve to be unhappy,” which really is a thing that gets said by guys on the “nice guy” spectrum, is super unhelpful. But there are other ways to talk about it that *shouldn’t* trigger the “oh gross nice guys” response.
Of course, this requires an environment where everyone approaches the topic in good faith. Such environments are rare.
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Yes, and this falls under the banner of “policing”. A general rule of “you have the right to be sexual or not with whomever you want; you don’t have the right to enforce those standards on third parties, or police others’ prospects” would pretty much be accepted by everyone. The issue is in the specifics, of what exactly constitutes “enforcing standards” and “policing”.
The subtle scenario you give is a good example. Everyone would agree that a friend being openly negative because a friend is going out with someone socially “below” them, is policing. What about if it’s a case of merely withholding positivity, positivity that is freely given to everyone else? These actions may be unconscious. Or they may be conscious, with just enough plausible deniability built in so that it’s hard to call out. But no matter. Any action you take that would have a net effect of exacerbating society’s divisions of romantic fulfillment and loneliness, is potentially fair game for criticism expressly aimed at eliminating it. Such criticism is not an impingement on your freedom (or else all social criticism must be a violation of freedom), nor can it be anywhere close to reasonably interpreted as “forcing you to have to sex” with someone. You can have sex or not with the exact same people you are currently, while not playing these status games.
It may be harder if society doesn’t get to pre-emptively make people you don’t like feel shitty about themselves so that they don’t infest the public spaces you frequent, thus lowering your signal-to-noise ratio. (This is essentially the main reason why I think so many people defend these status games under the guise of “individual freedom”.) But, you never had a right to that in the first place. On the contrary, other people have the right to not be treated this way.
I’d argue that a lot of the nerd culture wars started because of the double standard, but I don’t want to get into it here because I don’t want every post to be about nerds.
It’s very hard for many people to be unemotional about this topic, is the main problem.
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I use the word “you” a lot, because I find the third person “one” to be very awkward. I hope it was clear that the accusatory “you’s” in my post above were general you’s, unlike the specific you’s that came before it. If there was an edit function, I’d have added a note when I made that switch.
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To be clear, I understand racial fetishization and various gross forms of trans fetishization are things and should absolutely be avoided. But that’s an issue of “you have very unhealthy racist/transphobic attitudes that need to be addressed RIGHT NOW” rather than “hmm, you seem to be attracted to more than half a standard deviation away from the right number of asians” and in particular, it seems toxic to infer the former from the latter which I don’t think I’ve seen you do, but have definitely seen other people do.
I think “fuck you trying to control my sexuality” is a valid response to that, rather than “why yes I will apply the effort to perfectly calibrate my attractions from 30% latino to 15% latino and 15% white to 20% white”.
Also, sorry for the anger, I don’t think I’ve seen you apply pressure in this way but I’ve definitely seen other people attacked for having the temerity to date outside of their race.
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>To be clear, I understand racial fetishization and various gross forms of trans fetishization are things and should absolutely be avoided.
Why?
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I would gusee that, in a relatioship, things would suck in some way for the fetishised individual.
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The word “Fetishization” carries many negative connotations, perhaps best described with this excerpt from the “fetishization” post linked above:
“Fetishization is not about attraction, it’s about using your attraction as an excuse to objectify people.”
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>I would gusee that, in a relatioship, things would suck in some way for the fetishised individual.
Yeah, but any form of fixation, sexual or not, is probably not going to be productive to the mantaining of healthy relationships and a stable life in general.
>an excuse to objectify people
Related to the previous blogpost, what feminist source would people here recommend that explain objectification? Of the myriad of concepts I have learned, this one is possibly one of the ones I really can’t seem to wrap my head around.
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Objectification gets used in different ways.
Feminism is a false consensus driven culture. A lot of terms of art it uses are engineered to let everyone feel like they’re on the same page while holding very different views.
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Well, in the end you have precisely as much right to say, “I have a thing for Asian women” as Asian women have to say, “Go away! D00dz like you are gross creepoids.”
On the other hand, I have a “thing” for Asian women, particularly Asian trans women. So there.
This is tricky and I cannot give precise rules. I’ll say this, being sexualized and fetishized can be pretty fucking unwelcome, and some people have *really complicated romantic and sexual baggage*.
When you “have a thing for Asian women,” and you are with an Asian woman — well, you’re not the first fetishy-person she’s dealt with, perhaps not eve the first *that day*. And it’s not like you’re evil and kill babies, but on the other hand it really does come across as kinda creepy. She’s encountered a lot of “guys like you” (or in my case “gals like me”), and she’s maybe kinda used to such people getting really weird when the romance starts.
Like, they really *are not* ready to engage with her as a full human being. They really do expect her to play the role of “cool Asian girlfriend of my imagination.”
This is really immature, but I think fetishizing people is a somewhat immature attitude.
Well, maybe not *immature* exactly, but people who have figured out how relationships work know to look past their preconceptions and their iconic notions of what romantic partners are like. Figuring this out does seem like part of growing up.
It’s hard to explain.
Anyway, so yeah. The men who fetishize trans women want us to be like the women in that porn they fap to, and that is ALL THEY WANT FROM US, and any deviation from the script is unwelcome.
And look, I might even want to do some of the things these guys dream of — cuz I have a libido also and I’m kinky as fuck. But still, I may not want to do the precise things in just the way they want, and maybe I’m just *sore* that night and want to do other stuff, just be gentle, just be close.
I ain’t no fucking dreamgirl, cuz no one is.
I hope you all can understand why this sucks.
Anyway, all that said, I think that while fetishization probably correlates with shitty, immature relationship ideas, I don’t think they are essential bound together. Which is to say, an emotionally healthy, mature person can “have a thing for X” without being a super creep.
It turns out I’ve never dated an Asian woman. I might never. Who knows. But the point is, I think I am mature enough to not fuck it up, to not fetishize.
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Anyway, final point. If folks are calling out the way *you* talk about this stuff, well there are various possibilities. One is they are wrong, they are hypersensitive, etc. The other is, well, maybe you really are coming across as a creep, and maybe you could listen — well listen some, you don’t have to stick around for abuse — and learn from what they are saying.
What kind of person are you? What kind of person do you want to be?
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@Ann, I think that what’s worthwhile in the concept of objectification (it is, I think, probably misused more often than it is used in any helpful way, unfortunately) is explained in something approaching adequate detail in Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. I don’t think she uses the word, but the terminology is obviously not as important as the ideas. Studying Kantian ethics probably also wouldn’t hurt, since the ideas certainly derive from there; Christine Korsgaard explains Kantian ethics better than anybody else I can think of (certainly better than Kant himself).
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It’s not that hard to find people saying “you are an asian woman, I love asian women they’re so demure and submissive and willing to cede to powerful white men” which, you know is caricaturing and often false and if I were an asian woman I’d feel uncomfortable with this. Similarly if I’m like “you are a trans women, you’re clearly trying to trap poor innocent straight men like me oh no I fell for you” that’s assigning implications to the person that they don’t necessarily want to have and if I contact people assuming that. I’d basically be being flat out racist/transphobic.
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The men who fetishize trans women want us to be like the women in that porn they fap to, and that is ALL THEY WANT FROM US, and any deviation from the script is unwelcome.
Assuming you mean something more than just “only sex,” is this “script” really a well-defined thing?
As someone with fairly broad tastes in porn, I haven’t really noticed a greater homogeneity in porn featuring trans women than in porn featuring cis women. If anything, I’d count the former as more varied, simply based on a comparison of (a) how often each type includes a woman anally penetrating a man and (b) when that occurs, how often it isn’t portrayed as domination and humiliation of the man.
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@Ann Onora Mynuz,
I second J’s response to you. I agree that terms like “fetishization” can be targetedly pejorative but loosely defined, so I’ll eschew that term altogether and just say that people don’t like being associated with stereotypes or ascribed traits that they find demeaning, even under the guise of a compliment.
I agree with you on “objectification”.
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“Fuck you, this is my sexuality” is a pretty reasonable response to nosy strangers trying to micromanage your sex life.
It doesn’t matter how nicely the message is phrased, like “you should re-examine your preferences because you may have subconsciously internalized unhealthy messages about…” or whatever, because the fundamental point is that *they still don’t have a say in who you’re attracted to* no matter what their theory says. Especially when it’s really transparent that behind that theoretical justification what they’re saying is ‘you should have sex with [more / fewer] people like me!’
It’s patronizing and extremely creepy to try to change someone’s sexual preferences ‘for their own good’ or worse for some nebulous greater good. After all, I think we would mostly agree that even if it worked conversion therapy for gays is seriously unethical. I don’t see how that suddenly changes if we’re trying to convert people to pansexual anarchists rather than chaste christians.
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My position on same-gender attraction is the same as it is for everything else I talk about in this blog post. It is very rare for someone to repress their heterosexuality or to have not interacted with people of other genders whom they could be attracted to, so those two considerations don’t often apply. If someone is only attracted to one gender because of an incorrect belief about another gender (for instance, if they believe women are stupid and frivolous and hence are not attracted to them), I think they should stop having that incorrect belief. If someone can use their sexual fluidity to become attracted to people of multiple genders, good for them, but for most people sexual preferences are hard to change.
Also, at no point did anyone suggest trying to change other people’s sexual preferences. There is a really important difference between “I think it would be right for you to do X” and “I am forcing you to do X.” If there isn’t, aren’t you being creepy and patronizing by thinking it’s wrong for me to have the opinions I have about sexual preferences?
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To be honest I don’t see a meaningful distinction between the two statements, since in practice it seems like the former is what people say when they don’t yet have the power to say the latter. Personal moral qualms tend to turn into policy pretty quickly.
Besides, isn’t shaming or guilting someone into sex with a supposed obligation considered coercive or manipulative behavior even in the absence of threats?
As to whether or not I’m being creepy or patronizing, I suppose I’m in a rather bad position to judge. I certainly would like for people to stop having loud public discussions of why I and men like me are obligated to or forbidden from having sex with partners of any given category (whether I’m already “doing the right thing” or not). If that qualifies as censorship I will cop to the charge of being creepy on the issue, although since it’s explicitly for my good rather than theirs I still reject the use of patronizing.
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This … kind of seems to be implying that it’s impossible for anything connected to sex to have ethical problems?
Like, I’m pretty firmly anti-rape, and I don’t exactly think rapists have a right to tell me “fuck you, this is my sexuality”. Same with pedophiles. Same with, IDK, someone who gets off on suicide trying to persuade people to kill themselves while they have sex.
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Pedophiles are probably your best example, given that it’s actually an immoral sexual attraction to a demographic. The other two aren’t really close analogs so I’m going to ignore them (plus it lets me avoid dragging rape or suicide into this).
And I agree with you: pedophilia is a clear case of a sexual preference being wrong and we should do as much as possible to prevent and punish child molestation. I’m not thrilled about attempts to ‘modify’ pedophiles’ preferences via chemical castration, on the creepiness grounds above, but if it’s necessary well then so be it.
So yeah, there can be ethical problems from sexual preferences serious enough to justify screwing with people’s heads, with the caveat that the preference should be on roughly the same order of magnitude of “badness” as child molestation.
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Here’s the thing: being a pedophile is not inherently “wrong”. We don’t imprison people for pedophilia; we imprison them for raping children. (That said, I’m thoroughly OK with attempts to develop some sort of “cure”, although it should probably be consensual.)
Similarly, we don’t punish people for finding rape or murder or assault hot; we imprison them for raping, murdering, or assaulting people.
This seems to me exactly the same as the Christian idea of “love the sinner, hate the sin”; specifically as it’s applied to homosexuality. It’s not wrong to be attracted to the same sex; that’s “temptation”. It’s wrong and harmful to have sex with them; to give into the “temptation”. (It may or may not also be a good idea to take steps to reduce the attraction, if you can find some that work.)
So, yeah, I think it’s hypocritical to argue that homosexuality prima facie cannot be unethical because it’s a sex act, and people’s sexuality is inherently immune to criticism.
Homosexuality is ethical because it has no relevant differences to any other sex act; because nobody is being hurt. Not because criticism is wrong.
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Ooh, boy, this one used to worry me. Mostly because, on paper, I have A Type. An extremely specific type at that. And when I was young and foolish, I legitimately thought I could only be attracted to lanky dark-haired but otherwise Nordic-looking dudes with five o’clock shadow, and that this was Bad.
Then I left high school and started dating.
As it turns out, I can be attracted to all kinds of people–lanky dudes, heavier dudes, dudes of various ethnicities, even (as I recently discovered) people who are not dudes at all.
I think a lot of what people call their sexual preferences are actually more their social circle cross-bred with their celebrity crushes, and their preferences will probably widen as their social and/or media consumption circle widens. There are a few immutable preferences, of course. And I REALLY ought to write something of my own about sex and classism, but that’s another story…….
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Hmm…
A model I’d like to put forward is that people imprint on a physical “type” and filter for that, but secondary characteristics can sometime shift the payout matrix and people “find” attraction where it wasn’t expected.
A more cynical way of putting it: people have an “ideal mate”, and trade-off on characteristics for sexual or romantic access. Some guys in prison get pretty (consensually) fluid.
Also: I very much suspect that people don’t have 100% conscious access to their attraction triggers, and they do all kinds of post-hoc rationalizing about attraction.
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Some guys in prison get pretty (consensually) fluid.
I think making arguments from “people in prison sometimes…” is generally not a good idea. Many prisons are sufficiently awful that the people being kept there are effectively under a regime of constant psychological torture. “Behave atypically under conditions of extreme psychological duress” is not necessarily the same as “discover they’re bi.”
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Fair point – but if psychological duress contributes to sexual fluidity, that would be an interesting (if morally disgusting) fact to know.
I’m not sure “discover they’re bi” is the right way to put it. It depends if people have “bi-ness” that is an unacknowledged part of their identity that is forced out due to , or if they choose to express bi-ness or “become” bi as a strategy to obtain intimacy in a difficult situation.
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That should read “due to factors x, y or z”
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Sailors on long voyages, then. It’s a reasonably well-established phenomenon, IIUC.
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I have all the signs of repressed androphelia:
* AMAB, raised in anti-gay family
* Attracted to penises.
* Attracted to “butch” women
* SUPER attracted to people who have penises, an estrogen body, a “butch” aesthetic, and who identify as this gender I made up which basically has all the male gender roles except it has a different name.
* Not attracted to men with estrogen bodies.
* Attracted to trans women but wary about dating them because my attraction is rooted in the really offensive alief that trans women are men who have just enough estrogen not to count as men anymore.
So I’m really trying to change my orientation now, because it’s a lot easier to find straight men then to find butch lesbians, much less butch lesbians who would be willing to identify as a gender I made up. But it’s *really* difficult. and I’m not making any progress.
So if someone were to say to me “Gwen, I know you’re a trans woman, but I don’t want to date you because I alieve you’re a man,” I’d be sad but I couldn’t get angry at them because I know how hard it is to change your aliefs.
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I think a lot of this hinges on why they need to point that out to you. Could they not simply say, “Hey I’m not feeling it.” Like, if you asked them out. On the other hand, if you did not ask them out, and they just come out with that, well, why?
I totally get that there are people who are not attracted to me. Which actually I’m fine with that. There are plenty who are. So yay me!
Like, my biggest romantic problem is not that I’m trans, it’s that I’m shy. And I was shy before in dudely-space.
Actually I get more sex now as a trans woman than I ever did as a dude. I mean, there are personal reasons for that, and I don’t mean to suggest it’s easier for us, cuz it ain’t, not in general. But still, I’m pretty satisfied. Being happy and gorgeous actually works!
But I have really no patience for people who need to make a fuss about not dating us. Like, putting it on a dating profile just seems shitty to me. It’s not likely you’ll find dozens of us clamoring to hook up with you. If you’re not interested, just politely decline. Easy peasy.
(On the other hand, if you are open to trans women, you might say so. A lot of us kinda assume most folks won’t like us, so we look around for partners who are pretty explicitly pro-trans.)
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In addition, while no one knows where sexual preferences come from, it seems likely that they’re influenced by who you interacted with as a kid and your early sexual experiences. If you mostly hung around white people, you’re more likely to end up attracted to traits associated with whiteness.
Many of the women in my family have thyroid issues; they’re often quite heavy, and really big breasts also run in the family. I’ve previously hypothesized that my preference for thin women, and more tellingly, for small boobs, is a subconscious anti-incest response. (Literally every actress and porn star I’ve ever seen before/after breast enhancement, I’ve thought looked better before.)
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Yes. I’m not attracted to tall men; I believe for the same reason you have given.
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Believing that trans women are men, even on a subconscious level, is wrong
Define ‘wrong’.
Remember, the categories were made for man, not man for the categories.
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I *think* the usage here is a combination of two things.
Wrong as in ‘incorrect’ – because Ozy (and I) believe that trans women are women and not men,
*and* wrong as in ‘bad’, because the belief that trans women are men hurts trans women.
I mean, of itself, the idea floating around in your head that trans women are men doesn’t hurt trans women but beliefs don’t stay floating around in your head not affecting your actions.
I think it is justifiable to be worried about the notion of beliefs being morally bad because that does have Implications, but if the belief is incorrect then obviously one should try to believe the correct thing.
If the categories are made for man (or woman) that seems like an argument for people getting to be in the categories they feel they should be in.
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It is liable to cause trans women pain with very little benefit.
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I’ve noticed that I have a type or types, a few different clusters of physical characteristics that I find particularly attractive. I won’t go into details, but I also notice that my relative preferences have both changed gradually over time, and a recent specific incident re-ordered them more abruptly. Not in a bad way, but it was still alarming.
I can totally believe, based on that, that for some people, preference can be much more fluid, and for others, much more static.
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It seems fine to politely suggest that someone’s preferences might be the product of unfounded assumptions, as long as you’re willing to accept “I thought about it, and they’re not” as an answer without further demur.
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Just to tie a little knot in my head:
“Let’s start with the most uncontroversial. There are a lot of straight boys who are attracted to trans women and are very upset because they think that that means they’re secretly gay. I think everyone can agree that it is very good to enlighten those poor boys about how lots of straight men and basically no gay men are attracted to trans women, because trans women are women, and straight men are attracted to women and gay men are not. Those boys are, clearly, attracted to trans women; they’re just conflicted about what it means to be attracted to trans women, which makes it hard for them to express their attraction.”
If someone born female identifies as a man and considers himself a man, but takes no steps at all to alter his appearance, is it gay to be attracted to him?
If a man, who identifies as a man and considers himself a man, dresses and surgically modifies his body and takes estrogen in order to appear as a woman, is it gay to be attracted to him?
Does it matter if either of these men is gay?
What does “gay” even mean?
For that matter, even once the situation is clear, somebody attracted to trans women is likely still going to be attracted to the second man… who is neither trans nor a woman. Somebody attracted to cis women is likely still going to be attracted to the first, who is neither cis nor a woman.
Does it matter how superficial that attraction is?
What does “attracted to trans women” even mean?
I mean, yes, the easiest way to deal with all of this is to drop all the categories as you suggest. I just think that the paragraph with which you start your argument is not so “clearly” “uncontroversial” as it might appear.
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If there are people who are only attracted to people who
a) appear
b) were born
c) identify
as the “opposite sex”, it seems reasonable to describe this preference as “heterosexuality”. (And if the inverse is true, as “homosexuality”.)
I get the impression there are “heterosexual” people around who occupy all these sliiightly different categories, although maybe I’m just picking up on people who just have different aliefs or who’re trying to “repress” their attraction to certain groups.
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“I’m worried about people fucking members of marginalized groups for SJ Points, which is likely to make everyone involved feel gross.”
Status games around sex don’t seem to make people feel gross if the status game is endorsed by society at large. Thinking about it outside of the endorsed status game and analyzing it is mostly what produces the response I think.
People have been using sexual hacks for all sorts of religious practices. SJ holiness points from sex would probably feel pretty righteous from the inside. It would also reproduce with slight variation, perhaps in the same frequency perhaps less, most of the subtly problematic aspects of the older patriarchal system on sexual psychology: people feeling guilty and evil over not experiencing things “all good people” find rewarding as rewarding, socially savvy people using the socially endorses norms to extort sex from people who really don’t want to others, people who desperately want to have sex with each other being considered bad for doing so and so on.
Of course an accurate description of what is going on psychologically sounds gross. To us. Right now. It probably wouldn’t to them.
Fortunately I don’t give a fuck about future values.
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>Fortunately I don’t give a fuck about future values.
I care a lot about future values. That’s why I want to make damn sure people’s values don’t change*,and make sure they aren’t different in the future. Because if they do change, then, since I care about future values, I’ll feel obligated to respect them. And I really don’t want to do that 🙂
*The one exception to this is when a value is changed in order for it to be more in line with some sort of larger, meta-value a person has.
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SJ paganesque rituals. Lord have mercy.
***
Question unrelated to topic at hand: Did MoreRight move? The url is no longer working for me?
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We moved to http://thefutureprimaeval.net/
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It seems like a lot of the counterarguments here are basically defensiveness, which seems curious to me. Like, I take it as a given that my attractions are socially shaped. I mean, obviously. Likewise, I take it as a given that I should care about this, at least to some degree.
This is because we are social creates and how we think about each other affects how we treat each other, and that seems kind of important.
As an example, many of you rail against the way “white cis men” are discussed (I suspect cuz a lot of you are white cis men.)
[Note, the following does not represent my true thoughts.]
Okay, but look, what if I despise white cis men for dumb reasons? Like, it’s not just that I am critical of sexism and racism and cissexism, but that I just don’t like your faces?
Well, I get to feel that way, I guess. But many of you seem really worried that we social justice folks are winning and you’re gonna lose out in life.
And you have precisely as much right to complain about this as I do about trans stuff.
Short version: why should anyone care about your issues when you don’t care about ours?
I’m really *not telling you* that you should date trans women if you don’t want to. Nor fat women. Nor even women, if that’s how you roll. I am saying, hey, some of this reflects social prejudice and is not *essential* to your being. Like, in a less prejudiced society, your attractions might have shaped up differently, along with most people’s attractions. Wouldn’t that be a good thing?
Of course, maybe some of our attractions are somehow “essential,” whatever we take that to mean. Perhaps some of it is baked in to our neural structure, from genetics or pre-natal hormones or whatever. (I suspect the hormones theory is true.) But who thinks that is *all* that is happening? And even if it were true, we might still find it unfair and care about that. We might still say, is there a good way to mitigate this, that is not oppressive?
You would think that nerds would be receptive to this idea, given how they are regarded romantically.
Do weirdo nerdy guys deserve to be lonely? Should anyone care?
I mean, if someone said, “veronica, you need to go make out with this weirdo nerdy guy in the corner,” I’d tell them to fuck off. On the other hand, I’m not afraid to ask myself whether my attractions are ideal. Perhaps they are less than ideal. I maybe should care about that.
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“I am saying, hey, some of this reflects social prejudice and is not *essential* to your being.”
How do you feel when people say equivalent things about your gender identity?
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@Patrick — I don’t know what the boundaries of my “essential self” are. I can talk about what I have experienced, and I indeed expect to be heard, at least from anyone who wants to offer up an opinion about me. But my “essential being”?
Personally I suspect that the prenatal hormones theory is true, that as my brain developed in utero, it was exposed to girl-hormones when, if I were a cis boy, it would have been exposed to boy-hormones. I suspect that this set me on a lifelong path to womanhood.
So yay me. I like being a woman. I like being trans.
Is it my essence? Well, why should anyone care? I think we should care about neuroscience, so I do support research into these topics, cuz I want us to know more about how brains work. Moreover, I suspect that knowing more about how brains work will likely tell us some things about how gender works (but not *all things* about how gender works). So yay knowledge.
But regarding essence — the questions are these: what role does my gender play in my life, what role does it play in their lives, what do I need to do to make my life work, what do they need to do to make their lives work?
Do we care about each other’s well being, about each other’s happiness? Do I care about theirs? Do they care about mine? How should we treat each other?
I don’t know what “essence” means. I know what brains are. I know that they are shaped in various ways, and are in some ways highly plastic and in others not so much. I know that we are social animals, and a big part of this is how we treat each other as sexed beings — which is a pretty big part of what gender is. I think we should care about this stuff, including our attractions.
There are non-tribal ways to talk about this.
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I doubt there are many readers of this blog who genuinely don’t care about trans people’s issues. (Or was that part of the “not my true thoughts” section?)
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I mean specifically caring about people’s romantic prospects, along with understanding how society shapes this, and how each of us participates in this little dance. I am suggesting that each of us should *care enough* to self examine our role, and even perhaps to make changes.
Of course, what changes one should make is a highly personal topic, but I would recommend against pursuing the question in a defensive way.
You mention that no one on this blog “doesn’t care about trans people.” But likewise, no one on this blog is guilt-tripping anyone about their attractions, but people here still have their defences up.
In fact, one poster above has suggested that *talking reasonably* about this is simply code for being unreasonable, specifically this:
That’s some very unhelpful bullshit. Later they say,
Except no one here is doing that. We’re trying to do something else.
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“But likewise, no one on this blog is guilt-tripping anyone about their attractions, but people here still have their defences up.”
People on this blog are, very literally and very explicitly, telling people that their concept of their sexual orientation is built, in part, out of prejudice that it would be morally better if they did not have.
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For the record, I’m a he not a they.
The thing with demands for self examination is that they really aren’t as neutral or unobjectionable as you imply. I’m trying not to kill too many digital trees on this, so just restricting my explanation to three points.
1. The obvious psychological reason: if you call someone out for having the wrong preferences and ask that they reexamine them, then you are positioning yourself above them and invoking social disapproval on them. Even if you’re right in that case, it’s going to get people’s backs up because it’s a passive-aggressive attack.
2. They never stop: if a presumed-straight man reflects and decides that he’s actually bisexual or homosexual or a woman or whatever, then he or she has successfully come out and questioning him or her further is bigotry. But if he decides, well actually no he was pretty much right on the money with his preferences then he’s right back at square one and must now defend his “unexamined” preferences over and over.
3. The conflict of interest: while some busybodies will pick your preferences apart more generally, mostly it seems like people only really care about problematic preferences when it stops them from getting in your pants (or gives them unwanted competition). This really does happen, it’s really really disgusting and frustrating to deal with, and the only reason people think it will work is because of this theoretical framework.
Now we could go #notallcalloutculture here and say that just because a lot of people do use “reexamine your preferences” as a repetitive self-serving attack that there are more academically inclined people who use it as a universal admonition to seek truth. Ok cool, but even then the second group is providing cover and justification for the former.
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fuck yeah, 246… . It’s manipulative language, and there is no place to stand on and say “no, sorry, I am still not attracted to you, I may be an evil cishet, but fuckage will not happen.” It’s just like the anti-king people wanting to “save” us by asking, fake-concerned, what made us such perverts: you can keep battling them with a spoon to keep them away, but they will keep coming back, and it’s no way of getting rid of them, except tabooing forced-questioning in general.
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*kink. Altough I guess pretend monarcny would be a power inquality type of thingie.
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It seems like a lot of the counterarguments here are basically defensiveness, which seems curious to me.
I think there are three positions that get conflated a lot, both tactically by people seeking to defend the stronger ones, and in perception, by people pattern-matching to the former phenomenon:
1. People’s sexual attractions are socially influenced.
2. It is commendable (i.e. supererogatory) for people to examine their socially-influenced sexual attractions, in the interests of broadening them.
3. It is the right thing to do (i.e. obligatory) for people to [as above].
Being defensive against (1) is (in the abstract) kinda weird, but being “defensive” about (3) is perfectly sensible. It doesn’t help that Ozy is explicitly arguing at least (2), and doesn’t actually believe in a distinction between the supererogatory and the obligatory (even if they feel that acting like there is such a distinction is useful), so (2) and (3) are (technically) indistinguishable.
Like, I take it as a given that my attractions are socially shaped. I mean, obviously. Likewise, I take it as a given that I should care about this, at least to some degree.
I take it as a given that my attractions are socially shaped, but am baffled by the idea that I should care about this.
I mean, I care about a lot of things about my desires, sexual and otherwise, beyond just that I have them. Whether achieving them will actually make me happy, whether I’m balancing them against each other correctly, whether they’re virtuous, whether they’re vicious, whether satisfying them tends to injure others . . .
But where they came from? Why would I care about that!? I mean, clearly, a lot of people do. I know someone who identifies as lesbian, but is sometimes attracted to men, and is weirdly concerned about whether that’s a result of societal brainwashing or not. And that baffles the hell out of me. If it is, so what?
And you seem to endorse a similar attitude toward mine in another comment:
This seems eminently sensible, so I’m confused by the apparent tension with the above.
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On the one hand, I find it hilarious that the LGBT community, which was founded in large part on the right to be attracted to who you’re attracted to (and not attracted to who you aren’t attracted to), is now developing splinter groups who argue that if you aren’t attracted to them then you’re brainwashed; on the other hand, that community has never been immune to the allure of conducting its own brainwashing (see: how long it took me to realize that I was bisexual because of all the disdain for bi people in the LGBT community).
Sometimes we suppress our attractions, consciously or unconsciously, because of social stigma or misinformation, and that’s a real thing. I’m less concerned with the potential objects of affection here than with the damage it can do to the one doing the repressing: On the mild end of things, it means a reduction in potential partners, or a nebulous dissatisfaction with what you have; on the nastier end of things, it means a powerful self-loathing.
However, the way the point is phrased is more often about how the speaker deserves to get laid/the insufficiently attracted party is evil than it is about the value of personal development, and I’m not in any way inclined to listen to that, because if it’s right then it’s right by accident.
“You should like this thing that you arguably don’t have any choice in liking because if you don’t like it then you’re evil” is a vile an unpersuasive argument; “You might like this thing if you looked at good examples of it” is kinder and more likely to see a change in behavior because it’s suggesting a concrete course of action.
And frankly: If you’re applying moral relevance to your inability to get laid, you need to grow up. Perhaps you are being portrayed in an unfairly unflattering way in the world, but don’t take that out on the people who find your blog just because they’re the easy targets.
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Can we define homo- and heterosexuality really carefully here? First of all, is it defined relative to what people identify with, what people read as, or a combination of both? Because although it doesn’t work for everyone, you can totally take a cis man and make him read as an attractive cis woman, even when only mildly clothed. For another cis man, does being attracted to him count as homosexual attraction, or not? Similarly, does being attracted to a trans woman that reads as a cis man count as homosexual attraction? Second, are we talking about purely physical “liked porn with them” or mostly emotional “met, talked a lot, and fell in love” attraction? Thirdly, do we make a distinction between being attracted to trans women just like to cis women, and having a strong preference for women with penises?
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And for the record, it’s not only straight men who are attracted to Bailey Jay. Cuz OMG Yes!
(She followed me on Twitter the other day and I went around bragging to all my friends cuz I’m the worst.)
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