Miles writes:
By this logic, doesn't some SM stuff violate your standard of "normativity"?
Only if there is no consent involved.
> Moreover, what sex is "harmful" is far from self-evident.
The standard for what is harmful is set by the parties involved. It is part of the negotiation that precedes a sexual encounter.
> For some, a one night stand and no further contact with a sexual
partner is just fine; for others, this produces significant psychological
harm (feelings of abandonment, betrayal, deception, etc.). Who gets
the power to decide what nonharmful, "normative" sex is?
The people invovled in the sexual event about to occur, who else?
> Dividing the population into normals and deviants (using any criteria,
including Brian's "harmful/not harmful" dichotomy) is ideological through
and through and can only lead to further surveillance, control, and
stigmatization.
I am not dividing the population into anything since I do not believe that the self exists. What I am doing is saying that there are actions that are harmful and those which are not harmful, and that the participants decide among themselves what is harmful at any particular moment.
If such decisions/distinctions aren't/shouldn't be made, what prevents me from leaving my office when I finish this email and pushing the first person I see into oncoming traffic?
How can people make moral choices in society without there being distinctions between harmful actions and unharmful ones?
Kelley writes:
> well, do me and a lot of other people the favor or respecting how they see
the issue.
Who said I didn't respect them?
> when you describe your queerness, speak for yourself.
How could I speak for anyone else's?
>_you_ feel you were born queer. i and many others do not. have the decency to
acknowledge the minority within your own community.
What form of acknowledgement do you wish? And, more interestingly, why? To prop up a sense of self perhaps? When I attack a position/belief I am not attacking a person, I am attacking an opinion. If a person has chosen to cling so tightly to a belief that he begins to believe that the belief and he are equivalent and that an attack on the belief is an attack on him, where is the problem: in my attack on a belief or in the idea that a person and his opinion are one and the same?
> read the rest of the site and get back to me.
I did read it. I thought it was good. Only deficiency to my mind was the absence of a discussion/explanation of the self that is doing the choosing. Other than that it is a good site.
I found my position represented by this statement: "Some of us believe that we were born with a tendency toward being queer (or toward being hetero) but also had a degree of choice in the matter." Covers both genetics and choice. A pleasing Buddhist middle path.
> compelled issue: you're missing the point.
And that point is?
Brian Dauth Queer Buddhist Resister
P.S. Wally Cox was known to have the biggest schlong in Hollywood/on Broadway.