More on anger

There are times when I almost want to believe in astrology, just so I could say "Ah, this is happening because Mars is tricepting the copula of Pisces and the Crab Nebula." For example, these days, an unusually large number of people I know, both online and face-to-face, seem to be really angry about various things (including, sometimes, me). I recently had a colleague nearly resign because her boss was shouting at her (continuous aspect used to emphasise duration). My (Turkish) family are angry with each other when they're not being angry with me, but I suppose that's not unusual. I've been banned from one LJ (though admittedly I literally asked for it) and in other journals and mailing lists I have pissed people off for no reason that I can fathom.

On the other hand, I suppose it could be because I've gone from spending a week in England in the calm presence of maggie_lucy and spending very little time online, to being back in Turkey in a stressful job which I de-stress from by going online and conversing with other stressed-out people. Nah, that's a boring explanation. I reckon it's demonic activity.

Preference vs. Orientation

I'd always assumed that "sexual preference" and "sexual orientation" meant more-or-less the same thing, with the exceptions that "sexual preference" may be broadened to include things not usually covered by "orientation" (e.g. latex fetishes) and that people who like to think we choose our sexuality prefer "preference" over "orientation" (which, despite the inclusion of bisexuality, for me conjures up an image of a person placed in a spot where they can gaze only upon men or women, unable to turn their head). However, it has occurred to me that there are situations where the two may not only be different but opposite.

Consider that you are playing a role-playing game and create a character of the opposite sex to play. This would mean that for your role-playing character to have the same sexual preferences as your real-life character, they would have to have the opposite sexual orientation. "I'm heterosexual" would mean completely different things according to whether you are in or out of role, while "I fancy women" would mean the same.

This raises the question of how to describe the overall sexuality of someone whose orientation matched but whose preferences therefore didn't. Let's say Fred is a heterosexual man who regularly plays D&D as a female elf called Tinúviel. Tinúviel then cops off with a hunky male ranger. Let's also assume that Fred (and not just Tinúviel) is actually stimulated by this encounter, and is not just doing it to keep the story-line going and thinking "When are we going to get on with it and kill some orcs?" Nevertheless, when out of role, Fred is completely uninterested in man-on-man sex.

The simple explanation is that Fred has just discovered (probably to his surprise) that he is actually bisexual, but that doesn't seem satisfying unless you're an old-school psychologist who could have fun describing how Fred's repressed homosexuality was triggered by Tolkien. Maybe we would need a new term, like "bi-gendered heterosexual". And of course there are other possibilities raised by the fact that people also role-play members of other species, but let's not go there just now.

Agent Elrond

While trawling Google Images for pictures to spice up my Tolkien course book, I came across this delightful image:



That must strike a chord with all those who, like me, expected Elrond's first line to be "We've had our eye on you for some time now, Mr. .. Baggins."