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Coming Out and Sperm Spikes

2011-10-13 · Hank · watch on YouTube · US politics & society · reflection essay

Lower-confidence wave

2011 videos did not pass the QA gate (17 %); their analysis is shown but less reliable.

On National Coming Out Day Hank argues that people, far more complex than electrons, resist neat categories: he recalls fearing at 12 he was gay because of stereotyped cues, says he is straight but effeminate ('a Kinsey one or two'), and urges viewers to be honest with themselves; he opens with a bed-bug coda to John's animal-mating Truth or Fail.

What is said

00:00:00 — Greeting; thanks for John's animal-sex Truth or Fail; traumatic insemination in bed bugs, including males stabbing males

  • ★★ Thanking John for his animal-sex Truth or Fail, Hank says John missed the most fascinating thing: some bed bugs inseminate females by stabbing sperm through the thorax (traumatic insemination). — 00:00:09
  • ★★ Hank says male bed bugs also stab other males, shoving in sperm to mix with theirs, so the original stabbing male's sperm may end up fertilizing a female's eggs. — 00:00:22

00:00:49 — 'Actual video topic': wave-particle duality (link to a video); even simple electrons are hard to categorise, yet we categorise far more complex humans

  • ★ Hank recommends a video that explains how small particles function both as particles and waves, linked on screen and in the description. (playful) — 00:00:51
  • ★★★ Hank: electrons are as elementary as it gets yet hard to categorise as wave or particle; humans are orders of magnitude more complicated, yet we still try to categorise ourselves and each other. — 00:01:11

00:01:27 — National Coming Out Day: Hank as 'a bit of an electron'; gay stereotypes and his fear at 12 (ice skating to the Village People); not gay but effeminate, Kinsey 1 or 2; orientation is complicated; know more about the electron before judging

  • ★★ Hank says that as a younger man he was 'a bit of an electron', unsure whether he was a particle or a wave, except when someone was observing, when he was 'definitely a particle'. (playful) — 00:01:33
  • ★★ Some people know whether they are gay or straight by age five; Hank thinks they are the exception rather than the rule. (hedged) — 00:01:46
  • ★★★ By puberty Hank knew being gay was tied, at least theoretically, to social cues (flamboyance, loving ice skating and stuffed animals, hanging out with girls non-romantically), so he thought he might be gay, which scared him because he didn't want to be different. — 00:01:53
  • ★★ Hank remembers, at 12, ice skating to the Village People and worrying that liking it so much was a problem. — 00:02:22
  • ★★★ Hank says this sounds funny but isn't: someone can be so afraid of what they might be, and liking ice skating to the Village People says nothing about one's sexual orientation. — 00:02:39
  • ★★★ Hank says it turns out he is not gay; he is kind of effeminate, a less guyish kind of guy. — 00:02:49 > «I'm just sort of a less guyish kind of guy.»
  • ★★★ Hank says sexual orientation is very complicated and rarely 100% in either direction (he is 'like a Kinsey one or two heterosexual'), which is hard to accept because it upsets assumptions about gender roles and orientation. — 00:02:56
  • ★★ If an electron were a person, Hank would want to know a lot more about it than whether it was a particle or a wave before judging what kind of person it was. (playful) — 00:03:15

00:03:28 — Message for National Coming Out Day: be honest with yourself and those you love, even if unsure who you are; unless you are a bed bug; sign-off

  • ★★★ Hank's message for National Coming Out Day (today in the UK, yesterday in the US): be honest with yourself and the people you love, even if unsure who you are, as most of us are; try to be who you are. — 00:03:28

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