liminal_luke

Me too. It´s tough not following precepts and all, but, on the bright side, we´re not bad Buddhists. Just look on the internet: those fellas know a thing or two about ethical lapses. Fortunately, you´re asexual which really cuts down on the suffering. As for myself, it hurts when potential bootie callers claim they can´t find my apartment. I keep telling them....go through the mysterious gate, go through the mysterious gate. But they never do. So I end up staying up all night beating the heavenly drum. Seriously though, ya spend the best decades of your life traipsing through China in search of lost teachings, and then, when you´re finally old and wise, nobody wants to drink from your gourd. Life sucks and then ya don´t die.

Not to give myself too much credit or anything, but I kinda knew that.

I´m not exactly sure what you mean (is the well asexuality or lesbian sex or a particular body part that will go unnamed?) but I´m just joking around.

Asexuality is sounding better and better.

One of my best gay buddies has a thing for transmen but not me. I´m all about the dick. If I was in a carousing space and had a choice between a transman and a transwoman with a dick, well, I´d go for the transwoman every time. Guess that makes me bi. Wait till I tell my mom!

Whew...this has been quite the ride. I often rethink my posts after I´ve written them and decided to let a few of my latest entries go. What came over me? This thread was winding down nicely and it seemed everyone had settled into a cozy and nearly miraculous peace. And then for some reason I decided to kick up some dirt -- go figure. Anyway, thanks to all who have contributed here and especially to Maddie. If the point of this thread was to make people think, then I count it a rousing success.

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I guess I still think dicks are a male thing because of the function the dick has in sex; the whole process of enseminating is quintessentially male. This is not a culturally imposed thing -- it´s objective reality. Just like pregnancy is a female thing. I continue to believe in anatomy as the basic marker of manhood and womanhood. How people fit into that or don´t fit into that is something else, but our anatomy does matter.

I would say you are succeeding.

@surrogate corpse If somebody experiences their dick as a powerful symbol of their femininity, well, who am I to say differently? That seems odd to me but I guess I´ll just add it to the growing list of things I don´t understand about this crazy life.

I don´t mean to exclude you, BES, or anybody else's for that matter. I just want my own understanding of myself to be included in this gender umbrella. I have a distinct memory as a young adolescent, perhaps around 13, of marveling at my genetalia. I thought then, and think now, that having a penis is a distinct marker of masculinity. I liked that. I don´t want anybody to take that away from me, not even for the sake of including someone else. Surely there´s room for all of our messy and contradictory human experiences?

This is, shall we say, a minority opinion. And it gets at the heart of what many people find disconcerting about what is often called "gender ideology." I get that it works for you to decouple genetalia from cultural meaning, but I´m a pretty phallocentric guy and the cultural trappings that normatively accompany having a dick work for me. My dick is very central to my identity as a male. To me, it´s not just a "choice" to call having a dick a male thing. Using the word "choice" here decontextualizes dick-edness in a way that gets my gruff. It´s one thing to decide to get rid of your dick because you don´t like it, quite another to impose a particular understanding of what it means, or rather doesn´t mean, to have a dick on the rest of the dick-possessing world.

Is it? Seems to me that almost everyone from a very young age can reliably sort people into male and female groupings at sight. There are some people of indeterminate sex, of course, but the vast majority of folks are born clearly male or female. I realize that these categories don´t feel comfortable to some people. Some people avail themselves of medical therapies to successfully change their outward appearance such they appear as a different sex -- and if this make them happier or relieves suffering then more power to them! But let´s not deny the reality of the categories themselves. Afterall, if "maleness" or "femaleness" didn´t exist there would be nothing to transition away from.

I can´t say what an abundance of synchronicities mean either but it strikes me as a very good sign. An alignment of inner and outer realities such that fluctuations are perceived as a smooth unified force, an edgeless flowing between the conventional you that lives inside your skin and the you that is as big as the universe? Seems to me that synchronicities are a prerequisite for creating positive change in the world. Most people try to change things by focusing on something outside of themselves. This method lacks oomph. It´s like a beginner at tai chi waving her arms around without an integrous connection through the body. Another sneakier way is to make the change on the inside and let it ripple out into the world synchronicity style. This is obviously an advanced method but I reckon it works better, especially for stopping hurricanes.