Bisexuality--AGAIN

[C J]

When'd I agree with you?

 

I understand your perspective, but I think you're being a bit daft.

 

OK, whatever you say.

[Adam Phillips]

Wow. "Daft." I haven't heard that word in any context in ages, except for references to the old musical act Daft Punk. 

 

It's a nice word, actually, except that here it was a bit of a flame-thower, right?

 

Arbour is one of my longtime online buddies, going back to years before he ever even saw this place, much less came to dominate it. And one of the things I always liked about him was that he pretty much told you what he thought, and the consequences be damned. He got into some trouble early here because of that, but I always liked it.

 

Still, it probably isn't a bad idea to recognize when something you say is gonna throw a little fuel on it. Not saying you did your you didn't, Persinette, or that you intended to or didn't. I'm just saying that if you call a person "daft," it's gonna cause a least some elevated temperature. 

[Persinette]

Wow. "Daft." I haven't heard that word in any context in ages, except for references to the old musical act Daft Punk. 

 

This might be because I'm english. Do you guys not use the word much over there?

 

 

Still, it probably isn't a bad idea to recognize when something you say is gonna throw a little fuel on it. Not saying you did your you didn't, Persinette, or that you intended to or didn't. I'm just saying that if you call a person "daft," it's gonna cause a least some elevated temperature. 

 

Wow, that's the nicest way anyone's ever called me a shit-stirrer.

 

Out of curiosity, what tone does the word have on the other side of the pond? Here, it's pretty damn light - kinda like 'oh, you silly bugger'. There's almost an affectionate edge to it, if that makes sense? You're saying, well, 'I think you are being a bit silly but I hold no malice about it', only...not...

 

Okay, I'm not sure I can think of a description that doesn't use other UK terms.

[Adam Phillips]

This might be because I'm english. Do you guys not use the word much over there?

 

 

 

Wow, that's the nicest way anyone's ever called me a shit-stirrer.

 

Out of curiosity, what tone does the word have on the other side of the pond? Here, it's pretty damn light - kinda like 'oh, you silly bugger'. There's almost an affectionate edge to it, if that makes sense? You're saying, well, 'I think you are being a bit silly but I hold no malice about it', only...not...

 

Okay, I'm not sure I can think of a description that doesn't use other UK terms.

 

 

Actually, it doesn't have much of a connotation at all, because we just don't use it much, if any. I had a kind of "working sense" for what it meant, viz., "ridiculous," or something like that, but I actually had to look it up to make sure! And I responded the way I did is because I'm thinking over here it possibly doesn't feel quite so light-hearted. I think maybe it feels to me roughly equivalent to looking at someone and telling them "you're being ridiculous."

 

It might be fun to start a thread on "things we hear from across the pond" that make us smile. From both sides. 

[Persinette]

It might be fun to start a thread on "things we hear from across the pond" that make us smile. From both sides. 

 

You start that thread, I'll chime in on it.

[Adam Phillips]

You start that thread, I'll chime in on it.

 

Done.

[Thorn Wilde]

My opinion on this topic was pretty much summed up in this blog post I wrote a while back. As I can't be arsed to write it all up again, I refer anyone who's interested there.

[Adam Phillips]

An additional lament that I have--besides my lament over gay and straight people doubting that I exist and perpetrating various other kinds of "bi erasure"--is that far too many of us chronically invoke Alfred Kinsey as the be-all and end-all of what should be known about sexual orientation. There are two subsequent researchers whose studies of sexual orientation are so significant that, in my opinion, that any discussion making even passing use of the Kinsey Scale needs to be supplemented.

 

Those two scholars are Michael Storms and Fritz Klein, whose assessment tools are known, respectively, as the Storms Sexuality Axis and the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid.

 

You can do your own research on these guys, and subsequent criticism has demonstrated that they're not the be-all and end-all of what should be known about sexual orientation either; but their insights offer a significant elaboration on and advance from Kinsey's ground-breaking proposals.

 

In a nutshell, Michael Storms basically establishes that there are a whole variety of sexual configurations that get lumped under "bisexual," and that these configurations aren't about "how gay you are"/"how straight you are." For one thing, Storms' work demonstrated that a person's same-gender attraction level is independent of that person's opposite-gender attraction level. "How straight" a person is doesn't indicate "how gay" that person is. What that ultimately means is that there's a wide variety of attractions out there, none of which are reducible to the others. I won't say more; it would take too long. But I'd invite people to read up on Michael Storms and the Storms Sexuality Axis. It's because of Michael Storms that some of us prefer talking about bisexualities over talking about bisexuality, as if bisexuality were some monolithic, unified thing.

 

In a nutshell, Fritz Klein establishes that sexual orientation isn't just a matter of sexual arousal, but also involves a social dimension, an emotional dimension, a self-identification dimension, a "fantasizing" dimension, a "lifestyle preference" dimension, and a behavioral dimension...and, regarding all these dimensions, a temporal dimension. It is impossible to speak adequately about sexual orientation, he contends, if we define sexual orientation exclusively on matters regarding physiological sexual arousal. I think he's on the money when he contends that sexual orientation is more than about what makes a man's dick hard.

 

The primarily limitation of both of these men's work is that each, in its own way, assumes that the basic template is binary. It's about your response to men, broadly construed, and women, broadly construed. Lately, people have been pointing out to us that sexual orientation may be even more complicated, at its heart, than that. This is the contribution that gender scholars and researchers have made recently.

 

But in any case, the tendency we have to use Kinsey as the guy who let us all out of the box tends to overlook that he merely puts us all in a somewhat bigger box. And boxes are for storage, just like closets are for clothes. We may not be able to avoid boxes when we do conceptualizing, but at least we should not revert chronically to smaller boxes when larger ones have been found.

[Thorn Wilde]

An idea that I've seen around the Internet, and which makes sense to me, is that sexual orientation and romantic orientation can be separate. So a person can be equally attracted to both men and women, but form romantic attachments only to one gender, and as such might identify as gay or straight based on that. Likewise, people who identify as asexual can still be romantically attracted to people, and often to one gender over another, even though they're not sexually attracted to either.

 

I find myself speaking in binaries here, which isn't really something I agree with as I don't believe in a gender binary. I think we default to expressing our thoughts along those lines because it's easier for others to grasp, though. 

 

I could picture a sort of compass rather than a line, to take into account different gender expressions. For instance you could have male/female on one axis and cis/trans on the other. In the centre would fall those who are pansexual in the word's truest sense, who really couldn't care less what gender or sex their partner is. Personally, I don't care whether a potential partner was born as their gender identity or not, to me you're a man if you identify as a man and a woman if you identify as a woman, though I find myself slightly more attracted to people who identify as male, so I would fall pretty much at zero on the cis/trans axis, though closer to male on the male/female axis.

 

I dunno, I'm thinking out loud (out loud? more like in writing), this is just my brain at 2 am.

[Zombie]

Personally, I don't care whether a potential partner was born as their gender identity or not, to me you're a man if you identify as a man and a woman if you identify as a woman, though I find myself slightly more attracted to people who identify as male, so I would fall pretty much at zero on the cis/trans axis, though closer to male on the male/female axis.

 

I dunno, I'm thinking out loud (out loud? more like in writing), this is just my brain at 2 am.

 

Speaking for myself I have to say the body bits are fairly important too...

 

But I agree that the labeling thing is simplistic. It's a crude attempt to pigeonhole people, and people are more complicated than that.

[Cole Matthews]

Fascinating thread. I wrote a study a few years ago on the genesis of the word "Homosexual". My thesis was for thousands of years we existed yet were never an identity until defined in the late 19th Century by the word invented to describe desire for the same sex. We can't know this for sure, but without the language used to identify shared characteristics a group can never coalesce and socialize.  I just wanted to throw that out there. Perhaps bisexual is the same. It's still relatively new.  

[Kitt]

I dunno, I'm thinking out loud (out loud? more like in writing), this is just my brain at 2 am.

Your brain at 2 am makes more sense than most people I know when at their best.

 

I identify as straight since I have never felt any sort of sexual attraction to another woman, but that does not change my assertion that it is the person you are attracted to. If the feelings are there you will make it work with whatever anatomical bits are involved.

[joann414]

Fascinating thread. I wrote a study a few years ago on the genesis of the word "Homosexual". My thesis was for thousands of years we existed yet were never an identity until defined in the late 19th Century by the word invented to describe desire for the same sex. We can't know this for sure, but without the language used to identify shared characteristics a group can never coalesce and socialize.  I just wanted to throw that out there. Perhaps bisexual is the same. It's still relatively new.  

This bisexual is relatively old.       :funny:  

[Adam Phillips]

This bisexual is relatively old.       :funny:  

 

I dunno, I thought 50 was the new 20.

[Thorn Wilde]

Saying that homosexuality and bisexuality didn't exist as identities before we had words for them feels a bit off to me... Things can exist even if we don't have words for them. Just because the identity didn't exist in the public mind, that doesn't mean it didn't exist to the people who held it. The idea of sexual orientation and sexual identity may not have existed, but the people who 'practiced buggery' must have felt like they belonged to a group once they discovered others who practiced the same. 

 

It's when you get into trans identities that history becomes really interesting, though. Such as, for instance, did you know that all through the middle ages and into the renaissance, a man could marry a eunuch? Not being a 'full man', as it were, a eunuch would have been an attractive companion for a man who preferred other men, as he could enjoy an open relationship that way. He might have been viewed as a bit weird, but it was perfectly legal, at least. In India, there's a tradition of men who dress and live as women, and in the past they were revered and taken care of by society, but since colonial times (when the British brought homophobia to India) they have fallen on hard times and are often forced to live as prostitutes. Many of them these days are on hormone replacement therapy and get gender reassignment surgery. And then, of course, there's the example of the native American 'two-spirit' people; people born in the wrong body who take on the gender role of the opposite sex, and marry people of the same sex.

 

It is also a historical truth that religious leaders often turned a blind eye to same-sex relationships within convents. It's not unlikely that many gay people, both men and women, would have chosen that life over being forced to marry someone they couldn't imagine a sexual relationship with (just as many young Catholic men today choose priesthood for the same reason; it doesn't always go so well), and as such the percentage of homosexually identifying people would have been greater in convents than elsewhere. 

[Zombie]

Saying that homosexuality and bisexuality didn't exist as identities before we had words for them feels a bit off to me... Things can exist even if we don't have words for them. Just because the identity didn't exist in the public mind, that doesn't mean it didn't exist to the people who held it.

 

The words are really about recognition. And once you have recognition you can have understanding ... or persecution