eirikur@amber.DEC (Eirikur Hallgrimsson) (07/12/84)
Steve Dyer > > Provocative, but I'm a little unclear on what you are trying to say: > Gay and lesbian people are also ruled to some extent by sex roles (not > surprising) OR that gay relationships display a male/female role polarity > (definitely disputable.) Can you expand on this? Uh, no--I didn't mean male/female stereotypes. (I wasn't clear.) I see interesting role things happen at work and in social interactions, too. But then, I see subliminal messages in advertising. My point was that we have this stuff (available behavior patterns) and since most of the time we don't think to think, we use the default, and we get this very old, known to work, set of interaction patterns. I'm not so sure, any more (and this is a big change for me), that we ought to try to eliminate them. Sometimes it's nice to be able to coast on a default protocol, and sometimes it's nice to be able to get back to something that you intuitively understand, in a hurry. I've had several relationships where everything had to be built up from scratch, (and indeed that was the way that the political me of then insisted upon it), but that consumes a lot of energy and time, and I'm not sure that it brings you closer. I don't think that you can invent intimacy--it's not something that takes place between the self-invented, or even mutually invented parts of you. Eirikur (still cloudy) Hallgrimsson {decvax|ihnp4|allegra|ucbvax|...}!decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-amber!eirikur ARPA: eirikur@dec-marlboro.arpa Thu 12-Jul-1984 16:21 Marlborough uncorrected time.