Funny Events of the "Woke" world
- Thread starter CriticalGaming
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Holy shit one of Biden's picks for the bureau of land management used to put metal rods in trees.
And I thought I was extreme.
www.politico.com
Also interesting idea.
Edit: She got confirmed.
www.nytimes.com
And I thought I was extreme.
Biden’s BLM pick hit with new allegations from former investigator in tree-spiking case
Republican opposition to the nominee to lead the agency that oversees the nation’s public lands is reaching a fever pitch.
www.politico.com
Also interesting idea.
Edit: She got confirmed.
Senate Confirms Biden’s Pick to Lead the Bureau of Land Management (Published 2021)
After a party-line vote, Tracy Stone-Manning became the leader of an agency that manages oil and gas drilling on public lands.
A University suspended a professor before eventually reinstating him for refusing to give Black Students easier exams because of George Floyd's death
www.newsweek.com
Professor Suspended for Rebuff of Black Student Seeking Leniency Sues UCLA
Gordon Klein, who teaches financial analysis, law, and public policy at UCLA, claimed he suffered financially and emotionally, though he retained his position.
www.newsweek.com
I'm...going to need help understanding this one...
You're out to make me feel even more suicidal than usual, aren't you?
It is more than possible to enjoy sex without necessarily feeling sexual attraction towards your partner
No, he's talking about enjoying the physical sensations of sex without being attracted to the other person involved.
As a very, very rough example that should be accessible to everyone here, you likely feel zero sexual attraction towards your own hand. However, the act of that hand masturbating can still feel good. It's a similar situation except instead of your hand doing the pleasuring, it's another person.
Having a casual sexual encounter is kinda outside the definition. There's asexuals out there who have committed physical relationships that don't feel sexual attraction towards their partners. Meanwhile if pop culture is correct, one night stands depend almost entirely on a X/10 Hotness Scale and the use alcohol to modify your rankings. (/j)
The short and uncomplicated answer is that ace people don't typically find people of any gender "hot". If you regularly have casual sexual encounters with people you don't think are sexually attractive, then you have some idea what it's like to be a sexually active asexual. They just happen to be like that all the time, regardless of the level of relationship they're in.
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A one night stand is literally just screwing someone without bothering with the whole relationship stuff.
Asexuals are (to my knowledge) people either disinterested in having sex, or who lack sexual attraction to others. In the latter case particularly, not feeling sexually attracted to people doesn't mean they don't enjoy orgasms, including orgasms administered by congress with other people.
If I can try this by analogy, presumably most men would want to screw Scarlett Johanssen more than they would Melissa McCarthy, because Scarlett is more conventionally sexually attractive, so excites them more. But a lot of those people would still screw Melissa McCarthy anyway with the opportunity, because sex is fun.
Broadly speaking that's 2/3rds of the categories, yeah. There's the third main type, the Demi Ace, who only gets sexually attracted to somebody after they've already developed a close emotional bond. Of course, neat categories and messy humans never interact well so there's legions of subcategories created in a futile attempt to define humanity, but it is what it is.
It has to do with the different meanings of the word asexual.
Asexuality in a modern context describes a sexual orientation that is marked by the absence of sexual attraction. An asexual person doesn't feel that there is a type of person (regardless of gender) to whom they are sexually attracted. They don't feel those feelings most of us get when we're attracted to someone. Basically, their sexual interests are not directed towards people.
But, asexual people can still have a sexual response. They can (in some cases) still become sexually aroused and feel sexual pleasure. They may even enjoy sexual pleasure enough to actively seek it out. What differentiates them from any other sexual orientation in this regard is that their desire for sexual pleasure is not focused on people to whom they are attracted, merely on the pleasure they derive from the acts. This, ironically, could result in them being "slutty" in the sense that they may not actually care who they sleep with at all, because they do not experience attraction to those people and thus they are all essentially interchangeable.
So yes, it is entirely possible, and indeed makes a degree of sense, to be an asexual slut who loves sex.
No. For most people sexual attraction is extremely important to one-night stands, and is a large part of why they do it.
Ace people don't necessarily feel an absence of deep emotion towards others. They are, for the most part, perfectly capable of liking or even loving people or indeed of having sexual relationships, but those relationships (for them at least) are not based on sexual attraction and, certainly based on people I've known, tend to be a lot less sexual than other relationships even if they are sexual, just because it's kind of hard to get going without some degree of sexual attraction.
The problem is that, from the outside, an asexual person who doesn't actively avoid sex or relationships can pass as a straight/gay/bi person with relatively little difficulty, which might raise the issue of what actually distinguishes an asexual person from those groups? However, that's also a dangerous argument, because the same could be said of bisexual people (who can often be mistaken for gay or straight depending on the sex of their current partner) because like asexuality bisexuality is not easily intelligible. It's a complicated issue, particularly when it comes to the question of marginalization. Gay people sometimes envy the ability bi (and ace) people have to pass as straight, and tend to see them as having it easy, while bi people in particular may also envy the ability of gay people to be socially visible/culturally distinct and may assume that they have it easy. There's no easy answers to any of this, and it tends to get people mad if you bring it up in the wrong context.
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Personally, I remain steadfastly unconvinced that that is not a "normal" sexual behaviour with wide societal knowledge and acceptance for millennia.
- Nov 27, 2009
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There are certainly examples of romantic stories that definitely fit the mold of what a demi-ace relationship looks like, I'd even say that it's actually not uncommon for women in particular to be portrayed in this manner, though I wouldn't necessarily say that means it's widely understood, if it was I don't think it'd be seen as such a gendered behaviour, as the sexuality of people perceived as men that aren't more straightforward and aggressively sexual tends to be mocked and questioned particular in environments like school or work, while from the people perceived as women it's often dismissed as the typical womanly behaviour and it goes with that stereotype that women don't like sex as much as men.
Basically while I can see why you would think that, I think further examination says that while it's perhaps easier for people to accept that something like homosexuality or asexuality for the average folk, I don't it's genuinely widely understood even if there is arguably a lot of media that portrays this kind of sexuality and it does to some degree fit classic notions of how relationships are perceived.
It's also important to mention that the perceived assumption of this notion is actually behaviour that can be conducive to appalling behaviour such as corrective rape, something that a lot of people of different sexualities have suffered from because it's assumed they'll like it afterwards.
I know I'm basically rambling but I think that to some degree this post does illustrate that while it's something that can be perceived as normal that doesn't mean it's understood or accepted, certainly not as aggressively discriminated against as other issues, but still something that deserves more consideration and thought than how it might seem at first.
Yes, I think you touch on an important point there that this overlaps with cultural notions of romantic love and chastity before marriage, and especially for women, rather than deep psychological feelings. On the other hand, is it any less a sexual behaviour because it is heavily influenced by social norms?
My point is more that throughout my lifetime I have known a substantial number of men and women largely uninterested in sex outside of relationships. It is not rare now and I suspect never has been. There's no reason it can't be called a sort of asexuality, of course, but I start to question what the point of "asexuality" becomes when it reflects increasing numbers of different types of behaviour some of which society would recognises as "normal" sexuality.
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I guess the point is simply to illustrate that there's no such thing as normal, as though in certain traditions, particularly conservative traditions where sex is purely procreational feeling like that might be considered the norm, in a more sexually liberated environment the same behaviour might be considered uptight and as such deviant, pert of the issue is that whether it's considered normal or abnormal behaviour is down to where you are located, but even then the behaviour might come with assumptions that might simply not be true.
While I'm not gray ace or demi, as I'm asexual as in fully disinterested in sex, it is often assumed that I'm a prude or sexually conservative and while I may not engage in sex my views on the topic of sex tend to be less conservative than most would assume as I'm pro sex work and their rights and pro LGBTQA in general as well as many other things.
I don't think this is necessarily revolutionary or like an earthshaking revelation, but having this as a categorization puts in perspective what is and isn't perceived as deviant behaviour, the sheer fact that we can argue right now and raise points that would indicate it as normal sexual behaviour or as abnormal sexual behaviour is more than enough to prove that what is considered normal sexual behaviour is basically completely arbitrary and as such maybe worth examining why we even try to maintain the idea that there is such a thing as a normal relationship.
But I guess I could be overthinking it, ultimately all these sexual labels are arbitrary definitions to point out something we as a collective society is important enough that it deserves to be categorised and there is an argument to be made that perhaps none of these categorizations should exist at all and that the downfall of our perception of sexualities is that we have to define them between all these weird arbitrary parameters.
It's less about outside behavior and more about feelings. Like, sure, a constant diet of "no sex before marriage" and other such things will influence end behavior, but that doesn't necessarily equate to "don't find people sexually attractive before marriage". You wouldn't need chastity vows and promise rings and such, and stuff like soaking and jump-humping developing in response. (Nobody gets freaky like the repressed, I swear)
Plus, in much the same way as a bunch of obstinately straight dudes have a list of attractive male celebs they'd let fuck them or who're particularly excited about mmf threesomes, you might have just run into people who just haven't thought too hard about their own sexuality or didn't have the vocabulary.
I think, to some extent, cultural notions of romantic and love and chastity do influence the experience of sexual attraction. For example, I think because the expression of agentive sexuality or proto-sexuality is much less tolerated in girls, many girls learn in response to sublimate sexual desire into romantic desire. The desire for pleasure becomes the desire for love, and love becomes a kind of substitute or compensation for a self-imposed denial of sexual gratification. I think this is less true now than it was previously, but I do think it's still a very real part of a lot of women's sexuality.
I rag on heterosexuality a lot and I understand it must be quite boring, but part of why I do it is because I do think there is something quite fundamentally wrong with the kinds of heterosexual dynamics which are presented to each sex as the ideal they need to aspire to, because they fundamentally set each sex up to fail to meet the other's expectations. There's a scene in the film The Love Witch which I think expresses this incredibly well, because the film is kind of about that search for an idealized form of complementarity between men and women. In the scene, two characters have a mock wedding, and during the wedding their thoughts are narrated in voice over. The woman is thinking about how loving a man means learning to love their flaws, to the point where the more you learn about a man the more you love him. The man, meanwhile, is thinking about how as you learn more about a woman, it takes away the fantasy and the mystique that she once had, until no matter how much she tries to love you just end up feeling smothered.
Of course, not all men and women think that way, in fact I would say that very few people do all the time, that's why I'm talking about it as an ideal. But I think a lot of straight relationships do fail because men and women are on some level pursuing fundamentally incompatible ideals. Women are taught to sublimate their desires into this idealized, unconditional form of love that exists only for its own sake and entails no real emotional closeness, while men are taught to endlessly chase an idealized, fantasy image of a woman and to project mystery and beauty and sexuality onto her only to discover that in the end it can't last, and all they're left with in the end is a person whom they have little in common with and get bored of. Neither sex is really able to relate to the other, because each of them has spent their lives absorbing that is is supremely important to be different from the other, and thus has repressed the parts of themselves that would enable them to coexist.
It's weird to me that older straight people, even those who are ostensibly in happy relationships and/or have been married for years, so often fall into this weird heteropessimism of constantly emphasizing the failures of their own relationship as a means of bonding or relating to other straight people. Like, that's a strange thing to do right?
Ugh, anyway. This is ADHD rambling. What I really meant to say is that I don't think human sexuality is completely outside of societal influence, I think it is merely outside of conscious influence or engineering. So, while I don't think teaching your kids that sex before marriage is evil is necessarily going to stop their uncontrollable rampant horniness from manifesting, human sexuality is at least partly formed from our experiences. A lot of women, and a lot of men who for whatever reason find themselves alienated from the aggressive, hypersexual fantasies of masculinity that our culture tends to emphasize as ideal, will end up redirecting their sexual impulses into a desire for emotional intimacy or towards the sense of worth and value that comes with being in a relationship, and their desires might become less about pleasure and physical gratification and more about the emotional gratification derived from some form of relationship dynamic. In that sense, I think having an emotional component to your sexuality is actually very normal, and most of us do to some extent or another.
Here's one for Woke world
Insulate UK another climate action group totally not linked to Extinction rebellion as far as anyone knows.
They're presently blocking UK roads to force the government to give a statement and commit to insulating or subsidising insulation of all UK homes to fight climate change. A noble goal you'd think but also an entirely silly quite impractical one because it's not all UK homes that can have it, it's all UK homes. That means somehow installing loft and or cavity wall insulation into homes that don't have loft spaces or cavity walls............(See my former lecturer on Environmental Sciences home in North Wales) or you know random log cabin places in wales or other such places people still live in or use or random cabins that exist on some larger estates like gamekeeper cabins still in use as homes for some.
Oh but it gets funnier as according to their leader the reason they're blocking roads and even stopping ambulances getting through is because their fight to get insulation installed is about saving the NHS and reducing the pressure on the system which is why they're blocking ambulances and potentially causing patients to be put at more risk or face delays in getting care which could make their conditions worse putting more stress on the system.
So yes I present insulate UK the latest bunch of climate activist clowns claiming to be saving lives by blocking ambulances.
Timecode for the most relevant bit is 0:50
Insulate UK another climate action group totally not linked to Extinction rebellion as far as anyone knows.
They're presently blocking UK roads to force the government to give a statement and commit to insulating or subsidising insulation of all UK homes to fight climate change. A noble goal you'd think but also an entirely silly quite impractical one because it's not all UK homes that can have it, it's all UK homes. That means somehow installing loft and or cavity wall insulation into homes that don't have loft spaces or cavity walls............(See my former lecturer on Environmental Sciences home in North Wales) or you know random log cabin places in wales or other such places people still live in or use or random cabins that exist on some larger estates like gamekeeper cabins still in use as homes for some.
Oh but it gets funnier as according to their leader the reason they're blocking roads and even stopping ambulances getting through is because their fight to get insulation installed is about saving the NHS and reducing the pressure on the system which is why they're blocking ambulances and potentially causing patients to be put at more risk or face delays in getting care which could make their conditions worse putting more stress on the system.
So yes I present insulate UK the latest bunch of climate activist clowns claiming to be saving lives by blocking ambulances.
Timecode for the most relevant bit is 0:50