scientism comments on Transsexuals and otherkin - Less Wrong
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The wording here is strange and overcomplicated, and I think you're stacking the deck. In common usage, a man is called homosexual if he is interested in taking men to bed and uninterested in taking women to bed. Why is that an extraordinary claim, and why would it require evidence beyond the say-so of the man in question?
I'm discussing the concept of a "sexual orientation", the mental model of which is a mechanism of attraction within individuals that can be either for the opposite sex or the same sex but is essentially the same thing, and juxtaposing it with what I believe to be the more accurate account that homosexuality falls on a continuum that includes various fetishisms. The problem is that political acceptance of homosexuality has become almost completely (and needlessly) aligned with a particular mental model of how homosexuality functions and it's therefore difficult to talk about it without sounding like you're on the wrong side of the politics. But essentially I'm saying that the mechanism underlying same-sex attraction is potentially not at all similar to the mechanism underlying opposite sex attraction.
You might be right that there are important differences between the attraction that a typical gay man feels for a man and the attraction that a typical straight man feels for a woman. Certainly there are important cultural differences. But the claim, from a man, "I feel about men the way most men feel about women" is far more innocuous than your contrary idea that he feels about men the way some men feel about feet, or rubber.
Most gay men after all report feelings of romantic love for other men. A fetishist who claims his object or activity of erotic focus is something more than an entertaining sex fantasy is much more rare, or so I think. Also note that there is something obviously culturally contingent about many famous fetishes, while men who take men to bed have existed in thousands of cultural contexts across thousands of years.
The scientific understanding of fetishism is even poorer than the scientific understanding of sexual orientation. By positing a "continuum of fetishism" you're already on dubious ground, whether or not we would go on to accept that homosexuality falls on that continuum.
BDSM is often spoken of by practitioners as being integral to their identity and to the emotional content of their romantic relationships.
Eric Raymond has a good discussion here of just how culturally contingent models of homosexuality are. He analyses four "types" of homosexual behavior:
He goes on to say that for male homosexuality acceptance of the "romantic homosexuality" type is the exception, and by exception he means that
"Models" of heterosexuality are also culturally contingent.
The essay is interesting but not altogether convincing. Socrates would not recognize pederasty as a category distinct from romantic homosexuality, as the author does.
Not in the sense that Eric uses the term. In particular, he wouldn't consider consensual homosexual relations between people of comparable ages in any way normal.
Your wording was ambiguous.