{In my limited experiences as a hetero male} Women identify their breasts as important or not important less by the size of their breasts than by their bodyweight. In this model, women prefer to be skinny, but if they can't reasonably say they are skinny it is better to be "curvy" with big tits than be a pudgeball. So a woman with small tits will still identify herself as curvy (emphasize her breasts) if she's fat, but a woman with large tits will identify as skinny even if she has large breasts. A woman with medium-sized breasts will emphasize or de-emphasize how nice they are based on her body weight, a mostly-unrelated variable.
Guys to the upper left, more athletic than smart, identify as jocks; guys to the lower right of the line, smarter than they are athletic, identify as nerds. But the result is that many guys who identify as nerds aren't actually as smart as guys who identify as jocks. And many guys who identify as nerds are actually a lot stronger than guys who identify as jocks. Which attribute you identify with has less to do with what you have than with what you lack, it's the balance between the two that makes the difference.
So I think, to cite SA on themotte, the best way to figure out if someone identifies as something odd has to do with a need for a quirk to avoid being "basic." So maybe it's like skinny vs curvy, you'd rather be a manly man, but if you can't be manly you'd rather be nonbinary.
the best way to figure out if someone identifies as something odd has to do with a need for a quirk to avoid being "basic."
I think that's the default anti-woke explanation for this kind of behaviour, or as I said in the post itself: "The default explanation among the woke-sceptical is that such people are 'snowflakes': they want to be seen as special and unique, but are hampered in this goal by the critical defect of not actually possessing any special or unique traits. Hence, they dress up their perfectly ordinary traits using language which implies that they are far more unusual than they really are."
What I'm trying to get it with my post is that maybe people aren't just describing themselves as "ambivert", "non-binary" or "grey-asexual" because they don't want to be seen as "basic": perhaps some of the people describing themselves as such are legitimately (and understandably) confused about what the terms in question refer to.
So maybe it's like skinny vs. curvy, you'd rather be a manly man, but if you can't be manly you'd rather be nonbinary.
There's been some recent discussion on this forum about how, prior to coming out, trans women tend not to be exemplars of "peak masculinity" (and vice versa for trans men), so identifying as trans could be thought of as a sort of "you can't fire me, I quit!" response when a person realises that they're losing a game which they were entered into against their will.
I don't dispute this hypothesis, and it certainly jibes with my experience of trans people I know personally. But I don't think this is necessarily true of non-binary people. As I said in the post, if you've been raised in an environment in which even banal and unremarkable instances of gender non-conformity are interpreted as red flags for gender dysphoria, you could be forgiven for believing that only "peak masculine" men are actually men (and vice versa). Whereas twenty years ago we would've said "Alice doesn't wear makeup and likes playing rugby, but she's still a woman - she's not a man, or something other than man or woman."
Or if you've consumed a great deal of porn (which almost exclusively depicts fictional characters with hypersexual/nymphomaniac sex drives), you might come away with the inaccurate impression that the average person is always rearing to go, and hence that your (perfectly normal) level of sex drive is below average - something intermediate between sexual and asexual, when in fact it's nothing of the kind. Hence "grey-asexual". It's the social-justice equivalent of men feeling inferior about the size of their perfectly average dicks because porn has given them a skewed impression of what the average dick looks like.
What I'm trying to get it with my post is that maybe people aren't just describing themselves as "ambivert", "non-binary" or "grey-asexual" because they don't want to be seen as "basic": perhaps some of the people describing themselves as such are legitimately (and understandably) confused about what the terms in question refer to.
Sure, and I think that's a good point, some people will always take the rhetoric too seriously and break the kayfabe. But it's still downstream of feeling that X is something that needs to be labeled about oneself, or that Y is a valid axis on which to build one's identity. There's a lot of groundwork that goes into those assumptions.
It's sort of the Nietzsche-an idea of Achilles acting without thinking to satisfy his desires and labeling that the good, versus the slave morality of overthinking and labeling everything.
I think what you're saying, correct me if I'm wrong, is that Gray-Asexuals aren't acting in bad faith when they do so, they legitimately think that label describes them. What I'm saying is that their need to label it is downstream of their attributes or lacks. I don't think there's anything consciously false about their cope, but it's still a cope. The need for an explanation for their own misery is at the root of their need to explain themselves and identify themselves.
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Notes -
More graphs and ways to think about identity vs distribution of attributes
I'm thinking about breasts, and I think you're missing a more important question than the gaussian distribution.
Shitty sketch graph
{In my limited experiences as a hetero male} Women identify their breasts as important or not important less by the size of their breasts than by their bodyweight. In this model, women prefer to be skinny, but if they can't reasonably say they are skinny it is better to be "curvy" with big tits than be a pudgeball. So a woman with small tits will still identify herself as curvy (emphasize her breasts) if she's fat, but a woman with large tits will identify as skinny even if she has large breasts. A woman with medium-sized breasts will emphasize or de-emphasize how nice they are based on her body weight, a mostly-unrelated variable.
Or consider, guys identifying as Jocks or as Nerds. Second shitty sketch graph
Guys to the upper left, more athletic than smart, identify as jocks; guys to the lower right of the line, smarter than they are athletic, identify as nerds. But the result is that many guys who identify as nerds aren't actually as smart as guys who identify as jocks. And many guys who identify as nerds are actually a lot stronger than guys who identify as jocks. Which attribute you identify with has less to do with what you have than with what you lack, it's the balance between the two that makes the difference.
So I think, to cite SA on themotte, the best way to figure out if someone identifies as something odd has to do with a need for a quirk to avoid being "basic." So maybe it's like skinny vs curvy, you'd rather be a manly man, but if you can't be manly you'd rather be nonbinary.
*The Jalen Hurts joke It's gonna get memed so bad when he starts losing games.
I think that's the default anti-woke explanation for this kind of behaviour, or as I said in the post itself: "The default explanation among the woke-sceptical is that such people are 'snowflakes': they want to be seen as special and unique, but are hampered in this goal by the critical defect of not actually possessing any special or unique traits. Hence, they dress up their perfectly ordinary traits using language which implies that they are far more unusual than they really are."
What I'm trying to get it with my post is that maybe people aren't just describing themselves as "ambivert", "non-binary" or "grey-asexual" because they don't want to be seen as "basic": perhaps some of the people describing themselves as such are legitimately (and understandably) confused about what the terms in question refer to.
There's been some recent discussion on this forum about how, prior to coming out, trans women tend not to be exemplars of "peak masculinity" (and vice versa for trans men), so identifying as trans could be thought of as a sort of "you can't fire me, I quit!" response when a person realises that they're losing a game which they were entered into against their will.
I don't dispute this hypothesis, and it certainly jibes with my experience of trans people I know personally. But I don't think this is necessarily true of non-binary people. As I said in the post, if you've been raised in an environment in which even banal and unremarkable instances of gender non-conformity are interpreted as red flags for gender dysphoria, you could be forgiven for believing that only "peak masculine" men are actually men (and vice versa). Whereas twenty years ago we would've said "Alice doesn't wear makeup and likes playing rugby, but she's still a woman - she's not a man, or something other than man or woman."
Or if you've consumed a great deal of porn (which almost exclusively depicts fictional characters with hypersexual/nymphomaniac sex drives), you might come away with the inaccurate impression that the average person is always rearing to go, and hence that your (perfectly normal) level of sex drive is below average - something intermediate between sexual and asexual, when in fact it's nothing of the kind. Hence "grey-asexual". It's the social-justice equivalent of men feeling inferior about the size of their perfectly average dicks because porn has given them a skewed impression of what the average dick looks like.
Sure, and I think that's a good point, some people will always take the rhetoric too seriously and break the kayfabe. But it's still downstream of feeling that X is something that needs to be labeled about oneself, or that Y is a valid axis on which to build one's identity. There's a lot of groundwork that goes into those assumptions.
It's sort of the Nietzsche-an idea of Achilles acting without thinking to satisfy his desires and labeling that the good, versus the slave morality of overthinking and labeling everything.
I think what you're saying, correct me if I'm wrong, is that Gray-Asexuals aren't acting in bad faith when they do so, they legitimately think that label describes them. What I'm saying is that their need to label it is downstream of their attributes or lacks. I don't think there's anything consciously false about their cope, but it's still a cope. The need for an explanation for their own misery is at the root of their need to explain themselves and identify themselves.
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