Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london
as someone probably once said..life’s a joke, might as well make it a funny one.
Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london
Gender seems to be a very hot topic at the moment, driven in large, by the hard fought for acceptance of Trans Genders. There are now apparently at least 50-70 different gender options currently being proposed for you to be able to classify yourself (list here – scroll down to read). There is even now a term called gender fluid, which, regardless of its intention to explain that the dividing line between the sexes isn’t quite as rigid as initially thought, it just sounds wrong.
In an attempt to recognise all the potential strains of gender identity and sexual orientation and give them validity they have, in some ways, just ensured that we are creating more barriers between people when we should be using this modern scientific understanding to tear them down.
I have just got back from a trip to Thailand and they are a race that perfectly show that there is a much vaguer and greater crossover between the sexes. There is just not as strong a visible division as in other populations but the reality is the gender border is not the wall they thought it was. Its more like a giant ellipse encompassing all variables within it.
What they have learnt about chromosomal combinations is that there is a tiny percentage of the human race who are extreme male and also extreme female, and everyone else, like 98% of us, are somewhere in the middle, on a sliding scale, with varying percentages and always potentially slightly in flux in either direction. So if we are all really just floating around in the XXXY soup does it really matter what the breakdown is? Do we need to be so specific. Does anyone really care anymore? You’re into men, woman, furry mascots, pickled cucumbers, who gives a shit? Good luck with all that…
To breakdown conventional notions of ‘normal’ we should just all call ourselves ‘soup’ (come on, that’s better than gender fluid right?) What the internet has shown in terms of sexual preferences is that there is no such thing as normal other than everything is esssentially normal because it is all happening to some degree somewhere in the world at any given moment.
They don’t even use the term ‘normal’ anymore in psychology, they use the term neuro-typical so that just shows you that ‘normal’ is basically dead.
We cling on to classifications of gender, sex orientation & race as a way to give ourselves a fixed identity, some way to define ourselves as it is reassuring for us and others to know we are just one thing, fixed & set, without deviation, but its just not how we are actually constructed. We are a floating amorphous blob of fluctuating ideas. We never stop changing and our influences, drives and desires are constantly shifting.
We don’t really need to be trapped in these self-made constructs, we can just accept we are whoever we are at any given moment. Why live in a box? We are free range humans. Long live the soup!
Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london
love vs hate. The eternal struggle. The latter seems to be on the rise. The former seems to be on the wane. #lovenothate was a online reaction to both brexit and Trump but if you need a hashtag to tell people which way to feel it would appear the battle is already lost. Its a bit like when they add “Save” in front of anything you know its already doomed. If hate starts to infect more and more societies at this seemingly alarming rate will we soon see a “Save Love” campaign? Will it soon become endangered like the most of the other species on this planet?
Hatred of the other has been an integral part of human societies since the beginning of integration and recent trends show that not only is it not going away but that it is increasing in its toxicity and tenacity in so many different cultures around the world. This is mainly because it is being used by governments to deflect attention away from their own failings, a tactic that has been used since time immemorial. Depressingly it is very effective and coupled with the xenophobic fire stoking of the right wing press (see the stop funding hate campaign on FB) huge sections of populations are now being whipped up into a nationalistic hate mongering frenzy.
I mentioned in a previous post about how it is essentially a brain dysfunction acting as a protective device which causes us all to be inherently racist but I really feel that so many of us have evolved beyond this faulty processing to the point where the illogicality of racism just doesn’t hold anymore. We genuinely don’t give a fuck where people are from. We hate people who are selfish uncaring arseholes from all walks of life. And its not about being tolerant. Tolerance is the wrong word. It implies you have to try. It shouldn’t be hard at all. Just judge everyone on their own individual basis. There is always one glaringly obvious fact that seems to constantly be ignored is that every population of every raceand culture is made up of mostly alright people and just a tiny percentage of total dicks. Unfortunately it is these dicks who are dictating (reddit?) what happens because they are the ones in power and they feel the way to stay in control is by appealing to the other arseholes who believe their bullshit. (thanks Team America)
You can spend your life blaming other people that are not part of your in-group for all the ills in the world all you like but please just understand one thing…if you think someone else is the problem, you are the problem.
#savelove