For Your Enjoyment: Too Drunk to F*ck

So, like just about everyone, I’ve had my fantasies of musical competence, even of musical creativity. Sometimes I’ve even fantasized about being so good people might drop a looney or two in a bucket set up by the front door of a café where I’m playing. In my absolute wildest dreams, I’ve even managed to convince a few gullible people who can actually play real music to make me a part of their band, and then have people show up to drop a looney in the bucket to see my band play.

But unlike most of the people that I know, I don’t have fantasies of playing rock and roll. Unlike a significant minority of people I know, I also don’t fantasize about playing orchestra or symphonic music. No, I (futilely) aspire to something much different.

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Modeling Gender & Sex Without a False Middle

There have been many attempts to create a model that simplifies gender, sex, and sexuality enough to easily communicate important concepts without either simplifying it so much that the concepts are lost altogether. Now that we know something about social models, let’s look at a model I shared some time back on Pharyngula’s (now obsolete) Thunderdome.

The model came up in response to the suggestion of the Genderbread Person as a teaching model. As I noted then in other words, the metaphor is not the concept, so all models will fail to communicate some aspects important to a concept. The question is whether there is a better metaphor available. As a teacher or someone attempting to articulate a concept, the responsibility is still on you to know the limits of the metaphor and be able to address questions, ambiguities, and extensions. If you aren’t aware of a metaphor’s limits and able to address them longhand, using any model is risky. If you are, any model is adequate, but the models that minimize those longhand conversations are better than ones that only somewhat reduce them.

It’s with this in mind that (many years ago) I abandoned the Genderbread Person and adopted a different model, one that permits a shorthand visual model to combat multiple myths at the same time.

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