Beyond Sexual Orientation (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Beyond Sexual Orientation (2016)

nautil.us

57 pointsdnetesn46 comments

This is very interesting stuff. I'm a man and have identified as gay for most of my awareness of my sexuality, but started experiencing attraction to women sometime in college. I think I'm bi now, but preferences seem to vary considerably month to month. It was pretty confusing for a while before I stopped trying to put labels on it and just went with it.

The biggest thing I've realized is that in the ways that count, I really actually just like people. There seems to be a small aspect of sexuality driven by visual attraction ("wow he's hot") but really the person inside (behavioral identity) seems to be more important.

I wonder how many people (especially men) might have expressed sexual fluidity if it wasn't for the societal idea that you're gay/straight/bi and that's that...I know I wasn't too open to being attracted to women for a long time, and I don't think that's a healthy place to be.

personally, I'm fairly certain that 99.9% of the population is to some degree bisexual, though most people fall on an extreme where they prefer one gender over the other a lot (but you could convince them to say someone of the same gender is hot or someone of the other gender is hot or whatever you land on)

I suspect you're correct,

One implication of you being correct though is how we should react to things that subtly move the culture one way or the other,

The behavior of culture warriors of all stripes makes a lot more sense if you are correct

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/01/setting-the-default/

was an interesting post that made a lot of behavior that seemed baffling to me, make more sense after I read it

This is my personal experience and yet I'm careful not to put my own experience onto anyone else. I've met more than enough people, gay and straight, who seem genuinely repulsed by one or the other. I don't purport to know what they feel like, nor can I.

Well isn't attraction a combination of physical and intellectual attraction? The physical attraction seems to be strongly binary for the majority, but if you're not then being "sexually fluid" seems like a natural consequence to me.

> I'm a man and have identified as gay for most of my awareness of my sexuality, but started experiencing attraction to women sometime in college

I'm a gay man myself, but what I sometimes find difficult is sometimes I feel some sort of attraction to a few of my very close women friends. It's quite confusing, I can't entirely decide whether these feelings are platonic or sexual, or even some sort of FOMO that I don't know what it's like to be with a girl, maybe I should try it. And as I've come out, and labeled myself as gay, I think it would be disingenious of me to try anything, since my women friends don't expect that from me. Though it has become easier being heavily into the kink scene (Recon, rubber/leather etc), and I come across all sorts of people, a lot of whom would identify as bi or pansexual.

I'm just glad we can have a conversation about this instead of hiding it all and I'm 21, so I'm sure I'll work it all out.

I feel like all people would be "sexually fluid" without social pressure. If a person can reach sexual gratification with nothing but their own fist, they can do it with anyone else's.

I don't think attraction is exclusive to physical appearance or genitalia.

Certainly happens in prisons ...

I really don't give a shit what society thinks about who I sleep with, but there's a type of basic, visceral 'punch in the gut' feeling I get when faced with a very physically attractive woman which never happens with a man. The idea that but for societal pressure I would start fancying men just does not match my experience at all.

It's hard, as a straight male my whole life, to tell whether personal anti-homo feelings are completely natural or the result of an ingrained societal bias. I wonder if there's some sort of pyschological test for that.

No it's not. Prejudice isn't preference.

Societal bias. "Homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" are, mostly, modern inventions. The line between "normal" and "deviant" behavior as regards relationships between the same sex has varied drastically over time and between cultures. In antiquity, such a distinction didn't even exist in many cases, and it wasn't that long ago that men kissing one another was considered perfectly in line with what we would now classify "heterosexual" behavior.

At least one axis here, alongside the gay-straight axis, is dominance behavior. One can feel dismissal or dislike towards people whose behavior registers as submissive. There are varying degrees to which gay men manifest this -- and considering whether your anti-homo feelings correlate with it can be informative -- but many definitely do.

Thought experiment time (perhaps this happened to you in real life as well): suppose you saw this attractive female body from behind. Then as she turned around, you noticed she was a man. Doesn't that mean you are also attracted to men in some way? At that point it's no longer binary—it's just a matter of degree.

I'd say that proves the opposite - the moment of realisation is when your brain identifies the sex of the person, and then discounts them as not being of interest.

Not being of interest yes, but it doesn't take away the fact that you found them sexually attractive in some respect.

Before they turned around, you had a mental image that filled in the rest of the picture.

I do think that there's an innate component to attraction, just as you suggest.

But we also know that mental habits, repeated for years, become deep visceral reactions. And society programs our unconscious attitudes in a way that's difficult to appreciate simply through conscious introspection.

It's actually hard to know what you'd be attracted to, if you lived in a society that truly accepted/encouraged same-sex attraction. Maybe you'd be the same. Maybe you'd have dated guys once or twice, but ended up straight. Maybe you'd have five kids with a male partner. It's hard to say - it's an experiment that hasn't been run.

In many of the papers on sexual arousal and orientation, the sensation assessed is genital arousal. In men this is erection. I wonder if this punch in the gut feeling is linked to it somehow, or independent?

In those studies -- many by Meredith Chivers -- there is a clear differentiation in men (though not in women) in arousal that distinguishes heterosexual and homosexual patterns of attraction.

I used to consider myself straight, and then I got into the sex scene (think kink scene, but with less kinkiness, and the same amount of sex). After some time, I realized that I could be having fun with people of the same gender as me, and boom, suddenly I had no idea what my sexual preferences identified me as. I have fallen in love with people of both typical genders, and also people across the spectrum of sexuality. I like peoples' personalities, not their genitals. Everyone's got holes, and everyone has things to stick in them. If you need some more holes or some better things to put in them, there's a whole industry waiting to help you find a solution to that problem.

> Sexual fluidity is also not the same thing as bisexuality, which is another sexual orientation.

This kind of thing triggers me now. Sexuality is not a category. It's the relationships you have. If we want to categorize this, then there are effectively an infinite number of sexualities. How would you categorize me? I am currently in a relationship with a person of the opposite gender, but we both enjoy having sex with people of all kinds. I have fallen in love with people of all kinds. Does that make me bisexual? Pansexual? Sapiosexual? An adventurous asexual? Sexually fluid? My point is that it doesn't matter! It is what it is.

Go experiment and learn about yourself. You might be surprised at what you find

Edit: I would also like to add that you are never too old to experiment with this. And! The "sex scene" is probably the safest place to have sex that I can think of because everyone that I've met in it is open and honest and respectful

I experimented and eventually realised I'm asexual.

I'm not depressed, or ill. All my parts function. It's just that I'm not sexually attracted to anyone.

I'm still perfectly capable of having, and enjoying, sex, but it's been a long time now. Even before I realised I was asexual, I was still aware of an asymmetry in what was going on, that I wasn't experiencing things in quite the same was as my partner.

I still like the idea of love and partnership, but I've let this get in the way of my finding it.

And that's okay. And _you're_ okay.

:-)

Just wanted to say this, because it seems like aces are still one of the most misunderstood groups out there.

I got a feeling of incredulity from reading this article because it seems like the article is saying that sexual fluidity is a sexual orientation, you can be asexual, gay, straight, bi or fluid. But that seems like falling into the same type of rigid thinking that the article decries. I think sexual fluidity is orthogonal to sexual orientation. If right now you're attracted to both men and women, you're bisexual. If, in a few years, you find yourself attracted only to men (as a man), then you'll be gay.

I think the problem arises because most people consider sexual orientation to be an identity, instead of a description. Some languages have multiple verbs that are covered in English by 'to be'. In Spanish, for example, there's ser and estar. Ser is used for things like inherent characteristics, while estar is used for temporary conditions, moods, etc. If you say "I'm tall" you would use ser, if you said "I'm tired", you'd use estar. People tend to think of sexual orientation in the ser sense instead of considering that it can be used in the estar sense.

I had the same impression. I think the authors are taking what's simply a previously-unacknowledged dimension of sexuality (time) and reifying it into an orientation in and of itself.

The most interesting statistic I found in this article is that nearly three times as many women as men have had a same sex encounter according to a 2016 survey of 10k US adults - 17% vs 6%.

In what way did you find it interesting? It seems to make complete sense. Any lower and I’d probably be surprised the ratio isn’t higher.

It seems to me that same-sex encounters are way more acceptable among women than among men. If a woman has such an encounter the peer group would classify it as a once-of experiment. If a guy has such an encounter you can be sure he'll be called gay bob for as long as he stays in the same group of friends.

tl/dr: Different people like different things, and sometimes that changes over time. Huge surprise, or?

I imagine attraction is a non-trivial function of multiple variables for most people. As such it doesn't seem that surprising that for some certain variables have more (or less) influence than for most others.

On a somewhat related note, I truly cannot imagine why anyone would put jelly on a peanut butter sandwich. The thought seems utterly gross to me. But as long as I'm not forced to eat it, I no problem with others having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Why should I?

>On a somewhat related note, I truly cannot imagine why anyone would put jelly on a peanut butter sandwich. The thought seems utterly gross to me. But as long as I'm not forced to eat it, I no problem with others having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Why should I?

Same with me except replace PB & J with pizza & pineapple respectively.

Title says 2016 but article is from 16th August 2018.

Edit: I now see the article was reposted from a 2016 issue.

The last line of the article:

> This article was originally published in our “Selection” issue in October, 2016.

I didn't spot that, sorry.

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