"The need for the semantic roadmaps provided by meaningful taxonomic descriptors goes a lot deeper than the kind of petty branding described in the rather flip comment about clothes. "

I disagree.

I think labeling is both personal and meaningless. Each person has two labels. The one they give themselves (either through pursuit or acceptance) and the one other people give them.

One is delusional, the other superficial.

Any claims to a "deep" understanding is just more delusion.

Personally, I say use Occam's razor to pick whatever label gets you where you need to go.

So to piggy back on Sonya's "fucking pomos can bite me", I'll give a little analogy that explains my agreement.

I used to (and at times would still like to) play roleplaying games... No, that actually has nothing to do with sex - I'm not talking about those kinds of games, I'm talking about "adventure" games like Dungeons and Dragons (for those too old or too rural to be familiar with World of Warcraft). Growing up, there was rather a lot of the sort of oppressive / demeaning kind of labeling of those of us kids who played D&D and similar games. And I'm not just talking about the Patricia Pulling garbage where she got herself an armed detective's license and went on a witch-hunt against RPG's and badly informed a lot of cops because she was pissed off that her son commit suicide. I'm also talking about the jocks, who demeaned us because that's what jocks do (I'm not gonna get into their motivation).

Now we could have grown up to found some anti-label campaign in which we strove to get people to describe all varieties of games as just "games", but we didn't. We continued to call them "roleplaying games" in spite of the fact that we often had to then follow with "Dungeons and Dragons" if we wanted the uninitiated to know what we were talking about. Why didn't we go the anti-label route?

Two reasons:
1) it wouldn't have done any fucking good - the jocks know who the "nerds" are, whether we choose to label our games as "roleplaying games", "chess", "D&D" or just "games". It doesn't matter.
2) It would have made things harder for us. If I asked around about "games" instead of specifically "roleplaying games", I'd wind up playing CHECKERS at the park half the time. Oh boy, what fun!

Same thing applies here:
1) it won't do any good - calling yourself "pomosexual" if you're a man, have sex with other men and dress in pink chiffon won't make it any safer for you to walk through a redneck neighborhood
2) it makes things harder - calling yourself "pomosexual" is an invitation for people you're not interested in to get the wrong impression and hit on you -- is it a travesty? depends - I know people who aren't bothered by being hit on by people they're not interested in - I also know people who are royally freaked out by it -- but it's also easily avoidable

So there you have it - zero advantage, plus a handicap. No thanks.

I'm bisexual - or if I'm being particular about it, sapiosexual - doesn't mean I'll sleep with you, but it does mean I'm open to being approached.