Not Telling You Who To Be Attracted To

I recently participated in a discussion on Facebook about the word “sapiosexual” and how it is ableist, among other problems. While many responses were good, several people objected, claiming that we were telling them who they should be attracted to or who they should sleep with. I’ve seen this with many other discussions about people’s attractions related to race, weight, and other traits as well. Someone usually comes into those discussions and says “I can’t help who I’m attracted to! I can’t just decide to be attracted to someone!”

I think what isn’t clear to some people is that we’re not asking people to be attracted to people they’re not attracted to. Rather, when someone’s preferences are in line with some axis of oppression, it’s worth examining how society has lead us to those preferences. It is absolutely not true that our desires exist in a vacuum – they’re a product of our culture, and our biases.

In other words, if you find you are only attracted to white people, it would be a good idea to examine your feelings about race. If you find you are only attracted to thin people, you may have underlying negative feelings about fat people. If you only are attracted to people you deem to be “smart enough” it’s likely you need to think hard about your ideas about intelligence. If you defend these preferences aggressively when someone points out you may be coming from a place of prejudice, then you especially need to examine your biases – they’re showing.

In fact, there is evidence that prejudice corresponds with sexual attraction in these cases. Last year an Australian study found “Sexual racism, therefore, is closely associated with generic racist attitudes, which challenges the idea of racial attraction as solely a matter of personal preference.” Body size preferences also seem to be influenced by culture, according to this study which found “The universality of an ideal [waist-to-height ratio] is thus challenged, and historical changes in western societies could have caused these variations in men’s preferences.” In other words, our culture and the biases of that culture influence our sexual preferences.

No one is saying you have to be attracted to people you’re not attracted to. Attraction doesn’t generally work that way. However, since attraction is in part based on our subconscious biases and prejudices, we can use our attractions to help us better recognize in what areas we may be judging people unfairly. Furthermore, I suspect working to become less racist, sizeist, ableist, and otherwise oppressive will likely change our sexual preferences over time. Challenging our own prejudices often changes many things about our views of the world, and I doubt that excludes our sexual outlooks.

Not Telling You Who To Be Attracted To
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Why I Went To College

Next week I will begin the last year of my undergraduate degree. Not my fourth year, but my tenth. Not at age 21 or 22, but at 34 years old. I will be 35 when I graduate. When I graduate it will have been exactly a decade, down to the week, since I first entered a college classroom as a student. It’s been a long path, but I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I did not go to school to get a better paying job, though I hope that will be a nice side-effect. I had a reliable job (which I hated) that I left to go to school full time. I also didn’t go in order to get some specific job that I wanted. In fact, I wasn’t even sure what my major would be for quite awhile.
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Why I Went To College

Remote Sensing, Not Remote Viewing

When I mentioned to friends that I was going to be taking a class in remote sensing this quarter, many were baffled. “Wait… Benny… WHAT?!” they asked. I understood immediately what the confusion was. No, I assured them, I don’t think I’ve become psychic.

Remote viewing is the term used for the belief that people can use clairvoyance to perceive and learn about places, objects, or people that they cannot sense directly. It is a psudoscientific belief and process with absolutely no evidence to support it and flies in the face of all known science. Despite this, research into it was invested in by militaries around the world, including the United States Army. This is NOT what I am studying in college.
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Remote Sensing, Not Remote Viewing

Environmental Anti-Science: Appeal to Nature

One of the most frustrating parts of being an environmental science major is realizing how much incredibly bad information is out there about environmental issues. People often believe they know what the best environmental decisions are, when they are actually ineffectual, complicated, or completely wrong. I really believe that a lot of people want to make decisions that are best for the environment, but they make decisions based on mistaken logic and incorrect information. The most common problem is the fallacy of the appeal to nature.

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Environmental Anti-Science: Appeal to Nature