[Theory Thursday #2]

[sythyry]

Mirrored from Sythyry.

Though my prior theory of cisaffection and transaffection was quite elegant and straightforward, it doesn’t seem to be terribly good at either describing people (e.g., people who are, say, primarily interested in powerful mages of any species, or certain other quite disreputable acts), nor at predicting what they will do (e.g., the exotic prime species get relatively little attention from most traff-folk, contra theory).

My previous theory could be described pictorally thus, where the entire block represents the behavior of all people, and the ?’s are choices that are poorly described by it.

?	?	?	?	?
?	Classical Transaffection			?
?	?	?	?	?
?	?	?	?	?
Cisaffection	?	?	?	?

Unfortunately, my new theory looks more like this, where the “–” marks a behavior that is not strictly cisaffectionate, but may be anything else:

–	–	–	–	–
–	–	–	–	–
–	–	–	–	–
–	–	–	–	–
Cisaffection	–	–	–	–

I suppose this may be considered an advance. It does cover all possible choices of behavior and desire — by definition, for the outer box is defined to be the set of all such choices. I do not know precisely what this set is. I am not at all sure I want to learn what all the corners are like, even. The advance, such as it is, is admitting that (contra my previous theories) the outer box is quite large, and must not be reduced to a couple of little sub-boxes, regardless of how plausible they may seem to people who are trying to live in them.

I daresay that Prof. Plunatti, for one person I have had a long but slow correspondence-duel with on this topic, will be glad to see me concede defeat.

Still, this leaves me in a certain amount of uncertainty about what to do next. A theory that says “In few if any cases is sexuality a simple matter; it will generally require a paragraph to describe an individual’s essential tendencies, and even then the person may violate those tendencies occasionally without invalidating the paragraph” has very little predictive value.

Nor can it be used as the foundation of a community such as Castle Wrong, which is one of my immediate needs.

(I must defend myself on this point — I was not wholly ignorant of this theory before today, or even before this century. I dismissed it as useless, preferring a theory that had some intellectual power. And some community-building power: if traff-folk all have the same sexual orientation, then it is sensible to weld them into a community and work for common goals. If we are all fundamentally individuals without anything in particular in common, then we are divided ab inito, and devoid of natural allies. Whatever I may conclude privately — or in the non-privacy of my own diary — I do not wish to announce a theoretical advance that, fundamentally, attacks Castle Wrong.)

[Pace the people who gave Sythyry good and useful answers. The lizard may yet get to them, but zie is slow. -bb]

Comments

Re: Well...

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

Gay/lesbian are fairly equivalent to the "classical" notion of "traff". Bisexuality seems to have an interesting parallel on the Tree in those who will bond with their own AND other species(multiaffectionate?): the cissies see them as traff, the traff see them as cissies, neither group wants to be too closely associated with them.

Transgender also has an interesting parallel there. Still staying with the World Tree tendency to emphasize species over gender, there was, of course, Mynthe(put the umlaut on there, can't type it on this keyboard), who would have been quite happy with a same species lover... if that same species were Orren or Rassimel instead of Herethroy.

Any of these would probably be seen by polite WT society at large as sexually deviant or "wrong". So there's still a theme to gather people around - so long as those people are mindful that some of their number might occasionally enjoy the things that are "normal", and shouldn't be shunned because of it. (Even if it was at least partly in jest, I'm thinking of the reaction to the bells-with-kissing-Sleeth way back in the early days of the "vacation". And Inconnu's "As if *I* would touch an *Orren!*" or however he put it doesn't seem unusual among the political traff.)