Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007
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Edit: This post has been altered by request and reposted. To those that have read the original, there's no point rereading it, as the change is only in regard to the profanity filter circumvention used in the original post. My most recent posts on the thread are #316 and #317 on page 16, not this one. My apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused, as well as for the lost formatting.
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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
There was enough in your post to suggest that your position has evolved considerably over time. My impression is that the main drivers of this change were your honesty and courage in dealing with your needs, emotions, feelings and desires; and acquiring knowledge, thinking things through and then applying the lessons to your life.
In fact, a lot of it came with moving on to a Gorean worldview, as stripping back the excess is characteristic of the main part of the process. There are a lot of things we internalize, that become part of our assumptions and implicit worldview, which have to be disinternalized in order to get down to the basics of a naturalistic worldview. Otherwise, you're building on the patchwork underlying the conventional, modern western worldviews we've been raised into. The majority of the additive change has been a matter of letting things sink in. Integrity is the main driver of change. You think about things, and just make sure your views are consistent and coherent, a complete and unbroken whole (which is pretty much one of the dictionary definitions of integrity).
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This in turn suggests that homophobic influences are largely acquired from the environment, that social phobias that are learned can be un-learned.
There is a fair bit of implicit learning (i.e. assimilating from environmental exposure) involved in establishing the degree of homophobia that is common. But a lot of it is also a question of having people around that are openly homosexual, as familiarity is the primary factor in getting rid of unwarranted phobias.
Consider racism, for instance. My old man can remember the first black man on the city's football team. Back in the day, a lot of people in the city had never even seen a black person. These days, most have one in their social circles, and there isn't a person around that hasn't seen several. The level of racism is significantly diminished by that. Still, his generation is comfortable with a lot of words, terms and jokes that are not kosher to my generation. The tooth isn't in it anymore, as the myths and misconceptions have been dispelled, so I don't much care. But it does offer some exposition as to how the process works.
By exposure, the negative cultural norms are first diminished to the point of tolerance, then to acceptance, then to taking for granted. I expect that as people grow used to having LGBT people around, it will make its way into the culture by all the usual routes. Media will probably play a significant part, since the number of LGBT people is lower than e.g. blacks, and since LGBT doesn't become evident in early life stages and thus doesn't "bypass" the social conditioning as much as is the case with e.g. race. Lesbians have gotten more screen time than gay men (Buffy, anyone?), but once it reaches a certain critical point where the ratings won't be hurt by it, networks will risk depicting them, and that will get the ball rolling.
I'm not sure whether that will fully address the question of internal comfort, though, as the male behavior of using sex as a part of dominance games (cf. prison rape, dogs mounting each other, etc.) appears to be instinctive, not learned. I think that may be part of why the prospect invokes less reluctance when considered in the context of M/s, though I'm not sure. Also, stoicism, rather than intimacy, is fairly normative in social relations between men, so it seems likely there will be a bit more of a hurdle for gays than for lesbians in the long run.
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It makes perfect sense to me to assert that hate is acquired, that hate is unnatural.
I think what people hate is acquired, but the mechanism is probably innate.
Or, at least, hating individuals is probably an innate mechanism. Hating people 'by template' almost certainly leverages a lot more wetware, the same way other basal feelings can be invoked by 'higher' functions, giving rise to more complex responses that even extend into the realm of language (e.g. connotations with a conditioned response embedded in them). What templates are tied to this response will be learned, obviously, and the mechanism is probably counterproductive in a culture that has poor control over what it targets.
As an example of another such mechanism, patriotism is a compound emotion, and can be invoked by symbols (words, items, images, actions, etc.; anything that can be a symbol, i.e. stand for the idea itself). While able to do great harm in some cases, the mechanism can also be a great boon in others. It can also be useful in reinforcement, as the swell of pride at seeing a particularly iconic interaction can be internal positive feedback around the interaction, and we usually build an idea of what we are (including what we are as citizens of wherever, members of whatever, etc.) that is positive in its nature. As such, the iconic will be more iconic of how we wish to be, than of how we are, and the feedback reinforces in the direction of the ideals to which we aspire. It can be subverted and perverted, of course, but that's true of all "higher" mechanisms.
Don't knock hate. If it's only ever correctly applied, it will only do good, by definition.
The question is one of preventing the misapplications.
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Are my impressions accurate? If you like, would you care to share the path you travelled over the years to arrive at your current position. Please don't feel any need to respond to this if you prefer not to. Thank you
I don't have a problem with sharing. I just don't know that I have much more in the way of details that could be relevant.
A lot of it comes down to having a thought and questioning it.
Why did I take the long way round at the top of the mall? Why didn't I cross the bridge spanning the gap in the middle? It feels uncomfortable, somehow, that glass bridge with the 50ft drop under it. Why is that uncomfortable? Am I worried about the structural soundness of it? Is it a healthy respect for heights? Or is it a fear of heights? The moment of vertigo says it's a fear of heigths. Fine. So I make a point out of going up there anytime I'm in the building, to walk out to the center of the bridge, look down and stay until there's no vertigo. It's dysfunctional and unneccessary, so I grind it down.
One doesn't need to actively grind away everything that doesn't have a purpose, or even everything that is dysfunctional, but it is useful- perhaps necessary- to identify these things and be aware of them, or else they might hold us back in that critical moment where an important decision is made, or weigh us down in the general business of living, or fuck things up for others around us while we're not even aware of it. Or maybe it just nags that the 'complete and unbroken whole' is incomplete and fragmented.
Here's a good exercise: say the N-word, loudly.
Edit: The profanity filter registers it as a racial slur, hence my mistaken decision to bypass the filter. The compromise suggested by the moderators ('the N-word') is quite acceptable to me, and this incident serves to further underline the point of the exercise.
Even though there's nobody around, and you're saying it with no ill intent toward anyone, it still feels damn unpleasant, long before opening your mouth, doesn't it? A simple sequence of sounds has centuries of history behind it, none of it good, and still it wields power over us. It holds our tongue. It's not our word, yet it's in our vocabularies. We know it. We could wield it. But it has a hold that it shouldn't have. It compromises our free speech, even when we don't intend to speak it. Changing it isn't very worthwhile, but for most of us, it's pretty damn illustrative.
I'm neither homosexual, nor interested in shaping my sexuality in that direction.
But I've no interest in being restrained by it, either.
Health,
al-Aswad.
ETA: Just to be clear in case anyone took offense at the post, edited or unedited, I do not use the slur in question, and am not invoking it to give offense, merely to illustrate a point on the power that words and ideas can hold over us, even when divorced from their original context and used to a different purpose.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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RE: Girl Scout troops disband over admittance of transg... - 
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