Its agenda is to promote a bisexual-centric way of thinking!

[baratron]

This rocks my socks: The Limoncelli Scale of Sexuality. Humour, but it makes some valid points (particularly wrt any scale where "0"=heterosexuality - I'm amazed I've never noticed the problem with that before).

Link from the lovely otterylexa.

In other news, I am waiting for the wuzzie to get back from the supermarket, so I can make moyashi soba with a modified version of the recipe in the Wagamama Cookbook. (Modified for fat content and to remove vegetables we don't care for). I am impatient to know whether it'll work, because I'm ravenous. Yesterday I made fatfree chips using the recipe on kake's site, and although the chips got burnt to hell in the grill owing to my lack-of-familiarity with our grill (I generally avoid grilling on the basis that combination grill-and-ovens are asking for trouble at the best of times, and our oven is fundamentally evil anyway) they were surprisingly edible when covered in a little salt, lots of black pepper and Heinz tomato ketchup. I now at least know what the timings for our microwave & grill "should" be, so achieving chips should be possible in the future. This is a Good Thing (not least of all because the Sainsbury's Be Good To Yourself "only 3% fat" oven chips made me extremely ill, and I'm sick of boiled potato).

All in all, it's been very weird having to almost-completely-remove fat from my diet. I figured that being vegan, I had a pretty low-fat diet already, but I've been horrified by how much fat is in almost anything preprepared. (I mean, yes - sausages, bacon, cheese - these things you know are high in fat, and it's unsurprising that the vegan alternatives are likewise. But oven-cooked burgers? Marinated tofu? Vegetable stews? Tofu should not contain 10% fat, even if it's been soaked in lard!).

The one good thing that'll come out of this illness is that I've learnt how to cook with virtually no fat, which'll be good for sustained healthy eating in the future. But it's annoying that I have no choice - right now, I can't even offset a high-fat food with salad or steamed vegetables at the same meal. Tossing a few nuts into my stir "fry" renders it inedible (the only concentrated protein sources I can eat are tofu and dehydrated soya protein chunks). Even if I have to do low-fat forever, I just want to get to the stage where I can eat some fat, so that I can eat out again. I like restaurants, and Richard & I have both missed eating out, but nowhere does food low enough in fat for me to be able to eat it.

Comments

[geminigirl]

Tom, the author of that scale an amusing guy. His lj is yesthattom (and the nickname is well deserved.)

[johnckirk.livejournal.com]

I can kind of see his point about the scale, so arguably it would make sense to say something like "-1 = straight, 0 = bi, 1 = gay". I'm not sure whether his scale is supposed to be serious or not (looking at his index page, it isn't in the "Humor" section), but I don't think it would be particularly useful. However, by putting bi in the middle like that, it conflicts with his other issue. That said, I'm not sure why it's a problem, and I'm inclined to say "You can't have it both ways". I.e. you can't say "Treating straight as the middle ground is bad because it implies that everyone else are deviants" while also saying "Treating bi as the middle ground is bad because it implies that only the extremes are ok".

the conclusion is... I have no conclusion

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Ah, but bisexuality by its very nature is trying to have it both ways :) And mostly, we succeed.

Seriously, I believe that page to be semi-serious. He's making a serious point that it is problematic that with any sexuality scale, one or other of the numbers get defined as "normal". The only way to do it non-judgementally would be to use completely random numbers, like
45 - straight
78 - 50/50 bisexual
93 - gay

(ok, so they're not very random - I'm not good at picking random numbers from thin air)

Anything that goes either side of 0 is a problem, because people see "0" or "1" as "non-deviant". It could well be that Kinsey intentionally made 100% homosexuality "as deviant as it comes", but that doesn't work nowadays.

To be honest, I don't even know where I stand on the Kinsey scale. There is a particular subset of humans that I find attractive - specific enough that close friends can tell if I'll find someone attractive - but godknows how they fit into physical gender boxes. Almost everyone has a "type" they go for, and (a) kind/s of sexual activity (or lack of sexual activity) that they prefer doing. I sometimes question whether it's any more useful to categorise people by "people who like males" and "people who like females" than by "people who like blondes" and "people who like brunettes"?

I think the only way to map something as complicated as sexuality in a non-judgemental way is to use more dimensions, but then it gets too complicated for "most" people to understand, and it does away with the "neatness" that is a single number.

Yeah, I started wondering about a +/- scale with bi as 0 as soon as I saw the Limoncelli scale - but I also figured the problem with that is that non-geeks assign bad connotations to negative numbers. Regardless of whether you defined 100% homosexual or 100% heterosexual to be the negative number, some people would get badly offended. And if you're honestly trying to be non-judgemental, the last thing you need is people getting offended.

Re: the conclusion is... I have no conclusion

[johnckirk.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I started wondering about a +/- scale with bi as 0 as soon as I saw the Limoncelli scale - but I also figured the problem with that is that non-geeks assign bad connotations to negative numbers.

I know what you mean; maybe a colour scale would work better (like the Red/Blue political metaphor), and then people would come out as varying shades along the spectrum?

Re: the conclusion is... I have no conclusion

[baratron.livejournal.com]

I like that! But I fear everyone would be fighting for purple. And it would make no sense to the colourblind.