Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

In our culture, there's a default assumption of heterosexuality. In the absence of clues to the contrary, most of us expect a random person we meet or hear about to be het, if we think about their orientation at all. When a clue or solid information is introduced indicating that the person is gay or bi, there's a moment of mental readjustment as this information is processed, even if we hadn't been consciously thinking of the person's orientation until then. To a large extent this actualy makes sense, since hets make up a pretty darned large majority. But it does have some unfortunate side effects, starting with the phenomenon of bi-invisibility, and to a lesser but significant extent, absence of consciousness of gay people in the minds of sheltered hets. (Similarly, there's an assumption that people are cisgendered in the absence of contrary clues, but this is a weaker statement because of the near-tautological nature of the observation that someone who passes for male is assumed to be bio-male. It's a tautology if you focus on the meaning of the word "passing", but slightly more interesting if you focus on the what makes the concept of passing meaningful and so often desirable.)

But when I read the assertion that "young people overwhelmingly support marriage equality because they have had the chance to grow up knowing that gay people are not some alien 'others,' not a threat, but their fellow Americans", I started wondering what a society would be like where there was not that default assumption of heterosexuality. I'm not envisioning the opposite, a society where homosexuality is assumed, but rather one where bisexuality is the default assumption, or where not knowing is the default so that discovering someone's orientation is never surprising, never requires readjusting one's assumptions, because there was no assumption.

I suppose what I'm imagining starts with a generation raised not to have to remind itself that all orientations are natural, but having grown up never having known any other way of looking at it.

Would some basic level of bisexuality, or at least bi-experimentation, be expected, with Kinsey 0 and Kinsey 6 folks considered freaks but everyone else just having a "type" that includes gender as a component? (Note: I don't actually like the Kinsey scale, but use it here for the convenience of being able to assume most of my audience is familier with it. When I think of orientation, I usually think of a two-dimensional system with attraction-to-men on one axis and attraction-to-women on the other and a warning label floating over one of the quadrants reminding us that it's still a simplification for convenience, not a complete model of reality.) "Oh, Janet likes blondes, and Audrey likes male brunets. Stan is a bit odd though; he takes it to an extreme. He won't even consider dating someone unless they're female. He's as weird as Judy, who only dates people who play mandolin. What a curious duck."

Or would every orientation, and every history of orientation shifts as one discovers oneself, since some people do get surprised by a previously unexpected attraction along the way, be considered equally cool, with the only real difference being somewhat more visibility for homosexuals, vastly increased visibility for bisexuals, and no assumptions made and awkwardly apologized for when discovered to be wrong?

Or would frequent use of the labels "gay" and "het" (and especially "straight") fall by the wayside as the importance of the labels diminished? The phenomena would still exist, of course, but when the label is less important, using a phrase such as "attracted to chicks" or "attracted to dudes" doesn't seem so long that it needs to be replaced with one word. Would the words, and the concept of identifying oneself on the basis of them, continue from inertia, or would orientation cease to be a matter of self-identity and just become another background fact about oneself? (Hmm ... shades of the discussion in vvalkyri's journal about what aspects of oneself it feels okay to "be nouned for" and which it's okay to "be verbed or adjectived for".)

What other subtle and unsubtle effects would there, or might there, be? What do the rest of you imagine having grown up in such a culture to be like?

Hmm. Too bad my books are all still in boxes in the basement. I think it's time to re-read Shadow Man by Melissa Scott. (What else should I be reading?)

"I'd feel a bit better if I had to actually do something to maintain a reputation." -- juuro 2003-11-12

I am feeling better than last night. The roads are better than last night. (The weather isn't exactly inviting, but it's nowhere near as treacherous ... until things freeze again tonight.) Now to see whether I can stay feeling better long enough to go to the photo lab (I just got a check for developing photos from a friend's wedding last year in 2002) and the nail salon and my mother's house and the Sheepie's house and the music store. I'm not sure I'll make it to all of those. This week my stamina has been poor. First, let's see how I feel after a shower.

With the weather getting above freezing in the daytime I haven't needed to burn as much heating oil this week. It doesn't have to be above freezing very long, and it can still get pretty cold at night, but the fact that it gets above freezing sometime in the afternoon makes a huge difference to the temperature of this house. I've got 3/8 of a tank left from the gift I got last month.

But not running the furnace as much because my head, torso, and legs are not uncomfortable does mean that the house gets into that middling temperature range where I'm not uncomfortable but my hands become clumsy and slow. (What I'm starting to think of as the "too dangerous to try to clear spam out of my mailbox" zone.) I'm noticing typos all over the place, mostly missing letters that I have to go back and insert. I know I fired the neurons that are supposed to direct those muscles, but apparently my fingers aren't hitting with enough force on each keystroke. Kind of disturbing considering that this is a computer keyboard, not a manual typewriter. Heck, it's not even the TeleType in the corner. (I really do need to hook that to a box that still understands how to do uppercase-only logins for UNIX and can slow down to 110 baud.)

I'm two and a half weeks behind on my television watching again. (Never did track down a copy of the epoisode of Alias I missed.) Need to give myself permission to veg in front of the tube before I run out of videocassettes again. (<whine>But I have soooo much to doooo.</whine>)

Okay, I turned the furnace on when I sat down to type this, and now the house has warmed up to "walk around wet after a shower" temperature, so I've stalled exactly long enough. So it takes four paragraphs to warm the house that much. (This one doesn't count -- it was warm enough when I started this paragraph.)

Oof. Showered. Pawed through a couple hundred rolls of film to find the four I need to take to the lab. Feel myself slowing down. If I were to get into the car right now (as I start writing this, at 17:04) and manage to not hit too many of the lights red, I could get to the lab just in time to hand them the film before they close. But I'd be going there in my bathrobe. Instead, I'll see if I can drop it through a mail slot or something after hours. And just work on feeling energetic enough to go to the nail salon and the music store before they close, and my mother's house before the roads get too icky again.

Looking forward to seeing what I managed to get on these rolls. Two rolls of colour Fuji 800 which may have been rather pushing my luck with only a monopod to steady the camera, one roll of clour Fuji 1600, and a roll of black and white Kodak that I shot at 6400 which was probably fast enough to be useful. There was also a roll of colour slide film (Kodak) shot at 3200 that has already been developed, and the slides are darkish in overall look, but useable exposure-wise (and slide film is much pickier about that than print film ... and a few frames are actually as bright as they can be without white clothing blowing out and losing detail).

It was a dim church, no flash ... fast film is my friend. I no longer think of 800 as fast. (I don't think I've pushed anything farther than 12500 though. IIRC, both the Kodak and Ilford high speed BW films are supposed to be pushable to 25000, depending on which documentation you read, but they're already pretty grainy at 12500.)

Oh my. I should see whether I can scrape together money to buy film to shoot at the wedding I'll be attending next weekend.

Okay, I might have enough new strings on hand to get away with skipping the music store as long as I don't wind up breaking the wrong ones during the recording session. Can I get away with putting off the trip to Bowie until Saturday night or Sunday? What do I absolutely have to stay awake and functional enough to get done this evening?

That's been the kind of week it's been. It'll get better. It has to.