Sexuality Is Complex, and That's a Good Thing
The sexualities we each manifest are more complex and nuanced than we sometimes believe. Such complexity can offer us an expanse of options to continually grow and experience new erotic horizons.
It can be so easy to label and categorize our sexuality, orientations, and erotic activities and identities. Whether it’s the more mainstream varieties of sexuality or the kinkier and edgier variations, we like our labels and neat boxes into which to place ourselves, others, and what we do.
I’m as guilty of this as anyone. Often, I’ll use a word to identify someone knowing full well that they’re not entirely or exactly that. I sometimes do the same when talking about certain activities and interests. Same for relationships. Commonly accepted nomenclature for anything is convenient. It’s a comfortable default. But I contend most of the time it’s inexact at best.
When I recently listened to Meghan McDonough’s first Scientific American “Science, Quickly” episode, “How to Explore Your Sexuality, according to Science,” the complexity of our sexuality and attractions was driven home and reminded me that I need to always view myself and others with a more open, reality-based mind.
This is part one of a four-part Fascination on the science of pleasure. In this series, we’re asking what we can learn from those with marginalized experiences to get to the bottom of BDSM, find the female orgasm and illuminate asexuality. In this episode, we’ll discuss new ways to question your sexuality, according to science that draws from feminism and queer theory.
The entire episode is only 13 minutes long and I recommend listening to it. The text will certainly give you the gist of what those interviewed are saying, but it’s always great to hear it directly from the person’s mouth with the accompanying emphasis and passion that hones the discussion.
The first thing that struck me was the astute wisdom of Sari van Anders, a gender, sex, and sexuality researcher at Queen’s University in Ontario, when they said sexuality research science is catching up with people’s reality. That resonated immediately. As someone who writes and speaks about sexuality while also exploring adventurous sexualities myself, this struck home. It always feels like the concepts and words we use lag behind the cultural realities they represent.
Van Anders coined the term Sexual Configurations Theory (SCT). Even though we typically think of sexual orientation as more or less static, SCT asks: What if this sort of definition is incomplete? SCT “complicates the idea that sexual orientation is only based on gender.”
SCT was especially interesting to me because the research took into account people with diverse sexualities and genders including marginalized groups such as LGBTQ, disabled, kinksters, BDSMers, asexual, and non-monogamous.
When it comes to sexual orientation attractions, the researchers found it’s not just about how certain genders and genitals match up. There’s so much more going on. Someone’s gender/sex (socialized and biological) is just one of many aspects of sexual orientation. Other sexual parameters such as kindness or a sense of humor play a part in overall attraction.
The article explains these various parameters through the visualization of cone-shaped diagrams. I’ll let you listen to or read the episode for more about that, but the pertinent point here is that we often oversimplify sexuality and associated attractions, thereby discounting a lot of people who don’t fit neatly into predefined boxes.
This made me ponder the ways sexual and relationship adventurers often reduce who we are and what we do to certain codifications that belie the true complexity that underlies sexuality.
The way I increasingly visualize sexuality, orientations, and the relationships in which they exist is as nonbinary for many and perhaps most people. A more accurate visualization is a spectrum with each end representing the most rigid of the binary options.
Take the classic sexual and role position identifiers of top, bottom, and versatile. In the kink world these might often be phrased as dominant, submissive, or switch. Those are but three specific choices along a static spectrum continuum. Add in the factor that where someone finds themselves on that spectrum might vary by mood, situation, person, kink, sex act, environment, age, physical ability, or other factors and it becomes obvious the combinations can produce an endless set of sexual and role position identifications.
My own sexuality history has run the gamut. Over time, not only have my role and position preferences varied considerably but so have the types of sex acts, kinks, and mindsets that accompany those role and position choices. Each year that passes reveals a broadening of my range of erotic interests and potential partners. Yet, at certain times, they’re quite specific and exact.
I theorize that people tend to grab onto identifications and activities that align with the culture and vernacular of the time. I used to say people often don’t know they’re into something until they learn it exists. Perhaps someone had early tendencies to like the concept of being tied up, but would they have envisioned they’re into something like the ornate rope bondage common today had they not seen it firsthand or secondhand through adult content or social media? It brings to mind the saying, “build it and they will come.” Much of sexual and kink culture has been built by a relative few and once seen by others a large audience is drawn to it.
That’s all a longwinded way of saying that we discount the complexity of sexuality at our peril. Oversimplification and narrow concepts and terminology are just the ideas and words we know and can act on up to the point we learn of something new. Then once we see new horizons, options open up for us and we might change how we see ourselves, what we like to do, and who we like to do it with.
Of course, per the nature versus nurture quandary, much of our sexuality and attractions are likely baked into us at a core level. Perhaps genetically. Perhaps solidified through early experiences. Why doesn’t really matter if we recognize we might all start from a baseline. But that baseline can be changed, adjusted, nudged, and added to over time as we explore and learn more about ourselves and the world of sexuality available to us.
Options are great. Complexity can be a good thing. In an article Ayodeji Awosika once wrote, “Reinventing yourself lets you become the real you by unlearning the blueprint that was forced on you to become the current you.”
The complexity of sexuality allows you the opportunity to constantly reinvent yourself to keep yourself interesting to yourself. At least that’s how it works for me, and my guess is it does for most people.
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