Stabilities

[shinydan]

There are two ways to make sure that things which are roughly spherical stay where you put them. One is to make a peak, the other is to make a trough. When a rugby place-kicker, or a golfer, wants their ball to stay in place, they make a little hill - or use one of those newfangled "tees" - and it does. When somebody wants to eat a boiled egg, or plant a seed, they dig a litle hole in the ground - or an egg-cup or a seed-tray - and put their sphere into it. They will then do other things to it, but that's not the point.

The point is that it will take a lot more energy to knock the egg out of its hole than to knock the golf ball off its tee, for reasons of PHYSICS! and you can prove it by trying. Alternatively, you can watch some poor sap trying to hit a golf ball out of a bunker, or try to eat an egg off a golf tee. (Not me. I don't like boiled eggs. Or golf.)

But what happens when you move away from physics, and start thinking about this as a metaphor for sexuality and sexual behaviour? Is bisexuality a peak, from which we can easily be knocked away, into the troughs of other, more visible sexualities? Or is it a trough that takes a lot of other people's pressure to remove us from? Granted, a lot depends on the individual and the people they're around, but how about some sweeping generalisations to get Wednesday off to a good start?

Comments

[haggis.livejournal.com]

If you think about other people's perceptions and say, a Kinsey scale, there are definite troughs at 0, 3 and 6 - people tend to assume that you are in one of those three, whereas your internal experience may be more subtle.

And now I've started thinking about quantum tunnelling, where an electron (or person) 'tunnels' through from the low energy state of 'straight' to the low energy state of 'gay', without appearing to pass through the higher energy state of bisexual on the way!

My own thoughts on my sexual attractions is that it's more interesting and useful to look for patterns in the historical data (ie what my current and previous partners are like) than to try and work out what I like and select for that.

[shinydan.livejournal.com]

Very appropriate, as the idea for this post came out of a discussion of the Lagrange points with a friend whose grasp on science is supposed to be even shakier than mine.

[haggis.livejournal.com]

Once upon a time, I read "In Search of Schrodinger's Cat" by John Gribbin. What I mostly got out of it is that quantum mechanics is very difficult to explain and if you think you know what words like "orbit", "spin" and even "electron" mean, you're probably wrong.