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how did this deteriorate into a debate about who gets to say x is or is not "normal"? and why is this interesting?
any considered understanding of "normal" in the broader social or descriptive sense treats it as a synonym for "functional"----and what is socially functional encompasses a wide range of behaviours, like it or not.
you can't revert to evolutionary-style narratives in this context because there is no agreement on which time-frame is relevant to such discussions when they are applied to social life, and because there is no such agreement there is no meaningful way to demonstrate claims.
to revert to this is to mix up descriptive and normative.
normative claims about "normal" involve fundamentally different criteria.
the simple fact of the matter is there there is no natural law, there is no single set of norms that function as a baseline for all others, and so it follows that there is no way for people who operate within one normative set to argue that the normative set of another is absolutely wrong. all that can be said, really, is that actor x in group 1 does not like what actor b in group 7 does. the usual next move is to try to link claims that are arbitrary outside a given frame of reference to another claim concerning the idea that there is a single "mainstream culture" and a subsidiary claim concerning who gets to speak for that meanstream culture. there claims are ridiculous, and even if they weren't they still are not any good because the strongest position you can dervie from it amounts to a variant of "eat shit: 100 million flies cant be wrong"
mixing the two kinds of evaluation is simply an example of shabby thinking--which i see alot of here from the "we do not like gay people" set--ustwo is engaged in a tedious semantic game that is predicated on blurring any meaningful line between descriptive and normative, which he tries to legitimate by endlessly referencing his background in biology, much of which is no doubt a kind of abstraction in his line of work and so is amenable to being rearranged, blurred and used for cheap political purposes, etc. the recurrent claims of "ich bin ein expert" resonante in this context in a manner similar to the way it resonated when acting immortal karl hungus uttered this line in "the big lebowski"---ncb seems unaware that there is any distinction between normative and descriptive and the results are predictable...i could go on but my interest is waning fast.
perhaps it is time for this thread to dribble toward a well-deserved conclusion.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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