Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
case) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomsecrets2013-10-13 03:23 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2013-10-13 03:23 pm
[ SECRET POST #2476 ]
⌈ Secret Post #2476 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
01.
__________________________________________________
02.
__________________________________________________
03.
__________________________________________________
04.
__________________________________________________
05.
__________________________________________________
06.
__________________________________________________
07.
__________________________________________________
08.
__________________________________________________
09.
Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 048 secrets from Secret Submission Post #354.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2013-10-13 09:57 pm (UTC)(link)If you have a jar of 99 blue marbles and 1 red marble. You reach in blindly and grab one marble. If you guess what marble is in your hand, you get one million dollars. What color are you going to guess?
no subject
(Anonymous) 2013-10-13 10:08 pm (UTC)(link)What you actually have, in this metaphor, is a jar full of marbles of undetermined colour that may or may not misrepresent themselves when you draw them out for a variety of reasons. They may be red, blue, green or black, or even a few rarer colours, but you really don't know until you pull one out which it will be.
Statistics are not clean things, especially when they are based on human reporting in a socially fraught context.
Statistial Application lesson ahoy
You come up to me in a street, ask me to guess your sexuality, I will say "straight" or something along those lines. You will say "no, I am asexual" and I will be wrong. And that's how statistics work - I'm guessing on the basis of what is most likely, not what is. Statistics are what you use when you have no other information to rely on. If you tell me, "I am asexual, now guess my sexuality", that would a) completely defeat the point but b.) give me the information to correctly say "asexual". Or maybe you tell me to guess your sexuality first, and you don't tell me your sexuality, but I notice the way you're dressed (maybe you're crossdressing, maybe you're wearing something rainbow themed or just a lot of purple, etc), or maybe you aren't dressed in a way particularly informative of your sexuality but we're in a gay enclave of the city we're in (i.e. the Castro District of San Francisco, West Hollywood of Los Angeles, etc). That information would trump the statistics and I would say "probably gay or bi". Of course, in this case, I would still be wrong, because I'm still working on "what is most likely" not "what is". If you are wearing some kind of ace pride symbol, I will say "probably asexual" and in this instance, I would be right. But in that case, I wasn't working purely off statistics - I made a statistical value judgement based on non-quantitative data.
In other words, I still guessed. I just used something besides statistics to make that guess, and because I had something other than statistics, I was right. But I still guessed.
As for mis-representation and self-reporting skewing the data...
Even if the "straight" population is only 51%, with 49% being the rest of the spectrum of sexuality, it's still the majority and still the guess I would take. And honestly, even if it goes below that point, and hits something as low as 40%, the other 60% are composed of a multitude of sexualities, each less than 40%, so I would still guess straight because it is the one single answer that is most likely. Sure, there are a multitude of other sexualities, and all of them together are more likely than straight...but I'm only allowed to make one guess. I can't guess "all of the others together". I can guess one thing, and the one thing still most likely is straight. Until "straight" is a negligible portion of the population, that is what I will guess. And once it is negligible? I will guess the next dominant sexuality.
I will only be able to guess your sexuality correctly if asexuality happens to be the dominant single sexuality in society at large.
As for what you said a few comments up...
Why can't you just assume that anything is possible?
No one is insisting that if you are made to guess or presume someone's sexuality, they are the most likely sexuality. They are assuming anything is possible, but if they're picking one sexuality, they aren't going to assume "what's possible" but "what's probable".
Re: Statistial Application lesson ahoy
(Anonymous) 2013-10-14 12:42 am (UTC)(link)I guess I just don't see the point in going around guessing people's sexualities. If it's math class, fine, your explanation makes perfect sense. But in real life I just find it rude. And when it comes to fictional characters, well, I don't like that the authors have to make a big deal out of a character being gay in order for people to get it (and even then, people find excuses to deny it), but nobody needs "proof" that a character is straight.
I might've taken it a bit personally, but then it's a personal subject for me.
Re: Statistial Application lesson ahoy
As for fictional characters...I enjoy slash, I love it, but I really hate the attitude of "just because we've only seen them in straight relationships doesn't mean they are straight" attitude because it starts to feel like a cop-out - writers don't have any obligation to try and include actual queer characters, because if fans are just going to claim that straight characters are secretly or subtly queer anyway, why bother? I would rather get a few actually (and more importantly, visibly) queer characters rather than a lot of could-be-queer-but-in-practice-are-straight characters.
Re: Statistial Application lesson ahoy
(Anonymous) 2013-10-14 01:53 am (UTC)(link)Re: Statistial Application lesson ahoy
(Anonymous) 2013-10-14 02:52 am (UTC)(link)Oh, don't get me wrong, I would too. In fact the media I tend to go after these days is usually queer-inclusive because I got sick of mainstream TV's bullshit. So the attitude I usually run into is more along the lines of "Clearly they mean love in a platonic sense, I flirt with my female friends all the time and I'm totally straight."
Re: Statistial Application lesson ahoy
(Anonymous) 2013-10-15 04:07 am (UTC)(link)Though I understand your frustration with underrepresenting non-straight characters and having to rely on subtext when it's just text for straight characters.
Re: Statistial Application lesson ahoy
I don't think anyone is giving writers a free pass for queer erasure, far from it. I just feel like the writers end up taking that free pass anyway when fans try to insinuate that characters must actually be gay beyond fanfic/fandom and in canon.
Lose-lose situation, me thinks. :|
Re: Statistial Application lesson ahoy
(Anonymous) 2013-10-14 04:49 am (UTC)(link)