Two things occurred to me whilst reading this. The first pre-empted your use of the term “target market”, and was my sudden remembering of the cover of (I think) a Radiohead EP which reads “You are a target market”. That idea really haunted me and I couldn’t think of a way for it to not be true. Because we are; but we’re also so much more than that. It’s a very unsettling idea.

The second thing I realised was that I have been tip toeing around the idea that we need “more relationship models” – a term I think I stole from Rachel Rabbit White – when, actually, I think it’s that we need to recognise that relationships should be fluid, just as emotions are fluid and sexuality is fluid, etc. What I would rather see is a breaking of assumptions. We enter into everything with so many assumptions, and I feel it would be far more human to try and see outside the confines of assumption. I think many writers do that in their work, either because they know that labeling their characters simplifies them, or because they don’t want to be predictable. In any case, I think this lies quite parallel to your point about not classifying people’s sexuality as well.

When we stop labeling, we start thinking. And that must be a good thing.

However, keeping it to the kink/sex world, I find that the problem with classifications is that it allows short cuts that eventually suck the juice out. Take incest porn. Can’t get the “juice” from the characters–well, let’s make them related! There are exceptions, but most of the stuff I’ve found online, and the pseudo-incest sold by Amazon, fits that definition. We lose out on the sexiness and powerfulness of the relationship between two people by immediately jumping to that short cut.

Besides, in the kink world, my experience was that the most enjoyable individuals to talk with were pansexual. It was all good to them, and they treated each encounter as it’s own, without any particular care about labels or roles or much beyond, “that was good! Let’s do it some more!”

I agree with most of the rest. Except in simplifying things I believe we’ve created so much red-tape we’ve over-complicated it instead. But that’s just me. I think the worlds fucked up and only getting worse anyway.

thanks for another thought provoking post RG

Thank the fucking god!

I’d really be disappointed if you knew my moves ahead of time.

I just said this in response to the post she listed in her comment, RG, but in applying labels, it’s best to stick it on one’s self, because in applying it to anything, or anyone else, we are going to fuck it up.