| The
original posting: Sexual attraction is
shaped conciously by our mind through experience,
preference and social conditioning of what is sexually
desirable, but sexual magnetism is driven by chemical
secretions generated from the frontal lobe cortex which
controls sexual arousal and sexuality. Therefore sexual
racism can not exist. There is only sexual discernment,
which we are all entitled to. Sexual discernment is
evident when our preferences(ie "I like waxed arses")
are motivated by sexual practices (ie "I like waxed
arses because I love to rim"). There is a rational
thought process that links physical attraction with
certain sex acts. That's fine. But racism only occurs
when sexual attraction is only aroused through misheld
beliefs and stereotypes (ie "I only have sex with
Asian/hispanic men because they have smooth arses and I
love to rim." OR "I don't have sex with Asians
because I'm a bottom boy and nips have little dicks.")
Which, of course, is not necessarily true. It is
ignorant to exclude a race out of false beliefs - "
I am not attracted to Asian men because they are
effeminate and bottom". But this isn't sexual racism,
it's just racism. Period. You can't train your synaptic
nerve response in your cerebral cortex to force yourself
to be sexually attracted to a certain racial group...
Funnily enough, most racism felt by young
Asian men in the gay community comes from Asians
themselves. Asian men who have 'white' lovers or life partners
feel superior to Asian men without Anglo lovers or
friends. These Asian men use 'white' Australian lovers as
a status symbol to boost their sexual desireability
amoungst members of their own race or cultural group.
At the end of the day, nobody is going to have sex
with people they are not attracted to. I am not going to
have sex with an Asian guy based on the philosophy of
multicultural inclusion just to improve the Asian mans'
self-esteem. I don't sleep with men out of pity.
A response from timster:
Hi,
Thanks for the opportunity to rebut a bunch of ideas that
I've been thinking about for a while. A bunch of
what you've said is superficially sensible, but I
think you're operating on a set of mistaken
assumptions which I'd like to tease apart.
In fact, proposition by proposition. Let's go!
Sexual attraction is shaped conciously by
our mind through experience, preference and social
conditioning of what is sexually desirable,
Sure, yep. With you so far.
> but sexual magnetism is driven by
chemical secretions generated from the frontal lobe
cortex which controls sexual arousal and sexuality.
Sure. But to separate those as distinct process is to
create a false dichotomy where none exists.
Attraction and arousal are linked. In my view, our
experience plays a role in what arouses us, unless we suffer
from some kind of brain damage. Anyway, carry on...
> Therefore sexual racism can not exist.
There is only sexual discernment, which we are all
entitled to.
Woah, dobbin. How did we get there? There's a few missing
steps in that argument. Because I'm a sweetheart, I'm
going to let you carry on and assume that you'll
pick up the point in a while...
Oh, hang on. Yes, we are all entitled to sexual
discernment. Otherwise we'd be having sex with *everyone*
and what kind of world would that be?! Hmm.
> Sexual discernment is evident when
our preferences(ie "I like waxed arses")
are motivated by sexual practices (ie "I like waxed arses
because I love to rim").
Weird example, but sure.
> There is a rational thought process
that links physical attraction with certain sex acts.
That's fine.
I think the gap I'm seeing is that a tiny amount of our
thinking about sex is conscious and an even smaller
amount is rational. There's a lot more that is based
on "contextual conditioning", certain
sensed patterns cause certain responses - this stuff is learned
through exposure to an environment, but not conscious (or even
consciously accessible) and certainly not rational.
Your whole argument seems to me to be about what is
rational and what is silly, but it's about what is
conscious. The rest you relegate to brain chemistry
(and make it therefore unalterable and unaffected by environment).
But in fact, and there's a wealth of research that agrees
with me (check out Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink"
for a delightfully readable wander through this
stuff), there's a huge middle territory of embodied
cognition that is learned (in that contextual sense),
situated and alterable.
> But racism only occurs when sexual
attraction is only aroused through misheld beliefs
and stereotypes (ie "I only have sex with Asian/hispanic
men because they have smooth arses and I love to rim."
OR "I don't have sex with Asians because I'm a
bottom boy and nips have little dicks.") Which,
of course, is not necessarily true.
Let me rephrase what you said to what I want you to say:
"A person can only be *called* a racist, when
sexual attraction is only aroused through misheld
beliefs and stereotypes". I can agree with that. Calling
someone a racist is a tough call.
But, as the members of this group have slowly led me to
grasp, racism is experienced in situations with no
actual racist present. Racism can be systemic, or
cultural or inadvertent. From the point-of-view of
the person subject to it, it doesn't matter a damn.
Racism can quite happily "occur" in a
situation between two people with no actual racist
in the room. Eerie, but true.
> It is ignorant to exclude a race out of
false beliefs - " I am not attracted to
Asian men because they are effeminate and bottom". But
this isn't sexual racism, it's just racism. Period.
Silly terminology issue. I use "sexual racism"
to refer to situations where racism occurs in a
sexually intimate or romantic situation. Yes, it's
racism, it's also sexual racism. Period.
> You can't train your synaptic nerve
response in your cerebral cortex to force yourself
to be sexually attracted to a certain racial group...
I've had lots of email from and conversations with men
who have, through environmental or experiential
circumstances, found that their sexual taste
broadening from just a focus on their own ethnic group to
gradually encompass men from other places. Sometimes,
guys who've travelled suddenly "noticed"
that Asian guys (for instance) were hot, often by
travelling to somewhere like Cambodia or Vietnam. Then
they return home and suddenly there's all these new
faces on the streets - who'd been there all the time...
I have no idea if they're training their "synaptic
nerve response" or
not, all I know is that desire is something which can
grow to
encompass a greater range. It seems to me that this
situation is
preferable and healthy.
> Funnily enough, most racism felt by
young Asian men in the gay community comes from
Asians themselves. Asian men who have 'white' lovers
or life partners feel superior to Asian men without Anglo lovers
or friends. These Asian men use 'white' Australian lovers
as a status symbol to boost their sexual
desireability amongst members of their own race or
cultural group.
Wow. That's one of those amazingly clueless
generalisations I've heard people made but never
actually saw. Thanks for expanding my experience.
I'm sure you're making that statement based on actual
situations you've seen or had related to you, and I'm
not denying such situations occur or that racism
against a group of people can certainly happen within
that group as well as without it. But, how you can
have the gall to observe that "*most* racism felt by
young Asian men" is... well, anything you
reckon really without being inside that experience
or spending a lot of time very carefully studying it
is... brave and amazingly insensitive, frankly.
From what I hear, racism against Asian folk in Australia
is alive and well both in the broader community and
in the gay community and it manifests in lots of
ways both overt and subtle, personal and systemic
and cultural, deliberate and inadvertent. To dismiss the reality
of that experience as irrelevant and claim that racism is primarily
perpetrated by Asian men on Asian men might give you comfort,
but it does little to change the reality of people's
actual lives for the better.
At the end of the day, nobody is going to
have sex with people they are not attracted to. I am
not going to have sex with an Asian guy based on the
philosophy of multicultural inclusion just to improve the
Asian mans' self-esteem. I don't sleep with men out of
pity.
I can see how you might infer that that's our position
from what's written on the campaign web page, but
that's not what we're saying. That you can get here
from there reinforces an opinion that's been slowly
forming in my head that the page needs an update to
include more of the points of view on this list and
broader argument about
racism in sexual life and the gay community.
A fact that I think your post neatly illustrates.
Anyone else care to hop in for a go?
Regards
Tim
YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS
(Oct 05)
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