Haha, asexual as an option. That's great. I know a few people that I really believe are asexual.
Verin, IIRC
You're confusing me with the other
*hughughug*
juvenile, CheeseWhiz.
Straight. I doubt anyone is purely straight or gay, but I've considered myself 'straight' so that my attractions pretty much fit perfectly into that role. If I have any latent bisexuality, it's well-repressed.
Really? What do you base that on? I find it pretty easy to imagine that sexual preferences would be one way or the another. I have a much harder time understanding bisexuality than homosexuality, for instance.
I don't have much familiarity with the field, but it seems like arousal and emotional attraction is probably not concrete by sexual orientation. Isn't that basically what the Kinsey studies of sexuality found?
I suppose what I'm saying is that I'm unclear on whether incidental homosexual behavior is just needs fulfillment, and to what extent not pursuing something like that is filling social roles vs. genuine orientation.
On a similar line, I think there's been some research that shows that sexual experiences and attractions rewire the brain. So maybe we really do convince ourselves that we're hetero, during the period that some younger people are unsure of their orientation, in a way. Honestly I always just "assumed" I was what I was, but I gather that's not the experience for lots of people.
1. Kinsey, I believe, has been largely discredited and his studies are viewed as very untrustworthy.
2. People don't start out as sexual beings. I had no interest at all in girls before puberty. I didn't want to be attracted to them either. But it happened. I agree that there may be some social influences and so on, but I doubt it is that random. I mean, why would it be? Fundamentally, sexual attraction serves a clear biological purpose. It's pretty obvious why men and women are attracted to each other. That it can be rewired in some way to be the opposite is also not so strange. Nor, I guess, is it strange that it can be linked with something else (like leather or whips or cream or something) but most people do not have a sexual attraction for just randomly anything. I don't get anything from animals, for instance, and I doubt that's due to socialization.
What Gustaf says is essentially true. Actually, there's even a bit more nuance... there is a limited amount of data that indicates that female sexual orientation is a bit more fluid than male. Or, at least, there seem to be relatively more bisexuals among females and gays among males than in the other gender.
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