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It may not be important to you, but surely you can see how it would be important for them? As a straight guy, it's pretty easy for me to find people for romant

• notahacker 10y ago
  It's also useful to contrast that with the world described in the article in which sexual attraction and expression was more straightforwardly defined as normal/moral/socially-acceptable vs abnormal/sinful/illegal and most people engaging in behaviours society considered to belong to the latter group sought to avoid identifying too closely with them by acting out a pastiche of conventional married life and congratulating themselves on not being effeminate like a poof. The idea expressed in the article that the Victorian era was gloriously genderfluid for anyone but a few well-to-do families without any notable enemies seems more than a little optimistic too.
• Glyptodon 10y ago
  I at least agree there are lots of people in this world who are obsessed with getting in other's business and unnecessarily making it theirs, whether it's sex or abortions or bathrooms or guns. But rather than taking things for granted I think it's the opposite. For example, your statement about it being hard/easy to find relationship seems to assume that trying to find love should just be acceptable and not hard in most social contexts, whereas I think it's often obnoxious regardless of orientation/identity and probably best reserved for contexts where it's explicitly okay. Likewise, I agree that understanding yourself and your own feelings is really important, but I'm not sure why everyone's own internal voyage of discovery is something to be worn on on the sleeve more like it's some security blanket and less like it's as intrinsic to them as gravity. I'd actually posit that past a certain point a need for social acknowledgment of one's identity suggests some level of discomfort and uncertainty with it, which is fine. But why it's something everybody has to parse when they're just trying to bag your groceries or go over a quarterly report or something is beyond me. I do think there is something to "targeting" as you put it, or people not minding their own business as I may have put it. But I'm also definitely naive enough to think that telling those people to mind their own business shouldn't require a particular identity.
  • icebraining 10y ago
    Who are these people making you parse their precise identity while you're bagging their groceries?
  • Latty 10y ago
    I mean, if someone comes to you and starts explaining their sexuality while you are bagging their groceries, they are over-sharing, sure. Has that happened to you? It definitely hasn't to me. I find your post kind of hard to reply to because I've read it a couple of times and I can't really understand your issue. You state it's "obnoxious" to search for relationships, but that's a big part of life for most people, and it influences most of our human iteraction. I think it's very easy to just take it for granted you can do literally nothing and people you are attracted to can take an interest. How many people do you know that met in a 'context where it's explicitly okay'? Virtually everyone ends up in relationships through casual contact that grows into more, in my experience. That's hard if you can't signal in those contexts. Furthermore, it's not just that, but also things like gender identity - where it's partially about how other people see and treat you, becuase you want people to see you the way you see yourself. I just fail to see how it's so burdensome for us to deal with slightly new situations when it can improve someone's experience of their life so much. Sure, people have private business, but some parts of life are public, and interacting with people is a part of life. I think to pretend that we can segment that all away and ignore it is weird, and only really works for people when everyone can make assumptions about you that are right, which often isn't the case.