6 Sexual Identities Everyone Still Thinks It's OK To Mock

6 Virgins

Virgins are often portrayed as punchlines, unlovable losers who haven't even been picked last to play the game of love -- they're still sitting on the bench with a fake doctor's note, watching everyone else play a rousing game of dodgeballs. It's one of the most prevalent peer pressures across all of society. But pressuring someone else into sex is at least the worst possible thing any asshole can do.

I've been guilty of mocking virgins. In context, I was mocking sexist assholes for targeting women as a way of venting their incredibly obvious sexual frustration, but I should have been more specific. I should have clearly described those men as hypocritical overcompensating idiots ... sexists who had reduced all of life to a simple game that they still lose at by failing to score and blaming all the other players. But I shouldn't have associated all that with all virgins. Virgins really have done nothing to deserve that.

Virginity doesn't have any intrinsic value (and you should be seriously suspicious of anyone fetishizing your sexual status), but the decision to keep it or not is the most important thing in the world. Because when it comes to someone's sexual activity, their decision is the only thing in the world.

The same sticky brush of implied sexual superiority is often used against asexuals, "aces," people who lack attraction to or interest in all the sexual squickiness. Some guys (and, yes, it's usually guys) take this as a personal offense. Their sexual egos are so fragile that someone else never getting laid is personally disturbing. Probably because it strikes too close to home. But if you've ever refused to believe that someone is ace, don't worry; they don't believe anyone else would want to have sex with you either.

And if you wouldn't ask your boning friends about their favorite sexual position, don't ask your virgin friends why they don't have one. Maybe they haven't met the right person. Maybe they're recovering from abuse. Maybe they're waiting for the Third Conjunction that their genitals might raise an Elder God to feast on all flesh. In any event, if they want you involved, they'll let you know, but until then don't user their crotch for light conversation.

5 Furries

Not all furries are interested in dressing up as anthropomorphized animals and having sex with each other, but that's what they're famous for. Which sounds weird as hell until you realize that they're not harming anybody else. And they're putting more work into pleasing their partners than some people put into their wedding night.

Having sex in a full-body fur suit? Forget merely having sex, that's more exercise than I've done in my life. If there's ever an Internet Olympics, "Hedgehog Humping" will be a greater endurance test than the heptathlon. And have many, many more viewers.

Furries have been the Internet's punchbag ever since people realized bigotry was bad but still wanted to make fun of strangers. Obviously it's much better to blame people for something they choose to do. But when that thing doesn't actually harm anybody else, and their only offense is doing something you don't enjoy, mocking them still makes you kind of an asshole. Luckily we now a volunteer group working to publicly be bigoted assholes in a way that actively hurts others. So we can all focus our mockery on them.

What's more, dressing up as animals is a brilliant shortcut past modern society's bullshit body-shaming beauty standards. The advertising industry spends billions of dollars convincing every human alive to be unhappy in the skin they're in. So furries art-and-craft new skins! Skins made of silk in the shape of a centaur! Let's see you sell that in a jar, assholes! They've short-circuited the entire body-image industry and crossed it with a fantasy novel. Using imaginary characters to counter advertising makes them the Banksys of boning.

This doesn't mean every furry is fine. Individually anybody can be an asshole, and any activity where people can cover their faces before trying to grope people is going to attract them. It's every community's job to call out the harassers and warn everyone else instead of keeping things quiet because they've "done a lot for the scene." But considering that even the Catholic Church and '80s American family comedies couldn't manage that, furries shouldn't be singled out.

4 Masturbators With Tools

Anyone who has never masturbated raise your hand. The rest of you, carry on.

We're wired to want sex, our arms are preset at the right length, and humanity's entire advantage is being better at using tools to solve needs. Despite this, dildos and Fleshlights are still presented as punchlines. Either embarrassing in themselves or big veiny signs of failure (while) in or on their owners. But we're still meant to be fine spending over half a thousand dollars on video game consoles? Or paying far more per inch of plasma screen than even the most advanced proxy genital? And masturbation is way more fun than either of those. If there wasn't a refractory period there wouldn't be an electronic entertainment industry at all.

I don't know how much fun these tools are (I don't have the pleasure-plumbing for some, and I've always found idle hands sufficient for my sexy devil's work), but every other option I've heard is way worse. Apple pies waste food. Bottles can create awful vacuum seals. Teen comedies talk about guys using socks, which means they're set in some awful puritan utopia where there's no sex but socks don't produce lint or loose threads. And where wool is used for incredibly refined bestiality.

3 Old People

Imagining old people having sex is like banging piercings through your genitals. In that, if anybody forces you to do it, yes, complain as loudly as possible, but if they're enjoying it without you then it's really not your problem. Complaining about interacting wrinkles feeds into the same bullshit beauty myth that only conventionally attractive people are allowed to have sex. Which is putting the cart full of sexiness-enhancing products before the horse capable of actually having sex.

The advertising industry has created a stand-alone complex of appearance unsupported by any end point or biological reality. When people are happy in their own bodies, and in other people's, they're skipping the skin-deep circus of makeup. Which is why marketing tries to shame them back into place. If old people are having sex they win. They've lived longer than average and are continuing to live (and in some cases get longer) with the most vital verb we have.

The worst subset is people acting horrified that their parents have sex. It's the ultimate creationist argument, people getting upset over biological processes that must have happened for them to exist in the first place. It's also the sad bleating of a defeated killjoy. Trust me: If your physical arrival and subsequent years of screaming and shitting didn't kill your parents' sex drive, nothing will. You've already used every orifice-output option available. Mere words are nothing.

2 Fat People

If you don't find someone sexually attractive, that's it! That's everything you need to know about their sex life. And it's only you that needs to know this information. If they don't ask you to join in, you don't need to offer any opinion. Just quietly go on with your life not wanting to have sex with them. Instead of loudly failing to have sex with them, which is what the majority of such complaints really sound like.

Most anti-fat aggression sounds like somebody complaining that they've been swindled. "I obey way more bullshit about what's meant to be conventionally attractive than them, why amn't I happy and having sex too?" Because outside the Borg sex isn't an issue of collective consensus. Sex is about finding someone who wants to have sex with you, and if you want to have sex with them too then woohoo.

But feeling superior to someone else feels good. And it's easier to diminish them than improve yourself. Easier again when you decide those people are worse in an instantly observable way that conveniently ignores any medical or personal facts. "Oh, but it's unhealthy!" wail the concern trolls, advancing to attack strangers under the camouflage of good intentions. If you're worried about helping people who are unhealthy, find someone screwing their spine and their senses by sitting hunched over a screen every day. Start calling them out on it. See how that goes.

Even when their weight really is bad for them, it's still only bad for them. That's their problem. If you must generously donate your life in the service of all humanity, go "help" problems that affect other people. For example, start calling out assholes on the street when they harass women.

1 Trans-Anything

A certain kind of comedy still thinks "man dressed as a woman" is funny, and that kind is the unfunny kind. In the future, people are going to look back on our era's jokes about every kind of trans, and they're going to smirk to their friends that they would totally never have done that sort of thing even if they'd lived back then.

Anyone insisting that people wear the "right" clothes for their gender is saying, "I sexistly categorize every single human I see on sight, and you're screwing up my filing system." And those insisting on calling people what they "really are" really are shitheads.

If someone says they're he, she, or they, you call them he, she, or they. Just like you'd expect someone to call you by your name and not "that appalling asshole," and these two processes are now simultaneous. Every trans person has worked harder for their prefix than any doctor, lord, or king in the last century. Anyone trying to turn that into a joke isn't worth your time.

The only reason gender isn't obsolete as a concept is society is too entrenched in the mountains of bullshit we built up around it. After inventing a medium of exchange, electricity, and forklifts, physical differences should have become irrelevant. Continuing to discriminate by gender is like ignoring cars for horse-drawn carriages because we got too dependent on having horseshit everywhere, but the only industry was dumping that shit on half of the population. And training the other half to think they enjoyed the shoveling.

Enjoy more sexiness with Luke in 5 Reasons Homophobia Is Unmanly, or learn The Worst Romantic Lessons From Video Games.

Enjoy more Internet sexiness with The 6 Geekiest Sex Toys, or more Internet alerts in 8 Things Some A$$#ole Says In Every Debate About Sexism.

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