Pansexual? What is it to you?

[jizzeater]

The first question in this thread asked for a definition, which I accurately gave - not an approximation nor a popularised misinterpretation, nor any pseudo-definition.

Heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual all refer to sexual attraction based on gender, not species nor age. It's the same with "pansexual", the "pan" meaning all genders. It's offensive to lump pedophiles and zoophiles in with pansexuals.

 

[theFallenGod]

Heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual all refer to sexual attraction based on gender, not species nor age. It's the same with "pansexual", the "pan" meaning all genders. It's offensive to lump pedophiles and zoophiles in with pansexuals.

The problem is there is only 2 genders.... when someone is transgendered they are usually male gender identified or female gender identified...

to say one is pansexual means they have sex with anything and everything not specifically both genders. that would be bisexualism.

To me honestly... I see people who identify as pansexual as too afraid or pretentious to take on one of the other labels. It's almost as if its a badge of pretention to consider yourself above bisexuality

 

[fetaby]

when someone is transgendered they are usually male gender identified or female gender identified...

That pretentiousness is a rebuke of allowing what is, to be.

 

[jizzeater]

The problem is there is only 2 genders.... when someone is transgendered they are usually male gender identified or female gender identified...

"Transgender is the state of one's 'gender identity' (self-identification as woman, man, neither or both) not matching one's 'assigned sex' (identification by others as male, female or intersex based on physical/genetic sex)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender

to say one is pansexual means they have sex with anything and everything not specifically both genders. that would be bisexualism.

To me honestly... I see people who identify as pansexual as too afraid or pretentious to take on one of the other labels. It's almost as if its a badge of pretention to consider yourself above bisexuality

You're welcome to see things the way you want. I see it as a matter of accuracy, not pretentiousness.

 

[SLOPPYSECONDS]

pan sexual
it a mean

ya flips ins everyone pan ta suit their whack job cultures piss call civlization of da day

-

fairy folk like honey cause bees Kool!

if ya wearin cock say hi ta ya nose

 

[EJMichaels]

... Pansexualism is about transcending gender and sexual identity, in adult humans. It is emphatically not about the inclusion of extreme sexuality like pedophilia, zoophilia, objectophilia and other kinds of paraphilias.

I see I wrote my reply incorrectly when I said it includes some of the alternative sexualities or fetishes. I meant it can because the point is not attraction to a particular sex, but rather to someone found sexually attractive. The person's sex is not the first thing I consider in choosing a partner. It's more common in the BDSM community because of this, I think.

 

[Sam Blum]

Heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual all refer to sexual attraction based on gender, not species nor age. It's the same with "pansexual", the "pan" meaning all genders. It's offensive to lump pedophiles and zoophiles in with pansexuals.

I absolutely agree with you that the term is problematic. Even homosexual and heterosexual in human social context are problematic: Homo meaning same is applied to men who have sex with men, because we have sex with the same sex as ourselves; heterosexuals have sex with the other sex to themselves. But in social play, homosexuals are regarded and objectified as "other," or hetero, while in this same context of social intercourse or play, heterosexuals are treated as being "the same," or homo to each other, being in the majority. So we end up with an inversion of the language, both being 'right,' but in differing circumstances. Neither instance in this example should give reason to feel offence, as it is merely an observation of social politics in action and the verbal representation of that interplay.

However, homosexual, heterosexual and bisexual, as well as asexual are words that apply to all living organisms, regardless of whether they be plant, fungi, animals (people are animals), bacteria or virus. Have I missed anything? They are not ever inferred to relate only to legal adult human being status, and to suggest so is a little bit of a stretch.

"Sex," is not, as many bureaucratic forms seem to suggest, addressed by the word "gender;" although the number of sexes is limited - ie. Male/Female/& today we accept Male to Female Transsexual, and/Female to Male Transsexual. Gender refers to the social roling of the various sexes, or the expected behaviour of a person of particular sex (yes, I know, you know this already...), and the number of genders is also generally limited to the notions of simply the most obvious two, male and female - however glib or facile this may seem to some very dexterous and detailed minds. While sexual attraction may involve gender assessment and recognition, it may also involve sex (the...of the object of desire), and any number of other attributes. (Transgender speaks to a person changing the way that they behave in relation to the social expectation of their sex, so that a transgender woman may dress and behave in what is recognised in her social order as being the behaviour and dress of a typical man, to the point that it is noticeable by others in that social context. It does not necessarily speak to that person's sexuality, or to their sexuality alone either.)

These two words, "pan" and "sexual," literally mean, "all," (not "all genders", with no hint of genus) and "sexual." There is no ambiguity, and there is no hint of reference to "people," except in the clear context of the initial questioner asking for a definition of the term as it relates to people, let alone "people meeting particular criteria." If one infers from this term that such meaning exists, whether that inference be encouraged through context such as the tone or colour another speaker or writer uses when introducing the term to one or not, one over-generalises. The inference is incorrect. There is no rudeness nor malice expressed or implied; it simply means as it means. Pansexual speaks to universally inclusive sexuality. If we need other words to descibe the various shades of human sexuality that relate to the experiences and expressions that some here have denoted as how they understand/stood "pansexual," so be it - find different or build new language; that is what seperates our language from dead languages such as Ancient Greek and Latin, which will never come to be defined differently legitimately. I do not make the rules, but I do respect them and adhere to them so that most people will understand me fairly well. This is not intended to be insulting to anyone.

 

[bankside]

I absolutely agree with you that the term is problematic. Even homosexual and heterosexual in human social context are problematic: Homo meaning same is applied to men who have sex with men, because we have sex with the same sex as ourselves; heterosexuals have sex with the other sex to themselves. But in social play, homosexuals are regarded and objectified as "other," or hetero, while in this same context of social intercourse or play, heterosexuals are treated as being "the same," or homo to each other, being in the majority. So we end up with an inversion of the language, both being 'right,' but in differing circumstances. Neither instance in this example should give reason to feel offence, as it is merely an observation of social politics in action and the verbal representation of that interplay.

However, homosexual, heterosexual and bisexual, as well as asexual are words that apply to all living organisms, regardless of whether they be plant, fungi, animals (people are animals), bacteria or virus. Have I missed anything? They are not ever inferred to relate only to legal adult human being status, and to suggest so is a little bit of a stretch.

"Sex," is not, as many bureaucratic forms seem to suggest, addressed by the word "gender;" although the number of sexes is limited - ie. Male/Female/& today we accept Male to Female Transsexual, and/Female to Male Transsexual. Gender refers to the social roling of the various sexes, or the expected behaviour of a person of particular sex (yes, I know, you know this already...), and the number of genders is also generally limited to the notions of simply the most obvious two, male and female - however glib or facile this may seem to some very dexterous and detailed minds. While sexual attraction may involve gender assessment and recognition, it may also involve sex (the...of the object of desire), and any number of other attributes. (Transgender speaks to a person changing the way that they behave in relation to the social expectation of their sex, so that a transgender woman may dress and behave in what is recognised in her social order as being the behaviour and dress of a typical man, to the point that it is noticeable by others in that social context. It does not necessarily speak to that person's sexuality, or to their sexuality alone either.)

These two words, "pan" and "sexual," literally mean, "all," (not "all genders", with no hint of genus) and "sexual." There is no ambiguity, and there is no hint of reference to "people," except in the clear context of the initial questioner asking for a definition of the term as it relates to people, let alone "people meeting particular criteria." If one infers from this term that such meaning exists, whether that inference be encouraged through context such as the tone or colour another speaker or writer uses when introducing the term to one or not, one over-generalises. The inference is incorrect. There is no rudeness nor malice expressed or implied; it simply means as it means. Pansexual speaks to universally inclusive sexuality. If we need other words to descibe the various shades of human sexuality that relate to the experiences and expressions that some here have denoted as how they understand/stood "pansexual," so be it - find different or build new language; that is what seperates our language from dead languages such as Ancient Greek and Latin, which will never come to be defined differently legitimately. I do not make the rules, but I do respect them and adhere to them so that most people will understand me fairly well. This is not intended to be insulting to anyone.

99 times out of 100, I am on the side of linguistic prescriptivists but in this case I think you go too far. It is a rare, auspicious, occasion. I'll open Champagne later and toast your success by indulging my other great pedantic hobby - palæogeography - by looking at my maps of Laurasia, Gondwanaland, and of course Pangæa. Wait, what's this? A little island off the coast of Pangæa? How can this be? Pangæa refers indisputably to the whole earth. This island can't be right! It's just sitting there, clearly separate from Pangæa, and therefore showing that Pangæa is not truly the whole earth.

Oh Ehm Gee.

This utterly discredits tectonic theory. Utterly. Utterly I say. We might as well just discard all of modern geography, geology and so on, because they clearly have it wrong.

 

[Sam Blum]

99 times out of 100, I am on the side of linguistic prescriptivists but in this case I think you go too far. It is a rare, auspicious, occasion. I'll open Champagne later and toast your success by indulging my other great pedantic hobby - palæogeography - by looking at my maps of Laurasia, Gondwanaland, and of course Pangæa. Wait, what's this? A little island off the coast of Pangæa? How can this be? Pangæa refers indisputably to the whole earth. This island can't be right! It's just sitting there, clearly separate from Pangæa, and therefore showing that Pangæa is not truly the whole earth.

Oh Ehm Gee.

This utterly discredits tectonic theory. Utterly. Utterly I say. We might as well just discard all of modern geography, geology and so on, because they clearly have it wrong.

Yeah, yeah! Maybe somebody thought it sounded better than "almost all earth." Except that this particular example of 'Pangaea' does not really speak to this argument, because it firstly agrees with my argument in claiming more 'meaning,' more than just 'some,' whereas my detractors are claiming 'pan' to mean 'less than all', and secondly I do not throw away modern or new theory because of inadequacies in older understanding, but because of short-comings in the new argument, and thirdly it addresses a retrospectively nominated theoretical reconstruction of what was at the point of nomination considered to have been likely to have been practically all encompassing, and to rename it on the grounds that it was/was to be/is incorrectly or misguidedly named would be as pointless as renaming Greenland, wouldn't it? A land, language, person or object can be known by a word that has lost common understanding and therefore common meaning and we still associate the sound of the name with the object of nomination, thereby assigning some if not a great amount of (incomplete) meaning to the object. (Although, the actual inherent meaning of names is still such a strong interest that many people seek out the historical and lingual definitions of their names, as we saw on a recent thread here, and we still teach Ancient Greek and Latin.) As we know, we cannot so easily say what something is, but we can readily say what it is not: 'Pan' does not mean 'less than all.' More recently, Lorde said that the old definitions have let us down and that no matter how cleverly we re-arrange to imitate progress we cannot give new meaning to old language: We need to change and grow - she didn't say re-hash, but change and grow.

To redefine a term that has widely accepted and academic contemporary use in its historically accurate meaning and is used psychologically, socially and philosophically (of special interest to me in literary theory), only (ironically) using ignorance as a kind of anti-authority (in the sense of 'origin') authority is bizarre, and I cannot help but wonder at what kind of mind imagines in adulthood that if one just says something loudly enough, regardless of lack of foundation, it will become true. I can back up the definition I gave with etymology, any other definition lacks that. And I'm not anti-proscription, as I stated and as I've shown over the years, but let all speakers/writers use logic and sound reason, not just say, "I said it is so, and because I've never been told I'm wrong, and I'm so bloody minded and whizz bang, I am still right, regardless of the over-fucking-whelming evidence to the contrary." Okay, now even I'm bored shitless with this. If an adult person still can't grasp the point of a dictionary, then fuck 'em, I say. What the hell, let's all speak shit and sound like pointless, meaningless, under-educated and irrelevant idiots.

 

[bankside]

Mhm. You can count the number of tenured "sexololinguists" on something less than one hand. Pansexual was almost certainly not coined by a professor of ancient languages, and probably not coined by anyone researching in the field of human sexuality either.

In that regard, consider it not pointless, meaningless, under-educated or irrelevant shit, but a very wise, meaningful, "folk euphemism." And it just doesn't refer to zoophilia or other paraphilias.

 

[Royal Heart]

Pansexuality is wrong!

"Pan" is a Greek prefix and "sexual" is a Latin suffix. It should be "omnisexual" or "panfylófilos".