Misc. comments 9

[redbird]

To yonmei, who is good at getting me to think:

But the edge is just possibly there when a woman dumps a woman for a man (or a man dumps a man for a woman) and it would behoove the dumper to be aware of this and not rub in the social approval their new relationship gets because it looks heterosexual, if the dumper and the dumpee are still talking after the split.

This is true. Not only are there added stresses in a same-sex relationship because it doesn't have the same social credibility and approval, but there are more potential other-sex partners than same-sex partners for any given bisexual person. So if s/he does leave someone for another lover, that new lover is more likely to be of the other sex. I also suspect that some people, if they've broken up with A, will seek someone who is as unlike A as possible, and that can include gender.

Addendum to the above:
There's definitely a cultural attitude that a relationship that produces children is "real" and one that doesn't isn't. We know that same-sex relationships can produce children (including but not limited to adoption), and plenty of other-sex relationships (like my long-standing partnership with cattitude) are childfree by choice: but the not-always-conscious belief that children come only from heterosexual relationships is there, and is a factor here, I think. (Ye gods, I'm still not sure how much of my mother's delighted approval of Cattitude was because he's a really cool person who loves me and is good to me, and how much of it was (or is) because he's male, let alone whether the desire for grandchildren was a factor there. If so, she never said. (eve99, if you're reading this, you are not required to comment.))

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In bisexual, in response to somewhat rambling post about identity:

Are you sure that you aren't choosing between a specific, and known-to-be-flawed (you know him, you know his flaws as well as his virtues) man and an idealized perfect woman?

Other than that, I think you've defined me as not-a-woman: my lips aren't exactly taken care of, and hand lotion isn't a gendered trait as far as I know. I have no problem with you wanting a femme--I have a major problem with you defining "woman" so that only femmes qualify.

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In response to rysmiel, who is also very good at getting me to think, and who wrote "There should probably be a metric for scaling how unlikely common sense is to fit any given problem.":

Definitely worth thinking about. Related to this--and sparked in part by having just read Matt Ruff's Sewer, Gas, and Electric, which I'll try to write about when I surface from work again--is that humans (and probably other kinds of people) are all too good at clinging to premises after those premises have been shown to be anywhere from partial maps of the world to completely absurd.

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yonmei asked people when we'd learned to cook:

My brother and I both learned to cook from my mother. It was basic cooking: not much on spices, because there weren't any around, but honest ingredients and techniques. Not much baking, then: we bought good rye bread from a nearby bakery (I still do, though it's a different bakery now), Mom baked cakes on occasion or bought cookies and pies, and we'd have ice cream, chocolates, and fruit--lots of fruit--for desserts. The first thing I learned to make alone was plain omelets, for my own breakfast on mornings that I didn't want cold cereal.

I've gotten a lot better at it in my adult life: a familiarity with far more herbs and spices, and a lot of confidence that comes from experience and getting it right often enough. When I was in Montreal for New Year's, I was describing a variation on papersky's cakelings to her, and said "it's easy", and she pointed out "it's easy if you know how to cook"--which not everyone does, and which at this point I sometimes take as much for granted as literacy, a thing I can forget that not everyone learns, let alone enjoys.