[Theory Thursday #1, part 2]

[sythyry]

Mirrored from Sythyry.

Thanks, truly, for everyone who answered my last post. I am trying to thrash this out, and I don’t have very many people around that I can safely talk to about it. I appreciate the discussion — I appreciate the direct challenge to some of my basic principles, even. I do not promise to agree with anything you say, but I will try to be an intellectually honest little lizard, and try to understand them at least.

I am not sure quite how to go about this, though.

There are at least two sensible approaches.

First, I might have mis-classified myself in my current (and correct) classification system. I had somewhat assumed that in my previous post, but many of you have challenged me on it, so I am willing to consider the possibility that this is the wrong question altogether.

Or Second, my current classification system might be incorrect, in a lesser or greater degree. (Example ‘lesser’: modify the definition of ‘traff’ to allow some same-species interest. Example ‘greater’: toss the whole thing out, and simply rank a person’s possible interest in each of the eight prime species on a scale from 1-12.)

But I can’t see all the way to picking a new classification system right now. Before that, I should at least try to think of what makes a good classification system. Here are a few thoughts from a distinctly dazed dragonet:

1. Conciseness: it has as few categories as possible.
2. Simplicity: Each category is well-described by a simple phrase.
3. Accuracy: it describes people well; in particular, nobody is in two categories.
4. Ethnocentricity: it makes sense in terms of prime people and culture
5. Canonicality: it is, in a sense that I cannot currently define, defined sensibly. (E.g., a system with “likes mammals” and “likes non-mammals” is more canonical than “likes Cani and Rassimel” and “likes the other six species”.)
6. Usefulness: it is useful, e.g., for telling who I should admit to Castle Wrong on the basis of romantic preferences.

Bearing in mind that my current system scores well on all of these save, perhaps, accuracy. [Bard adds 'and canonicality' for reasons of its own. -bb]

Addendum: Tarfnie

(Tarfnie’s situation was rather more complicated than it might have seemed from my brief description. The Considerable Drama part of it include a number of regrettable incidents from nearly everyone involved, and I might have expelled Tarfnie — or Yowdon — on the basis of violence. The observation that Tarfnie was not traff and Yowdon was did help my decision. One or both of them had to go, though. I grant that several aspects of the situation continue to trouble me, and that I did not behave particularly well myself: but it was not so simple or wicked as discovering that Tarfnie was cissy and immediately tossing him out.)

Comments

[cowboy-r.livejournal.com]

Think of it as a Venn diagram. There are people who are cisaffectionate, and people who are transaffectionate, and there is some overlap between the two. How large the overlap is might be a lifetime's worth of study material for some energetic Rassimel researcher.

[stryck.livejournal.com]

Certainly in Monster world's sexual mores, there is overlap between those who have the standard attraction and those who have the non-standard one. So, us monsters usually use three categories, one to describe those with the standard attraction, one to describe those with exclusively the non-standard attraction, and one for those who have both.

Note that none of this has anything to do with love- it's all about sexual attraction. Love really has very little to do with sex. We might hope that we can find the two together, but all too frequently, this does not happen.

[rowyn]

That last does not match my personal experience at all, really. There are people that I love without being attracted to them, but almost everyone I've felt a strong sexual attraction to has been someone I love. I may be unusual in this regard, though.

[stryck.livejournal.com]

I was generalizing on a cultural level. One look at some of our common entertainments shows that, culturally, there is lots of sex without love involved.

Personally, I also don't feel much in the way of sexual attraction for people I don't already love. However, for all the time spent talking about "casual sex" in our culture, there's a real confusion where people mistake having sex for a statement of being in love. It causes a lot of harm to confuse the two. People make arguments based on love that are really about sex, or have expectations about sex that are really about love. It leads to a lot of people going after sex that really want love, who end up unfulfilled. It also leads to people who don't want love and just want sex hurting those who weren't told ahead of time that's what was involved.

[redbird]

We need more axes. One of which might be, indeed, whether someone is attracted to people they don't also love. With a range that would include "sure, they're separate things," "only attracted to those they already love," "fall in love with anyone they have sex with" (such a person might get cautious about taking new lovers), and "it depends on some other variable."

[At this rate I'm going to be digging out an old post by one of my partners, and noodling about things like what axes might be useful here.]

[zeeth_kyrah]

I actually use a tetrahedron to describe examples like this, though one might also use a multi-axis chart. One point is "cis", one point is "cross", one point is "non" and one point is "love/romance". People are described in regions based on the ranges of sexual attraction or experience in which they engage; thus pansexual types who are a bit choosy end up near the center of the block, while a person who is mostly heterosexual but varies in amount of desire would have an area more toward one side and reaching up toward the nonsexual point (and their preferences toward romance then define the height map of that region). Or someone with strong preferences and then an occasional tendency might have a tendril or even just a dot where the outlier rests.

[delight-in.livejournal.com]

No wonder Sythyrs got all confused by the suggestions for new classification systems! @.@

[zeeth_kyrah]

... you worked with "Here" and you can't visualize an area in the space of a triangular cone?

[delight-in.livejournal.com]

I can visualize it but that's a really strange way to model sexuality! But you can do pretty much anything with space if you just use enough of it.

[zeeth_kyrah]

I suppose. Then again, I'm only modeling a handful of major aspects, rather than a majority of possibilities, and normally I only use a triangle with "cis" "cross" and "non" on it and don't worry as much about love-based attractions. But Sythyry made a point of including libertines and defining them as not loving the persons they have sex with.