Quote:
Originally Posted by Roger Rambo
TinyRedLeaf. I understand and can sympathize with why you would be upset about being labeled as gay due to some weird circumstantial evidence. But that can be applied to analyzing characters from an animated show from another culture.
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LOL. What are you now, my psychiatrist?
Unless you've scanned my psycho-pass, I daresay you aren't anywhere near qualified to say that I'm "upset about being labelled gay". (It's a privately-held suspicion that crops up pretty often now, in any case, given that I remain happily single at my age.)
More humorously, you just went ahead and proved what I mean about the importance of context, something you didn't bother to check: my friend was just teasing. She was a prolific theatre actress even in her teens and, unsurprisingly given her chosen field, many of her best male friends were gay. She eventually came to the tongue-in-cheek conclusion that any man who is even halfway nice had to be gay, according to her "gaydar". (Because, in her experience and worldview, men who aren't in theatre are a boorish, uninteresting lot. Biased? Of course. Was her assessment very wrong? I'm not so sure any more.)
On a more sober note, for the longest time, I couldn't quite figure out what people meant by "gaydar". And it was only recently that I realised how it worked — any guy who behaved effeminately triggered said "gaydar". I don't think I need to elaborate how wrong this stereotype is, but I was taken aback by how prolific this assumption actually was. In my office, there was a colleague who often sparred with me over all kinds of issues, one of them being that of homosexuality, with her being appalled over some of the provocative positions I'd take simply for the sake of argument. And yet, said colleague also unconsciously labelled one somewhat-girly male intern as gay, based purely on her "gaydar". This despite me pointing out that I've overheard how the other interns, who all got along pretty well, had already asked him the big question upfront. And he said: "No." Quite emphatically.
To which my colleague simply retorted: "What are you, an idiot? Which guy would ever publicly admit to being gay?"
So, there you have it. If you can't even take a person's statement at face value, convinced that you know him better than himself, what more is there to say?
The whole story also proves something else that's relevant to the debate at hand: We humans are perfectly capable to profiling ("condemning") people based on our own biased stereotypes, with or without the help of technology. The Sibyl System doesn't change that. It merely reinforces what was already there to be begin with: a flawed value system.