If the question is not trolling but is still polemical, and I disagree, then part of my answer will be dedicated to dismantling its assumptions. And I might make an aside at the OP.
But there have been many seemingly silly questions, for which I have given serious answers. I like to treat them as springboards.
Well, let’s put it this way:
And can you imagine the delighted reaction that would get at work tomorrow!
I’m actually shielded from the worse of the new terror of credentialism, because I obsessively bio’d myself about everything I regularly write on. Let us suppose I am adding a new topic to respond to . Well, that’s not as painful as I feared:
But of course, picking a bio relating to the existing topics of a question was not broken, and no, it did not need to break now, and no, I will not scroll through the dozens of bios I’ve built up.
Quora UI. And of course, this is the debugged version, as Peter Hawkins points out.
For my meme on the subject, see: Quora Credentials by Nick Nicholas on The Memes of Production
I’m leaving out of my answer the role of mtf transgender performers in the transaction—on which see Do real transsexuals and “shemale porn” have nothing in common?, and the transactionality, on which see Is it wrong of me to enjoy “shemale” porn? I know it’s degrading and fetishizing, but what can I do about the fact that I like it?
Uncontroversially, I trust: some cis het men enjoy mtf transgender porn, and some cis het men are repulsed by it.
And that’s spelling out stuff your question didn’t, OP. I don’t know what the stats are on cis gay men enjoying mtf transgender porn. Or for that matter transgender people enjoying it. (Then again, I don’t have the stats on cis het men; I trust someone does, at Pornhub if nowhere else.)
That’s not really the interesting question, and I surmise not the question OP is actually getting at. The question is more, what kind of cis het men enjoy mtf transgender porn—and, more interesting still: what does that tell us about their construction of heterosexuality, and femininity?
Bear in mind that the performers in TS porn are a subset of transgender performances of sexual identity, which themselves are a subset of queer sexual identities.
What kind of cis het men like TS porn?
Men who are still, at some level, het (or bi). They are attracted to performances of femininity. To be blunt, they are much more comfortable with someone who looks like a women performing fellatio or receiving anal sex, than they would be with a macho bearded man doing so.
There is a societal and a narrowly biological understanding of femininity from the cis het perspective. Viewers of TS porn may be confronted to realise that their construct is broader than just narrowly biological. (Those whose construct isn’t will be repulsed by TS porn, and won’t consume it further.) Of course, porn is always about kink, and that’s part of the kink. The kink clearly exists. (It explains where there are almost no “post-op” performers.) But the kink doesn’t do as much as you might think to undermine heterosexuality.
Hence complaints about TS porn adhering to a heteronormative construct of femininity or attractiveness. Hence why there are few performers who don’t look overtly feminine (though non-zero). Hence, if you think about it, why there are relatively few scenes involving mtf women and cis women.
Of course, mtf women are also shows as tops, both of transwomen and of cis men. It’d be interesting to see whether as many cis het men are OK with those depictions: they pose a bit more of a challenge to heteronormativity. But then again, so does pegging.
Elliott Mason brings up the question Does being attracted to transgender women who have penises, or porn involving them, mean a man is gay? This is a rich source of information, in some part because it has been overenthusastically merged.
As I groused at Brian Collins in his answer: it’s always political.
Scripts are bound to identity, and the major vehicle of identity in our age is the nation-state. So scripts that are tied up with the nation-state as emblematic—say, Greek or Thai—aren’t going away in a hurry.
Minority scripts in a country have been under clear threat, and will remain so. The scripts of India, though, are safe under federalism.
The obvious area where there will be movement are multi-nation scripts; they have been driven by ideology in the past, but that ideology might not be supported as strongly by the nation-state: they can come to be regarded as alien.
The only area I can see this playing out is where it has already been playing out: Cyrillic in the sphere of influence of the former Soviet Union. Cyrillic is already out in Moldova—and not coincidentally, is still mandatory in Transnistria. Cyrillic is obsolete, optional, or contentious in the independent -istans; but the Russian Federation is making sure it’s not going anywhere within Tatarstan.
Of course, the Roman script in the -istans isn’t the vehicle of Westernisation and modernisation: I think that imperative is no longer in play, though it clearly was a century ago. For the Turkic languages, the imperative is pan-Turkism.
Mongolia is the other country to keep a watch on: Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet. I said to Brian that technology isn’t an issue, but Mongolian script does introduce vertical writing, which is awkward, and it hasn’t been in much use anywhere for close to a century. Not that well supported on the internets either: the following preview of the Mongolian script wikipedia is apparently faked.
So Mongolian script is handicapped. I would not be astonished if Mongolian Cyrillic goes away, but the -istans come first.
Memes have developed a useful shorthand of associating a particular character with a particular kind of statement or role.
There are my suggestions. More suggestions welcome, and feedback solicited.
Quora UX: Disaster Girl
Quora UI: Absentminded Goldfish
Quora Moderation (bot): Bot Executioner please!
Quora Moderation (human): Judge Dredd Sentance
Topic Bot: Confused man
Quora Leadership: College Freshman
I resisted watching this. I did not want to watch a show about how the terrorists are out to get us, and the president is some Action Man, and “Kaboom Kablooey Ergo No Habeas Corpus”.
In other words, I have made a point of never seeing 24, and I did not want to watch 24 #2.
I came around through the trailer and the interviews: this was a series that was as much about how someone grows into the responsibilities thrust upon them.
Verdict:
The ordering of the letters is ultimately Phoenecian: the order of the Phoenecian alphabet was maintained in Greek (with a little bit of jumbling, and some leftovers appended at the end), and thence in Latin (again, with a little bit of jumbling—C G Z).
Why is the alphabet song easy to remember in English? That’s actually the wrong way around. Latin, and its successors, dropped the letter names of Greek, and went with letter names that (mostly) rhymed: a be ce de e ef etc (Latin alphabet).
Once the letter names rhymed in Latin, an easy to memorise alphabet song was inevitable in the languages that inherited its script and letter names. We certainly don’t have one in Greek.
OK, going backwards in my followee list for the past month:
