[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...

[kris-schnee.livejournal.com]

I've found people who seem to want to abolish categories for this sort of thing, so that whatever they do can't be condemned... because the words for even describing it are poorly-understood. For instance, a person argued to me that "genderqueer" should describe anyone who doesn't conform strongly to society's stereotypes of male and female -- meaning it applies to almost anyone -- meaning that there should be no distinction between a man who doesn't like football and a man who's attracted to livestock. Sythyry's original categories didn't perfectly describe the people zie deals with, but I'm leery of how zir new theory doesn't yet draw any useful distinctions at all.

Re: Well...

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

The main problem with the original categories was that people thought too rigidly with them. They didn't allow for deviations from the "standard" of those categories. They could be useful guidelines - not entirely predictive, but better than nothing; the problem was that the predictions kept getting applied to people for whom they had been shown to be inappropriate.

Re: Well...

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

"People" being "me". I wouldn't say that everyone was that fussy about the standards.

Re: Well...

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

Maybe not, but some of my remark elsewhere was meant to point out that even other people in your household seem to think so. And you got that line of thought from other people, way back when. There was a time when you allowed for the possibility of being in neither rigid category; then you adopted the local custom and identified as firmly "traff".

Re: Well...

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

That was before I really thought about it much!

...

Which doesn't at all mean that the thinking was right, or even useful.