So Many Labels!

Person A (on a message board):

What exactly is your sexual orientation?


Person J (i.e., about nine replies down):
...apparently I need a Wikipedia page and a science degree to know for sure? No offense meant, but I had no idea of all these labels and what they mean.

Is this helpful? To have all the labels so people can put themselves in boxes? Or on a scale? I guess it is or people wouldn't do it. I know I'm completely naive so would anyone care to venture why? To identify with others?





I think that for the majority of people, all such labels are unnecessary. That's because the majority of people have a majority orientation, and there's absolutely 100% nothing wrong with failing to deviate from what's typical, there really isn't! :) And labels exist for the purpose of differentiating. It sometimes seems unfair to us weirdo deviant atypical folks that mainstream folks get to strut around simply thinking of themselves in an undifferentiated way as "just people, you know, normal people", but I can understand it and I don't think it's oppressive. I don't even think it's oppressive for most of you to go around treating everyone and expecting of everyone that they will be normal in all the ways you are normal, as long as you're willing to be nonjudgmental and adjust accordingly when folks explain "nope, I'm different".

So you want to know why so goddamn many labels and such complexity and never-ending proliferation of categories? That's also a reasonable question.


When you're a mainstream person, you get a pretty unified and consolidated experience about your sex / gender / orientation. Like everyone else who is part of human culture, you get a barrage of messages from other people, messages that are aimed at all people with your kind of body, messages that are pointed to all people with your kind of personality-and-behavior, messages that focus on all people who share your sexual appetite's object of desire, messages that speak to all folks who harbor your general sexual-romantic tastes and expectations, and so on.

What makes this ongoing experience unitary and consolidated is that, for mainstream folks, they don't contradict each other! The messages for folks with a body like yours, for example, say that such people will find people with this other specified bodytype to be sexy and attractive (and you do), that you will have a personality matching a certain description (and, hey, it happens to be mostly true for you), that the sexy attractive people that you're attracted to will tend to have a different set of personality and behavioral characteristics (hmm yeah, pretty much true for you), and that the actual WAY that sex and courtship and attraction and relationship-formation will tend to take place will be according to the following overdone movie script or TV sitcom set of scenarios (yep, watched them, and corny or oversimplified or not yeah they aren't foreign to you). So those messages reinforce each other. They don't prompt a bunch of questioning inside your confused little head.

Not so for some of us outliers, the exceptions to the rule. (And for some of us weirdos, the exceptions to whatever general rule you can make about the exceptions to the rule, and exceptions to whatever generalizations you can make about those folks as well).

Oh baby, things are a snarly mess on our side of the experience-continuum. The messages aimed at people with our type of body describe a personality that is not ours, or perhaps indicate that we'll be attracted to a body-type other than the ones we find attractive, or describe our likely sexual behavioral patterns in ways that completely don't mesh with how things are for us, and so on and so forth. And there are messages we hear specifically about the exceptions and those are generally not good messages either — in part because they tend to be the general consensus not of us about ourselves but of you normal folks and whatever conclusions y'all have reached about the deviant-from-normal folks you've run into or heard about or observed from the outside — and in part because they tend to be prescriptive messages that designate us as wrong, examples of how not to be. We hear those too, and bouncing back away from those as well as bouncing back away from the non-fitting normal messages means we do spend a lot of time contemplating all this shit. Or many of us do at any rate.

Well, guess what? We don't reach a single unified and consolidated "minority opinion" consensus! Instead, first you get a sort of first-tier "voice of the exceptions" and after that's been out there and ingested a bit you get the next tier of dissenting exceptions who AREN'T that way and THEY put out a second set of descriptions of experience and identity and after that's hit the airwaves / magazine covers etc you get another tier and another tier.

It's like one of those statistical graphs where you've got a long tail fading off from the concentrated blob that represents the main trend.

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