Re: Coming Out

[lejend]

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[SnipedAttheBasement]

I'm sure we don't need a higher population and that argument is outdated since we don't need more soldiers for a tribe.

[lejend]

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[Cometk]

@lejend i imagine there are a lot of children in america who would love to have adoptive parents, so excuse me if i don't see it as much of a sin that homosexual couples can't reproduce

[kami_ryu]

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[Snuden]

Why is it stupid and retarded?
I think it's quite a nice feeling.

[deleted_user0]

In the end, love is a retarded, stupid concept

What's the concept?

stupid and retarded?

That's your judgment of the concept. It's not the concept or idea itself. What, in your own words, is (the concept of) love

[kami_ryu]

-- deleted post --

[deleted_user]

"Go, ill-sped book, and whisper to her or
storm out the message for her only ear
that she is beautiful.
Mention sunsets, be not silent of her eyes
and mouth and other prospects, praise her size,
say her figure is full.

Say her small figure is heavenly and full,
so as stunned Henry yatters like a fool
& maketh little sense.
Say she is soft in speech, stately in walking,
modest at gatherings, and in every thing
declare her excellence.

Forget not, when the rest is wholly done
and all her splendours opened one by one
to add that she likes Henry,
for reasons unknown, and fate has bound them fast
one to another in linkages that last
and that are fair to see."

-John Berryman Dream Song 171

[XeeleeFlower]

Okay, I have no energy to write a dissertation regarding the biological component of sexuality. Anyone can look shit up online and clearly see that there is. For our purposes here, let's pretend that there isn't.

The purpose of sexuality is reproduction. Homosexual acts aren't conducive toward that end. It's similar to masturbation in that regard, not heterosexual sex. An organism sexually active with members of the same sex, despite having a reproductive system that only works with the opposite sex, is engaging in an unnatural act.

Someone might now point out that a lot of heterosexual couples are child-free too, but that's not inherent to heterosexuality; it's an injury, illness, or choice, and can be avoided or cured when possible. (There are religious justifications for heterosexual people getting into an infertile relationship, but that's another matter entirely.)

When it comes to homosexual acts, it's just unproductive and not what the human body was designed for.

Are you saying that masturbation is wrong? How about oral sex between heterosexual people? Foreplay? Are all these things "sin"? They are all "unnatural" meaning that they don't cause sperm to be released and being embraced by an ovum. Individuals who are infertile are also "sinners" since they are unable to procreate. They can't be cured. Heterosexual individuals who choose to not have children are also bad since they are engaging in sex without the goal of having children.

Do you not believe in pleasure?

[Snuden]

And fetish.

[deleted_user]

It's time we start sending reverends out into the bedrooms of good, god-fearing christians to properly sanctify sex acts. Can't be too careful now.

[deleted_user]

It's Missionary work, damn it!

[deleted_user0]

Discussing with religious nutjobs is an ultimately fruitless afair, akin to eating dirt and pathological hair-pullimg, the human body simply isn't made for it.

[gibson]

Why would your engage with lejend? He's making a huge(and obviously fallacious) claim that the purpose of sexuality is reproduction. You don't even need half a brain to see how this is wrong. Maybe 30000 years ago but not today. Although he did make a small blunder cause he mentioned nothing about marriage and sex outside of marriage is wrong as well.

[dietschlander]

Why would your engage with lejend? He's making a huge(and obviously fallacious) claim that the purpose of sexuality is reproduction. You don't even need half a brain to see how this is wrong. Maybe 30000 years ago but not today. Although he did make a small blunder cause he mentioned nothing about marriage and sex outside of marriage is wrong as well.

[Gendarme]

My reaction as well @dietschlander.

[gibson]

come on this is so basic a 1st grader could work through it. If you look at all human sexual activity, lets say that 1% is with the purpose being procreation. In reality it is much less, but for the sake of argument we will say 1%. In the other 99%, the purpose is pleasure. So how can the purpose of human sexuality be procreation when in 99% of sexual acts the purpose is pleasure and in standard sex between a male and a female measures are usually taken to be sure there is no procreation? Perhaps you can make an argument that from an evolutionary standpoint, our ancestors who randomly muted to experience sexual pleasure obviously lasted much longer than those who didn't( and those who muted to not find sex pleasure probably didn't last very long either). However at that point in history procreation was much more important than it is today, and as I stated earlier, it is very clear that the primary purpose of sex for us today is pleasure.

[lejend]

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[deleted_user0]

Yesh, verri poor arigument. Much better ish naturalishtic phallusy and cause biblesh.

[lejend]

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[deleted_user0]

Trolling is sinful.

Matheus 19.21

[spanky4ever]

@lejend and whoever this may concern; Sosial constuctivism is a theory on how we as humans, work together to construct "artifacts"; and how this artifacts in return form our perception of the "world". In a sence, almost "everything" we can understand, perceive, are colored by our language, and the language are sosially constructed. Very abstract thing this "sosial constructivism"
-So "God", "love", "gender", "sexuality", "religion", or even such a basic thing as a "cup" are sosially constructed.

A very simple example is an object like a cup. The object can be used for many things, but its shape does suggest some 'knowledge' about carrying liquids (see also Affordance).

I found this artichle online, and though I would share it you with you, http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/03/04/

sexuality_as_social_construct_foucault_is_misunderstood_by_conservatives.
Where does sexual orientation come from? It’s a tired question and, frankly, a tiresome one, since it always seems to lead us back to the same familiar (and likely inextricable) tangle of science, culture, and ideology.
That said, it’s at least worth trying to keep the terms of the debate, well, straight, and “social construct”—the notion that sexual orientation is a modern invention, with which a person might or might not choose to affiliate—is a concept that has been greatly misunderstood.
To wit: last month, the religious journal First Things published a controversial essay by Michael W. Hannon called “Against Heterosexuality,” which offers an ultra-conservative take on the issue of whether our sexual orientations are natural conditions or chosen constructs. Hannon’s piece is just the latest in a number of recent articles in the “choice wars.” Brandon Ambrosino, writing for the New Republic, set off a small firestorm in January when he described his homosexuality as a choice, not a biological fact. His article provoked vitriolic responses from, among others, Gabriel Arana and Slate’s own Mark Joseph Stern. Clearly, the biology vs. choice (or nature vs. culture) debate remains a point of serious contention within the LGBTQ community and beyond.
But does “construct” mean what these new adopters think it does? Though Hannon and Ambrosino have different political endgames, they both invoke a very unlikely ally: Michel Foucault, the French philosopher who’s known as the grandfather of queer theory and a central architect of the “construct” conception of sexuality. Though Foucault died in 1984, his History of Sexuality, Volume I is still mandatory reading in LGBTQ studies courses. His theories about where sexuality comes from have been hugely influential in academia for decades. But Foucault is also responsible for a lot of the confusion surrounding the biology vs. choice debate—largely because his work been taken out of context by liberals and social conservatives alike. While Hannon’s essay is a particularly disturbing piece of work (see Stern’s scathing take-down for more), all of these popular misinterpretations tend to muddy the political waters, and risk obscuring Foucault’s most important contributions to our understanding of sexuality.

Let’s start with a quick primer. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault writes that Western society’s views on sex have undergone a major shift over the past few centuries. It’s not that same-sex relationships or desires didn’t exist before—they definitely did. What’s relatively new, though, is 1) the idea that our desires reveal some fundamental truth about who we are, and 2) the conviction that we have an obligation to seek out that truth and express it.

Within this framework, sex isn’t just something you do. Instead, the kind of sex you have (or want to have) becomes a symptom of something else: your sexuality. Though Foucault traces the origins of this shift back to the 16th century, our modern conceptions of sexuality really take root during the Victorian era, when the psychiatrist replaced the priest as the confessional authority figure. The science of sexuality was born—along with the elaborate systems of classification that allowed doctors to establish a divide between “normal” sexualities and “deviant” ones (like homosexuality).

How did one detect, diagnose, and correct deviancy? Parents, teachers, and doctors had to maintain constant vigilance over young children, so as to identify abnormal tendencies as early as possible. As they grew up, children would internalize these procedures of examination, until eventually they could be counted on to carefully monitor and report on their own thoughts, feelings, and desires. Foucault and people like Hannon agree on this point: in modern Western society, we experience a great deal of pressure to share and interpret our sexual impulses. Every desire, no matter how fleeting, must be catalogued and made to fit into our overarching sense of who we are. Queer people may experience this pressure in a more intense and immediate way than heterosexuals do, but nobody is immune. You might think you’re straight, but you’d better keep a very close eye on things, just in case. And even if you cross your t’s, dot your i’s, and say “No homo” at all the right moments, it’s still possible that others will be able to detect something in you that you didn’t know was there.
For Foucault, the obsession with figuring out the truth of our sexualities is a trap. After all, how do we know when to stop? Who can tell us when we’ve peeled back the final layer of social constraints and discovered our truest, most authentic selves? Foucault—who, by the way, identified as gay—knew that knowledge can never really be separated from power. Sometimes knowledge can be empowering, like when we take the language that was once used to diagnose us and turn it into a political rallying cry. But that knowledge can also be wielded against us, often with very concrete and painful results. Thinking and talking endlessly about our sexualities doesn’t really get us closer to figuring out who we “really are.” It does, however, generate plenty of evidence that can be used to monitor, control, and discipline us when we deviate from the norm.

This is why Foucault, who spent his life studying criminals, so-called sexual deviants, and the mentally ill, never tried to analyze these people the way a doctor or psychologist might. He wasn’t interested in figuring out what environmental or genetic factors caused them to turn out like they did. In fact, he refused to ask or answer those kinds of questions at all. When an interviewer inquired whether he thought homosexuality was an “innate predisposition” or the result of “social conditioning,” Foucault replied, “On this question I have absolutely nothing to say. No comment.” Pressed for details, he explained that he would not use his position of authority to “traffic in opinions.”
orientation was biologically determined or, indeed, socially constructed. What he wanted to understand was how sexuality came to be the question—the one thing we believe we have to answer before we can move on to anything else.

However, that does not mean he thought we should, or even could, dismiss these categories out of hand. And this is where Hannon and the other choicers deeply (and, it should be said, perhaps willfully) misunderstand Foucault: “Social construct” doesn’t mean “not real.” Try that logic out on the 81 percent of LGBTQ students who report experiencing verbal or physical harassment at school, or the estimated 40 percent of homeless youth who identify as gay and/or trans: These are people who know firsthand that these “fragile constructs,” as Hannon puts it, still have tremendous real world power. We live in a world that values and rewards certain identities and punishes, often brutally, those who don’t fit that mold. Concepts like sexuality aren’t just names that we can take on or cast off at will. They are structures built into the very fabric of modern society, and they shape, from Day 1, how we understand the world and our place within it.
If I believed Hannon was actually interested in dismantling what queer theorists call “compulsory heterosexuality,” I’d be the first to enlist in his campaign. As theorists of race and gender have long recognized, however, the dream of easily declaring ourselves “post”-anything often conceals a desire to sweep structural inequalities and long histories of violence under the rug. To say that sexuality doesn’t or shouldn’t matter is to deny many people the reality of their lived experience. It is also to ignore this important truth: that while society may construct these categories, these categories also construct us, and not only in negative ways. Identifying as queer isn’t simply a matter of swapping your straight hat for a feather boa. For most of us, it is a lifelong process of crafting bodies, relationships, and selves that can make our lives fuller, our art more vibrant, and the task of existing a little less destructive.

To me, making space for that kind of work seems like a better use of our collective energy than spinning our wheels at the biology vs. culture impasse. Changing our ideas and institutions is possible: that’s what The History of Sexuality helps us see, by showing us that our categories are not set in stone. After all, we arrived here, and that must mean we can still go elsewhere—but in order to do that, we have to follow Foucault’s lead and start asking some different questions.

The highligst where made by me. And yeah, I know it is a long text to read, but I felt that only taking a small clip from it, would not give you the whole picture.

When I made a post for some months ago, about the feeling being in a box where I did not belong, I said that I like woman more. I did not put myself in a homosexual or heterosexual category. I do believe that most of us have the potential for loving both sexes. And yeah, I have been in a long term relationship with a man before. And yeah, I did love him
But prior to him, and parallell I must admin, I had this tendency to fall in love with woman in secret. Never acted on it though. I was trying to fight it, but as you all prolly know, its a lost fight to try to suppress your feelings and thoughts (even thought "feelings" and "thoughs" also could be classified as a sosial construct ). But you can be sure about this, I did not want it, and I would do almost anything to not feel the way I felt.
The constantly infatuations with women, was a struggle for a long time. It ended when I met a woman, and fall so deeply in love with her, that I could no longer fool myself. It was a very hard time for me, I could not eat, sleep, study for the best part of 2 months. Instead I started running, going out for dance for hours. I got a lot of attention from men, because they could prolly smell my sexual energy from being in love??? Was a very strange period - for sure. In the end I felt I had to come clear, and I broke my mans hearth in the prosess.
I could have stayed in the relationship with him, but I would not have been a good girlfriend. I prolly would have broken him even more if I had stayed.
So, yeah, you could say that it was a choise I made, after 2 months of struggeling with myself, and years of trying to surpress what I felt. I choose to be happy. But then again, "happy" is just another social construct

Btw, I was about to make my post a little less personal, but I guess some ppl need to understand and know the person behind all this intellectual talk about nature vs society.

[Snuden]

And what are you? A cartoon construct?

[spanky4ever]

And what are you? A cartoon construct?

thanks for your constructive feedback Its complicated