Welcome to another Sexual Education for Adults!
Last time we covered Anatomy and Identity.
This session we’ll be covering Orientation and Desire — what turns you on?
When we’re talking about sexual activity, we usually are talking about the intersection between your Identity and your Orientation. Last class I explained that your Identity is what you think you are, not necessarily what’s between your legs. Well, your Orientation describes who you are sexually attracted to. Basically, who do you want to have sex with?
I will admit that I frequently make a common error here on the blog: speaking and acting as though there were only two possible orientations — gay or straight.
There are more than two default sexual orientations for humans.
Turns out human beings are incredibly complex, and therefore the expressions of our sexuality are complex, too. Way back in 1947, Alfred Kinsey founded the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction. He got super interested in human sexuality, and asked a lot of very personal questions. And he got a lot of interesting answers from people! He discovered some really fascinating facts about human sexuality, and kicked off the entire field of sexology. One of the things he discovered about human sexuality is that you can think of Orientation as existing on a sliding scale, with absolute hetero on one end and absolute gay on the other, and a whole lot of bisexual people in the middle.
You can think of Sexual Orientation as being just about gay, straight, and bi.
You’d still be missing some nuance, though.
- Some people identify their sexual orientation as “pansexual”. A pansexual person is attracted to all gender identities, including trans, cis, intersexed people, and people with no preferred gender identity.
- There are also “sapiosexual” people, who are sexually attracted to a person’s mind, rather than to a person’s physical body.
- An “asexual” person experiences no sexual attraction towards people, but may experience sexual feelings all the same. Asexual people are capable of sex, but aren’t likely to instigate it. They also masturbate, sometimes with sex toys, sometimes without.
- Under the ‘asexual umbrella’ you can find people who identify as “grey-A’s”. A grey-A very rarely feels sexual attraction, but does sometimes. A “demisexual” only feels sexual attraction to a person once they get to know them, and never for strangers.
Completely separate from your Sexual Orientation, we have your possible Fetishes, or desires.
Yes, it is possible for you to be a straight male who fantasizes about sucking cock. Your desire to suck dick doesn’t make you gay, per se. It just makes you kinky, and means you have a sexual fetish. Strictly speaking, a fetish is a para-sexual item, act, or paraphernalia that is necessary and required for a person to reach orgasm. I use the term a little more loosely than that, so when I talk about a fetish, I’m talking about something that is outside “normal, vanilla, straight penis in vagina sex”.
It is very common for people all along the Orientation spectrum to have fetishes associated with different orientations.
Some women really love threesomes and kissing girls, but still identify as straight women. Some lesbian or gay women really dig penetrative sex, but just because there’s a dick shaped object involved doesn’t make them straight. Men can deeply enjoy pegging, or being fucked with a strap on cock by their girl friend. Still straight, no matter how scared you might be that being fucked in the ass might make you gay.
You can think of your fetishes as happy sexy sprinkles on the vanilla ice cream of your sex life.
For some of us, those kinky sprinkles are more required than for others, and some of us have more flavor of sprinkle available to us.
Next lesson: Relationships and Intimacy.
I think this discussion really shows your intelligence Ms. Harper. For a long time, I thought of Myself as pansexual since I enjoy looking at both men and women. I tease men horribly that they are gay because they want to suck cock because that is also a fetish at least for My clients. However, the seriousness of the topic is also a rather important conversation to have. Thank you for posting this well thought out and informative blog post!!
Aw, thank you Ms. Simone! I wanted to bring some facts and solid information to the world of cocks and jacking off. No knowledge is ever wasted, and understanding more about ourselves leads to less shame, fear and guilt, and more pleasure, intimacy and bliss!
I think there is a further level of this, where we sometimes want to have our desires manipulated. So it is more than even just orientation and desire as a piece of identity, but that there is something inherently fluid in that our identity as it exists in a vacuum really is a misconception, our identity really exists in relationships and is impacted by our interactions with other people.
You are totally correct! Identity is a construct, made up by our interactions with the world around us. All of society and our culture, plus our relationships with friends, family, lovers, neighbors and so on, all interact to make what feels like a constant and well defined sense of self actually a lot less constant or consistent than it really is.