In today’s online societies, where social justice,
inclusiveness and acceptance is actively practised and idealised, there has
come to be a word for almost anything you can think of. I’m speaking primarily
here of the discourse surrounding sex, gender, etc. Having recently looked into
the asexual community from an outsider’s perspective, I was simply astonished
at the glut of vocabulary used to define various preferences and orientations (see here).
I must admit that some of these supposed definitions struck me as unnecessary
and slightly frivolous. Nonetheless, I can understand why they exist.
Language is about communication. I won’t stumble into any
academic debates which I know nothing about here, but I believe that the
primary goal of language is to transmit ideas between people. If this is the
case, then wanting to encompass as many conceptions of the human experience as
possible through language is a very natural step to take. Language has a power
all of itself. By describing and précising an experience through language, it
comes into being as an idea that can be communicated between people. The
experience becomes real. But: is it the user of the language that has the
power, or the structures of the language itself?
Language only has
true meaning when people can relate the language with the idea. That is why,
after all, a private language really isn’t a language at all. The problem then
for me, with any labels, is simply: what if the idea cannot be grasped at all?
If I invented a feeling called * and said to you that whenever I felt *, you
would have no idea what I meant. But then if I said that * was like happiness
and then said to you that I felt *, you would understand it to mean that I felt
like happiness but you would still not have a conception of what exactly
* was. In short, this I feel is the problem with labels. It is useful to a
degree to have labels in order to create a community of similar people in a
broad general sense. In that way, words can truly enable communication and help
to cement communities. However they cannot substitute true understanding of individual
experience.
So then, beyond a certain point of this broad scale
communication and identification, labels are reductive and alienating rather
than conducive to promoting the communication of ideas, as language should do.
Beyond a certain point, these labels begin to dictate rather than act as tools
of the language user. They narrow and exclude and (perhaps unintentionally) constrain
an individual’s behaviour and thought.
For me, the most important thing is to be accepted and seen
as an individual, and to be able to communicate with other people from this
understanding. If certain labels enable better transmission of ideas between me
and other people or if they enable improved communication, then I will use
them. However, I do not want to feel as though these labels are a suit of
armour: both preventing me from being expressive and protecting me from truth.
Excellent article. One point I'd like to make is that I believe language can be useful even if it's exclusively for the person speaking/thinking/writing in it, and doesn't necessarily have to have an external recipient. I think words need that to be formed in the first place, but once they're there, there's no need to have them always be public and there's nothing wrong with tweaking their meaning in the private sphere of your identity, because language has a wonderful ability to be relative and not absolute :) . I don't personally like to use all the myriad of labels that exist in the gender/sexuality community, and just tend to refer to myself in vague terms like "I'm me" or "sorta asexual" or "sorta gay" when people ask. This stems from a personal choice to not care whether or not everyone knows who I am and am not willing to have sex with (gender has never been an issue for me, I identify fully as cis-male). Most people, including me, have an innate need to define their sexuality though. And for that we need a lot of terms, because there's a lot of nuances to human sexuality. Labels aren't always about identifying your sexuality to other people, sometimes they're in place just for self-disclosure, so that as an individual you can feel more comfortable that you have some idea what you want. You don't have to share it, and you don't have to consider it an exhaustive explanation of you, because language can be relative and conditional as well. I could identify myself as a sexually active but flexibly asexual, homoromantic bi cis-male to people that asked, because that is the phrase I self-disclose to myself as, but I think it would be useless because even then I'm twisting those words somewhat away from their actual definitions into some form thats relative only to my own sexuality. It's just a jumble of words to anyone else who hasn't lived my life. I'm absolutely glad that the terms exist because I personally think it would be much harder to deal with if I couldn't define it, but I disagree with your implication that those words need be public (if I'm understanding you right). To me they belong in my private identity, and to my public identity I'm "just me" or "sorta gay" or "sorta asexual" or even "straight", depending on the day and the person asking.
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