construction of desire

[firecat]

This LJ post has some really good thoughts:
http://orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com/105179.html

Someone (in a friends locked post) quoted some of them.

I found some more I wanted to quote:

The heart is totally untrustworthy, people. All you have to do is make it want something and you think you invented that wanting, you think desire is an expression of truth and unmediated self.

The primary arena I've noticed this in myself is in my responses to clothing fashions. Over and over again, I'll see some new fashions or colors and go EWWWWW...and then in six months to two years or so I will see the same fashions and really like them. This doesn't happen with every new fashion, but it invariably happens with some, and it happens even though I know it happens.

This flexibility can be used for good or ill, of course. I've also used it to widen and shift the set of people I'm attracted to, which I think is a good thing. The constant shifting of my fashion sense, not so good (although fairly harmless overall).

Comments

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

OTOH, seeing the ideology is the first step toward deciding which parts of it you want to keep or discard.

If you haven't read HellSpark by Janet Kagan, you might want to give it a try. It did very much the same thing for me that this book seems to have done for the OP, but from a somewhat different direction; it showed me how to look at my own culture "from the outside" and see what makes sense and what's just "because".

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

Some of that post makes me feel guilty and sad (as a man married to a woman and with mostly female sexual partners) because part of what I'm seeing in it is an assertion that all heterosexual sex and marriage is support of the patriarchy and oppression of the women involved (even though the author doesn't seem to feel that that should stop them).

I didn't read the book, so perhaps that's it, but I also didn't understand why the guy telling the lesbian woman to find a partner who is better for her because the other partner didn't appreciate her and treated her poorly is bad (even if he did himself treat women poorly).

[snippy]

Oh yeah, I remember seeing color forecasts for the 90s in the mid-80s and thinking "there's no way I'll ever like green! Even if it is everywhere!"

And now I like green, and I wear it reasonably often, and I even considered painting my living room green. (It's going to be a slightly purple taupe.)

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

I am deeply suspicious of someone who warns us, The heart is totally untrustworthy, people. If I cannot trust my heart, then I have nothing left but reason, and reason is notoriously subject to being misled by unwarranted hidden assumptions. Without the guidance of my heart, I am more subject to manipulation by the forces of culture, not less.

Of course it might be that what I mean when I say "my heart" may be completely different from what the OP means.

[innerdoggie.livejournal.com]

What if it's the initial EWWWW that's the problem, and the gradual broadening of taste that's the Good Thing?