A new theory of sexuality

[forgetmyself]

**I'll be posting the following idea on AVEN to get broad reaction. The discussion here tends to be more measured and thoughtful, so I welcome comments here to.**

I have not yet seen a comprehensive theory of sexual orientation that accounts for all of the glorious diversity that is evident in the asexual community, or the larger human population. The Kinsey scale does not account for asexuals. The AVEN triangle does not account for the pan orientation, or the crucial distinction between romantics and aromantics.

I propose instead that each of us has a three part sexual orientation. The primary orientation distinguishes between sexual and asexual in the manner described by rabger. The secondary orientation distinguishes between romantics and aromantics. The tertiary orientation distinguishes between hetero, homo, bi, and pan subtypes.

For example, Hugh Hefner is a sexual-aromantic-hetero. Elton John is a sexual-romantic-homo. forgetmyself is an asexual-romantic-hetero etc.

[Dargon]

Problem: the third scale need to exist twice. Once for romantic orientation and once for sexual orientation. An aromantic would not register on the romantic orientation scale, nor an asexual on the sexual orientation scale. I've even known people with different sexual and romantic orientations (usually one bi and the other hetero/homo). Common terminology when I was at AVEN would be (hetero/homo/bi/pan/a)romantic (hetero/homo/bi/pan/a)sexual. For instance, Dargon is an aromantic asexual, and under said terminology, forgetmyself would likely be a heteroromantic asexual. The aforementioned sexual with a different romantic orientation might be a heteroromatic bisexual (one who is sexually attracted to both genders, but only romantically attracted to the opposite). For most sexuals both romantic orientation and sexual orientation are the same, thus a heteroromantic heterosexual seems a tad bit redundant.

That being said, sexuality is far more complex than a mere three scales. There's the direction and magnitude of sexual attraction, magnitude and direction of romantic attraction, magnitude of libido, and countless other attributes that could be charted as spectrums, vectors, distrobution charts, or whatever.

It is my opinion that attempting to build a single comprehensive model is an excersise in futility. Rather, several small, individually discriptive scales.

[forgetmyself]

What you are proposing is to locate an individual at point on a multidimensional hyperplane. Of course that is the "right" model, but it is often useful to generate simpler models that cover most cases most of the time, which was really my intention. Under you system we would need to describe peron x's sexuality as (.5,.3,.07,.002,.9,.06,.0007,.5).

[pretzelboy]

To some extent, the main questions are a) what do we need to distinguish between and b) how do we attempt to measure those. In rabger's model, there is the distinction between primary and secondary sexual attraction. I think that this potentially can be useful--it seems especially important for those that experience one but not the the other--but there is the question of how it is experienced by those who experience both. Can they even distinguish between them? (I have no idea.) Granted, the same holds true for distinguishing between romantic and sexual attraction. For people who experience these as generally going together (or maybe experiencing romantic attraction only after sexual attraction), it's not clear how easy it would be to distinguish between them.

Unlike Kinsey's scale, which is bimodal, Storms proposed a model where same sex attraction and opposite sex attraction are put on two different axes, allowing for hetero/homo/bi/asexual. A similar model can easily be used for other kinds of attraction. (I found a proposal vaguely along these lines in a '77 paper that no one ever seemed to pick up on and where the authors didn't even see some of the implications of their model, such as its allowance for asexuality and aromanticism.) And then there is the distinction between bisexual and pansexual.

Here I'm going to be somewhat less than PC. It's cool these days to attack the idea that there are only two genders. Doing so indexes your identity as someone who is radical, someone who challenges the system. Yet, a gender binary is real enough in how at least most people perceive others. Yet, I wonder the extent to which people outside a strict gender binary are perceived within a gender binary. For example, even if someone chooses, out of respect, to use the preferred pronouns for a transexual person, do they perceive that person as being just like any other member of that gender? Probably not, though they they may be (at least partly) perceived that way, and as I understand, this has significant interactions with attraction towards them and sexual/romantic orientation. Still, I suspect the extent to which such perception exists will be exaggerated to be PC.

I am doubtful of claims and third and fourth genders. It seems entirely likely that some people will perceive others as being neither or both genders or some combination of them, but I have my doubts about how many people actually have some kind of third gender active in how they perceive others. Granted, I suspect that there is probably also considerable variation here among people. (People who know lots of transgendered people versus people who don't. People who have strong gender classification and stereotyping in how they perceive others versus people who have much weaker gender classification and stereotyping.) This is a matter I don't know that much about, but I expect that it might be difficult to get accurate reports sometimes because I'm going to guess that there are a lot of people who perceive gender quite a bit differently from how their politics say they should perceive gender, and this has the potential to distort (depending on the person) self-report.

[forgetmyself]

I agree with everything you say!

[Dargon]

I suppose if you were to represent my stuff, it would be on a multidimensional hyperplane, but that is not what I am suggesting. While all these axes do make up sexuality, it is not really necessasary that they all be on the same model. It is difficult for most people to visualize things beyond a simple 3D graph, and even then 2D ones are more easy to read. As such, I think it is more useful to create numerous one and two dimensional scales concerning sexuality, rather than a single comprehensive model.

Concerning the things you mentioned in the first post, I still believe a minimum four scales are necessary. Romantic gender preference, Romantic magnitude, sexual gender preference, and sexual magnitude. Really, if I were to get as in depth as I'd like, it would be two two-axis plots, one being gender preference vs romantic attraction magnitude and the other gender preference vs sexual attraction magnitude, each with a full line across the scale which shows how it varies as it goes.

I will add that I'm trying to figure out where that gender stuff came out of that pretzelboy is talking about. (Dargon still does not understand the whole concept of "mental gender.")

[forgetmyself]

Dargon, I think I agree with you. If we were to apply a simple version of your system, we would say that person x's sexuality is romance(high, hetero) + sex(lo, bi).

I admit that I am too ignorant to critically comment on pretzelboy's post. To be frank, I included the pan orientation simply because so many people in the AVEN seem to self-identify with it.

[pretzelboy]

A comment someone made on the AVEN version of this thread reminded me of something that probably is significant regarding the bi vs. pansexual distinction. In the book Sexual Fluidity, the author reports on a 10 year longitudinal study of women who had experienced some amount of same-sex attraction. The book mostly focuses on women attracted to men and women (largely because most research up to that point focused on lesbians despite bisexual women consistently being more numerous in survey data; however, the author avoids the term bisexual because of a lot of these women didn't feel comfortable using that term.)

Among these women, there is a group that feels they are "attracted to the person not the gender" and that gender isn't really a major component in their attractions (except possibly as a hidden variable of sorts, where they are attracted principally to people with certain sorts of traits regardless of the person's gender, though these traits may be more common in one gender than another.) Evidently, this phenomena pops up here and there in the literature, but is generally ignored or treated as an anomaly.

However, none of the women in the study identified as pansexual. For those who experienced both same and other sex attractions, a very large portion changed their identify labels at least once (often more) over the course of the ten years. Many were uncomfortable with "bisexual" because they felt it suggested interest in sexual relationships with men and women at the same time, when they generally (but not always) wanted a long-term monogamous relationship, recognizing that could be with a man or a woman. (Also, for these women, there often was a sense that "queerness" was, to a large extent a choice as they had the option of going with an other-sex or same-sex relationship.) Often, the identity trend was lesbian if they had relationships mostly with women. But then if they had one with a man, they might go to bisexual or unlabeled. One went from unlabeled to bisexual after getting married to a man, but that was because when she was younger, she had a number of lesbian relationships, and she was mostly attracted to women. But she ended up falling in love with a man and getting married to him. Because people tended to use this to dismiss her earlier lesbian relationships as "just a phase" (when she insisted her feelings were quite real), she identified as bisexual to make it clear that that had not been "just a phase."

Edit: I'm not sure what connection, if any, exists between the idea of "pansexual" and what Diamond (author of above cited book) calls "person based attractions" (which is a problematic term since people for whom gender is an important factor in their attractions also experience "person based attraction" within (a) gender/s.) Also, not all of the "bisexual" women experienced these sorts of attractions. Rather, some felt that there were certain mail traits they found especially attractive and other (overlapping but non-identical) female traits they found especially attractive. However, a big drive for "pansexual" seems to be that many people's politics motivates them to try to see people (themselves?) as post-gender, or rejecting a gender binary, etc. I really don't like the idea of attempting to enlist certain people's non-gender-based attractions in service of someone else's gender politics, as though these people have somehow "moved past gender" rather than that just being how they are. The only ideology I would be interested in enlisting these sorts of people's attractions into is one that says models of sexuality that can't account for them are too narrow.\

It certainly does complicated the idea of "sexual orientation", because it's not clear that everyone has one--including a number of sexual people.

[primoaprilis]

I recently read an article Brains Do It: Lust, Attraction, and Attachment
By Helen E. Fisher January 01, 2000.
This generally aimed at heterosexual people but I think can easily widened to include all orientations. The main thrust of her argument is that the brain processes sexual activity in three independent ways each of which is affected by hormones and neurotransmitters. She divides this up into lust, attraction and attachment where lust is about wanting to have sex or not, attraction is about being attracted to other people or not and attachment is about wanting to be with other people or not and all of these have a strength of application from none to a lot. In terms of asexuality the attraction part of this triplet deals not only with strength of attraction but but can be widened to include in which direction it points. Thus by this theory, sexual orientation is confined to and is associated with that part of the brain which processes attraction. The lust and attachment parts (the latter associated with romantic feelings) are the same and vary in the same way for all orientations.

If this is in any way true, then investigation of sexual orientation can be viewed independently and in trying to work out why an individual has a particular orientation can be viewed as being dependenent solely on the inputs to the part of the brain which processes attraction for sexual purposes. There may be other parts of the brain which deal wither other sorts of attraction which use the same inputs or diferent ones or a combination of the two for other kinds of attraction. For example, how an individual was treated early on in life and by which gender of person could affect different sorts of attraction including sexual attraction. All attractions are associated with needs, the fulfilling of which feels good and which therefore the person experiencing the feelings will want to repeat. The characterisation of how these needs are dealt with is therefore dependent on accumulated experience and how the individual is or becomes predisposed to deal with that experience and so will differ from individual to individual.

[ily]

I don't know if I'd agree that there's a crucial distinction between romantic and aromantic people. Am I an outlier because I can't figure out whether I'm romantic or aromantic, or do the existence of people like me show that maybe it's not a part of everyone's orientation? The only place where I've heard romanticism vs. aromanticism talked about is in the asexual community, and even there, there aren't standard definitions of these things. Also, if you're an aromantic asexual (or an asexual like me), would the third part of the model just not apply to you? I guess I just want to be included personally in everything

The Kinsey scale *sort of* mentions us...technically the scale includes "X" (that's us) in addition to the standard numbers, but since Kinsey did not find us titillating enough to warrant further study, most people don't know "X" exists. I'm sure everyone here knows this, but I don't know if it means we were included or not.

[pretzelboy]

I think that part of the reason that the romantic/aromantic distinction is so fuzzy is that it involves a number of things. First, there is the issue of (some kind or other of) attraction. But there is the issue of what we want to do on the basis of those attractions (if we have them), which is connected to romantic preference. For someone who gets crushes on people, but very rarely, and these never go anywhere, or for someone who gets crushes on people, but these don't cause them to want to go out with those people, the question of being romantic vs. aromantic becomes very tricky. I've had the experience of having a crush on someone and then having those feelings completely go away when around that person. My infrequent attractions (combined with a number of other factors) have resulted in me having virtually no experience in romantic relationships, so I have no idea how I would react/respond in such a situation. As such, I don't feel that I fit either into romantic or aromantic categories.

[Isaac]

I think, pretzelboy, that these thinks that make fuzzy the concept of aromantic are in fact different components that should be distinguishes. In parallel with sex, we distinguish sexual attraction, sexual desire, sexual arousal, sex drive... why not for the romantic side? For me is clear that I'm aromantic (while I'm never been sure about my asexuality) since all these criteria give the same result. Another problem is confusing aromantic squishes with romantic crushes, but disusing the concept of squish might require its own thread.

[sinisterporpoise]

It is getting late so I am not at my best. The problem with this proposal is that it is too complicated for the average person to understand.

[ily]

For someone who gets crushes on people, but very rarely, and these never go anywhere, or for someone who gets crushes on people, but these don't cause them to want to go out with those people, the question of being romantic vs. aromantic becomes very tricky.

That's been my experience exactly.

The problem with this proposal is that it is too complicated for the average person to understand.

Definitely, but I guess that's true for most theories of sexuality-- most of them are just going to be seen by people with some interest or experience in the field.

[ghosts]

Yeah, I'm not crazy about the romantic/aromantic distinction. I haven't felt the need for a term like that to describe... well, what is it describing? The feelings I experience towards other people, or the relationships I form? ::shrug:: I'm not romantic or aromantic. I think part of the reason that the terms bother me is that it seems to reinforce the idea that there's also a crucial difference between "romantic relationship" and "friendship," which I don't feel is the case - it depends on the person and how they choose to distinguish their relationships.

[Isaac]

I think part of the reason that the terms bother me is that it seems to reinforce the idea that there's also a crucial difference between "romantic relationship" and "friendship," which I don't feel is the case - it depends on the person and how they choose to distinguish their relationships.

I like this point. This qualitative difference might be nothing but a bunch a societal and mutual expectations.

[Dargon]

I think part of the reason that the terms bother me is that it seems to reinforce the idea that there's also a crucial difference between "romantic relationship" and "friendship," which I don't feel is the case - it depends on the person and how they choose to distinguish their relationships.

While I still tend to throw the word "aromantic," I do agree with this statement, and it has me thinking if I still want to continue identifying as such. I'm of the seemingly crazy opinion that relationships should be whatever they end up being. I believe we've discussed this before somewhere here.

[ghosts]

Yeah Dargon, I think we've talked about it before. But yeah, that's basically it - let the relationship develop & see where it goes.

[Siggy]

I don't speak for anyone else, but I for one feel pretty definitively aromantic. The line may be fuzzy, but I don't think I'm on the fuzzy part.

I personally find that the aromantic/romantic distinction is an important one to make whenever I explain asexuality to people. If I only present myself as asexual, I would give people the impression that asexuals are like me, without any sort of romantic couple-forming mechanism. But that's not true for all asexuals, not even for most of them. So I have to mention the distinction, lest I give people the wrong idea. If I have more time after that, I would also explain that not everyone draws a hard distinction between friendships and romantic relationships.

[GaiaShirley]

I would present it a little differently.
I find the following chart the best way I could think of describing one's sexual/romantic orientation:


It shows the spectrum between attraction to men or women, while the vertical line represents the level, or the power, of the attraction.

This chart also describes, for example, people who experience sexual attraction to a certain gender, but romantic attraction to a different gender.
And, of course, it separates asexuals from bisexuals by being able to change the level of sexual attraction one feels.

What do you think?
I know it's still problematic, defining the attractions by men or women - because where do pansexuals find themselves here? And it doesn't leave room for demisexuals either [unless you might say that if one would place two dots, one on each chart, that describe their orientation - than demisexuals could place a sort of flickering dot in the sexual chart that stays "on" when the romantic chart is involved as well... But that's just trying to push a state of being into these charts that don't describe it well, isn't it?].