The entire “women are expected to be bisexual for men” is really fucked up in general, too. It’s why I identify as queer instead of bisexual (for the most part, but also because I don’t date just cis people and I dislike “pansexual” for some reason).
ETA to add another point to this comment from @paulchernoff
This brings up an excellent point. Many men have had sex with other men yet do not see themselves as homosexuals.
And I think a lot of these men are probably technologically bisexual, or at least not totally straight, rather than gay, but even you don’t really seem to immediately grok that. Even you just seem to only understand the “gay or straight, no in between” narrative. “They have sex with men but don’t see themselves as gay” – well, what if they also like having sex with women as well as men? And that’s why they don’t see themselves as gay? But society isn’t too keen on men being flexible in that way, so they have to hide their attraction to men, or pretend it was just a phase or “because I was bored” or whatever. So they identify as straight.
Our society can’t quite grok that men might not be totally straight or totally gay.
I am lucky that I know quite a few bisexual men, but it’s not easy for them. They live in a different world than I do as a queer lady. It’s a big way that sexism affects men.
Yeah I don’t get that. I mean I got no problem with doing things with another man but mens bodies in general just don’t make me go oooooh like womens bodies do so I don’t. But quite awhile ago my wife asked in relation to a picture of a young and good looking Errol Flynn and I responded well yeah normally no but I’d probably have trouble saying no to that if given the chance, or to quote from Red Dwarf ‘Normally I am a butter side up man, but a guy like you can turn heads’. I imagine most of us fall somewhere on that kind of scale but don’t admit it.
Happened to me. Was flattering, sort of, nice, sort of; and annoying, sort of, as the girls were ignoring me and I don’t feel just about anything “that way” to other men (which is not-helpful in terms of getting laid).
(I grinned and complained bitterly. He laughed. We chatted for a good part of the night.)
I sometimes go to a little dive bar in my neighborhood where Bears hang out. Whenever I’ve had a shitty bad day, and feel like crap, I know I can head over to the OVP, and get hit on. Does wonders for the self esteem when you’re getting yourself down and feeling unlovable.
I think the idea of human sexuality as a spectrum makes more sense then thinking someone is either gay or hetero or bi. Some people prefer the opposite sex very strongly, and do not desire people of their own sex. More people prefer the opposite sex strongly, but in certain circumstances or with with certain people, find their own sex attractive. Oh the other side, some people have a strong preference for people of their own sex, and don’t desire the opposite sex. While more people strongly prefer the same sex, but in certain circumstances or with certain people, desire a person of the opposite sex. the closer to the middle, the less a person prefers one sex more strongly than the other.
I also think sexuality isn’t set, it can be fluid.
Not wanting to get into an indepth discussion on this, but… [and you very well may not be interested in it, but who knows, maybe someone else, if so… yes, ‘tl dr and my apologies’…]
It is misunderstood. The Law was given that people would believe. People of that time. Therefore, it did speak to them as they understood.
So, for instance, they might discover, or had already discovered: pork often can cause disease, likewise shellfish. They see that written in a book, they are impressed. The height of their knowledge at the time.
One of my friends put it this way: ‘the law was written for man, not man for the law’, echoing Jesus similar statement, ‘the sabbath was written for man, not man for the sabbath’.
Homosexuality is not covered much. Some like to attribute the destruction of Sodom to “homosexuality”. I do not think so. The issue was rape, not homosexuality.
Homosexuality is very often taboo in primitive social structures.Primitive not as in “New Guinea”, though that may be the case, but primitive as in 3500 years ago. And primitive as in not more advanced then that manner of group. As a “for instance” you can see this taboo active in diverse places such as deep in Hindu india. Why this is, one can conjecture. Probably for some basic social purpose, however. Not unlike the social function of primitively learning to avoid pork or shellfish because you see people dying from it, but do not know why.
One possible reason is like a joke on bisexuality “you don’t know who you can trust them with”, or “you can’t trust them with anyone”. Whatever the case, it isn’t a reason that applies to people who can do such things as “know how to cook pork correctly” or “properly handle shellfish without getting infected by sickening bacteria”. Noting here: both of those situations do involve societal functions, that is, you very well may have that pork or shellfish prepared by someone else. Is your society advanced enough that there is dependability in their doing so. (Not you, but them.)
All this means: speaking to a people’s “moral understanding” is necessary for rapport. People often consider: “what if an alien species came and wanted to communicate to us, they would be able to speak our language, right”. As we see this in many fantasy and sci fi depictions. But, that is acting, and it is distant, and so it is quite a bit off: they actually also would have to include in that usage of language the capacity to speak to them as they think in terms of - what might be called - their “moral understanding”.
eg, if I go and eat at a halal restaurant, and I do not wish to offend, I am not going to ask for pork. If I want to get along with Republicans in a conversation, I probably will look for commonalities. It does seem dishonest to go up to someone and pretend to have viewpoints on points of strong beliefs they have, correct? Just to have rapport or carry on a conversation with them? Moreso, “to impress them of your wisdom” (exactly the stated reason in the Law of the reason for it). Moses then was used as the conduit, or translator. And getting into that is where it can get really alien and difficult to understand.
One way of putting it is: strong beliefs of someone into sports in New York City. You go there and see this, but don’t have any interest in sports and zero idea of their team they keep raving about. You do not judge them, it is just not your interest. So, you can have someone who does and can speak to them translate for you, while establishing rapport via sports.
Put another way: if you come from a place where you don’t have trees, snow, rocks, and many other such normal earth things… and where your social structures and interactions are entirely alien… your morality will also be entirely alien.
I think one of the few good scenes I have seen that really even begins to get at this in popular fiction, is in Dr Who, where there is the “angels” subplot. At one juncture Dr Who finds himself talking to one of his pals, and realizes that he is actually talking to the superalien (even by Dr Who’s terms) angels who is not just using the pal’s phone, but the pal’s consciousness.
The phone, then, is not important, but the pal’s consciousness is the phone.
Addendum: only add on this is, I would point out that the GOP candidate is indicating that he is in exactly such a primitive society by his statement. Besides, as others have pointed out, he probably has severe sexuality issues. I do not mean by “primitive” necessarily only 3500 years ago, but primitive as in “a primitive furniture set” or “a primitive … car design”. eg, basic, “unevolved” sort of concept. He probably would also fuck up cooking pork or shellfish.
The way I see it, I can look at the Bible as a very interesting longitudinal exploration of the development of a culture’s beliefs - in that sense, I agree with you that the prohibitions from unusual sexual relationships had a purpose. The other prohibitions in that chapter are not talking about a specific kind of sex, but rather inappropriate sexual relationships - close family members and their sexual partners, the family members of your sexual partner, other people’s sexual partners, men as a man, animals. They’re social and have nothing to do with the type of sex. It’s not covered, but presumably having sex with adopted siblings would also not be acceptable - the risk of congenital illnesses may be one of the reasons for the prohibition, but it’s a social taboo rather than just a health concern. The same would go for foods, responses to plague etc. While extreme responses to skin diseases and house mould, non-normative sex and foods that are more open to germs would have a noticeably positive result, this was at least as much about purity, holiness (i.e. separation) and ritual as anything else.
Which is an interesting point: if we were to go back 3,500 years ago and try to encourage safe city living without tampering with the technological development too much, purity culture is a fairly effective way of doing it without going into germ theory. Morally it’s very problematic in a number of ways and it seems to be strongly tied to a patriarchal system, but hey - the survival rate is probably better and this is literally described as the period where the Israelites went from being nomadic tribes to city dwellers with the ability to raise taxes and armies, along with a number of other advances in cultural development. The question is whether it makes more sense to say that an external entity (God, aliens etc.) gave them this purity concept, or whether it occurred organically at the time that people started to settle in larger groups, based only on experience and borrowings from other cultures (which we know did happen). The second seems pretty logical to me, but it has the side effect that we are looking at the fascinating development of a civilisation, not the development of God’s grand plan for humanity. We can still learn some things from sacred writings, but we don’t have to look at the prohibition from gay sex and say that it was good. Likewise, the backstreet abortion trial by ordeal in the case of a husband’s jealousy without evidence, extreme exceptionalism and annihilation of all Canaanites made sense from the perspective of purity culture, but they were never good and if Moses was actually repeating God’s words rather than making things up, the unchanging and omniscient god whose words are the basis for multiple religions is not a good god.
An interesting modern parallel to this is Chinese ritual for pregnant women (which my wife had to deal with). While this page gives some examples, in our area (NE China) the woman and baby should not wash for the first month and practically nobody gets to visit for the first 100 days. It makes sense if you consider how cold it is up there and how there may not have been a lot of access to hot water or ways to control disease a few generations ago. With the loss of blood and other risks, the mortality rate would have been pretty high. Nowadays though, a lot of these precautions are excessive.
You mention that the law was given so that people would believe. What should they believe and why is this necessary? Who gave the law? If it was humans speaking from their own experience, then I agree - but that does undermine a lot of religious belief in the law as God’s Law. I agree about Sodom, BTW (why would God want to destroy two cities for a crime that hadn’t happened yet? This probably apocryphal narrative seems to me to be a better reason), but the parallel between that passage and this one make me suspect that the writer saw same-sex rape as a lot worse than the rape of women (other rape laws seem to address it as a property crime against men, and there is no prohibition against rape in the ten commandments). A lot of Bible stories are about parallels and chiastic structures though - in this case Lot offering his daughters to be raped has a parallel with them raping him after their escape from Sodom.
TL;DR There may well be clear reasons for the prohibition from same sex relationships in the Bible, but this is a more naturalistic explanation and the moral system doesn’t carry over well into modern ethics - whether you take the stories metaphorically or not.
Well, the “Apostle Paul” noted that this was “written on everyone’s hearts”. And to prove this he showed how people in other societies (Rome, for instance), operated “as if” they also knew the Law.
At the time, Paul took this as a mystical, magical thing. How could he do otherwise. Now we can look at many of these processes and understand them much better. There is DNA. There are a vast array of chemicals used in social interactions, which at least partially, dictate common human behavior at an “instinctual” level.
Higher entity or not, we can look at the Law (which was more like 5500 years ago, not 3500 as I erroneously said before), And come to a conclusion that “something like this happened”. Whoever wrote it, we can take as being Egyptian, which was a very advanced civilization at the time. We can also take that they knew how to write very well. And that they were studied not just in Egyptian works, but also foreign works, such as the similar Hammurabi’s code, and so on.
The higher entity problem I mention from a science fiction level, where it could be “God”, in quotes, aliens, sure, but also other factors like some manner of collective unconscious. Very much of our behavior and language is regulated by processes we are entirely unconscious of. But at the science fiction level, “what if a civilization was so alien that their world and social structure including ‘morality’ was vastly different then our own, how could they possibly communicate with us, and what would those problems be”. It is a linguistical problem, and I have concluded that they would - like the angels in Dr Who - best communicate through the consciousness of someone else… not unlike as we today might communicate through a phone or IM client. [Or how, for instance, if we move into foreign cultures or deal with them, we do best when we have someone who can speak at least somewhat for us to others as well as guide us about.]
In terms of the problem like “should we consider these things to be invariably true in a very static definition of what they mean”, that is another problem. That is getting into religion where terms are just too wildly defined, and probably neither of us wants to go there. However, what is also equally defined is much more equitable: that we human beings have the capacity for reasoning and by reasoning can rise above instinctual urges. That we can handle complex situations and complex problems in highly dynamic environments. So, for instance, we can go to a restaurant and eat pork or shellfish without getting sick, based on a large variety of reasonable factors. (Is the restaurant clean, has the restaurant a history of giving people botulism, etc, etc.)
“Higher entity” wise or not, I also would add that the law actually says a reason for it is so other people will see the wisdom of it and be sold onto it. That is something the Moses figure would very likely understand, having dealt with many such powerful texts from his own civilization and others.
From many standpoints the book is very interesting if one considers it in that manner. It is really incredibly ancient, and yet survived in very vivid manner. And it did propagate. It is extremely “viral” and it can be noted it “went viral” in an exceedingly deep way into a vast number of peoples.
All that said, however, the question I am more interested in is the “what if” scenario. I think in first world and other countries of sufficient advancement there is a very reasonable conclusion that “this sort of way” is how it should be seen. And that taking things “too literally” is extremely dangerous to a person and their society. I would condemn it if it did not actually say that in there, but it most surely does say that in there. I would also condemn it if I felt people had some excuse to not behave in such a way, as if the concept of reasoning was absent from them, but that, clearly, is not the case. People know better yet do it anyway.
On influence, I would only also note, that “yes”, I believe that societies have certain trends, and come to certain shared conclusions, even as they become more complex. And those specific writings are working exactly from that level advancement, as we can tell from how we see “this manner of behavior or something like it” not so much among small tribes, but very much among closer to “urban” civilizations.
Yes, of course…
One example I like from Chinese culture is the tradition of women altering their foot to make it appear smaller. Now we have studies that show feet size is actually an extremely good indicator for such things as estrogen levels and likeliness of fertility.
I do not think it is very useful to think in that way, as this way is already so well thought out and often comes to the same conclusions. But, if you step back and consider it more along the lines of a very sophisticated communicational system designed for sustainability, self-survival, and deepness then it can show some very interesting attributes about it.
Richard Dawkins actually also recognized this and really hated it for it. (Albeit, I have not read his books directly on those subjects, but like anyone online, of course, have picked up a lot of the concepts of memes, viral information propagation and etc.)
I do, personally, believe in “the above”, but again, I prefer to not get into such conversations because the terminology is so deeply entrenched in people’s minds and my definitions are so vastly different. I am also evidence based, and I view my situation not unlike someone in some fictional show where they are well aware that people outside of their evidence areas would treat matters you deal with as preposterous. Of course they would, they have not seen what you have seen.
For instance, MiB, Supernatural, Sleepy Hollow, the Matrix, etc, etc. The list is actually very long, and in almost any of these cinematic depictions there are going to be characters from the outside brought in. They usually have a moment of “oh wow, really” and then quickly adapt.
That is not how things work in real life. It is profoundly traumatic and disorienting. The closest I have seen to this being accurately depicted was probably in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys where the main character shifted realities and had, as a result, an extremely difficult time of it. He was not sure which reality to doubt, and that on a very severe level.
As they say “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs”.
I also deal with this online, as for some quarters I have an extraordinary work history. But, that is simple enough to prove. Though in the remote social quarters where it is considered very extraordinary, the claim becomes even more extraordinary… and I have seen many puzzling actions of disbelief even on such everyday of a matter.
“Funny mentalists” would not buy that (even though this is in “their” own book they claim to believe), but one thing to consider is that they are very much a minority. Yet, because they are the loudest, people often (online anyway) equate them to being - as if magically - the majority. Far from true.
Post Thoughts:
BTW, the various rules and regulations around about fidelity to God, I think can be considered as central to the overall power of the communication. One thing to consider here is that religion is a hallmark of such societies, and they did worship all manner of deities. That is an entirely different subject, but I would not I believe it can be studied in terms of “how did this block of communication work” manner completely separate from literal belief.
In meme terms, such things were essential to preserving the book and the culture its’ self which was created from it had it deeply embedded in their social consciousness which, one could argue, was a major component to its’ propagation.
