DrDelirium
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- May 14, 2017
- Posts
- 889
The presumption that people are lying to you is not helpful to discussion.
I think that people of all sorts have urges of various intensities in various directions, sometimes polar, and that while these are rooted in biology it is impossible to know to what degree the expression of the urges is a function of that biology and to what degree it is a product of adaptation to the environment. In everyone, it is a mix of these factors. If, as I think we both believe, there are variations in the intensity of these biological urges among individuals, then it follows that some people will express different urges, or express them differently, according to what their environment encourages, while others will be more difficult to influence in a linear fashion. Some people will be unhappy if they conform to social norms in opposition to their urges, others will adapt their happiness to those norms.
"Strong, Independent Woman" is a role, because the notion of "independence" is a social construct with a fluid definition, not an objective thing. Human beings are not 'independent,' they are deeply, irrevocably interdependent. Even those who adopt an 'off the grid' lifestyle are dependent on the entire history of the species to have the knowledge and technology to do so. Ignoring or denying the ways in which we depend on other humans and society at large does not make us independent. Abstractions like 'money' and 'property' allow us to form the illusion that we don't need others, but there are probably only one or two people on this board with a realistic prospect of surviving ten days without accessing the fruits of other people's labor- and even they could do so only because they have internalized the hard-won knowledge of generations of their forebears and consumed the products of others' labor to survive thus far.
Do men have similar self-serving constructs? Of course. People have these, in abundance. The essentialism behind contemporary identity politics is one of these, with many variations by race, gender, religion and ethnicity. If we are something, as opposed to being someone who does something, we justify intractability. I don't just want, this, I am this, so you have to accommodate me. And because what I am is just a fact, I don't have to examine its broader implications.
I think there is a valuable flexibility in embracing the concept of choosing what you want to be, who you want to be, what role you want to play. Are there aspects of personality that are essentially immutable? Probably, but we can observe people's operational psychology changing radically, and 'permanently' due to environmental pressures, so to talk about immutable personality traits is to discuss something at a level well below the level of behavior or consciousness.
I understand that people attempting to function in ways that are culturally condemned want to be taken seriously, do not want their desires to be viewed as frivolous or easily subject to change. I have no beef with that. I just don't think that this notion of 'identity' is the best approach to that, in part because it runs into all this debate about what is or is not 'really' BDSM, submission, homosexuality, 'black,' Christian, or whatever.
