What's the point of having a blog with very disparate topics if I can't juxtapose them once in a while?
An Interfaith Challenge offered by an Interfaith Office can’t be fully open to and inclusive of atheists. It rejects atheists in the very language it uses. We shouldn’t be pretending it doesn’t.
--Ophelia Benson
Even apart from what the movement's done to me, I really, really hate the word "sex-positive".
...
It grates, it really grates, to see people framing sex as universally positive. Because that's dismissing my experience. That's dismissing a lot of people's experience. And that that is the clear origin of a lot of the shit asexual people are putting up with now.
--Kaz
I make no claims as to how far this analogy holds. This is to get you thinking, as I write a post on asexuality and atheism.
2 comments:
Alright, I'll take the bait.
The idea of 'sex-nonjudgementalism' v 'sex-positivism' would be a useful framework within which to discuss 'interfaith' v 'transfaith', because it brings out a cause of the problem that is often undervalued- many people who get a lot of positive things out of sex/religion and see people they know getting the same positive things assume that everyone must be able to access those same things, that sex/religion can be positive for everyone. The problem isn't deliberate uninclusive terms, the problem is the lack of awareness that we exist as people who could be unincluded. Therefore we need to look for words like 'sex-nonjudgemental' for religion, which stress inclusion of negative identities as well as positives. Words like 'transfaith', 'secular'.
On the other hand, the usefulness of the comparison is limited by the fact that interfaith is subconciously 'religion-positive', while sex-positivity can be overtly and agressively sex-positive, therefore ways of dealing with them will be different.
The other limitation of the comparison is that many atheists are expressly religion-negative.
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