Well that's another step, beyond what I wrote about here (though I did hint in this direction) -- I was positing a culture where there were no assumptions about sexual orientation and wondering where that would lead; you're describing a de-emphasis of gender ... which is also interesting.
"Can't we just give up this whole categorizing thing and be who we are? Probably not."
I'm trying to imagine what our culture would be like if we did. Not to have a few individuals rejecting the categories, but to have a generation having grown up without the assumptions that we currently get a constant stream of reminders of.
Less out of some utopianist notion than out of curiosity -- what would it be like?
You're quite right. I did take it further, but it was late and I was on the verge of sleep and had just been told what I've always known by a stupid program. Kinda like my appointment with the neurologist.
In a world where sexual orientation wasn't assumed, or mattered, there are women I'm friends with that I'd become more than friends with.
As it is, I value them as friends far too much to even risk freaking them out by suggesting we become lovers. I'd be all over my favourite neighbor, if she'd have me.
For the rest of the world, I don't know. I would like to think that it would lead to a generation of people who could relate to each other as they find each other, and express their feelings politely and gently without fear of losing a friend because they're not "normal". And respect others' rejections on the basis of monogamy as nothing personal. There are lovely people who are just so constructed. I still love them. I just don't talk about some things when I'm around them.
I think categorization is a survival tool. We have all this data coming at us, and we have to process it SOMEhow (or miss the tiger/layoff/sleezoid coming our way), so we tend to filter/group it as best we can, which includes categorization. As The Police sang, "Too much information, running through my brain!" and we're going MORE in that direction, not less. Like so many of the internal tools we evolved with, there's not a lot of fine-tuning available; not easy to turn off filtering for just some data, unless we get better at pre-processing. Or something.
Re: gender
"Can't we just give up this whole categorizing thing and be who we are? Probably not."
I'm trying to imagine what our culture would be like if we did. Not to have a few individuals rejecting the categories, but to have a generation having grown up without the assumptions that we currently get a constant stream of reminders of.
Less out of some utopianist notion than out of curiosity -- what would it be like?
assumption of orientation
In a world where sexual orientation wasn't assumed, or mattered, there are women I'm friends with that I'd become more than friends with.
As it is, I value them as friends far too much to even risk freaking them out by suggesting we become lovers. I'd be all over my favourite neighbor, if she'd have me.
For the rest of the world, I don't know. I would like to think that it would lead to a generation of people who could relate to each other as they find each other, and express their feelings politely and gently without fear of losing a friend because they're not "normal". And respect others' rejections on the basis of monogamy as nothing personal. There are lovely people who are just so constructed. I still love them. I just don't talk about some things when I'm around them.
Re: gender