> From: andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com>
> No one will care, I am sure, if you
> mock them. Or pay any attention to your mockery
> either.
Empirically, this is not true; in my experience people (particularly people with unusual sexual preferences) get most extraordinarily cross.
> Just a question: would you mock homosexual
> desire? Or queers taking their sexuality seriously?
I'm British. This is like about 30% of my culture that you're talking about. Of course I would. Like I say, not in a way that involved being nasty to people, but if modern gay culture isn't funny then I don't know what is.
> Does that strike you as risible? Is only straight
> vanilla sexuality worth taking seriously, or is even
> that absurd to talk about?
Of course it's absurd. I am hardly the first person since the Greeks to notice that the act is absurd, with or without the vanilla. That's why it's the main subject of nearly half the comedy ever written. It's absurd enough to do, let alone talk about.
What I'm interested in is the close first-cousin relationship between the desire of minority-sexual-preference communities to have their rights respected (which is entirely achievable and laudable), and their desire to have the practices themselves taken seriously (which is entirely impossible and probably not laudable). I'm trying to make the point that the whole debate seems to me to have an element of oddity to it, in that people want a degree of regard from the world as a whole for their sexual personae which it is utterly impossible to provide.
> Don't bother to explain,
> just think about it.
I am also not the first person to suggest to you that you can come over as perhaps a bit patronising on occasion, and to be honest I find it rather difficult to construe this remark other than as intentionally nasty.
dd
___________________________________________________________ The all-new Yahoo! Mail goes wherever you go - free your email address from your Internet provider. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html