Why Not?

Heterodox Mores and Explicit Content

I’m told that I perceive and process social and emotional phenomena differently than most people. What makes me run and hide are things most others tolerate. For example, even on television, it roils my guts when someone is disbelieved or censured when they’re telling the truth, when someone embarrasses themself, or when someone thoughtlessly hurts an animal. Even when neurotypicals disapprove of these moments rather than laughing at them, it doesn’t upset them enough to make them change the channel.

Which I don’t get.

On the other hand, nowadays, alien ethical positions and sexual behaviors don’t short-circuit my rational sub-routines. Like abortion, they may strike me as abhorrent, but perfectly justifiable under some circumstances, and something often worth exploring. I don’t have an emotional warding response to alien mores or behaviors. I don’t react to them as “evil” unless the practitioners of those alien ethical positions or sexual behaviors themselves believe their practices wrong.

The closest I come to cognizing evil are the Three Sins in my Three Commandments stories: Cruelty, Waste, and Disrespect. But reasonable beings can differ as to what constitutes those sins, as well as the proper priority for avoiding them in “bad” situations. IMO, unreasoning beings cannot be characterized as “evil” at all.

So what the Eff does this have to do with segregating pages under the title, “Why Not”?

My goal on this website is not to upset or offend anyone, but to elasticize perceptions and valuations, so people think more like me, so they can help me and the rest of the universe find ends and means I can accept. FREX, in my Three Commandments universe, why can’t I accept that the Church of the Thinking Hedonist is right? Or, in the United States in the early 2000s, why are there “bad” words? Why can’t we use the words that, with all their historical layers and allusions, best express what we mean to connote? (I reserve for another day the issue of “private language,” just as I reserve the possibilities of solipsism and monism.)

In my writing in other venues than this PAGE, I perceive myself as soft-peddling my questions about rights and wrongs, about dimensions of reality. That’s why I write spec fic rather than memoir, and edit that spec fic until my neurotypical beta-readers tell me it does not “make them change the channel.”

Except here.

Here I’ll do my best to speak in my own voice.

Here I’ll trust you with the raw expression of my mind, unfiltered by the grown-up tact and political correctness and inclusive vocabulary that translates what I actually think into what I’m told neurotypical ears are prepared to hear.

Here I’ll do my best to tell my truths to myself, so please don’t disbelieve me.