My pet theory is that sexual orientation wanders anyway. Since as people, we tend to think in terms of fixed identity for ourselves, others and, well pretty much everything else, we've got this stupid notion that if someone 'is this' one decade, and 'is that' the next decade, then it means that one or other of those identities is false. I don't believe that. I think people just change all the time - they either change in a 'becoming different' way, or they change by 'digging a deeper rut' in their current way (but that's still change).
I spent several years being only attracted to men. then I went to see an Almodovar film and got really turned on by the woman in the film, and had to reassess myself a little, and it was fine.
As I've probably said here before, I think the classifications are stupid: heterosexual - bisexual - homosexual, that's like having a colour spectrum that's just purple, green, and red; and it's just an oversimplification so people 'know what they are'. I prefer to think of myself as just sexual, since at different times and with different people, I'm much more interested in either men or women. It's bad enough dealing with homophobia within and without - I'm not going to give myself a hard time for being inconsistent too .
Of course, some people do get into denial of their sexual orientation and go against their nature for a while. I've known this go both ways. On the one hand, men and women who are married for years because they can't deal with being gay. On the other, a friend of mine who, in his late teens, tried to be gay for a while basically because all his best mates were gay and he wanted to fit in. I told him to drop the labels and just fancy who he fancied, people would still love him - six months later, he was living with his girlfriend .
Edited by padmavyuha (02/07/0902:03 AM)
_________________________ If it's brokenless, don't suffix it...
Hmm... I know what you mean, I think, but this is where words and their meanings get skittish. There's being consistent, then there's being predictable. There's being inconsistent, and then there's being spontaneous. I think the best way to try to live is in a state of what I'd call dynamic continuity - some continuity is necessary to keep things sane, but never just for its own sake.
And sometimes it's great to just jump the tracks.
Hobgoblin is a lovely word .
Edited by padmavyuha (02/07/0902:13 AM)
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Language->speech - chess->game of chess - could be seen as related, could be not. Both those examples are about subsets. Mine were intended to be about subtleties of meaning within spoken/written language. But speech/language is an interesting one, in that lots of communication (and subtleties thereof) go on in speech that are nothing to do with the words - body language, pitch/tone etc.
A lot of it depends on your associations with the words - one man's consistent is another man's predictable and so on. Communication is an act of translation: from my mind to my voice/writing/whatever, to your eye/ear, to your mind. The art of good communication whether intrapersonal or interpersonal is in the art of good translation. How can I be reasonably sure that the concept you end up with in your mind is a close as possible to the one I start with in my mind?
I was in a meditation class once, and a woman talked about becoming 'spaced out' in meditation. the teacher started going on about alienation from one's experience, but the woman looked more and more puzzled. So I asked her what she meant by 'spaced out' and she said "You know, spaced... out..." moving her hands apart as she said so. He thought she meant 'stoned/absent', but she just meant 'more spacious'. So it's best to check out assumptions.
For example again, your association with the phrase 'gay pride' would be different depending on whether or not you had been forced to start from a position of 'gay shame'.
Edited by padmavyuha (02/07/0904:40 AM)
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