quoththeraven

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The world beats the importance of central tendencies into us. It's omnipresent. No additional emphasis is needed unless the point is to marginalize the so-called outliers, which means becoming your own oppressor. By your reasoning, you are advocating for your own marginalization and oppression as a gay man.

It's a way of trying to extract meaning when the person doing it is trying to be on the downlow. It seems a bit cowardly compared to posting in the thread itself, and affects what I think of the person doing it. I don't think it's a bad thing to point it out. It's more information that people can do with what they want.

What's even funnier is that sometimes the smokebomb emoji is used to indicate an opinion about the subject matter (say an act of homophobia) and not the post itself, which is why I dislike the non-standard emojis.

I have no thoughts beyond "that person has a weak handshake " because I don't use a handshake to try to draw conclusions about someone's character or personality. A flaccid handshake isn't pleasant, especially if the other person has clammy hands, but I don't read anything into it because it is the absence of something, not the presence of it. On the other hand (haha), if someone crushed my hand or held it for a long time or stroked my arm with his other hand, I would draw conclusions from that. And all of those things are more unpleasant and more intentional than a weak handshake.

There are more so-called outliers than you think. And we've had this argument before, but I think the world should not only accommodate the so-called majority but also be welcoming to outliers like intersex individuals, gay men and disabled individuals (who may be a minority at any given time but over a lifetime more people are disabled than not). That's what respecting human dignity means. Societies are only as good as their treatment of the powerless. None of us is free until all of us are free. And I don't see how respect and treating people equally (which certainly doesn't mean liking them all equally) in any way hurts or harms the so-called majority.

"Overanalyzing" = "stop trying to drag science into this"

What if that's their response to homophobia? Perhaps rather than adopt heterosexual standards we would all be better off by acting like ourselves and not elevating one group above another. If "true alpha males" don't make an issue of their masculinity because "they have long had their masculine status affirmed n reinforced," wouldn't we be better off if we affirmed and reinforced the masculine status of all men, or (my personal preference) stopped caring about it? Otherwise we have a world that worships a few men and tears down everyone else.

And that's why you feel the need to diss other people with your passive-aggressive use of response emojis, including to strictly factual posts based on actual science, rather than taking the time to respond? What a great sense of security you have! Like what you like, but don't puff your chest out and act like what you like is inevitable or superior, which is what this whole charade about manliness is. That, and the "science" and assumptions behind it, is what is being criticized.

But both are present in healthy, supposedly "normal" men and women. The difference is the relative concentration. Neither is a male or female only hormone. Whether they change more than physical characteristics is impossible to know. Also, transsexual is now only used to refer to people who have had surgery, particularly bottom surgery. People who identify as a different gender than they were assigned at birth are transgender.

It's a disingenuous question.

We want the tax burden shifted to those who can best pay. That's not the same as being opposed to individual taxpayers following the tax law as is, including provisions that may benefit them. Tax lawyers are for structuring transactions and tax defense and litigation. In most circumstances use of an accountant who is experienced in tax preparation is all that's necessary and consulting an attorney would be overkill.

For those of you unfamiliar with Chuck Tingle, here's an interview with him, or more accurately someone claiming to be him: https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast/206-proving-love-interview-dr-chuck-tingle/ A detailed review of one of his books: https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/reviews/oppressed-butt-inclusive-holiday-cups-chuck-tingle/

Except this whole thread was started as an opportunity for people to show their disdain for effeminacy.

I'm more intrigued by your need to make your skepticism public than by @LeonTrotsky posting a link to his Adam4Adam profile. One is someone sharing something and the other is someone minimizing it. One is friendly in approach and the other is hostile. I don't know, nor much care, in what circumstances he allegedly called you a loser, but someone pissing on someone else sharing a profile link outside of a post in the Deli questioning someone's professional bona fides sure doesn't sound to me like a winner. P.S. I get the same error message too but I'm not sure if it's because I'm using a tablet or because I'm not an Adam4Adam member.

I disagree that what are labeled "masculine" and "feminine" accurately describe anything other than social assumptions. I actually think there may be innate, though highly exaggerated, average differences other than the physical ones (male-gendered bodies have a higher ratio of testosterone to estrogen and progesterone and as a result greater upper arm strength and ability to form muscle and therefore are slightly faster, stronger and taller on average), but there's no scientifically valid way of proving that short of completely reversing our attitudes about gender. If we believed gender wasn't relevant to anything other than the bare minimum physical differences and acted that way, but statistically significant differences at the population level persisted, that would be proof of something innate. Everything else is just noise.

But what are masculine and feminine are culture-specific, so I don't know what this will prove.

I'm sorry, you're going to cite the animal kingdom as authority for human beings? That cuts both ways. Male emperor penguins hatch chicks while female emperor penguins are off gorging themselves, but oddly enough they don't get cited as authority for human behavior. Leaving aside the inadvisability of analogizing to other animals (remember alpha males? that term comes from research on wolves that has been debunked and discarded), there is no way to tell what traits and behaviors are innate and which are socially imposed because social conditioning starts at birth and no one is free of it. Furthermore, conditioning modifies biology, so (for instance) finding gender-related differences in brain scans is meaningless because they could be a result of conditioning. This is something even those arguing for egalitarian/gender neutral treatment get hoodwinked by; those so-called "genetic differences" in, say, gay men may be a response to being gay rather than a cause. Furthermore, there is as much or more variation within groups as there is between them, and even differences that have been documented (and could be caused by conditioning rather than being immutable), like differences in spatial ability, are less pronounced than they are perceived to be. Only removing group-based conditioning altogether can even approach an answer to whether and what differences are innate. Funnily enough, the people who are the most devout believers in innate differences never suggest this. Instead they dismiss any talk about the effect of social conditioning as nonsense. Besides embracing the logical fallacy of thinking that a description of the way things are is a prescription for the way things must be, that suggests that there is in fact a political agenda at the bottom resistant to the reality that we are all a mixture of traits we have deemed male and female.

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I'm fine with not being brainwashed into thinking there's only one way to be authentically male or female. Even at the biological level, sex and gender are a spectrum, not binary. For examples, see https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/stop-using-phony-science-to-justify-transphobia/.

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Wow. So what would a bunch of women playing softball be? Men? What about a bunch of average Joes playing baseball? Are they not men, or lesser men than professional athletes? I don't think the word "masculinity" can bear the weight you're giving it.

If homosexuality is considered a deviation from "normal" masculinity, then it makes sense to either exaggerate the difference (camp, "swishiness", use of feminized terms, etc.) or to embrace hypermasculinity (Tom of Finland, uber muscled types). It's also possible to ignore heteronormative standards altogether and just be natural, whatever that is and wherever it lands on the current "masculine/feminine" spectrum. In the former case, homosexuality becomes defined in terms of its relationship to heterosexual norms, which is why it gets labeled "internalized homophobia." That may also be why some of this behavior is identified as artificial; however, the embrace of buffness and steroids is functionally equally artificial but isn't perceived that way because it fits widely-held stereotypes and beliefs as to what is "naturally masculine." Also people who want their preferences respected should expect pushback when they express them as absolutes that don't respect other people's preferences.

What's intrinsically bad is having a standard, because then natural variance is considered deviant. Kind of like how homosexuality has been viewed as deviant rather than a regularly occurring variation.