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Forgeties79yesterday at 1:33 PM1 replyview on HN

From your NBC piece

> About half of the Gen Z adults who identify as LGBTQ identify as bisexual,

So that means ~15% of those surveyed are not attracted to the opposite sex (there’s more nuance to this statement but I imagine this needs to stay boilerplate), more or less, which is a big distinction. That’s hardly alarming and definitely not a major shift. We have also seen many cultures throughout history ebb and flow in their expression of bisexuality in particular.

> There are a bizarrely large number similar book as Gender Queer being published, which creates the numeric discrepancy.

This really needs a source. And what makes it “bizarrely large”? How does it stack against, say, the number heterosexual romance novels?

> We seem to have entered into an equal but opposite problem of the past when those of deviant sexuality pretended to be straight to fit into societal expectations.

I really tried to give your comment a fair shake but I stopped here. We are not going to have a productive conversation. “Deviant sexuality” come on man.

Anyway it doesn’t change the fact that the book banning movement is largely a Republican/conservative endeavor in the US. The numbers clearly bear it out.


Replies

somenameformeyesterday at 4:50 PM

I'll get back to what you said, but first let me ask you something if you would. Imagine Gender Queer was made into a movie that remained 100% faithful to the source content. What do you think it would be rated? To me it seems obvious that it would, at the absolute bare minimum, be R rated. And of course screening R-rated films at a school is prohibited without explicit parental permission. Imagine books were given a rating and indeed it ended up with an R rating. Would your perspective on it being unavailable at a school library then be any different? I think this is relevant since a standardized content rating system for books will be the long-term outcome of this all if efforts to introduce such material to children continues to persist.

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Okay, back to what you said. 30% being attracted to the same sex in any way, including bisexuality, is a large shift. People tend to have a mistaken perception of these things due to media misrepresentation. The percent of all people attracted to the same sex, in any way, is around 7% for men, and 15% for women [1], across a study of numerous Western cultures from 2016. And those numbers themselves are significantly higher than the past as well where the numbers tended to be in the ~4% range, though it's probably fair to say that cultural pressures were driving those older numbers to artificially low levels in the same way that I'm arguing that cultural pressures are now driving them to artificially high levels.

Your second source discusses the reason for the bans. It's overwhelmingly due to sexually explicit content, often in the form of a picture book, targeted at children. As for "sexual deviance", I'm certainly not going General Ripper on you, Mandrake. It is the most precise term [2] for what we are discussing as I'm suggesting that the main goal driving this change is simply to be significantly 'not normal.' That is essentially deviance by definition.

[1] - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301639075_Sexual_Or...

[2] - https://dictionary.apa.org/sexual-deviance

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