[ExI] sex again

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Dec 13, 2019, at 12:38 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> I see in the sports section where an ice skater is accused of sending a picture of his penis to an underage girl.
> 
> We have gotten to where we think that this can scar the girl for life and the guy needs to go to prison.
> 
> Is this a bit nuts?  (p.i.).  What if the girl had been raised in a home where the adults and children are nudists.? What would the girl say to the email photo?  Maybe 'Yeah, that's one looks like all right.  So what's the big deal?
> 
> Making love is obscene.  Photos of people having sex are so classified.  Is this nuts?
> 
> Well, this is what you get when you have a repressive society that is hung up on sex.  Why are they hung up?  because their parents were and so on back to the jungle where wearing animal skins was mandatory.  Or to Eden if you like that story.
> 
> Study after study shows that kids who get rational sex ed have fewer problems  - lower pregnancy rates, lower sexual activity, greater use of pregnancy preventatives if sex occurs, lower sex disease rates, lower anxiety rates,and so on.  Yet we refuse in many states to have sex ed at any level.  Some in biology but no showing of genitals, esp. erect ones.  Result - unbelievable sexual ignorance which I documented when I taught a college course in human sexual behavior.
> 
> Now I realize that humans are not very rational, but facts are facts and if people want fewer sex problems in society there are clear answers which, apparently no one wants to implement.

It’s not news to say that there are definitely social taboos around sex that seem more relics than sensible heuristics. Interesting thing I’ve heard about primates, which I’ve yet to follow up on: they tend to display genitalia as opposed to most (or all?) other mammalian orders.

> side note on gender - the sad facts are that people who go for the full operation to another sex are rarely happy with it.  They were psychologically messed up (new trendy term) before and after.  They did not need another sex. They needed therapy.  Which they got but did not work well for them.  The operation created a new identity of sorts which placed them in a group that has a lot more bias against them than the group there were in before.  So, additional problems.  And some will change back and be unhappy with that.  

Do you have evidence to back this claim? I’m not being snarky here, but trying to understand how you came to that folks undergoing such surgery are “rarely Happy with it.” Almost everything I’ve read on the subject leads me to believe that that’s not the case.

> So what's next?  Choosing your race?  Your species?

The thing is again trans people don’t usually experience this as a matter of choice — in the same way that people don’t experience their sexual orientation as a matter of choice. Now you might distinguish between identification or feelings and display/performance and say the latter is chosen — as in someone might identify or feel they are X, but not perform X in a social setting. An example is a gay who’s in the closet and might even go further to display as straight. But that’s almost entirely because of social stigma or other things like internalizing a social role.

Race is also socially constructed and so is ethnicity to a large extent. It’s not entirely surprising that some people feel more comfortable or identity with a race that would differ from their other family members. (Sometimes the driver here is avoiding an inferior social position or persecution. But there are also cases of people simply more identifying with a race other than the one their family history or legal authorities would apply to them. Surely, not all of these folks are either suffering mental issues or simply being arbitrary.)

Regards,

Dan
   Sample my Kindle books at:
http://author.to/DanUst
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