My issues with queer-positive Christianity

In the recent discussion of antitheism, Alex Gabriel brought up his personal experience as a queer atheist:

I keep hearing from believers who take great pains to convince me they don’t hate gay people. Jesus never said anything about it, they tell me, and scripture has been misinterpreted, and the real sinners are homophobes, so for heaven’s sake let that be the end of it. I find that conversation hard, mainly because it never feels like it’s meant to be a conversation. I get the sense I’m expected to nod and sympathise, that my role in the discussion is to validate their feelings, not say what I actually think. It’s as if only part of me gets invited to speak: I’m allowed to oppose religious homophobia as a queer person, but not to critique religion in other forms as a queer atheist. I’m not being asked to participate in a dialogue—just to tell Christians what they want to hear.

As a queer atheist, this is an experience I share. And this is worth ranting about.

A Catholic story

In high school, one of my best friends was gay. I didn’t have the slightest clue about it. I didn’t find out until several years later. He knew it himself, but he didn’t tell people, because my high school was Catholic. Instead, he only told his Catholic parents, and apparently they did not take it well.
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How to actually avoid generalizations

“Don’t make assumptions.” “Criticize the idea, not the person.” “Avoid generalizations.”

These are a few common rules about polite conversation. But they are broken so systematically that it raises the question of whether the rules are any good. One may vocally oppose generalizations, and in the next breath make a sweeping generalization of their own.

It seems that when someone else makes assumptions or generalizations, we hate it. But when we ourselves have the opportunity, we suddenly remember that assumptions and generalizations have some redeeming value after all. And when we next hear someone else make a generalization, we again forget what that value was.

I assert that the value of a generalization is quite simple. People like to state opinions, they like to hear opinions, and they like to use them to inform behavior. They also like to consider opinions and even disagree with them. And if the opinion is stronger by way of generalization, then all the better.

The question for me is not why we like generalizations, but why some generalizations turn out so wrong. What is the source of our aversion? And how can we avoid the kind of generalizations that produce such negative reactions?
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Japanese “herbivore men” hold a mirror to our culture

This is a repost of an article from 2013. There were a lot of comments on this one, probably because it upset MRAs.  To MRAs I say, cry more.

Herbivore men briefly explained

The Japanese subculture of “herbivore men” seems to hit the news every so often.  Here is a recent example in the Guardian: Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex?  What exactly is going on over there?

I’m no expert in Japanese culture, but my coblogger on The Asexual Agenda, Queenie, is an expert.*  I will defer to what she’s written about herbivore men.  My summary: In Japan, men are expected to be “carnivores”, aggressively pursuing relationships with women.  But many men in metropolitan areas have become “herbivores”, being less assertive in relationships, more sensitive, and even willing to be friends with women (in Japan this is a big deal).  And there’s probably other stuff as well, like their attitude towards money, jobs, and fashion.  Women of course are expected to be herbivores to begin with, although there is also talk of carnivore women.

*She’s actually an expert in Japanese religion, but close enough.

In Japan, herbivore men are sometimes the subject of moral panic because they’re not forming relationships, are defying Japanese gender roles, and may be contributing to the declining birth rate.  Cry me a river I say.  People aren’t obligated to make babies just to uphold the national birth rate, and if Japanese people really wanted population growth so badly they could try being less racist and accept more immigrants.

In the English speaking world, the reaction to herbivore men is… different.  Sometimes, the reactions really say more about our own culture than about Japanese culture.

Here I will briefly show the reactions coming from three different groups: mainstream news, asexuals, and men’s rights activists. [Read more…]

Ace webcomics you should read

Today’s the last day of Asexual Awareness Week.  I don’t do many things for AAW, except this survey thing.  There’s a sample of AAW activities in this linkspam.

But today, I have a small bonus: webcomics with ace characters.  Although ace characters in fiction are in general quite sparse, webcomics have been an exception.  There are more webcomics with ace characters than I can keep track of!  This is great for me, because I am occasionally picky.

For a more complete list of webcomics with ace characters (including much more obscure examples), I recommend the LGBT webcomics list.  To avoid “archive binge”, I use Comic Rocket to bookmark pages and generate custom RSS feeds.

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Why isn’t homosexuality (or religion) a mental disorder?

In a comment discussion last month, we touched on the question of whether religion could ever be considered a mental disorder. This is a common idea among atheists, sometimes expressed as a joke, or sometimes claimed seriously. I am not mentally ill, so I would defer to other people to explain why it is wrong to compare religion and mental illness even as a joke. Here I will ignore the jokes and consider only the serious question: Why isn’t religion a mental disorder?

According to the DSM-5,

A mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual’ s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning. Mental disorders are usually associated with significant distress or disability in social, occupational or other important activities. An expectable or culturally approved response to a common stressor or loss, such as the death of a loved one, is not a mental disorder. Socially deviant behavior (e.g., political, religious, or sexual) and conflicts that are primarily between the individual and society are not mental disorders unless the deviance or conflict results from a dysfunction in the individual, as described above. [emphasis mine]

There you go. Religious behavior isn’t a mental disorder because the DSM-5, an authoritative document, says so. However, you could be forgiven for not taking the DSM’s word for it. Let’s dig deeper.

Look at what else has been excluded from mental disorders: socially deviant sexual behavior. This exclusion arises from a famous controversy, which led to the declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder in the DSM in 1973. And until 1987, homosexuality remained as a mental disorder (“Sexual Orientation Disturbance” and later “Ego-dystonic Homosexuality”) as long as the patient was distressed about their orientation. The architect of these decisions was psychiatrist Robert Spitzer. I believe that Spitzer himself offers the best insight into the definition of mental disorders.

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What is a safe space?

Last month, a lot of discussion was prompted by a statement by the dean of University of Chicago opposing censorship, trigger warnings, and safe spaces. I’ve already briefly argued that the inclusion of trigger warnings is completely off-base. The inclusion of safe spaces is harder to judge. “Safe space” means a lot of things to different people, and I just have no idea what the dean thought he was criticizing.

Safe spaces under different names

In my personal experience, “safe space” is most frequently used as a description of queer student group meetings or conferences. Basically, we intentionally build an environment where people feel more comfortable sharing their experiences. This means starting meetings with an explicit agreement of confidentiality, as well as other agreements designed to head off conflict. Often these agreements have cutesy names, like “Step up, step back”, “One mic, one diva”, “Use ‘I’ statements”, “Don’t yuck my yum”, and “Ouch, oops, educate”, although I think the names might be regional.

I have mixed feelings about the explicit agreements, because they take up time and seem unnecessary. In my experience, atheist student groups also set up safe spaces, but they never call it by that name, nor are there any explicit agreements. Atheist groups also intentionally build an environment where people feel more comfortable being openly critical of religion. Many atheist students act very confident, as if they don’t need a safe space to speak their minds, but when you get to know them better you realize that some of the same students keep it very quiet around their families.
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Regarding consent in nightclubs

Content note: abstract discussion of sexual assault, and by implication rape and CSA.

One of my perpetual complaints about gay nightclubs is that people think it’s okay to grope strangers without getting any permission. However, many people are unwilling to acknowledge this as sexual assault, because they argue that they themselves would enjoy being groped. I think this is besides the point.  Inspired by a recent post by coyote, I’m trying out a new approach (and this is really a way of explaining a model of consent by way of application).

Under conventional models, consent is an expression of permission. A person asks if they can touch me, and if I say “yes” then I’ve consented, and if I say “no” then I haven’t consented. However, sometimes I might only says “yes” because I felt pressured. Or sometimes I might say nothing at all. And so we have multiple fixes to this model, such as “affirmative consent” or “enthusiastic consent”.

Most of these consent models fail to allow for the situation where nobody asked for my consent, but I’m still okay with it. This situation often occurs in nightclubs–people don’t ask for permission to grope, and yet sometimes the people being groped are okay with it.

So here’s a different model of consent: consent is an internal state. If someone is okay with being groped, they are consenting, and if they are not okay with being groped they are not consenting.  Someone may also feel violated after the fact, and this also qualifies as non-consent.
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