bankside
JUB 10k Club
Re: Bradley Manning, convicted of WikiLeaks disclosures, announces desire for gender reassignment
With much better medical science, in 500 years, with gene-by-gene and cell-by-cell control, 100.00000% infection suppression, and full reversibility, I'm sure I'd make my body into a science lab. I'd have 8 arms and 6 penises and balls the size of cantaloupes, and I'm sure I'd change my eye colour, and I'd add a third nipple. I'd want blue skin and gold hair and webbed fingers. I'm sure I'd try a vagina for at least a while. Or maybe I'd invent a new organ. I'd fiddle with everything.
But even in that future, my identity would not, obviously, be tied up in one particular anatomical configuration. For starters because I don't think I'd keep any of it. One version of my body would not feel more right than another or more fucked up than another. I think I'd feel that way in part, because of a healthy measure of self-acceptance with my physical being as it is, dings and wear marks and all. A change wouldn't make things "more right" or "more wrong." Nor would it be "meaningful."
I don't think I could enjoy my body more by making it look more like some other person's body, or more like an average male body, or more like an average female body, because my sense of contentedness in my physicality isn't associated in that way.
We're 500 years too early for that however. I don't think of the body as a shrine that is above modification or that the original packaging is somehow better. If you watch Big Bang Theory, I would have taken Spock out of the original packaging. It's only logical.
But I do find piercings and tattoos generally unexpressive to me.
My body is a blank canvas. Should it stay blank? Actually not a canvas. My body is like a 1990's computer monitor, and to me a tattoo or a piercing is like screen burn-in. Dead phosphors forever stuck showing an old image when the screen should have been able to show something else by now. Something lively. I object to them but not because the IMAGE of the original packaging was sacrosanct, but because they can't change. And I object to them because our medical science is so primitive and there is no reason for the risks of body modification, and no reason for the pain. Speaking of having different working definitions, I think pain and pleasure are defined partly by the way each of our brains are wired. In my own brain, they are utterly distinct and mutually exclusive. I seek pleasure and avoid pain, and the current generation of medical technology used in body modification is woefully inadequate.
With much better medical science, in 500 years, with gene-by-gene and cell-by-cell control, 100.00000% infection suppression, and full reversibility, I'm sure I'd make my body into a science lab. I'd have 8 arms and 6 penises and balls the size of cantaloupes, and I'm sure I'd change my eye colour, and I'd add a third nipple. I'd want blue skin and gold hair and webbed fingers. I'm sure I'd try a vagina for at least a while. Or maybe I'd invent a new organ. I'd fiddle with everything.
But even in that future, my identity would not, obviously, be tied up in one particular anatomical configuration. For starters because I don't think I'd keep any of it. One version of my body would not feel more right than another or more fucked up than another. I think I'd feel that way in part, because of a healthy measure of self-acceptance with my physical being as it is, dings and wear marks and all. A change wouldn't make things "more right" or "more wrong." Nor would it be "meaningful."
I don't think I could enjoy my body more by making it look more like some other person's body, or more like an average male body, or more like an average female body, because my sense of contentedness in my physicality isn't associated in that way.
We're 500 years too early for that however. I don't think of the body as a shrine that is above modification or that the original packaging is somehow better. If you watch Big Bang Theory, I would have taken Spock out of the original packaging. It's only logical.
But I do find piercings and tattoos generally unexpressive to me.
My body is a blank canvas. Should it stay blank? Actually not a canvas. My body is like a 1990's computer monitor, and to me a tattoo or a piercing is like screen burn-in. Dead phosphors forever stuck showing an old image when the screen should have been able to show something else by now. Something lively. I object to them but not because the IMAGE of the original packaging was sacrosanct, but because they can't change. And I object to them because our medical science is so primitive and there is no reason for the risks of body modification, and no reason for the pain. Speaking of having different working definitions, I think pain and pleasure are defined partly by the way each of our brains are wired. In my own brain, they are utterly distinct and mutually exclusive. I seek pleasure and avoid pain, and the current generation of medical technology used in body modification is woefully inadequate.
