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Deva - I don't think you actually have to read the Mail at any point to be a Mail-reader. Your woman on the train is just in reaction-formation: she's incredibly prejudiced but aha, you see! She reads the Guardian. So she can't be prejudiced at all, do you see?
I work in a bookshop at the mo' and we're doing a promotion for a new e-newsletter we're doing. I've noticed that Mail-readers never give you their email address. And do you know why? Because they know what you're going to do with it! You'll give it to all the asylum-seekers and use it to groom their kids for your terrible paedophile rituals and you'll send them spam! GAY spam! No thank you! No thank you indeed sir! Why oh why oh WHY what is this country coming to...
I made up a song about them, but to do that would be to go terribly off-topic, so I won't.
I think one analogy for heterocentrism would be the plight of the disabled (and no, I'm NOT saying gay people are disabled), in that maybe the assumption that people are able-bodied is generally a safe bet statistically, but as soon as someone who isn't able-bodied brushes up against it it becomes a huge problem. But I think that has already come up a bit here.
Sex science! The last-but-one issue of my current fave magazine, Scientific American: Mind had an interesting article on sexuality in its last issue. It came out as something of a double-edged sword - going contrary to Kinsey, it actually put the figure of actual gays in the population at lower than 5% (but see Mister Disco's points re. whether people tell the truth in surveys), and went, somewhat, against the argument that gayness stems entirely from genetics. This was partly in response to cases of people who've been 'cured' of the gay by various outreach programs: now, I like to sneer at those as much as the next guy but the authors found that in some cases they do seem to work (but see: not making massive judgements about an issue until proper longtitudinal data are in). Like most things, then, it seems the gayness is part genetic and part social, and social factors may be more important. The authors developed a new scale, ranging from people who were totaly hardwired gays to people who were mainly gay to bis to total straightlords, and argued that people on the hardcore gay end could never be 'cured' because they were both genetically gay and had developed socially to be gay. People who were mainly gay with some het tendencies could be 'cured' or rather led to follow only their heterosexual tendencies with the right encouragement etc. Of course, those of you who, like me, like to follow an argument to its more amusing conclusions will have figured out that this also means that mainly straight people can also potentially be 'cured' of their sexual orientation, which may give hope to that Tasmanian Devil of the modern era, the proselytising homosexual...
The argument in the end was that being gay is kind of like being left-handed (AGAIN: I'm not saying all left-handed people are gay or that all gays are left-handed, or indeed that Ned Flanders is gay or that my client has been near any such road of any sort), in that handedness appears to be at least as much a result of socialisation as genetics: left-handed people can and do have right-handed kids, because in our dexteronormative society right-handedness is an advantage. Of course, this means that in theory if you make it easier for left-handers to get by then you might increase the percentage of lefties in the population, and that similarly making it easier for gays to get by might increase the percentage of gays about. Obviously that's not a perfect analogy - most left-handed people don't lie about what hand they use to avoid being given evils, and obviously I'm not saying Flanders is making it easier for people to be gay, but...it is quite an interesting article...
...ruined only by the fact that some sub-editor has clearly knocked together a terrible 'Are YOU a gayer?' questionnaire to add onto it during his lunch break, on which I scored as being 'homosexual with possible heterosexual tendencies', but then I would do as the whole questionnaire had only one, count it, one question referring to levels of attraction to the opposite sex. A promiscuous bisexual and even a straight guy who'd once gone all the way with one of the guys from the track team would score the same as I did. Irritating.
On the subject of gay authors, I note that, IIRC, Mark Gattis' biog in the print edition of The Vesuvius Club mentions him living with his partner, but the biog in the new graphic novel edition doesn't. Are they saying comic boys won't buy it if they think it's written by one of the gayers? And, um, isn't that a bit stupid given, er, one of the key plot points in TVC? |
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