So we are in a world where our most intitutive concepts of how things work usually doesn't apply. For me, that's a warning signal. Always look to your preconceptions.
Tahir: Virtually all of science is based on this procedure.
It is trivially obvious that we reproduce through sexual reproduction. We have preassigned the words male and female on the two types of reproducing pairs. It is a shock to discover that in the real world, in fact there are non-reproducing intermediate combinations of our category of male and female.
Tahir: How does this call into question the notion of heterosexuality? I don't see it yet.
What does this do to our concept of sexual pairs which in pure genetic terms are supposed to be equal? What does this do to our concept of male and female?
Tahir: The notion of equality is part of the notion of heterosexuality? Well, well.
What does heterosexuality mean when viewed from the female population? What does it mean when viewed from the male population? What does the concept of heterosexual mean to the spectrum of the transgendered?
Tahir: I don;t think you are talking about meaning at all here. You are talking about feelings, personal significance, points of view, etc. regarding a phenomenon. If the phenomenon weren't there you wouldn't be able to talk about how it is seen at all.
In its simplest definition, heterosexual means attraction to the opposite sex. On the other hand it also implies an equal and reciprocal relation in that females are attracted to males, and males are attracted to females. That is the attractor relation is assumed to be the same or an equivalent relation. There is an identity relation that does not seem at all likely to be concretely identical as the concept would imply. More simply, women do not seem to be attracted to men, in the same way that men are attracted to women. The attractor relation is different, and dependent on its given source of origin. How much of the apparent difference in this attractor relation is due to social construction and how much maybe attributed to some physiological source?
Tahir: Good question. I hope, as I said, that you will help us to understand this better.
What does that mean to the concept of heterosexuality? For example, most female mammals go into heat. Most male mammals go into some form of competitive behavior for mating. So in this sense hetersexuality seems to have a wide range of variance.
Tahir: Yes, in contemporary semantics this tends to be called instantiation of a schema. There is no concept that is not schematic in this way. If concepts weren't like this they would be so rigid as to make language impossible.
But let's look at this pattern a little differently. It seems from animal sex shows like Nature that most female mammals are successful in baring young, while most males are not successful in contributing anything to the reproductive process. This leads to the idea that most male lines fail and most female lines succeed. What does such an embalance do to the supposed homogeneous concept of hetersexual?
Tahir: Enriches it, no doubt.
>From a developmental physiological point of view there seems to be
nothing like an equal and reciprocal contribution under
heterosexuality.
Tahir: Funny that we find that also in the social world, but somehow inverted. Could there be a link? Let me remind you that some of the most radical forms of feminism advocated greater domination over nature as bringing about greater equality between male and female.
In my current martinis soaked state, I am not at all sure hetersexuality is a stable category. In fact it seems to me that hetersexuality has been designed through natural selection to privilage females---which is exactly contrary to our social construction of the concept of heterosexuality.
Tahir: Concepts are never entirely stable. Heraclitus knew that and so did Hegel. Are you sure though that you and one or two other people on this list are not confusing heterosexuality with something else, patriarchy perhaps? And now from the (relatively) sublime to the truly stupid:
From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] heterosexuality?
> This frequently occurs without the esteemed institution of
> heterosexuality. robert wood
In fact I think it had been going on for a 100k years plus/minus
before
the invention a c entury or so ago of the lifestyle of
"heterosexuality." Incidentally, Engels will do as well as Gramsci in
mocking "commonsense." I tend myself to use the term ("commonsense")
as
a synonym for "Bourgeois Ideology."
Carrol
Apparently words are now institutions. OK, so what does this contribute to human understanding? Both the English words 'heterosexual' and 'homosexual' are first attested in 1892 according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. But both of them only came into common use in the 20th century, and then only slowly. This means, the thought police ask us to believe, that heterosexuality and homosexuality, did not exist before that. That means, please note, that nothing exists until a word is coined to refer to it. So not only does it mean that there was no homosexuality in the ancient world, but it also means more generally that no scientist has ever discovered anything; every scientist invented the phenomena that they came to name. Electricity, then, only came into being in 1802, gravity somewhere around 1509, etc. etc. Sounds like something's a bit wrong here, doesn't it? Well, there's a branch of linguistics called onomasiology. This is the study of how meanings precede the coining of words. So there really were little fried bits of potato that some people came to call 'chips' and others 'french fries' and still others 'fritos'. Eelectricity was there before it was named. So were hetero- and homosexuality. Both Engels and Gramsci were erudite gentlemen (although not special favourites of mine), but they don't necessarily help us with everything, dimwit.
Tahir
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