Sexual orientation

[halfeatenmoon]

Or "Why the Kinsey scale doesn't really work for me".

So, every so often someone posts a secret on Fandom!Secrets that says something like "I'm a lesbian, but Jack Harkness is so hot."

The comments usually go something like this:
If you'd sleep with Jack Harkness, you're not a lesbian, you're bisexual

Comments

[sonictail]

Once people get around the basic point that a person's sexual preference is not their identity we might be better off. In short these idiots argue in black and white but in reality we're all shades of gray.

Nice post btw!

[sarahofcroydon]

This is a topic that's always really interesting and confusing to me. The Kinsey scale seems incompatible with the idea of queer to me, or at least my understanding of queer. The Kinsey scale is linear, whereas I thought the idea of queerness was to eliminate a gay/straight dichotomy alltogether and to eliminate those categories. I'd like to use the word queer to describe myself in a very PoMo way for that reason but feel like it's a word reserved for everything but a straight orientation.
assuming I'm straight here because I'm convinced I wouldn't know until I tried everything out, lol

[halfeatenmoon]

I think of queer as everything that's not heteronormative, but that's debatable.

It's interesting how you avoid labelling yourself until you've tried everything, because orientation labels seem to be generally regarded as pertaining to what you want, not what you've done. Do you feel like you don't know if you want something until you've tried it?

TMI warning! woop woop

[sarahofcroydon]

This is a point! Considering I have absolutely zilch relationship experience (which is feeling increasingly tragic at 24), I feel like what I might imagine/fantasise about would be different to my experience of it... I wouldn't call myself bisexual, but there are those days of the month when only thoughts of a woman will do. I hesitate to apply a label because I feel I couldn't distinguish between the enjoyment of my own body and the potential for enjoying another. Does that make any sense?

Re: TMI warning! woop woop

[halfeatenmoon]

Completely makes sense, it's just an unusual perspective. But I like that.

[friezaess]

I've noticed that a lot of the time you can be either straight OR gay, unless you're a drunken teenage female who is totally by because she kissed her BFF. Like, if someone's boyfriend has an affair with another man, everyone will be all "ZOMG YOU'RE GAY!".

Don't mind me, I haven't had my coffee yet.

[aardwulf]

Your grid actually makes a lot more sense to me regarding sexuality than anything else I've ever seen. Like, I generally have no interest in sex with other people but I've developed crushes, I guess you'd call them, on members of both sexes, and I was never sure if those crushes made me bisexual instead of fully asexual. And then I always wondered why the hell it was so important, anyway.

Butyeah, I think that, if only subconsciously, I've always viewed sexuality in a more nonlinear way than it's usually presented and this post kind of...helped to rearrange all the random muddled pieces in my head and make them click. So thank you.

[halfeatenmoon]

I didn't write anything about asexuality up there, but thinking of it like a grid is probably a helpful way of visualising the different kinds of asexuality, too. Some asexuals would have 'no' in every box, but others would have 'yes' in one or more of the boxes towards the top, so I guess that helps, too.

[pointytilly]

And then there's the split between romantic and sexual attraction. I'm not quite sure how to cram that in there...

[halfeatenmoon]

Mmm, yeah, I wasn't sure how to distinguish between the two. Probably because I'm bad at telling the difference even in my personal life. But then, the thing I chucked up there can only ever be a starting point - of course there will be things I haven't thought of.

[notalwaysweak]

I have the perfect LJ icon for this very discussion.

I'm queer. I'll use the label 'pansexual' rather than 'bisexual' because I don't believe gender is binary. I'm female, monogamously married to a male. This makes people assume I'm heterosexual, which annoys me. My attraction to people who aren't male, or indeed people who aren't my husband, didn't switch off when I said my vows. Just because I don't act on an attraction doesn't make it nonexistent.

[halfeatenmoon]

I like that icon.

Thank you for the comment about pansexuality. I don't really believe in a gender binary but an 'other' column didn't really work for the purposes of this thought exercise - it has its own limits.

After the write-in yesterday, I went and had drinks with Vanessa and Cari-An and we spend a while talking about how bisexuality becomes invisible when people are in relationships - it's just assumed that your attracted exclusively to whatever sex your current partner is. It's one of those frustrating things that has frustrated me for years but I can't see any way around.

[pointytilly]

I kinda gave up and went with queer myself because agh labels.

And hrm, why wouldn't an other column fit in that?

...though my answers would be the same for all three, and then I'd likely cross them out and write I DON'T CARE all over them and ruin the pretty table.

I'm not sure how to get the "no, the bisexuality thing doesn't go away" across either. It's explainable, in my opinion, but escaping the initial assumption doesn't seem doable.

[halfeatenmoon]

I thought that 'other' wouldn't quite fit because 'men' and 'women' are kind of definite categories (although even then they can be fuzzy and will depend on individual interpretation to an extent) but 'other' encompasses so many different things. For me an 'other' column will have 'depends on the person' right down the line, because the reasons for my being interested exclusively in women further down are multiple, and also I don't entirely understand all of them. If I were going to include 'other' I'd be tempted to break things right down into various modes of gender identity and combinations of sex-specific physical characteristics and I was kind of in a hurry. XD

Does that all make sense?