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Gay men who use surrogates, assuming they are the sperm donors, are engaging in a sexual act (sexual reproduction) with a woman. Similarly, lesbians who use sperm donors to get pregnant are engaging in a sexual act (sexual reproduction) with a man. What's the difference between wanting to engage in a sexual act with a member of the opposite sex and being sexually attracted to them?
This is equivocation between two different meanings of the word "sexual". One is "having to do with gamete mixing", the other is "having to do with orgasms". "Sexual attraction" is firmly in the "orgasms" side of the dichotomy, and sperm donation on the "gamete mixing" side.
Orgasms are only sexual because they can result in gamete mixing. If you remove that, what's to differentiate them from any other form of physical activity? Why should they be considered special?
There is a sense in which that is true. However, on the level of evolved human psychology, it is orgasms which are the fundamental drive with intrinsic rewards that facilitates pair-bonding, and so in that sense it is also exactly backwards: gamete mixing is only "sexual" because it happens to be a common side effect of one of the typical ways to seek orgasms with a partner. Why should gamete mixing be considered special, compared to blood transfusions?
I'm not arguing it should be. I'm asking why other people consider sexual orientation to be some sacred piece of their identity that needs to be special-cased in law, but then carefully define sexual orientation to only consider a subset of acts that can be considered sexual. If it is all about physical intimacy rather than sexual reproduction, why is it not romantic orientation?
Because the physical intimacy is the part that has the psychological drives attached to it. "Sexual orientation" is explicitly about the psychological drives. That's what they care about protecting.
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Tabooing the phrase “sexual act,” there are two obviously distinct clusters. Reproduction is not the same thing as intercourse, even though one can follow from the other. I can say I would like to eat a nice meal without personally being the one to cook it.
Clarification: In this metaphor is a woman having your child the chef and you are the... eater of the baby?
Yes.
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One cannot taboo the phrase "sexual act", as it is entwined with the phrase "sexual orientation". If we limit the definition of "sexual orientation" to non-reproductive acts, why should "sexual orientation" be treated specially as a protected category?
Some terms and phrases mean a variety of very different things. We're clearly experiencing that here, so in an effort to resuscitate clear communication, let's stop using that term and instead plainly say the particular definition of it you actually mean.
Or "taboo" it as lesswrong posters would say.
"How can lesbians want to [get an egg fertilized by donated sperm] if they don't also want to [get fucked by] men?"
The point seems rather trivial now.
Yes, I know how the community uses the word "taboo" in this situation.
Does it?
"How can [people who claim to not be attracted to men strongly enough to have created an identity around it that is legally protected more strongly than nearly any other] want to get pregnant if getting pregnant requires [the participation of a man] to fertilize their eggs?"
Your question is just trivial. Lesbians can have participation of men in many aspects of life. So long as they aren't also having sex with them, then they're still lesbians and not in some contradictory way.
Also, isn't their identity based on mutual attraction to women? Is this reframing gayness as a negative rejection of the opposite sex?
If I subjected a woman to IVF against her will, would people consider it a sex crime?
A man's sperm fertilizing a woman's egg IS sex, by definition. Intercourse is commonly referred to as 'sex' because it often results in such fertilization. By framing IVF as '[get an egg fertilized by donated sperm]', you are dehumanizing the participants, which is the entire point for lesbians as they must dehumanize the male sperm donor in order to maintain their identity as a lesbian.
It's not a reframing as far as I can tell. Such a negative rejection is inherent to gayness. If you remove it you get bisexuality instead.
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By taboo I mean use a different, more clear phrase for what you want to describe. Break out what you mean by "sexual act," because it seems obvious to me that there are lots of "sexual acts" that are not procreation, and lots of sex-adjacent concepts--like personal hygiene, puberty, or romantic poetry--which are not well described as "sexual acts." The category is confused. Find a different way to describe it, and you'll have an answer to your question.
I'm not trying to restrict "sexual acts" to only those that involve procreation though. I'm asking why procreative acts, which I believe should be central to the category, have been so thoroughly excised from it by others. What makes intercourse so important that it should completely push out everything else, and even that it should be expanded to cover things beyond PiV intercourse? To my eyes, the only plausible answer is that the people who did so are guilty of using self-motivated reasoning to gerrymander the definition to ensure they can have their cake and eat it too.
No, I really won't. My confusion stems precisely from the definition of the category sexual because we consider sexual things to be special. Sexual assault is considered a worse offence than plain assault. Sexual harassment is considered a worse offence than plain harassment. Sexual orientation is similarly a legally protected category in much of the West. Somehow I'm displaying sexual entitlement by looking at a woman who chose to dress provocatively, but a woman isn't when she claims a right to be impregnated by people she's "not sexually attracted to" though? What kind of backwards definition is that?
EDIT: Grammar.
Thanks, I think I follow you.
If procreation has been excised from the category, where’s the contradiction? The gay man who wants to procreate doesn’t have to feel or do any of the other signifiers of “sexual acts.” No courtship, no tingly feelings, no intercourse. At least not with a woman. Given how much human motivation stems from one or another of those desires, his lack of them makes for a meaningful category.
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Hence the other user with your sexual software package has the (absolutely defensible) answer of "and that's why they should never be allowed near the levers of sociopolitical power ever again".
The reason this definition remains stuck like this is mainly because of the socioeconomic effects described here- in short, the amount of economic opportunity for men-as-population is the check and balance against the social interests of women-as-population. Which is how some other commentators come to the conclusion "well, there must be too many men, female hypergamy means the ideal male:female sex ratio is 1:[some higher number]"- noticing the trees, but not the forest, of there not being enough economic opportunity available of the type for which men have the biological advantage to restore a more objectively equitable sociopolitical balance.
This sort of thing comes in waves as this balance adjusts following economic conditions- rather interestingly, the more economic opportunity exists for men-as-population as compared to women-as-population, the more the sexual balance is tilted away from the interests of women-as-population (employees seek minimum workload and maximum wage from their employers- for women, because the only thing they bring to the table for/as compared to men-as-population is beauty and youth, we should expect a society where women are more powerful relative to men to purposefully de-emphasize those qualities, and demonize attraction to them- so instead of a 40 year old man being able to afford a 15 or 25 year old wife, he'll have to settle for a barely-fertile, past-prime, bitter 35 year old instead, and we should observe men younger than that to be priced out of the market entirely, and judging by trends in the average age of marriage, they are).
This is why women-as-population love drag queen story hour, want shitty porn VNs in schools, and pretend that (absurdly ugly) men can be women too, why they believe that all men who might dare to interact with children is a predator, why they love the Science that claims "actually, you're not a human being until 25" as an excuse to argue it should be illegal to have sex with anyone under that age. It is why the claim traditionalists make about progressives "enabling pedophilia" does not logically follow.
And it is the reason women, who may not necessarily behave like women in aggregate do, won't meaningfully be concerned about changing things that are in their sociobiological interest (or in other words, "why feminists claims to believe in fairness between the sexes, but in reality will never work towards that").
Why did you even pick this fight, anyway? "Lesbians want kids so they go to the place where the cells that make them are", sure, but "and that means they're fetishizing men" doesn't logically follow from that claim. Or maybe I'm missing some dimension to "resource exists, human being wants access to resource to do Y".
Man, I’ve read through this a couple times, and it’s just not parsing. Who’s the other user with OP’s software package?
Maybe you’re on to something regarding economic equitability. The transition to a service economy—or the rise of automation, or the Industrial Revolution, or—has obviously devalued men’s labor. But it’s done this by reducing the value of BRUTE STRENGTH, and I don’t see how else it could have been.
What I don’t get, though, is how the state of nature was supposed to be “more objectively equitable.” Women couldn’t move cargo as easy as men. Now they can, because moving any meaningful amount means cranes and forklifts. Where’s the downside?
It’ll be the same story when technology makes it hard to tell, at a glance, who’s hot and who’s not. Instead of the early-Internet assumption that everyone was male, you’ll have to assume everyone is uglier than their pics and stupider than their curated posts. Man and woman alike.
Going to have to disagree with you there. Both because I don’t see how it follows, and because it looks like quite a strawman. The mismatch between ideological goals and individual actions isn’t exactly novel to feminism.
Yeah, I haven’t figured that one out either.
(In reply to @ThisIsSin too) I thought I've been pretty open about having a lot of issues surrounding sex and blaming LGBT and Feminist activism for many of them. I hold lesbians who use dildos and strap-ons and want to get pregnant via IVF in particular disdain for much the same reason that they hold transwomen in disdain--their behavior is a mockery of my sex, and in particular is appropriating the very aspects of my sex (my penis and the sperm it emits) I despise the most while rejecting the rest, all to serve their selfish desires.
You'll have to excuse me for not participating in that first thread directly (which is why I found it weird you're throwing seemingly-unrelated grenades here); I've only had read-only time these days, and these comments take a lot to write.
Yeah, that's what women tell me when I whip out the Fleshlight and start using it while thinking about them; I'm appropriating what beauty they have while rejecting the notion I owe them respect for their wishes and desires. I'm not convinced that's all that different- but maybe that's just because I can't just produce a kid by sticking a donated, fertilized egg up my ass and waiting nine months.
Sure, growing a kid inside yourself absolutely is an intensely sexual thing (even ignoring that it's just an outright fetish for some people), but I'm not as convinced it's the main attraction for lesbians looking for anonymous donations especially because it kind of sucks after a certain point. Maybe there just aren't enough lesbians on the face of the earth to have even one (IVF) Lesbian Octomom?
I dunno, I've done this a few times (not with the opposite sex though, sadly) with people I've absolutely not been sexually attracted to. Maybe it's just "not being sufficiently repulsed", "I actually don't have a strong enough attachment to my body to be actively grossed out by this if a friend asks me to do this", "you mentioned you were attracted to me and didn't seem to be doing so well lately, so sure, I'll share a bed for the night", or a combination of the above. Or maybe that's just what I tell myself so I can continue to feel pure enough to share a bed with my dakimakura.
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