Beautifully, wonderfully, amazingly well put!
Esprix
The simple answer: for some people, it’s static, and for other people it’s variable.
Instead of discussing sexuality, let’s go with something that most people consider even more invariable: gender. Most people are pretty convinced that they’re either male or female. Of course, we all know about transsexuals, but most transsexuals are just people whose bodies don’t match their self-image, right? Well, no. That describes “primary transsexuals” (“I knew I was female from when I was three”); it does not describe “secondary transsexuals,” who generally don’t recognize the need/desire to change their gender identification until adulthood, and others never seem to make up their mind at all.
My gender self-identification through most of my childhood was male. While in retrospect I can see evidence of a strong undercurrent of some ineffable “femaleness” poking out from around the edges, it wasn’t until I was in my twenties that this became obvious to me. When I was a teenager, I would take offense at people who “mistakenly” identified me as female, and after I was raped I took deliberate pains to try not to appear feminine (as I at least partially blamed having been raped on my rather feminine appearance at the time).
We can argue forever whether my self-identification changed when I admitted to myself that I was a transsexual, or whether I was merely “confused” or “misinformed” or “in denial” about it prior to that time. But if I can be wrong about my gender, surely someone else can be wrong about their sexual orientation, and carry on for quite a while in a vaguely happy way in the “wrong” orientation before something “snaps” and they realize their error?
I think it obvious that gender and sexuality are both continua – as are many other things, like pisaphilia (love of peas) – and that the tendency of one’s position to move on these various continua varies both from person to person and from continuum to continuum.
To Kelly M: couldn’t agree with you more on the whole "for some people it is static and other’s not: thing. Right on!
Your points on transexuals are even better put but there are a few things you may not know: what about people who are born without any discernable gender at all? People whose gender is totally ambiguous? These people lie exactly half way on the gender line. In fact even their genetic codes are sometimes half XX chromosone and half XY chromosone.
This is the reason why the International Olympic Committee has formally stated that there is NO sure way to tell if an olympic contestant is male or female.
Now I am sure you are thinking that this phenomenon must be pretty rare. Well it is rare but not that rare. In fact it is so common that ‘gender assignment surgery’ is performed a dozen times a DAY in the united states alone and (and this is the kicker) when the discovery channel did a special on this phenomenon they couldn’t find a singel individual who had the surgery who said they were at all happy with the results. They admitted that at least they hadn’t had to worry about people seeing them in the shower and freaking out but later in life they tend to find themselves more and more alienated and disgusted by what was done to them. I mean some of the surgey is just horrible: emasculation, cliterodectomy ‘vaginal lengthening’. In fact sometimes the physicians ask the parents if they would prefer a boy or a girl and the perform the surgery based on that and nothing else. Scary scary shit.
I am DESPERATELY searching for a cite to support my views and I am failing miserably if anyone could help me out then that would be great.
Anyhoo my point is that Kelly M has hit the ball on the…ummmm… … round side when she says that gender (and pretty much everything else) varies drastically from person to person. Gender is a continuum.
Actually, I am quite familiar with intersexuality, but thanks for mentioning it anyway. 
The plight of children born with cosmetically unacceptable genitals is especially heinous. Our society would be much better off if we would just chuck some of our more deeply-held polarities and let people be themselves.
But you see, that’s exactly the point I’ve made several times now. Given the current practical limiatations of our ability to fully comprehend and measure a person’s sexual orientation, the best we can do is make point observations at some particular “snapshot” in time.
And I deny that at any given point in time, a person’s “orientation” or “preference” or “taste” (or whatever word one wishes to use) lies PRECISELY and EXACTLY on the zero-dimensional point in between. It will always be on one side or the other, if only by a small degree, so small that the person in question might well not be aware of it.
A few personal observations on bisexuality in broad/general terms:
[ul]
[li]As noted in other posts, for some people sexuality is static, for other individuals it’s variable/fluid.[/li][li]Speaking of individuals; from what I’ve seen there are alot of * varying and unique* sexualities on this planet. Just as there are so many shades of gray between black and white, so too are there many “shades” of bisexuality.[/li]
That being said; There are a large number of self-identified bi’s who are either homosexual or heterosexual but prefer the “bi” label.
[li]It is for that reason a fairly large portion of both gay and straight communities question or doubt the authenticity of bisexuality. I couldn’t begin to count how many people in the GLBT community have told me the “B” stands for bogus or blurry. Alot of heterosexuals define bisexuals as either perverts, non-selective or insatiable sex addicts. The last (un-cite-able) book I read had 40% of the mental health profession unwilling to classify bisexuality as an orientation.[/li][li]Bisexality is often confused with polyamorous behavior. True, a substancial percentage of bi’s are polyamorous…but not all poly’s are bi nor are all bi’s poly (that was a mothful).[/li][li]Bisexuality (the ability to have deep, meaningful sexual relationships with either gender) is a gift. Sadly, most (not all) bisexuals consider their sexuality a liability. They despise what they are. There is more self-loathing, confusion and “I don’t fit in” atitudes amongst bi’s than I’ve seen in either the gay or hetero community.[/li][li]If you truly are bisexual, odds are you’ll have better luck dating a person who isn’t bi. There are some date-able, attractive, well-adjusted, confident bi-partners out there…just not in large numbers.[/li]If you’re bisexual and in a relationship where the your partner doesn’t know, you’re only fooling yourself. Tell them, discuss it and be open. You may be pleasantly surprised by the fact your partner either has bi-tendencies / fantasies or at a minimum is turned on by it.[/ul]
I think the ‘snaphot’ idea is bunk though; I would never consider that ‘at this precise moment in time, I like peas’ - I might not even have been thinking about peas (although of course I was, because I wrote the sentence); my perception (and after all, that all we can have) of my preference toward peas or otherwise is based on a view of more than a zero-length moment in time.
The snapshot thing is an interesting logical device, for sure, but I don’t think it has any particular reference to the real world .
besides, this is a logical impossibility; if the person’s sexuality genuinely wavers from one side of the line to the other, then there must be a moment(‘snapshot’) at which it crosses and is exactly on the line (unless it ‘tunnels’, but that would be just too bizarre).
Well, that’s sort of begging your own question, isn’t it?
And we don’t have to assume “tunnelling” (although you were probably just having some fun), as I’ve got to believe you realize. After all, somehow we manage to get from “point A” to the often dissapointing “point B” even though Zeno’s Paradox seems to make that problematic. (And then there’s the Planck Time unit and all that…)
The issue, of course, is that depending on the criteria, binary solutions can be entirely reasonable and even logically necessesary. The question of sexual orientation can be usefully and productively defined in such a way as to require a binary answer, even if there are also other ways of looking at the question.
Realistically, as has been very confusedly sugggested many times here, we should view sexual orientation not on a single “axis” (for want of a better term), but as a collection of “axes”. Even so, ONE of those “axes” could very usefully (from an analytical perspective at least) be represented by the two logical opposites: Same gender or opposite gender.
But please, let’s hear more about peas, okay? I like it when you talk about peas!
Peas, peas, peas please.
Where do people whose gender is ambiguous, and people who sexually prefer other people whose gender is ambiguous, fit into your Grand Scheme of Sexuality?
They would be represented by a point on the axis I’ve already described -AND- other appropriate points along as many other axes are necessary (such as a gender axis).
There are a great many analyses – commonly known as multi-factoral – which consist of measurements which are represented as points along multiple axes. Sexual orientation is clearly an ideal subject for such an approach.
Nevertheless, although other axes would be necessary to represent the larger picture, there would STILL be one axis among them that would represent “preferred” gender sexual orientation as of the time of measurement. That data point might well change position from one gender “preference” to the other over time in the case of females, but in the case of males, we lack sufficiently reliable data to know if the reading on the gender “preference” axis would change over time.
I am at a loss as to how you are going to define an “axis” to represent the fact that there are some people who are specifically attracted to individuals of ambiguous gender, or how this “axis” will interact with the “preferred gender axis”. You’re still assuming that gender is bipolar (which it probably is not), and when you have more than two values, you can’t have an “axis” at all.
I also strongly suspect that you failed to comprehend the question, and that you don’t actually know what you’re talking about, but I’m used to that in Great Debates. :rolleyes:
KellyM, if anyone doesn’t know what they’re talking about, it’s YOU!
The preference for “individuals of ambiguous gender” could indeed be reported as another axis. Why can’t you understand such a simple concept?
You are clearly totally innocent of even the basics of psychometrics, multivariate analysis, or even basic data representation techniques.
As for understanding the O.P., I was the ONLY ONE IN THIS THREAD who made a serious effort to answer it. See my post regarding Bem.
Please do not blame me for what you fail to understand!
Because it’s not such a simple concept. Yes, you can start adding axes for every little nuance and twist. Before long, you have N+1 (or N^2) axes to represent N people, and your model is utterly useless. Oh well.
What is it with people who have a compulsive need to put everything into a box?
Mangetout
Could you control whether or not you like peas? Not whether or not you’ll eat them, but enjoy them, seek out the opportunity to eat them?
It seems like there are two questions: can the gender that one is attracted to change? and can we consciously influence that change? My guess (and it is only a guess) is that it can and does change for some people, but that it is not under conscious control, any more than is my enjoyment of any particular vegatable.
ambushed
Color me dense. I like peas. I like cauliflower. At any particular “snapshot” in time I may prefer one particular preparation of peas over one particular presentation of cauliflower or visa versa.
Does this make my choice in vegetables binary? Am I, at any point in time a legumophagiphile or cruciferophagiphile and never both to varying degrees along a continuum?
I fail to see the significance of stating that any point in time a prefernce is more towards one over the other. That is what a continuum means, isn’t it?
I had a friend who was very confused. She had considered herself straight. Then gay. Then found that she could be attracted to a man after all. And it bothered her. She was little comforted by the fact that liking both increased her chances of finding a date for Saturday night.
Interesting question DSeid; I think I can control my tastes and preferences; I remember my very first experience of drinking Guinness; it was horrible! - but for some reason I stuck at it and I am now quite fond of the stuff.
Similarly, (as I said above) I used to prefer my coffee milky with two sugars, now I drink it black and unsweetened (I can drink it with milk, but I don’t enjoy it).
Both of these changes in preference happened under my conscious control.
Now of course, it would be much harder to imagine a situation in which I might determinedly work on changing my sexual preferences, but in some ways, it has happened; my attitudes towards sex are quite different now from what they were, say, five years ago (I can remember finding the idea of (other people’s) homosexuality quite repulsive - sorry, sorry, sorry, but I did - now I just find myself thinking ‘OK, but not for me, thanks’ - although this may be because I don’t consider it a moral issue any more)