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Aug. 5th, 2019 03:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithWhile looking for something else, I stumbled across an image of love as a type of quantum entanglement. That's the metaromantic pride flag in Terramagne-America.
The metaromantic flag has a black field with two red hearts, which are linked by red threads and surrounded by gray lines to show quantum entanglement. Metaromantic is an orientation of affection that transcends rigid definitions and may overlap multiple other orientations. Metaromantics tend to fall in love with souls, not bodies.
That got me thinking about what would make a metasexual pride flag. I coined the term years ago, but it didn't occur to me to think about a pride flag until I spotted the romantic version. So I thought of something, but there isn't an actual image of it.
The metasexual flag has a spectrographic background with the rainbow fading to black at each end to represent what lies beyond human perception. In the center it has a black outline of a tesseract. (Because the tesseract is a four-dimensional object drawn in two dimensions, it has multiple forms and all are considered correct. The most common ones look like a concentric cube or an eight-pointed star.) For purposes of flagmaking, the colors can be cut in vertical stripes with the tesseract appliqued on top, but the spectrographic version is more correct. Metasexual is an identity and orientation that transcends categories and may overlap several others. Metasexuals tend to feel attraction for souls rather than bodies.
Here's an example of the visible spectrum. Ideally the red end would be on the left. This one is flag-shaped but lacks the black ends.
The metaromantic flag has a black field with two red hearts, which are linked by red threads and surrounded by gray lines to show quantum entanglement. Metaromantic is an orientation of affection that transcends rigid definitions and may overlap multiple other orientations. Metaromantics tend to fall in love with souls, not bodies.
That got me thinking about what would make a metasexual pride flag. I coined the term years ago, but it didn't occur to me to think about a pride flag until I spotted the romantic version. So I thought of something, but there isn't an actual image of it.
The metasexual flag has a spectrographic background with the rainbow fading to black at each end to represent what lies beyond human perception. In the center it has a black outline of a tesseract. (Because the tesseract is a four-dimensional object drawn in two dimensions, it has multiple forms and all are considered correct. The most common ones look like a concentric cube or an eight-pointed star.) For purposes of flagmaking, the colors can be cut in vertical stripes with the tesseract appliqued on top, but the spectrographic version is more correct. Metasexual is an identity and orientation that transcends categories and may overlap several others. Metasexuals tend to feel attraction for souls rather than bodies.
Here's an example of the visible spectrum. Ideally the red end would be on the left. This one is flag-shaped but lacks the black ends.
Meta all the things
Date: 2019-08-05 12:18 pm (UTC)Re: Meta all the things
Date: 2019-08-05 01:51 pm (UTC)(It occurs to me that the nebula flags incorporate some of that idea... oooh, now I remember the core line from Cade Tinney's song from Saturday... "from stardust, to dust, to stardust again..."
*damn* that person is shiny. And their song makes me cry... *snif*)
Re: Meta all the things
Date: 2019-08-05 07:27 pm (UTC)Yay!
I went through various descriptions before settling on that one. Some of the others I still use too.
*chuckle* I found a gendercollector flag while looking up the nebula flags. I do that with everything. I'm not kidding when I say my sexuality is a tesseract.
>> (It occurs to me that the nebula flags incorporate some of that idea... <<
I had not seen those before. They're very pretty, although harder to read than standard flags.
>> oooh, now I remember the core line from Cade Tinney's song from Saturday... "from stardust, to dust, to stardust again..." <<
We are star angels, and heaven is where you can reach out and touch atoms made solid. :D
Re: Meta all the things
Date: 2019-08-05 08:08 pm (UTC)Yeah. Headcanon accepted. *HUGS* (Lady willing, someday in hugspace.)
Re: Meta all the things
Date: 2019-08-05 09:14 pm (UTC)I've just always tended to tell the evolution of the universe in mythic terms.
Re: Meta all the things
Date: 2019-08-06 01:36 am (UTC)Question on behalf of the character this account is normally associated with:
Date: 2019-08-05 01:47 pm (UTC)Re: Question on behalf of the character this account is normally associated with:
Date: 2019-08-05 07:12 pm (UTC)Re: Question on behalf of the character this account is normally associated with:
Date: 2019-08-05 07:50 pm (UTC)Re: Question on behalf of the character this account is normally associated with:
Date: 2019-08-05 09:13 pm (UTC)Re: Question on behalf of the character this account is normally associated with:
Date: 2019-08-05 09:23 pm (UTC)I was using it as shorthand for 'only towards characters who, relative to oneself, are perceived as fictional.'
Re: Question on behalf of the character this account is normally associated with:
Date: 2019-08-05 10:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-08-05 08:38 pm (UTC)That set my hackles straight up and feels super-judgy. I'm guessing that wasn't intentional. But consider from the point of view of a cis-het person in a long-term relationship. Is it in any way fair to say that their love of their partner is somehow body-centric when, say that partner's body has undergone decades of change, maybe even the extreme changes brought on by carrying children?
To say that there's a particular type of attraction that is somehow "rigid" and this other type is less rigid feels like setting up a superior-inferior comparison. And if I like guys without facial hair is that somehow worse than liking guys regardless of their facial hair?
Thoughts
Date: 2019-08-05 11:20 pm (UTC)I consider all orientations equally valid. They just have different parameters. For most but not all orientations, a primary parameter is body shape, sex, gender, or something along those lines. Exact details can vary a bit.
>> Is it in any way fair to say that their love of their partner is somehow body-centric when, say that partner's body has undergone decades of change, maybe even the extreme changes brought on by carrying children? <<
If you require that someone have a vagina, XX chromosomes, or something along those lines in order to be sexually relevant for you, then yes. Heterosexual men are attracted to women, and not to people who are not women. Gynephilia is a bit broader: women or feminine-inclined people. It includes both female-bodied, woman-presenting people and those who are feminine but have some other sort of body that would not appeal to most straight men.
Where it really gets complicated is when a person who thinks of themselves as straight has fallen in love with someone who is transgender, but at the time of said fall, was presenting as whatever someone guessed when looking at the baby's crotch a few decades back. And then eventually the transperson realizes that, no, this body and gender don't fit at all, something needs to be done about that. Most of the time, this causes the straight spouse to freak out and leave. Because it raises the question: if you fall in love with someone who is not, in fact, the opposite of your sex/gender but is actually something else, are you really as straight as you thought you were? Have you been deceived by other people who looked at a baby's crotch and made a very wrong guess about the gender, which then confused the child, who took several decades to figure out what was wrong and how to fix it? Or have you overlooked a part of your own orientation that actually is wider than you thought and genuinely includes the person you fell in love with?
Most people don't want to think about that, and will bail. :/
Orientation is really about prerequisites. In order to attract a gay man, you must be a man, however he defines that, and most of them would prefer that you also be a gay man. It doesn't matter how good a fit someone is otherwise, if the crotch is the wrong shape and/or the masculine-feminine-etc spectrum is on the wrong notch, no attraction will occur.
Except some of us don't respond much or at all to physical cues, even though those are the prevailing cues (heterosexuality covers about 90% of the population). Some of us orient based on other things. Sometimes, kind of a lot of different things, that don't necessarily stay the same. In order to figure that out, one generally has to hike through quite a lot of sex/gender terrain looking at all the options and going "Yes, no, maybe, sort of, WTF even?"
*chuckle* I also learned not to rule out anyone as sexually irrelevant, even if they think they are, because sometimes that turns out to be variable after all. When I was in college, one of my friends was gay. And then he made a pass at me. We were both very weirded out, not because there was anything wrong with it, but because it was unexpected. We thought we knew how we fit and then it shifted. After poking at it a while, we concluded that he was a long-phase bisexual shifting to where women became a possibility. It was only years later that I wondered if it might not have been that, or not only that -- if he was, after spending some time with me, picking on the actual masculine aspects of myself which could be appealing to a sufficiently flexible gay man.
Nothing about sex/gender is simple, and while it tends to be stable, that is not necessarily a guarantee.
And so it occurred to me that "meta" was a good description, because I just don't seem to perceive or experience boundaries in the same way most other people do, which baffles and sometimes annoys them. It's okay if other people consider only a subset of souls, bodies, or whatever to be sexually relevant to them. I don't care which subset that is, unless people start picking on each other about it.
>> To say that there's a particular type of attraction that is somehow "rigid" and this other type is less rigid feels like setting up a superior-inferior comparison. And if I like guys without facial hair is that somehow worse than liking guys regardless of their facial hair? <<
No. Judging orientation is pointless. They are what they are. For most people, most of the time, they stay put. Certainly they cannot be forced to change by outside pressure. It doesn't matter if you like women, or beards, round bodies or narrow ones, whatever.
It does matter when a straight man decides that murder is an okay way to express how he feels about being approached by a transwoman. Some people don't handle existential uncertainties well, and it can get a lot worse than the trans divorce pattern.
Me, my sexuality is a tesseract. Most people's isn't. These things are equally fine. Some people don't agree with that -- I've had people bitch over various aspects of it -- but that is their problem. You can't iron a tesseract onto a spectrum no matter what you try.
Which is why that flag has different options.