I guess that was a little too complicated

Maybe this is what I get for only spending an hour banging out my last post, but it’s received some genuinely confused reactions on YouTube – and I don’t really know whose fault that is:

Jesus Christ, man. Your post used to be slightly insane, but now you’re just lost it.

What the fuck are you even talking about?

This is a very bizarre choice of topic and an even more intellectually constipated way of talking about sex. Don’t try to *sound* like you are intelligent. Just *be* intelligent. Otherwise you just look like a pseudo-intellectual making up crap. You don’t have to construct these over long sentences in order to talk about gay sex.

ZJemp uses sneaky NLP (Neuro linguistic programming).

While speaking and using this technique, he tries to manipulative his viewers and sound interesting, making his videos seem better than they are.

I’m afraid you’ve lost me on this one. We are what we are; just as you want me to accept you for who you are, you have to accept me for who I am. We are products of out culture, and the dominant culture points the majority to PIV sex. Now it doesn’t make me a bad guy because I don’t find other forms of sex appealing-it’s a line I won’t cross. As you ask for respect for your preferences, I ask the same for mine. That’s MY choice.

Boring, you just said the same thing over and over. :/

This seems like a strawman – What exactly are people doing or thinking now that you think they should change, and which people are doing or thinking those things?

I like the video however… I think it was arrogant to claim that hetros somehow looked down on homosexual sex because it wasn’t PiV sex. I think you’re just making stuff up now.

I enjoy most of your videos a lot. You have a excellent mind and put forth some very impressive arguments. This video however seems like a complete waste of time. I’m a straight guy, and I have no interest in the mechanics of your sex life. It’s not personal, I have no interest in the mechanics of any other persons sex life either unless it’s the person I’m fucking. Then I care. Otherwise, TMI.

Are you saying you don’t fuck your girlfriend? Why would you even say that? How is that anyone’s business? WHy would you even talk about that?? I’m confused.

man, this looks and feels like a justification video for something that happened with your woman and your penis and her vagina… really sad.

(Yeah, even when people insist on trying to read into what I said in spite of the “I’m not going to get into specifics here” and “that isn’t anyone’s business”, they still manage to get it completely wrong.)

It would be easy to blame all this miscommunication on the poor listening skills and other general shortcomings of some people on YouTube, but concluding that they’re just inept individuals only gets us so far if we actually want to explain things effectively. Put all blame and responsibility aside for the moment: The fact is, somewhere, something failed to connect. Why?

Not every response provides a clue as to what was misunderstood – accusing someone of being “insane” or a “pseudo-intellectual”, being “manipulative” with “neuro linguistic programming”, or making “a justification video” doesn’t really help to clarify anything. But some are informative, even if only minimally so. Did I use too many big words? Did I fail to provide enough concrete examples of the phenomena I discussed? Did I not give people a reason to keep watching beyond the first 30 seconds, leading them to conclude that this was a personal video and they would learn nothing useful? Was I not explicit enough about criticizing people’s ideas and not people themselves? Did I not explain things in enough detail? Or was I actually too verbose? Could it be that I was just wrong?

Maybe some people really did need an expansive overview of the various items that can be applied to someone’s body for sexual purposes. Maybe they required a deeper explanation of virginity’s history as a tool for marking women as valuable or worthless, and why it’s an incoherent concept because of ambiguous ideas about what constitutes “sex” and misconceptions about what the hymen is and how it works. Maybe they needed to hear some instances of conservatives characterizing gay sex as less fulfilling and less genuine than heterosexual sex. Maybe they wanted to see some examples of how penis-in-vagina sex is the most common representation of sex in the media. Maybe they actually wanted to know more about my personal life, or maybe they didn’t want to hear about it even in passing. (Maybe I should have learned what “NLP” is so I can avoid doing it by accident.)

Obviously, we can’t please everyone. For every explanation, we have to decide on a certain level of detail and how much background knowledge we expect people to bring to the table. There shouldn’t be a need for a comprehensive review of all lower-level topics from the ground up every time before we can get to our actual point, especially in a 5-10 minute video where only so much territory can be covered. Sometimes we just have to go from Point 1 to Point 2, without stopping to rest at Points 1(a), 1(b) and 1(c). Unless the subject really warrants such a thorough explanation, this is likely to be even less effective at conveying our core points – not everyone is interested in a book-length treatise on our argument.

Yet even for what seem like fairly obvious concepts to some of us, there are essential foundations that many people truly aren’t familiar with. Sometimes, our expectation that they’ll have a basic grasp of the subject turns out to be completely and utterly mistaken. The less accurate our appraisal of their current knowledge, the harder our attempts at communication fail.

There’s one topic that so exemplifies this phenomenon, someone once described it as “the Kobayashi Maru of Reddit” – and there’s certainly no end of opportunities to try your hand at it. That topic, roughly speaking, is the existence of transgender people and the validity of their identities. It can come up almost anywhere nowadays, and the gulf between those who understand the subject, and those who don’t, is vast and often unbridgeable.

Attempts at trying to educate someone from the fundamentals all the way to the conclusion are too exhausting for most, so people on either side tend to talk past each other: the less informed hold a variety of misconceptions at the most basic level, and the more informed make their arguments based on facts and theories which their opponents are not aware of or do not recognize as legitimate.

Almost no one has the time required to bring a single person up to speed on the difference between sex and gender, the fact that gender is not always congruent with sex, the sexual differentiation of the brain and how this process can go awry, the various studies about trans people and their findings, the effectiveness of transitioning, the ineffectiveness of attempts at a “cure”, the importance of evidence in forming our beliefs about the world, the painful realities of dysphoria and transphobia, the value of being decent toward others, and everything that’s necessary to bring trans people into their personal Sphere of Individuals Who Are Treated Like Human Beings and Have Their Suffering Taken Seriously and Their Knowledge, Experiences, Identity and Self-Determination Respected.

Even fewer are willing to bet that their conversational partner is actually interested in knowing these things. Instead of caring about the truth, they might instead value some personal model of reality which reinforces certain ideas and views that they consider too important to give up. This often seems to be the case, and so genuine cases of successful persuasion are especially rare. The occasional positive outcome gives us hope – but not very much. Few of us bother trying anymore. Success may at least be possible, but failure is far too likely to justify investing ourselves in this.

So we make the decision: We’re not targeting the 101 crowd anymore. Someone else can try, but at some point, we need to move past the basics and deal with more advanced topics within a shared background of knowledge. Those who wish to join that conversation are responsible for educating themselves to the level needed to understand what we’re discussing. The cost is inaccessibility to those who lack the requisite knowledge, which may not be such a great cost when so many of them apparently don’t care anyway. The benefit is actually getting stuff done without being eternally bogged down in molasses, arguing over fundamentals with people who care more about their preferred beliefs being seen as right than changing their beliefs to reflect what really is right.

With everything I write, I have to draw that line somewhere, and it’s a delicate balance. Not everything I say will be within everyone’s grasp, and neither will it always be something completely revolutionary that you’ve never thought of before. Sometimes, ideas are complicated. Other times, certain fundamental elements need to be established before we can move forward. I can only hope that I manage to strike a balance that’s useful to everyone on some level, rather than no one on any level.

I guess that was a little too complicated
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The assumed primacy of penis-in-vagina sex

I’ve often noticed people leaving comments based on the assumption that if someone who (you believe) has a penis and someone who (you believe) has a vagina are having sex, then they must be having penis-in-vagina sex. I’m not going to get into specifics here, because that isn’t anyone’s business, but the topic itself is relevant to just about everyone.

I’m sure that for many of you this will be incredibly obvious, but for others, it’s evidently not. Just because someone has a penis, it does not mean they are at all interested in using it to have vaginal sex – even if the possibility of vaginal sex is readily available to them. Likewise, not everyone with a vagina is interested in having it penetrated by a penis, even if a capable penis is available.

To some people, this apparently defies comprehension. I suppose that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, as our culture and media often treat “sex” in general as equivalent to penis-in-vagina sex, presenting this as the predominant mode of sexual interaction.

Some will protest, “But this is how lots of people have sex!” And that’s certainly true. But the near-exclusive focus on PIV sex often serves to erase and delegitimize other forms of sex outside of the standard script, limiting people’s imaginations so severely that they might not even understand what anything beyond PIV might look like. When it’s not about a specific type of sex involving the interface between a penis and a vagina, a particular mechanics of sex centered on repeated thrusting, and a timeline of sex oriented around when the penis-bearer has an orgasm, people are seemingly lost.

This is a pretty ridiculous situation. I know we’re not all experts here, but it should be rather obvious that people’s bodies can be stimulated by more than just a penis or a vagina. Anyone with long enough arms should have a very… firm grasp of this.

Yet even when people realize why asking things like “how do lesbians have sex?” is ignorant and unimaginative, they often still persist in the attitude that anything other than PIV is not quite “real” sex. To them, PIV is the indisputable gold standard of sexual activity, the pinnacle of sex itself. Without it, the very fact of two (or more) people having had sex is considered vague, nebulous, and potentially in doubt, because the standard of a penis in a vagina has not been met.

This is more than just harmless nonsense. The narrow focus on PIV is largely responsible for the idea that oral and anal sex are “not really sex”, which is both a dangerous misconception, and sometimes an act of strategic ignorance within an obsolete value system. It also serves as a focal point for the concept of “virginity”, a model which fails to describe sexual experience in any meaningful way despite supposedly existing for this purpose, and instead functions to define a woman’s worth by the history of her vagina.

More than that, the belief that PIV sex is desired and engaged in by anyone for whom it’s possible has a darker side: it implies that those who don’t or can’t have PIV must be suffering in its absence, with their sexual activity being an unsatisfying simulacrum of “real” sex. This perpetuates the idea that the relationships of same-sex couples will always be inadequate in this respect – their sex will never be as good as that of heterosexuals, and as a result, neither will their companionship. And if a gay or lesbian couple does happen to have a combination of bodies which makes PIV sex possible, people assume that it would be their first choice by default. It’s as though they believe penises and vaginas behave like magnets: get them close enough, and contact is inevitable.

This is definitely not the case, and it’s an insult to all the people who are having completely awesome sex without a penis in a vagina. Their sex is real sex, no less real and no less satisfying than anyone else’s. How do they have sex? The answer is: However they want. So let’s stop making unwarranted assumptions about the ways people must be having sex, and the kinds of things they enjoy in bed. That’s just… fucked.

The assumed primacy of penis-in-vagina sex

More remedial poetry

I had always assumed that “Laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone” was just an old saying found on eternally-reblogged Tumblr pictures and the covers of overpriced diaries at Barnes & Noble. But as Heather was quick to inform me, it’s actually part of a longer work: “Solitude” by Edna Wheeler Wilcox. Rather than what would first appear to be a call for joy and focusing on the positive things in life, it turns out to be a bitterly depressing portrayal of the stark isolation of pain:

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air.
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you;
Grieve, and they turn and go.
They want full measure of all your pleasure,
But they do not need your woe.
Be glad, and your friends are many;
Be sad, and you lose them all.
There are none to decline your nectared wine,
But alone you must drink life’s gall.

Feast, and your halls are crowded;
Fast, and the world goes by.
Succeed and give, and it helps you live,
But no man can help you die.
There is room in the halls of pleasure
For a long and lordly train,
But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow aisles of pain.

Ultimately, the central message seems to be less like “Cheer up!”, and more like “Fuck people.”

More remedial poetry

Coming out again – again!

In keeping with my tendency to come out on the spur of the moment, I went on a whirlwind tour of coming out yesterday, because I recognized there was no reason to delay it further. By the end of the day, my sister, my parents, and my aunt and uncle were informed. (Once I got started, I just had to keep it going.) I explained to them what it means to be trans, what this entails, and what I plan to do about it. They were all very understanding and happy for me; I expect they were softened up by my two previous out-comings. My sister was not at all surprised, and seems to have taken this as a sign that we can finally go shopping for clothes – as if we couldn’t before!

I did feel bad that my family were among the last to find out, but they do keep up with my videos, so it clearly wasn’t too much of a shock. If anything, it was more of a confirmation than an announcement. This certainly isn’t something that came out of nowhere. Nothing has changed, and yet everything has. There’s no longer any doubt, any secrecy, any of the distance it placed between us. There’s just me – as it always should have been.

Coming out again – again!

NOM demands businesses stay "neutral" on marriage, then partners with anti-gay business

Last month, the National Organization for Marriage sent a letter to some of the largest corporations in Minnesota, demanding that they not oppose the state’s proposed constitutional ban on gay marriage:

As a cultural matter that has little to do with your corporate mission to serve customers, earn profits, and provide good jobs for the people of Minnesota we would request that _____ adopt a neutral stance on the Minnesota marriage amendment. We do not request that you endorse our efforts to protect the age-old definition of what is a marriage, but only that you stay neutral and respect the conscience rights of your customers and employees who are on both sides of the issue. […]

Wading into a culture war over an issue where _____ has no business interest is to invite public backlash, much like what Starbucks is experiencing in the DumpStarbucks.com campaign, with little upside.

And just to prove how important corporate neutrality is to them, NOM themselves have now partnered with a coffee company to raise money for fighting gay marriage:

This week we are proud to roll out Jitters and Bliss Coffee as a provider of excellent coffee that can be brewed with a clean conscience any time you want at home, at the office or at your church. […]

During the month of July Jitters and Bliss is offering a 5% discount to every customer who enters the promotional code “marriage”. A small portion of each purchase made also goes to support the National Organization for Marriage as we work to educate people and corporations on the importance of marriage to our society.

Wow, it’s almost as though Jitters and Bliss has failed to “stay neutral and respect the conscience rights of their customers and employees who are on both sides of the issue” by “wading into a culture war over an issue where they have no business interest”. But not to worry – NOM assures us this still somehow constitutes neutrality:

Jitters and Bliss has not, as a corporation, taken a position in the debate over marriage. Just like every company, they have customers, employees, and vendors who hold personal views on what marriage ought to be. They are committed to honoring those views by maintaining a neutral corporate position on marriage.

There you have it: giving a portion of your proceeds to the National Organization for Marriage is ” a neutral corporate position on marriage”. Now that they’ve established this precedent, I fully expect that they will never object to any business that supports the HRC, Lambda Legal, or any other group working for marriage equality. That sounds realistic, right?

NOM demands businesses stay "neutral" on marriage, then partners with anti-gay business

NOM demands businesses stay “neutral” on marriage, then partners with anti-gay business

Last month, the National Organization for Marriage sent a letter to some of the largest corporations in Minnesota, demanding that they not oppose the state’s proposed constitutional ban on gay marriage:

As a cultural matter that has little to do with your corporate mission to serve customers, earn profits, and provide good jobs for the people of Minnesota we would request that _____ adopt a neutral stance on the Minnesota marriage amendment. We do not request that you endorse our efforts to protect the age-old definition of what is a marriage, but only that you stay neutral and respect the conscience rights of your customers and employees who are on both sides of the issue. […]

Wading into a culture war over an issue where _____ has no business interest is to invite public backlash, much like what Starbucks is experiencing in the DumpStarbucks.com campaign, with little upside.

And just to prove how important corporate neutrality is to them, NOM themselves have now partnered with a coffee company to raise money for fighting gay marriage:

This week we are proud to roll out Jitters and Bliss Coffee as a provider of excellent coffee that can be brewed with a clean conscience any time you want at home, at the office or at your church. […]

During the month of July Jitters and Bliss is offering a 5% discount to every customer who enters the promotional code “marriage”. A small portion of each purchase made also goes to support the National Organization for Marriage as we work to educate people and corporations on the importance of marriage to our society.

Wow, it’s almost as though Jitters and Bliss has failed to “stay neutral and respect the conscience rights of their customers and employees who are on both sides of the issue” by “wading into a culture war over an issue where they have no business interest”. But not to worry – NOM assures us this still somehow constitutes neutrality:

Jitters and Bliss has not, as a corporation, taken a position in the debate over marriage. Just like every company, they have customers, employees, and vendors who hold personal views on what marriage ought to be. They are committed to honoring those views by maintaining a neutral corporate position on marriage.

There you have it: giving a portion of your proceeds to the National Organization for Marriage is ” a neutral corporate position on marriage”. Now that they’ve established this precedent, I fully expect that they will never object to any business that supports the HRC, Lambda Legal, or any other group working for marriage equality. That sounds realistic, right?

NOM demands businesses stay “neutral” on marriage, then partners with anti-gay business

Welcome out, Anderson Cooper!

In a letter that he allowed blogger Andrew Sullivan to publish, CNN reporter Anderson Cooper today came out as gay:

The fact is, I’m gay, always have been, always will be, and I couldn’t be any more happy, comfortable with myself, and proud.

I have always been very open and honest about this part of my life with my friends, my family, and my colleagues. In a perfect world, I don’t think it’s anyone else’s business, but I do think there is value in standing up and being counted. I’m not an activist, but I am a human being and I don’t give that up by being a journalist.

While this is certainly fantastic news, I’m sure some people are wondering why he didn’t come out sooner, and this is worth exploring. In Cooper’s case, there were specific professional concerns relating to his ability to remain objective in his role as a journalist, as well as staying safe in dangerous parts of the world. And as with anyone else, there could be any number of particular personal matters which I can’t speak to.

Cooper, of course, hadn’t gone to great pains to keep his orientation a secret until now. He was already out to many people who know him, and his sexuality has been a matter of public speculation for some time. So why today? Regardless of personal circumstances, there’s an element that I believe is common to anyone who comes out or has yet to come out, whether they’re gay, lesbian, bi or trans.

Even after we’ve come to understand who were are and become truly comfortable in ourselves, that final leap to public openness can still be foreboding, no matter how much time we’ve had to prepare. As suffocating as this continued secrecy about a central and important part of yourself can be, we still draw some small measure of comfort, empty as it ultimately may be, from avoiding whatever unknowns are lurking beyond that announcement. And giving up that sense of safety can be a difficult step.

We often still find ourselves putting it off, even when we’re not at personal risk and there’s nothing else left to do before we finally come out. We know that we have to do it sooner or later, and that waiting won’t make the event itself any easier. But we still cling to the familiarity of the closet, and back away from the mysteries on the other side.

In that state of limbo, where there’s nothing left to do but say it out loud, it could be just about anything that nudges us over the threshold and into the daylight. It can be as simple as one day deciding, on a whim, “You know what? Screw it, I’m gonna do this.” When I’ve had to come out about something, that’s what it was like. As I eventually tired of the tedium of keeping secrets about myself, I just made the choice to rip the band-aid off and get it done. There are still things I’ve yet to come out about to some of the people closest to me, but once everything’s in order, I know that I’ll end up doing it on the spur of the moment again. Ultimately, when we come out can be as simple as: “Whenever I feel like it.”

Welcome out, Anderson Cooper!

Gotta disagree with you here, thunderf00t

Hi, thunderf00t. I understand that you see Freethought Blogs as unrepresentative of the wider skeptical community in terms of its views on the problem of sexism in said community. That could indeed be the case, by whatever definition you use for FTB and the community at large (who’s included? who’s excluded? are we only counting the bloggers themselves, or also the commenters? and so on) and methods you use to quantify their stances on a given issue. But I don’t think your latest YouTube-based survey succeeds in demonstrating this.

You asked your YouTube subscribers whether they agree more with your initial post on sexual harassment, or with PZ Myers’ response, and requested that they rank their position on the question from 0 to 10 – 0 for full agreement with PZ, and 10 for full agreement with you. Out of 127 respondents, most agreed with you strongly. You took this as evidence that the views of Freethought Blogs in general are “widely unrepresentative of the wider rationalist community” on the issue of sexism.

I don’t believe the results of your poll are actually evidence of that. You claimed that “this puts FTB on a trajectory to be more of a fringe group that is intolerant of non-conformity”. However, the respondents to your video were a self-selected sample. The people who watch your videos tend to be… people who watch your videos. And out of those people, the ones who responded are the ones who take the time to listen all the way through your videos, and decided to leave a comment. This can be expected to skew toward agreement with you.

I would expect similar results in my favor if I polled my subscribers on whether they agreed more with me, or with someone I was currently having a dispute with. My viewers choose to watch my videos because they tend to agree with me, and this would be reflected in the results. While I certainly expect that my viewers are all perfectly rational and able to consider any issue fairly, accurately and even-handedly, this obviously isn’t always the case in reality. I assume the same holds true for your viewers as well.

While your survey does show that some people dissent from PZ’s stance on the issue, this doesn’t actually mean that his views are unrepresentative of the wider skeptical community. It’s possible that they could be, but your poll isn’t particularly strong evidence of this. It also doesn’t mean that the views of your respondents are representative of the skeptical community. FTB could be “fringe” in terms of its collective stance on the issue, but so could your respondents. Your survey doesn’t give us reason to think either of these possibilities is more likely than the other, because there are no grounds to assume that your viewers are representative of the community as a whole, however you choose to define it. And your policy that “The thunderf00t channel is essentially a 100 % free speech zone, with no conformational bias due to blocking/ banning people”, though admirable (and one I share), is simply not enough to ensure this. Even if PZ’s views “are widely unrepresentative of the wider rationalist community”, your latest post doesn’t show this.

Gotta disagree with you here, thunderf00t