Absolutely. There’s obviously a level at which sexual orientation is biologically determined, but sexual orientation should be distinguished from sexual identity, which is almost entirely a matter of culture.
Every letter in LGBTQ as well as all heteronormative expressions of sexual identity are perfect examples of social constructs. Hell, gender is a social construct. This isn’t controversial stuff. Social constructionism isn’t a critique. It’s just a frame of reference.
It’s a difficult thing to explain, because the kind of person who says “I’m only into to white guys — sorry that’s just my preference” is operating from the fundamental assumption that one’s personal preferences are the product of independent and original thought. Nothing could be further from the truth.Our personal preferences aren’t personal. They don’t spring forth from some internal source. We absorb them from the external environment, and that environment is racist as fuck. Our concepts of beauty, masculinity, femininity, and social status — hell, the very idea of race itself — these are all just things that get poured into our developing brains during our enculturation.
What we ultimately find attractive isn’t up to us. It never was. Sure, there’s some fundamental biology as to what turns us on, but the things we’re “into” are mostly just layers upon layers of social constructs. The problem with explaining this to people (especially small-minded racists) is that no one likes to think of themselves as being culturally programmed.
People want to believe that they’re autonomous individuals. They’re not. None of us are. We’re all products of our culture — a culture steeped in systemic, historic racism — and that’s what you first have to explain to a person before they’ll ever come around to understanding how their personal preferences can be racist without them ever having realized it.
Life is much harder than I ever expected.
You’re confusing your life with your circumstances.
Why does self loathing make me feel better?
You’re confusing self-loathing with self-pity.
I broke up with him. I wanted this. Why do I feel so devastated that my ex-boyfriend has found a new lover?
Because you’re the type who refers to the person fucking your ex as his “lover.”
Is it racist when someone says “I’m only attracted to white guys,” or “I would never date an Indian guy?”
Yes. Those statements are both overtly racist.
What does it mean when a guy says he doesn’t know what he wants?
It means he doesn’t want you.
Planning a trip to palm springs. Anything I should definitely plan on doing while I am there?
There is literally nothing to do in Palm Springs except shop, get shitfaced by a pool, or cheat on your spouse. Plan accordingly.
Why do I feel better writing about my life through a third person novel versus a first person memoir?
Because you, the person writing about your life, are a different person than her, the person who lived it.
why have you deliberately chosen not to marry money? what if you happen to fall in love with someone wealthy?
Marrying money is a long-form act of prostitution. That’s fine, but I don’t have the patience or the stamina for that much bullshit. Falling in love with someone wealthy is different, but still comes with its own unique complications. (It’s so adorable when you kids equate marriage with falling in love.)
Coquette, have you ever considered opening a dating website? I think the kind of people who frequent this blog could be great friends in real life. Bit of a cringe idea maybe, just throwing it out there. Peace.
Not a cringe idea. Kind of interesting, actually. If this is something you all would be interested in, leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.
If you want to be subtle, buy him a Brooks Brothers Dog and Stripe Tie. It’s part of the unofficial uniform for racist, homophobic poli-sci majors, especially the ones who think graduating cum laude is something to brag about.
If you want to be not-so-subtle, buy him a hardcover copy of The Reagan Diaries and a Ronald Reagan Presidential Jelly Bean Jar. He’ll be forced to laugh like he gets the joke, but he’ll understand that you’re making an open declaration of war.
As a secret stocking stuffer, you should also sign him up for a membership in the ACLU. (Be sure and check the box that lets them share his personal information with other charities.)
It sounds as though whatever mental process you went through, you managed to embrace both your insignificance and your mortality. That’s a good thing, in spite of the circumstances.
You let go, and in letting go, you stumbled into some enlightenment. It should be said, though — the peace you’re experiencing is a manifestation of life, not death. You’ve been given a gift. Spend some time with this new mental state. Explore it. Learn from it. Don’t waste it by actually killing yourself.
You can let go without giving up.
The Newsroom is a Frankenstein’s Monster of pretense and formula sewn together with the fatty tissue of Studio 60, slapped around the rotting skeleton of The West Wing, and shocked back to life with the artificial relevance of last year’s current events and the sanctimonious wish-thinking of Aaron Sorkin’s out-of-touch, vaguely narcissistic, and ever-so misogynistic world view.
You find it intellectually stimulating because you are an intellectually average person easily distracted by Sorkin’s worn-out bag of tricks, and you are extremely entertained because you prefer to swallow your popular culture without having to chew it first.
That’s fine. Not everybody wants to burn calories thinking critically about the television they ingest. If you just want to kick back and watch a puppet show, I can’t blame you, but some of us can’t help but see the strings.
So prisons are a terrible idea. What should we have instead?
We should have prisons. What we shouldn’t have are violent, privatized penitentiaries that take the place of psychiatric hospitals and subsidized housing. (Come on, people. Read some Foucault.)
Wait… so do you consider yourself leftist or centrist?
I consider myself the kind of person who loathes being asked to identify with a point on a political spectrum.
Therapy is a selfish, bourgeois indulgence that doesn’t work.
Yeah, no. You’re thinking of prayer.
Do or don’t tell my boyfriend, who I love, that there was a short period a few years ago when I was having sex for money?
If you have to ask me, then you aren’t prepared to tell him.
Is it still okay to have nights out at the bar after you turn 30?
Yes, but not the same bar.
Today’s hyper-conformist blogger is more interested in the policing of language and stifling debate when it counters the prevailing wisdom.
Dude. You’ve got a giant douche-flavored chip on your shoulder because you don’t like the way people argue on the internet. Go stare into a mirror for a while and really let that sink it.
I just looked at the day of the month and got excited because it means a new December coke talk playlist :O
Yep. It’s up!
Why do I feel like you’re Bret Easton Ellis in disguise?
Because you haven’t read anything by Bret Easton Ellis lately.
You seem deeply unhappy, and I feel sorry for you.
That’s a waste of perfectly good pity you could be using on yourself.
Write more, bitch.
You have to pay me to talk like that.
Police officers knowingly testify to some bullshit on the stand to justify why they pulled a black person over. Not stopping completely at a stop sign. Not signaling a turn 200 feet before an intersection. Fuzzy dice hanging from the rear view mirror. Patting someone down for “officer safety.” If I hear the phrase “fighting stance” once more time as a justification for beating the crap out of someone, I will cut a bitch. I actually read a police report where an officer said he shattered my client’s kneecap because he looked nervous. My middle-aged black client, who had never been in trouble, is arrested for the first time in his life and looked fucking nervous. AND THEY SHATTERED HIS KNEE.
But the institution protects these officers. Judges defer to their testimony. Prosecutors go out of their way not to secure an indictment on them when they kill someone. Cities will pay off the lawsuits so the complaints go quiet.
If anyone thinks that the anger in Ferguson is about this one particular white cop and this one particular black teenager, they are completely stupid. If anyone thinks that the “riots” and “looting” result from welfare-loving opportunists, they need to stand the fuck down. If every dumbass with an opinion and a Facebook account could have followed me around the courthouse for one damn week, there is NO WAY they would write the vile drivel they do. But they do. Because they do not understand. And they do not want to understand. Life is harder when you’re black in America. Simply because you are black.
Sorry to rant, but I get so hand-shakingly angry at some of the commentary I’ve seen, I just had to say something.
You speak the truth. I fucking know for a fact that you do.
As it happens, a sociologist friend of mine is finishing up what will become an important and controversial book in which she definitively proves what you already know to be true about racism in the court system.
I’ll let you know when it’s published.
The other day I was talking to a dude I went to high school with on Facebook. This is a white upper class kid, going to Cornell. We both commented on a friend’s post on the Cleveland shooting of a young black boy holding a toy gun. I stated how it was unjust that this cop took two seconds before unloading, especially in a state with legal open carry. I then made a statement on how this reflects the systemic oppression of black people by this country’s police force. My high school friend replied that this “systemic oppression was bull,” “There’s no universal directive for cops to kill black people,” and that I essentially had nothing of value to say on the matter. I replied, kinda angry at this point, on the numerous stories of white cop killings of black men and women and how this is not the case for whites, and then to cement my point I added that no one can ignore the 400 years of systemic oppression black people have faced, no directive but a strong correlation. Then he replied “sins of the father are not the sins of the son.” Like what the fuck is that? How do I respond to something like that? Isn’t that just some idiomatic bullshit? Like, I feel like I won’t change this moron’s mind, but I wish I knew what to say.
That kind of thing is what’s known as a thought terminating cliché. Feel free to point that out to him. Also feel free to point out that the sins of the father do quite often become the sins of the son, especially where being an asshole is concerned. Your upper-class white kid at Cornell is suffering from a world view that simply won’t allow him to believe in things like white privilege and systemic racism. He can’t believe in them, because to acknowledge their existence would shatter the delusions he maintains in order to justify his identity.
You see, this kid believes he deserves to go to Cornell. He earned it through his own hard work. Whatever wealth or high station his family holds is something they deserve too. Again, they earned it through their own hard work, and even if they didn’t, then they still deserve it because they are simply better than everyone else. The little shit believes these things to his very core. He has to, because the alternative would be unbearable.
If you want to win arguments like this, you have to understand what your opponent is really arguing about. This kid wasn’t defending systemic oppression. He was defending his own identity by denying systemic oppression. You can’t change his mind without destroying his entire world view, and he’s not going to let you do that on Facebook. That’s why people like him always start throwing up thought terminating clichés when their logic inevitably begins to fail. They’re trying to end the conversation and simultaneously quell their own cognitive dissonance. He’s essentially retreating from the argument. Take that as a win, move on with your day, and go do something more important, like trimming your fucking toenails.
No, you don’t get to bite. We can’t at least agree.
Two wrongs? Fuck you. You don’t get to equate the summary execution of an unarmed teenager with whatever irrelevant bullshit might have happened at that convenience store. They are completely unrelated incidents with no bearing on one another in any way whatsoever.
One has absolutely nothing to do with the other — absolutely nothing — and the very idea that you would weigh them together in the same sentence makes you a victim blaming piece of shit.
This is not about two wrongs. You don’t get to frame it that way. This is about the behavior of one police officer who killed a boy out of anger and fear. This is about one grave injustice endemic of an entire system of oppression. There is no other offense here. None.
Anyone who even brings up the convenience store in any discussion having to do with the shooting death of Michael Brown is validating the racist system of oppression that lets a cop shoot an unarmed black kid and get away with it.
I don’t give a fuck if you’re just playing devil’s advocate, and you don’t get any extra credit for calling Darren Wilson a pig. Of course he’s a pig. He’s a murderous fucking pig, and you’re a magnificent asshole for even mentioning Michael Brown’s past behavior in a discussion about the manner in which he was killed.