mmm, procrastination

[kindkit]

It's getting late and I really should be grading papers.

Instead, a poll. Inspired by an earlier discussion on my journal about the British TV show "Bob and Rose."

Comments

[executrix]

What about "John loves Jane which doesn't stop him from missing cock" or "Jane loves John but..."?

And there are often strains in relationships (even if both parties are happy to be entirely heterosexual or entirely homosexual) caused by the belief that not only should people have only one sexual partner, but their sexual partner should also be their closest friend.

[kindkit]

Yeah, that was pretty much what I meant. "Maybe" is less negative than "I doubt it." Sorry about the highly unscientific phrasing!

[julia_here]

Keeping to published material like a good little academic, there's always First Comes Love by who's her nose who used to be a commentor for NPR.

And ditto the "missing cock/missing pussy" thing: if people aren't inclined to be exclusive, whether they're straight or bi or gay isn't what matters, it's that they're not inclined to be monogamous.

Julia, also avoiding work of several kinds

[kindkit]

if people aren't inclined to be exclusive, whether they're straight or bi or gay isn't what matters, it's that they're not inclined to be monogamous

Well, I'm not sure about that. Admittedly I've never been in the situation, but it seems to me that missing sex with a person of the other gender than one's partner is not the same thing as just missing sex with other people, full stop. Because there would be a portion of that desire that one's regular partner simply could not satisfy. And I'd think that such desire and dissatisfaction might be especially acute and painful if one normally had a strong gender preference and one's partner was not of that gender--in other words, it would be extra difficult for a usually gay man partnered with a woman (or any of the other possible permutations of that scenario).

[minim_calibre]

Well, I'm not sure about that. Admittedly I've never been in the situation, but it seems to me that missing sex with a person of the other gender than one's partner is not the same thing as just missing sex with other people, full stop. Because there would be a portion of that desire that one's regular partner simply could not satisfy.

From my experience, it's not that different. A little (in that there's a stronger Forbidden Attraction Pull towards women for me), but not that different.

(However, I only mildly prefer women to men.)

[queerbychoice]

"(For the fans of slash.) Assuming characters who are not explicitly presented as gay or bi in canon, which scenarios do you like in a fanfic?"

None of the above. The scenarios I like best are ones in which the characters were straight until they met each other, but then converted to queerness.

[pearl_o]

My answer to pretty much all of the questions are: It depends. It really, really depends. I don't necessarily think A person will fall in love with ANOTHER person who is not the sex they're usually oriented to. But I do think that of specific people.

I think part of that might also be a range of meaning by what people actually mean by straight and gay, also. I mean, if you're a person who's spent a lot of time actively thinking about their sexual orientation, no matter what you finally decide, there's a perfectly reasonable chance that you can admit to yourself some variation, and just find it way too small to be useful as a label. If I think girls are pretty, but 95% of the time my thoughts and fantasies default to thinking about sex-with-boys, then "bisexual" might be technically true, but it gives a way more skewed impression of the facts than "straight" does. At the same time, I do think there's totally a chance that one day I'll find some girl and fall in love with her and live happily ever after with a chick instead of a

[pearl_o]

Also, I'm a little confused by your usage -- are you talking specifically about gender or sex? Because you use gender in the first question, but the rest seem to be more specifically biologically oriented (ie, do you lump a straight woman falling in love with a transgendered person who considers himself male but is still biologically female in with a straight woman falling in love with a woman above, since they both could have the "missing the cock" potential?).

[kindkit]

I wasn't really taking transgendered people into account, I'm afraid. (And yes, in the first question I was making the bad mistake of equating gender with biological sex.)

This is bad of me. And you're right that including transgendered people in the possible scenarios would add interesting complications. But I guess I was trying to create scenarios that were as stark and simple as possible, and therefore working within conventional categories of female/male, gay/straight.