Kindness as an expression of... anger?
21/06/18 16:34
This is in response to a Tumblr post: HERE
Posts like this misunderstand what anger and kindness really are, it's actually frightfully common in a lot of circles where people are increasingly talking about dealing with anger and sadness they experience as well as being "kind" to people. Let' me quote the piece (link above) with what I believe to be their thesis statement, this quote is their first full paragraph, I am trying to NOT take it out of context.
"ultimately i think kindness is the most radical thing you can do with your pain and your anger. it’s like, you take everything awful that’s ever been done to you, and you throw it back in the world’s teeth, and you say no, fuck you, i’m not going to take this. you say this is unacceptable. you say that shit stops with me."
So let's talk about what KINDNESS is, at the most basic level it is to be kind. Now I realize that's not a good definition so let's talk about what "kind" is. According to the dictionary (not always the best source but certainly one of the most widely available and understood sources):
1a : of a sympathetic or helpful nature
1b : of a forbearing nature
1c : arising from or characterized by sympathy or forbearance
2: to give pleasure or relief
3: chiefly dialectal : affectionate, loving
Of any of these definitions, the internal spiritual or mental state that precedes the giving of aid or relief, to forbear, to love or be sympathetic… these re all the opposite of hate or anger. The author wants to believe that somehow one can actively hate or be angry and somehow turn that into the exact polar opposite. There appears in the authors mind to be some sort of mental alchemy that can spin anger into kindness. They don't ever start to elaborate on the kind of cognitive dissonance that this would cause. In fact the obvious discrepancy there is why the author says this is "radical" because it goes so far against anger to be kind.
The problem here is that the anger still taints the entire thing here, you can see it in the quote above but let me include more of the original post as well here:
"i’ve seen a number of comments and tags where people feel that they must swallow or repress their anger in order to engage in kindness. that is not at all what i am recommending here. radical kindness is an expression of anger. it is not passive. it is not repressive. it does not require you, in any way, to forgive those that have fucked you up. it does not require you to be quiet.
it just requires that you be kind. viciously. vengefully. you fight back. you plant flowers. give to charity. play games. pet someone’s dog. scream into the dark. paint and write and dance, tell jokes, sing songs, bake cookies. you have been hurt and you don’t have to deny that hurt. you just have to recognize it in other people, and take their hand, and say: no more. enough. fuck this. no more. "
Kindness as a way of FIGHTING is impossible, it misunderstands the point of kindness. Kindness by it's nature is a divine thing in the classical sense. A brief aside for definition of "a divine thing" this comes from Plato mainly, though Socrates obviously had a hand here as well.
That which is divine requires 3 things. First is that you can never have too much of it. Second you cannot run out of it. Third and likely most difficult for people is the you cannot be ambitious about it. Let's take the divine virtue of JUSTICE. One can never have too much justice. However one could have too much policing, one could have too much litigiousness, but not too much justice. Being litigious and being policed are human (mortal) actions and they stray from justice in places, sometimes wildly, sometimes only a bit. The overbearing parent or the one who punishes too harshly could be overstepping Justice but maybe only slightly. That simply removes those actions from being the divine ideal of "just." One can also not run out of justice, there is no end or beginning to it, justice is a virtue that is inexhaustible. Lastly one cannot be ambitious about justice. As people want to use justice as an excuse to persecute people, as they hide behind the specter of justice to steal away liberties, these are human corruptions of the divine idea of justice.
Let's run that again with Kindness. One can never have too much kindness, while we might not always want help with something, having people willing to help us is a good thing. While a person may offer kindness or help or affection more than we need it, the sincere feeling of goodwill and honest kindness is seldom something we can have too much of. There is an exception here that kindness when we feel we are unworthy of it may induce guilt, that very human response to being in the presence of something divine that reminds us of our own mortal failings. But Kindness when we feel guilty is actually one way of overcoming guilt and driving us to be better, more deserving people. One cannot run out of kindness, you cannot run out of goodwill toward people who you feel deserve it. You may be too tired or too angry to engage in kind behavior, you may think a parson undeserving of kindness but your capacity for kindness and love aren't in question. Lastly one cannot be ambitious about being kind. Here is where the problem happens. The original author here is clearly being ambitious about kindness, they are trying to "viciously" be kind. That you "throw it back in the world's teeth." That's not kindness, that is not being forbearing or helpful or loving for the sake of it, that is performing an action that others might see as kind in order to prove something, to show someone up.
When I say that the mindset required for one to be kind excludes this kind of "kindness" that's what I am aiming at. If you are kind to someone, if you help them or ease their hardship that action you take is only kind if you do it because you want to be kind. At the point where you have a mental tallysheet going of how fucking kind you can be so this miserable world sees you as a light in the motherfucking darkness…. You've missed the point.
Now I am reminded of another quote from a guy named Will Durant in his 1926 book "The Story of Philosophy" (I mention that because it is often mis attributed to Aristotle, it is a summation of Aritotle's ideas that Durant gives new words to)
“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather have these because we have acted rightly; these virtues are formed in man by doing his actions; we are we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
Now if we take the having of virtue (Kindness) to mean simply that we have done things that are kind… perhaps we stop being angry and become kind if we continue to do kind things regardless of our purpose for doing them. But until there is a change in our internal self, we are not kind. What I mean is this: while you can perform acts of kindness as a form of rebellion, the outcomes maybe seines kind but you are not kind until your heart changes. If I have a competition with a friend to see who can do more for the homeless community, neither of us are kind. Our actions may be seen by others as kind but our ambition to win strips out the spirit of kindness.
For some people that may be a distinction without meaning. After all if the homeless are helped and the recipient feels like they were treated kindly… who cares? As a practical matter I might prefer people do the right thing for the wrong reason than not do the right thing because they don't "feel" the right way. However in a world where people want to banish the dark from their hearts, people want to feel better, people want to make the world better not just on the surface but better at a deeper spiritual level…. The distinction makes a huge difference.
Posts like this misunderstand what anger and kindness really are, it's actually frightfully common in a lot of circles where people are increasingly talking about dealing with anger and sadness they experience as well as being "kind" to people. Let' me quote the piece (link above) with what I believe to be their thesis statement, this quote is their first full paragraph, I am trying to NOT take it out of context.
"ultimately i think kindness is the most radical thing you can do with your pain and your anger. it’s like, you take everything awful that’s ever been done to you, and you throw it back in the world’s teeth, and you say no, fuck you, i’m not going to take this. you say this is unacceptable. you say that shit stops with me."
So let's talk about what KINDNESS is, at the most basic level it is to be kind. Now I realize that's not a good definition so let's talk about what "kind" is. According to the dictionary (not always the best source but certainly one of the most widely available and understood sources):
1a : of a sympathetic or helpful nature
1b : of a forbearing nature
1c : arising from or characterized by sympathy or forbearance
2: to give pleasure or relief
3: chiefly dialectal : affectionate, loving
Of any of these definitions, the internal spiritual or mental state that precedes the giving of aid or relief, to forbear, to love or be sympathetic… these re all the opposite of hate or anger. The author wants to believe that somehow one can actively hate or be angry and somehow turn that into the exact polar opposite. There appears in the authors mind to be some sort of mental alchemy that can spin anger into kindness. They don't ever start to elaborate on the kind of cognitive dissonance that this would cause. In fact the obvious discrepancy there is why the author says this is "radical" because it goes so far against anger to be kind.
The problem here is that the anger still taints the entire thing here, you can see it in the quote above but let me include more of the original post as well here:
"i’ve seen a number of comments and tags where people feel that they must swallow or repress their anger in order to engage in kindness. that is not at all what i am recommending here. radical kindness is an expression of anger. it is not passive. it is not repressive. it does not require you, in any way, to forgive those that have fucked you up. it does not require you to be quiet.
it just requires that you be kind. viciously. vengefully. you fight back. you plant flowers. give to charity. play games. pet someone’s dog. scream into the dark. paint and write and dance, tell jokes, sing songs, bake cookies. you have been hurt and you don’t have to deny that hurt. you just have to recognize it in other people, and take their hand, and say: no more. enough. fuck this. no more. "
Kindness as a way of FIGHTING is impossible, it misunderstands the point of kindness. Kindness by it's nature is a divine thing in the classical sense. A brief aside for definition of "a divine thing" this comes from Plato mainly, though Socrates obviously had a hand here as well.
That which is divine requires 3 things. First is that you can never have too much of it. Second you cannot run out of it. Third and likely most difficult for people is the you cannot be ambitious about it. Let's take the divine virtue of JUSTICE. One can never have too much justice. However one could have too much policing, one could have too much litigiousness, but not too much justice. Being litigious and being policed are human (mortal) actions and they stray from justice in places, sometimes wildly, sometimes only a bit. The overbearing parent or the one who punishes too harshly could be overstepping Justice but maybe only slightly. That simply removes those actions from being the divine ideal of "just." One can also not run out of justice, there is no end or beginning to it, justice is a virtue that is inexhaustible. Lastly one cannot be ambitious about justice. As people want to use justice as an excuse to persecute people, as they hide behind the specter of justice to steal away liberties, these are human corruptions of the divine idea of justice.
Let's run that again with Kindness. One can never have too much kindness, while we might not always want help with something, having people willing to help us is a good thing. While a person may offer kindness or help or affection more than we need it, the sincere feeling of goodwill and honest kindness is seldom something we can have too much of. There is an exception here that kindness when we feel we are unworthy of it may induce guilt, that very human response to being in the presence of something divine that reminds us of our own mortal failings. But Kindness when we feel guilty is actually one way of overcoming guilt and driving us to be better, more deserving people. One cannot run out of kindness, you cannot run out of goodwill toward people who you feel deserve it. You may be too tired or too angry to engage in kind behavior, you may think a parson undeserving of kindness but your capacity for kindness and love aren't in question. Lastly one cannot be ambitious about being kind. Here is where the problem happens. The original author here is clearly being ambitious about kindness, they are trying to "viciously" be kind. That you "throw it back in the world's teeth." That's not kindness, that is not being forbearing or helpful or loving for the sake of it, that is performing an action that others might see as kind in order to prove something, to show someone up.
When I say that the mindset required for one to be kind excludes this kind of "kindness" that's what I am aiming at. If you are kind to someone, if you help them or ease their hardship that action you take is only kind if you do it because you want to be kind. At the point where you have a mental tallysheet going of how fucking kind you can be so this miserable world sees you as a light in the motherfucking darkness…. You've missed the point.
Now I am reminded of another quote from a guy named Will Durant in his 1926 book "The Story of Philosophy" (I mention that because it is often mis attributed to Aristotle, it is a summation of Aritotle's ideas that Durant gives new words to)
“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather have these because we have acted rightly; these virtues are formed in man by doing his actions; we are we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
Now if we take the having of virtue (Kindness) to mean simply that we have done things that are kind… perhaps we stop being angry and become kind if we continue to do kind things regardless of our purpose for doing them. But until there is a change in our internal self, we are not kind. What I mean is this: while you can perform acts of kindness as a form of rebellion, the outcomes maybe seines kind but you are not kind until your heart changes. If I have a competition with a friend to see who can do more for the homeless community, neither of us are kind. Our actions may be seen by others as kind but our ambition to win strips out the spirit of kindness.
For some people that may be a distinction without meaning. After all if the homeless are helped and the recipient feels like they were treated kindly… who cares? As a practical matter I might prefer people do the right thing for the wrong reason than not do the right thing because they don't "feel" the right way. However in a world where people want to banish the dark from their hearts, people want to feel better, people want to make the world better not just on the surface but better at a deeper spiritual level…. The distinction makes a huge difference.
Definition & Distinction in Sexual Description
21/06/18 15:25
I'm going to offer an idea here, I'm not sure how people will take the idea but I will also offer an immediate defense of this idea based on what I THINK the problems with it might be. Others may have arguments against this idea that I have not foreseen and my characterization of these arguments is not meant to be a complete description of anyone else's point of view. All I can offer is what I expect are the opposing views.
*****. Please understand that I am talking about the creation of specific language here. I do not in any way want to diminish any person's lived experience. Every person has the right to love who they love and have whatever sexual desires they have. This is not meant to in any way reduce the validity of who a person is or to say their experience is inconsequential. This is about how the larger social order uses language to create perception and structures of social order and power. How a person feels or self identifies is absolutely up to them but how we create words and labels is a social process. I am trying to explore the idea that something innately personal, interior to ones self, may be at odds with the systems of socialized naming and control ****
The idea is this. In this day and age of sexual spectrums and definitions for sexuality, romantic attraction, and the associated (though not the same) ideas about gender we may be trying too hard to make these definitions happen. PERHAPS SEXUAL IDENTIFICATION IS TOO PERSONAL FOR SPECIFIC LABELING. I'm going to take a relatively simple example for the sake of argument here but one I feel does an excellent job of describing the difficulty of describing sexuality.
Take for example what seems to be a very baseline term Sexuality. We have now made this into a divided term between Asexuality and Sexuality. In 2008 a term in the middle of those two surfaced for Demisexual. But that term was later subsumed into a middle term called "Gray Asexuality" of course all of these terms are pretty tough for people to really understand. Let's look at the basic wikipedia definitions for each. I use wikipedia here because it is designed to be non academic, accessible but still fact based when possible.
"Asexuality is the lack of sexual attraction to others, or low or absent interest in or desire for sexual activity. It may be considered the lack of a sexual orientation, or one of the variations thereof, alongside heterosexuality, homosexuality and bisexuality. It may also be an umbrella term used to categorize a broader spectrum of various asexual sub-identities."
"Gray asexuality or gray-sexuality (spelled "grey" outside the U.S.) is the spectrum between asexuality and sexuality. Individuals who identify with gray asexuality are referred to as being gray-A, a grace or a gray ace, and make up what is referred to as the "ace umbrella". Within this spectrum are terms such as demisexual, semisexual, asexual-ish and sexual-ish."
So what we seem to describe there is a whole spectrum of space between two extreme polls, someone who has sexual feelings and someone who does not have them. In some ways this opens a whole discussion about things like severity of those feelings or desires, maybe the frequency of those desires, etc. That seems okay at first blush until we realize that most people have very little idea what to do with that wide spectrum. You can find forums all over about people asking for advice on where they fall here. What any human being feels here is a complex of emotional, cultural and physical elements. And yet these are so personal we often see people get very mad about others now labeling someone else.
If this is a complex issue, and if the only acceptable label is a self label… is there a value in labeling? I mean what do we use to understand sexualish, demisexual, semi sexual, asexual-ish and asexual? In that alone we have 5 different terms that essentially mean "Sexually Non-conforming" how is a normal person supposed to understand the minute and subtle variations there?
Let's actually back up a step and look at the definition of "human sexuality"
"Human sexuality is the way people experience and express themselves sexually. This involves biological, erotic, physical, emotional, social, or spiritual feelings and behaviors. Because it is a broad term, which has varied over time, it lacks a precise definition. The biological and physical aspects of sexuality largely concern the human reproductive functions, including the human sexual response cycle. Someone's sexual orientation can influence that person's sexual interest and attraction for another person. Physical and emotional aspects of sexuality include bonds between individuals that are expressed through profound feelings or physical manifestations of love, trust, and care. Social aspects deal with the effects of human society on one's sexuality, while spirituality concerns an individual's spiritual connection with others. Sexuality also affects and is affected by cultural, political, legal, philosophical, moral, ethical, and religious aspects of life.
Interest in sexual activity typically increases when an individual reaches puberty. Opinions differ on the origins of an individual's sexual orientation and sexual behavior. Some argue that sexuality is determined by genetics, while others believe it is molded by the environment, or that both of these factors interact to form the individual's sexual orientation. This pertains to the nature versus nurture debate. In the former, one assumes that the features of a person innately correspond to their natural inheritance, exemplified by drives and instincts; the latter refers to the assumption that the features of a person continue to change throughout their development and nurturing, exemplified by ego ideals and formative identifications."
So someone who is "sexual" already has this complex web of elements that shape and determine their sexuality and sexual drives. Does it really benefit us to continue to discuss and further try to sub divide this down into some arbitrary set of labels for people who simply experience sexual desire differently? Maybe this topic is simply too infinitely complex to really offer us a clear definition? Maybe instead of trying to gather enough people to form a coalition of people which we can then apply a group label to we need to accept that everyone experiences this as a unique individual. That all people are sexual, even if they do not have any sexual desire.
Asexual people talk a lot about erasure. The fact that they are not depicted in media. By their own estimates perhaps 1% of people fall into this spectrum. Now I have no idea how we would calculate that, the sample size for a self reporting study would be enormous. But when people self report how do they do so accurately? In fact I would think that either someone would have a desire for sex of some kind with some type of person to some degree…. Or they would have no desire for it whatsoever. That distinction makes sense, though even then we need to open up "sexual desire" a bit more to understand what we are dealing with. But a dichotomy here seems at least workable.
Everything else however feels… inappropriate.
For example. My parents told me I would know when I met "the one" I've been in a few long term relationships (3+ years) and I have no idea if I have ever met "the one" because I don't know what that feeling is. In fact that's why humans continue to write songs and make movies and poems and everything else about those kinds of relationships. From the pornographic to the victorian romance we have a hugely hard time really outwardly expressing love, sex and romance.
COUNTER ARGUMENT 1:
When we talk about erasure we have a group of people who feel wronged. The reason then that we continue to define people into groups is because when people are united as a group around an idea they have a combined voice and can empower one another. So the drive to define groups is to enable those groups to seek empowerment in society.
MY RESPONSE 1:
Let's continue with the example group. They may take up as much as 1% of the population. If you divide that down into the 5 different sub groups from the wikipedia article you are now at about 0.2% of the population for any one of those groups. That is a large number of people assuming the math is as clean as all that (which it likely isn't, I suspect it's far more complex) but 0.2% of the population is still a HUGE number of people. Assuming the world population is 7.5 Billion then 0.2% of that is 15,000,000. So if we take all the people who fall under any condition of "Non-Sexual" we would have about 75 million people worldwide. That's about the same number of people who play Minecraft. Breaking this down into smaller and smaller groups diminishes the voice fo the group. Trying to create artificial sections among Asexuals seems to actually run counter to offering them a unified voice.
However by further dividing it and making more specific groups it magnifies the strength of the individual's connection to the group and amplifies the sense of victimization at the hands of society. I think in many ways the goal of this continued specificity is to amplify that sense of victimhood and to allow an emotional release for people who feel they have not been heard or listened to about their sexuality (or in this case their lack of sexuality)
COUNTER ARGUMENT 2:
By attempting to limit the description of marginalized people you are enacting a sort of linguistic violence against them, limiting their personal expression. They need to have a label that works for them and makes them feel at ease with their sexuality.
MY RESPONSE 2:
That counter argument is one I hear a lot in discussions like this about sexual orientation and gender. The issue is that if people want to be something like Gray Asexual or Genderfluid they have a unique personal experience. One that no label will ever properly encapsulate. This means that they will absolutely be continually mislabeled or misunderstood because their particular feelings or desires are different enough from any mainstream definition that they need to deal with this not as a label but as a relational issue. While I can absolutely sit down with a person and learn about hem and then come to some (maybe limited) understanding of who they are and how they feel, with labels I simply have a set of preconceptions that have to be large enough to cover a useful percentage of people I meet. This is why people often have a hard time with bisexuality or gender fluidity. The rules they have come to know don't apply here. Bisexuals come in a myriad of flavors, I have a couple of friends who are married…. Both of them are bisexual but they area married hetero couple. That doesn't make them "bad bisexuals" it also doesn't make them heterosexual, but it will confuse the hell out of a LOT of people because they don't know my friends personally. They see a man and woman who are married and assume they are heterosexual.
Erasure and repression in these instances are kinda impossible because showing people the total possible outcomes of all human sexuality is equally impossible. For instance I just watched a show called "Lip Service" from the BBC and most of the main characters are LGBTQIA+ but they are a myriad of different specific people and they all do something in that spectrum differently. They all want who they want and want them how much they want them but they are all different. The show does on occasion talk about bisexuality but they certainly don't come up with 5 different sub categories, because then the whole show would feel very much like checking off boxes for what sub class of what marginalized sexuality each character is. Media, and by extension society, would become this endless morass of mental paperwork to understand the categories and sub categories of human sexuality.
*****. Please understand that I am talking about the creation of specific language here. I do not in any way want to diminish any person's lived experience. Every person has the right to love who they love and have whatever sexual desires they have. This is not meant to in any way reduce the validity of who a person is or to say their experience is inconsequential. This is about how the larger social order uses language to create perception and structures of social order and power. How a person feels or self identifies is absolutely up to them but how we create words and labels is a social process. I am trying to explore the idea that something innately personal, interior to ones self, may be at odds with the systems of socialized naming and control ****
The idea is this. In this day and age of sexual spectrums and definitions for sexuality, romantic attraction, and the associated (though not the same) ideas about gender we may be trying too hard to make these definitions happen. PERHAPS SEXUAL IDENTIFICATION IS TOO PERSONAL FOR SPECIFIC LABELING. I'm going to take a relatively simple example for the sake of argument here but one I feel does an excellent job of describing the difficulty of describing sexuality.
Take for example what seems to be a very baseline term Sexuality. We have now made this into a divided term between Asexuality and Sexuality. In 2008 a term in the middle of those two surfaced for Demisexual. But that term was later subsumed into a middle term called "Gray Asexuality" of course all of these terms are pretty tough for people to really understand. Let's look at the basic wikipedia definitions for each. I use wikipedia here because it is designed to be non academic, accessible but still fact based when possible.
"Asexuality is the lack of sexual attraction to others, or low or absent interest in or desire for sexual activity. It may be considered the lack of a sexual orientation, or one of the variations thereof, alongside heterosexuality, homosexuality and bisexuality. It may also be an umbrella term used to categorize a broader spectrum of various asexual sub-identities."
"Gray asexuality or gray-sexuality (spelled "grey" outside the U.S.) is the spectrum between asexuality and sexuality. Individuals who identify with gray asexuality are referred to as being gray-A, a grace or a gray ace, and make up what is referred to as the "ace umbrella". Within this spectrum are terms such as demisexual, semisexual, asexual-ish and sexual-ish."
So what we seem to describe there is a whole spectrum of space between two extreme polls, someone who has sexual feelings and someone who does not have them. In some ways this opens a whole discussion about things like severity of those feelings or desires, maybe the frequency of those desires, etc. That seems okay at first blush until we realize that most people have very little idea what to do with that wide spectrum. You can find forums all over about people asking for advice on where they fall here. What any human being feels here is a complex of emotional, cultural and physical elements. And yet these are so personal we often see people get very mad about others now labeling someone else.
If this is a complex issue, and if the only acceptable label is a self label… is there a value in labeling? I mean what do we use to understand sexualish, demisexual, semi sexual, asexual-ish and asexual? In that alone we have 5 different terms that essentially mean "Sexually Non-conforming" how is a normal person supposed to understand the minute and subtle variations there?
Let's actually back up a step and look at the definition of "human sexuality"
"Human sexuality is the way people experience and express themselves sexually. This involves biological, erotic, physical, emotional, social, or spiritual feelings and behaviors. Because it is a broad term, which has varied over time, it lacks a precise definition. The biological and physical aspects of sexuality largely concern the human reproductive functions, including the human sexual response cycle. Someone's sexual orientation can influence that person's sexual interest and attraction for another person. Physical and emotional aspects of sexuality include bonds between individuals that are expressed through profound feelings or physical manifestations of love, trust, and care. Social aspects deal with the effects of human society on one's sexuality, while spirituality concerns an individual's spiritual connection with others. Sexuality also affects and is affected by cultural, political, legal, philosophical, moral, ethical, and religious aspects of life.
Interest in sexual activity typically increases when an individual reaches puberty. Opinions differ on the origins of an individual's sexual orientation and sexual behavior. Some argue that sexuality is determined by genetics, while others believe it is molded by the environment, or that both of these factors interact to form the individual's sexual orientation. This pertains to the nature versus nurture debate. In the former, one assumes that the features of a person innately correspond to their natural inheritance, exemplified by drives and instincts; the latter refers to the assumption that the features of a person continue to change throughout their development and nurturing, exemplified by ego ideals and formative identifications."
So someone who is "sexual" already has this complex web of elements that shape and determine their sexuality and sexual drives. Does it really benefit us to continue to discuss and further try to sub divide this down into some arbitrary set of labels for people who simply experience sexual desire differently? Maybe this topic is simply too infinitely complex to really offer us a clear definition? Maybe instead of trying to gather enough people to form a coalition of people which we can then apply a group label to we need to accept that everyone experiences this as a unique individual. That all people are sexual, even if they do not have any sexual desire.
Asexual people talk a lot about erasure. The fact that they are not depicted in media. By their own estimates perhaps 1% of people fall into this spectrum. Now I have no idea how we would calculate that, the sample size for a self reporting study would be enormous. But when people self report how do they do so accurately? In fact I would think that either someone would have a desire for sex of some kind with some type of person to some degree…. Or they would have no desire for it whatsoever. That distinction makes sense, though even then we need to open up "sexual desire" a bit more to understand what we are dealing with. But a dichotomy here seems at least workable.
Everything else however feels… inappropriate.
For example. My parents told me I would know when I met "the one" I've been in a few long term relationships (3+ years) and I have no idea if I have ever met "the one" because I don't know what that feeling is. In fact that's why humans continue to write songs and make movies and poems and everything else about those kinds of relationships. From the pornographic to the victorian romance we have a hugely hard time really outwardly expressing love, sex and romance.
COUNTER ARGUMENT 1:
When we talk about erasure we have a group of people who feel wronged. The reason then that we continue to define people into groups is because when people are united as a group around an idea they have a combined voice and can empower one another. So the drive to define groups is to enable those groups to seek empowerment in society.
MY RESPONSE 1:
Let's continue with the example group. They may take up as much as 1% of the population. If you divide that down into the 5 different sub groups from the wikipedia article you are now at about 0.2% of the population for any one of those groups. That is a large number of people assuming the math is as clean as all that (which it likely isn't, I suspect it's far more complex) but 0.2% of the population is still a HUGE number of people. Assuming the world population is 7.5 Billion then 0.2% of that is 15,000,000. So if we take all the people who fall under any condition of "Non-Sexual" we would have about 75 million people worldwide. That's about the same number of people who play Minecraft. Breaking this down into smaller and smaller groups diminishes the voice fo the group. Trying to create artificial sections among Asexuals seems to actually run counter to offering them a unified voice.
However by further dividing it and making more specific groups it magnifies the strength of the individual's connection to the group and amplifies the sense of victimization at the hands of society. I think in many ways the goal of this continued specificity is to amplify that sense of victimhood and to allow an emotional release for people who feel they have not been heard or listened to about their sexuality (or in this case their lack of sexuality)
COUNTER ARGUMENT 2:
By attempting to limit the description of marginalized people you are enacting a sort of linguistic violence against them, limiting their personal expression. They need to have a label that works for them and makes them feel at ease with their sexuality.
MY RESPONSE 2:
That counter argument is one I hear a lot in discussions like this about sexual orientation and gender. The issue is that if people want to be something like Gray Asexual or Genderfluid they have a unique personal experience. One that no label will ever properly encapsulate. This means that they will absolutely be continually mislabeled or misunderstood because their particular feelings or desires are different enough from any mainstream definition that they need to deal with this not as a label but as a relational issue. While I can absolutely sit down with a person and learn about hem and then come to some (maybe limited) understanding of who they are and how they feel, with labels I simply have a set of preconceptions that have to be large enough to cover a useful percentage of people I meet. This is why people often have a hard time with bisexuality or gender fluidity. The rules they have come to know don't apply here. Bisexuals come in a myriad of flavors, I have a couple of friends who are married…. Both of them are bisexual but they area married hetero couple. That doesn't make them "bad bisexuals" it also doesn't make them heterosexual, but it will confuse the hell out of a LOT of people because they don't know my friends personally. They see a man and woman who are married and assume they are heterosexual.
Erasure and repression in these instances are kinda impossible because showing people the total possible outcomes of all human sexuality is equally impossible. For instance I just watched a show called "Lip Service" from the BBC and most of the main characters are LGBTQIA+ but they are a myriad of different specific people and they all do something in that spectrum differently. They all want who they want and want them how much they want them but they are all different. The show does on occasion talk about bisexuality but they certainly don't come up with 5 different sub categories, because then the whole show would feel very much like checking off boxes for what sub class of what marginalized sexuality each character is. Media, and by extension society, would become this endless morass of mental paperwork to understand the categories and sub categories of human sexuality.