Being vs Identifying as

This article is being cross-posted to The Asexual Agenda.

In modern philosophy, there is a thing called a performative speech act. That’s when you do things by saying things. For example if I say, “I apologize,” it is not merely a statement of fact, but is itself an act of apology. Likewise, if I say “I identify as queer,” it is not merely a statement of fact, but is itself an act of identification. It makes no difference whether I say “I identify as queer” or “I am queer” because both of them are acts of identification.

Nonetheless, if we put on our descriptivist hats, it sure seems like people are making a distinction between identifying as a thing, and being the thing. Instead of dismissing the distinction out of hand, we should try to understand it. I will propose two basic interpretations.

In the first interpretation, “I am” is an act of identification, right now in the present moment. “I identify as” is a statement about how you identify in a more general set of contexts, not necessarily limited to the present moment. For example, the following is a true statement that I could make:

Sometimes I identify as asexual, but I’m not asexual.

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On blogging networks

As many readers know, I run a group blog, The Asexual Agenda (TAA). Other readers might be aware that I’m on this blogging network called Freethought Blogs (FTB). Still other readers may be aware of other blogging networks like The Orbit, or Skepchick. Have you ever wondered how these blog networks are organized?

This is something that interests me, as a group blog admin. But perhaps nobody else is interested, because I hardly ever see anyone else talk about it. Or perhaps people don’t talk about it because the information is too sensitive. You don’t want to give away information that is potentially embarrassing to other people on the network. Many blogging networks may even have formal rules against disclosing certain information. I myself am limited in what I can say. But there’s some stuff that is public knowledge, at least in principle, so I’ll talk about that.

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Link roundup: November 2017

It’s my monthly feature where I share links I’ve collected over the past month, and offer brief commentary.

The Trans Reveal – I recently found this blog that reviews queer webcomics and of course I’m all over that.  This article discusses various ways that webcomics can reveal that a character is trans, and what the pitfalls of each approach are.

Exodus: Why Americans are Leaving Religion—and Why They’re Unlikely to Come Back – This is an old article summarizing results from a survey of religiously unaffiliated USians.  What I found most interesting: 1) the main reason for their growth appears to be increased retention rates, 2) 58% of them say religion is bad for the world, and 18% say religion is personally important to them, 3) The people who say religion is bad for the world are more likely to be white, male, and have more education.

I found this article via Aged Reasoner–although the speculation in that post is mistaken, as I point out in the comments.

Why we really really really like repetition in music (video) – Vox talks about how we seem to find repetition inherently enjoyable in music, but not, say, stage plays.  Something that I have great difficulty understanding is how music worked before recordings existed.  It seems like music should have been more repetitive in those days, to make up for the fact that you couldn’t just repeat the recording as desired.

Vox incidentally mentions the speech to song illusion, which is the most compelling auditory illusion I have ever heard. Listen to this video, and then listen to it again. What has been heard cannot be unheard.

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The impossible symmetry

This is the third part of a series about symmetry in origami.  Previously, I established the idea of a symmetry group, a set of transformations that leaves a model’s shape unchanged.  Next, I talked about how the colors of a model define a subgroup.  In this post, I will explain the concept of a normal subgroup.

First illustration: The Umulius

We begin with a case study of one of my favorite models, Thoki Yenn’s Umulius.  “Umulius” is a Danish insult meaning “impossible person”.

Umulius

Ignoring the colors, the Umulius nearly has cubic symmetry.  Here I have a series of diagrams “cleaning up” the details to make the underlying cubic symmetry clear.

A series of diagrams showing how the Umulius can be fit into a cube

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Image over substance

[cn: CSA, sexual assault]

Actor Kevin Spacey was recently accused of sexually assaulting a 14 year old boy. The incident was 30 years ago. Kevin Spacey, didn’t he play the protagonist in American Beauty, a movie that all but celebrated pedophilia, and featured a repressed homosexual murderer? Oh, I guess people today mostly know him for his role in House of Cards.

Anyway… this story caught my eye because several friends were saying that Spacey had found the one time that it was inappropriate to come out as gay. See, in Spacey’s statement of apology, he added a paragraph saying that he was gay.

Yeah, so about that. It makes sense that he would say that, because after all, he was accused of sexually assaulting a boy, and had long been rumored to be gay. People were going to connect the dots. They already connected the dots in the article which first published the accusations! But I agree that it seems like a deeply inappropriate time to come out, because it comes across as an attempt to distract. Indeed, some news outlets ran stories that mentioned the coming out first, and the accusations second. Although, looking at Google news results, I suspect this was the exception to the rule. If the intention was to distract, it probably just drew more media attention.

I want to talk about how some people criticized Spacey for the wrong reasons. Yes I know that sounds pedantic. Really who cares if some people come to the correct conclusion for wrong reasons? The reason I care, is because I care about the issue of sexual assault in the context of queer men. And some commentators? They seem to care more about image over substance.
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Origami: Octahedron Skeleton

Octahedron skeleton

Octahedron Skeleton by Robert Neale. I hope nobody was expecting an actual skeleton. Halloween was yesterday.

I know somebody who runs an art gallery, so every year I run a workshop for kids where we do modular origami.  The hardest part of designing the workshop is picking the right models.  I’ve been quite surprised by which aspects the kids find difficult, and which aspects they perform with ease.

Anyway, this is one of the models I picked this year.  It’s on the easy side, and the kids thought so too.  And that’s great!  Art doesn’t need to be technically challenging to be good.

If you’d like to try this one out, I made some fancy diagrams to print out and pass to the kids.  Check them out below the fold.

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Who is #metoo for?

[cn: non-explicit discussion of sexual harassment and assault]

A week ago, there was the #metoo campaign. It called for people who had experienced sexual assault or sexual harassment to say “me too” on social media, so that we might realize how common it is. It swept over Facebook for quite a while, so presumably most readers have already heard of it; I’m just recapping so nobody feels left out.

I didn’t say anything on Facebook, but here I will say, “Me too.” I have been a victim of multiple counts of sexual assault, including rape. It’s not a big deal for me to come out and say this, because I have been open about it for years.

#Metoo was not a helpful campaign to me personally.  I did not desire to participate, and I did not learn anything from it.  I already knew lots of people have experienced sexual assault and harassment.  I mean, I work on the Asexual Community Survey and produce graphs like this one.

A plot of the percentage of people who experience sexual violence, broken down by age. It's around 30% for minors and approaches 70% for people in their 40s.

Please do not take the numbers on this graph literally, and do not duplicate the image without citation to the report that it comes from. There’s a lot of additional context that changes its interpretation.

The plot suggests that about 70% of the ace respondents to our survey will experience sexual violence of some kind in their lifetime.  It will be somewhat smaller in the general population, because the general population has more men and is less queer.  (In our own survey, the straight non-ace people had rates that were about 10% smaller.)  But no matter how we cut it, we’re talking about a very significant fraction of the general population.  And that doesn’t even include sexual harassment!

This is all to say, if you really want to know how widespread sexual assault and harassment is, you can just look those numbers up.  Believe those numbers.  Internalize them.  Now just pretend that X% of your friends said, “Me Too,” and you can save them the trouble of actually having to do it.

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