On orienting oneself sexually

[kiya]

A while back I made an offhanded comment about having the system of axes I feel adequate to describe sexual orientation requiring eight; I was wrong, it seems to be, after some discussion with Kevin, nine. Either way, I run out of dimensions and start to tesser.

This is still tidier than my set of political axes, which was up well over a dozen last time I looked at it, but I'm not sure where I put my notes. Might even be a text file. One of these days I'm going to learn enough cgi and such to write up one of those stupid "Where do you fit on the political spectrum?" things, only I'll use my spectrum. Getting the results printed out will be a bear.

The thing with orientation systems, I think, that's a major problem, is that there are generally very few options for N/A. (Like the objection to the word "bisexual" on the basis of "more than two sexes available".) I don't think it's possible to assemble a system that deals with all of these sorts of objections, though.

I'm not entirely sure what brought this thing to mind, but I'm going to ramble about it anyway rather than doing play-by-play on two games in a row. (Besides, it's not Pedro pitching, so.)

The first thing that I want to note about orientation is that I have a really hard time extricating a lot of stuff commonly thought of as not-orientation-related from orientation. It's not just how I see attraction-spans constrained; or maybe it's that the things that constrain attraction and the range of potentially existent interactions seem to me to hit a lot of other places than the things commonly referred to as "sexual orientation", and some things are limiting and some are preferences and given that some people are limited to attractions based on genitalia and some have preferences and some people are limited in other ways and some just have preferences and all that tangly stuff, I can't really see defining the preference/limits of one sort as "orientation" and the preference/limits of another sort as something else.

That was a bit gibberish, but hey. I reserve the right to be a blithering idiot; the temperature's gone up over my lizard point, and while the snake's happy with this, I'm not. And the cats are Become Flat, too.

Anyway. For axes.

Het/Bi/Gay: This is one of those fraught things, of course. Does it apply to 'sex' or 'gender'? Is it necessarily relevant at all? Damned if I know; I don't really care much how it gets used, overmuch. I know one person who's arguably describable as bi, by which is meant 'attracted to male people and intersexed people'; I know another person who idents as gay without identing as gendered (and while this person says that this is not done for the mindfuck potential, it is considered to be a bonus).

Mono/Poly: I've seen it argued that this isn't "sexual orientation" but rather "relationship orientation". Given, though, that my sex drive noticeably differs in quality and condition depending on whether or not I'm actively poly, and generally is healthier and more, ah, robust (not that it's anything other than a wee, sickly thing even then) at such times, though, I'm not so sure about calling that a universal. Especially given some people who find having multiple sexual partners to be Deeply Important; it may be that for "sexual orientation" purposes this would be an axis heading up to polysexual, but I really don't know that it matters. I'm not sure I can separate "sexual orientation" from "relationship orientation" either.

Kinkiness Quotient: Some people get a kick out of experimenting; some people have various things intrinsic to their sexual response. I sort of conflate both of these into a single axis because they deal with the same realm of things, and I really do have to prune my axes pretty firm before they start proliferating all over the place, and trying to figure out how to express the entire realm of fetish and kink stuff is just beyond me. So I figure some function of how intrinsic something is and how much it shows up is good enough. This is another one of those things that I've seen called a preference, but given that I, at least, have had D/S fantasies for as long as I've found boys interesting (and this goes back well before puberty, stereotypes aside), I'm dubious there, too.

Modality: How many distinct flavours of relationship does a body notice? The 0-value for this axis is "I don't notice flavor" or "every person I might potentially be involved with has a distinct flavor"; the one-value would be "all relationships have more or less the same flavor". This is the axis where I personally distinguish "Men and women are different" bisexuality from "I'm attracted to people, not genitalia" bisexuality.

Menage Rating: Preferred number of people involved in sex act. Fairly straightforward, I suppose. (I theorized this axis from a combination of an awareness that I find masturbation utterly pointless without some sort of partner involvement and observing that some people prefer masturbation as a sexual expression and at least one seems to think get-'em-all-in-bed solves all problems.)

Selectivity: How close a match to the criteria of orientation does a potential sex partner have to be for sexual response to be possible? Sort of a measure of the fuzziness of the direction, I suppose. The stereotype that I think I find most irritating about human sexual politics is that all women are high selectivity and all men are low selectivity.

Tropism: A measure of the difficulty of avoiding pursuit of a good perceived match or, alternately, a measure of the attractive power of a good match.

Proactive/Reactive Mate Seeking: Does one, if desiring a partner, go out and look for one, asking various people who match one's selectivity out until one gets a hit, or does one wait to be pursued? (This is the one that came of talking with Kevin; I suspect it's also the one most strongly affected by inculturation.)

Libido Level: I'm not sure it's part of an orientation, quite, but since the stuff I was describing around it winds up being something of a portrait of the shape of potential sexual response, it seemed worth mentioning. If orientation is a direction, this is the magnitude of the vector. (Hey, oneironaut, if this doesn't count as an axis, we've still got eight. Does that make you feel better?)

Anyway. There it is at this point. And at this point I would just like to say Insufficiently Extracted Doughnut Hole, because somehow it seems a suggestive enough phrase to go here, and it was the sort of random moment of weirdness that I just had in my life.

Comments

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

[...] and at least one seems to think get-'em-all-in-bed solves all problems.

I think you are stretching the definition of the word 'person' beyond its breaking point.

Libido Level: [...] if this doesn't count as an axis, we've still got eight. [...]

I was about to get all excited, except then I realized you left one out. I don't remember what we'd named it -- libido activation? Something like that. Tendency to be libidinous only when in range of a desirable partner at one end, tendency to be libidinous completely independant of proximity to desirable partner at the other end (or perhaps in the middle, with tendency to be libidinous all the time at the end instead, except then it's slightly redundant and not really a proper spectrum).

It's sufficiently different both from mate seeking and from libido level that I believe it qualifies.

Insufficiently Extracted Doughnut Hole

Oh. I remember what was nagging at me earlier.

Band name!

[kiya]

I was about to get all excited, except then I realized you left one out. I don't remember what we'd named it -- libido activation? Something like that. Tendency to be libidinous only when in range of a desirable partner at one end, tendency to be libidinous completely independant of proximity to desirable partner at the other end (or perhaps in the middle, with tendency to be libidinous all the time at the end instead, except then it's slightly redundant and not really a proper spectrum).

See also "selectivity", though I suppose I didn't include all that in what I said there.

Oh. I remember what was nagging at me earlier.

Band name!

I think it's more of an album title.

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

See also "selectivity", though I suppose I didn't include all that in what I said there.

Oh. That's just different enough from selectivity as defined that it completely failed to occur to me, and just similar enough that I'm not going to quibble.

I think it's more of an album title.

Hmm. You're right. It has the same feel as 'A Momentary Lapse of Reason'.

(It is a hymn.)

It occurs to me....

[brooksmoses]

It occurs to me, on a strictly information-theoretic sort of basis, that you should be able to reduce the number of axes a bit and retain (or possibly increase) the amount of information contained, by allowing people to express as collections of points, or even probability/weight distributions of points, rather than single points.

The actual practical application of this observation, and the determination of whether it is even a useful idea to apply in the first place, is left as an exercise to the reader, except for a couple of examples. Obviously, selectivity could be expressable as a wider or narrower blob of probability distribution. Somewhat less obviously, modality (at least with regards to the flavors of bisexuality you mention) could be expressed by having either two tight blobs at opposite ends of the homo/hetero scale, or a distribution across. In addition, this would allow the middle of that scale to be used for genders/sexes other than the usual pairing, rather than needing to be used for bisexuality.

Not claiming that it's a better idea, just a different one that might be entertaining to ponder at. :)

- Brooks

Oh, and another thought.

[brooksmoses]

Is it worth putting in an axis (or pair of axes) for one's own gender and/or sexual identification? It would seem an important part of the picture, anyhow.... (And would the homo/hetero scale then be left as such, or flipped into a male/female scale?)

Combining that with the idea of multiple points would provide a clear way to express the feelings of someone who's relatively strongly gendered, but somewhat of a gender switch, and attracted to different genders depending on their current identification.

- Brooks

Re: Oh, and another thought.

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

The thing about gender, aside from the system needing at least two axes to define it (one for male/female, one for strongly gendered/nongendered, possibly one for butch/femme) without even getting into issues of dysphoria (euphoric/dysphoric, and variability of one's position on that axis. Though -- hmm. More on this below), is that gender and sexual orientation are not as inextricably linked as sexual orientation and, say, how many bed partners one prefers to field at a time. I offer myself as a prime example: my gender and my sexual orientation have nothing to do with each other, and in fact the former has changed wildly without having any effect whatsoever on the latter. In fact, the notion of gender and sexual orientation as universally inextricably linked is something I would like to take out back and shoot.

A separate-but-potentially-related system for defining gender might be a nice thing to have about, though.

What was I going to say in this paragraph? Oh, right. I think specifying multiple points (and ranges!) would be a useful thing for the system to allow, but I don't think modality is an axis that can be eliminated without hobbling the system -- because there are bisexuals, and then there are people who have different relationship-templates for blondes and brunettes, or, somewhat more sensibly, for doms and subs, and at the moment at least there's no other way of representing that and the almost infinite number of potential variations (and I can't think of any other way that wouldn't involve way too many additional axes).

Variability of attraction parameters with state of attractee is a nice thing for the system to be able to express, though.

In a perfect world, it occurs to me, there would be some way to cleanly replace the het/bi/gay axis with a 'state of partner' axis, but back here in reality, het/bi/gay is one of the few axes, perhaps the only potential axis of that sort which practically everyone who has a sexual orientation at all will be able to pick one or more appropriate points on.

Hmm. 'Distance' might be a useful axis, whereon at one end one prefers one's partners on the other side of the globe and a brief letter every couple of years, and at the other end one cannot sustain a relationship with someone one isn't constantly sharing an article of clothing with. Or could that be subsumed into Libido Level? I'm not sure they're quite the same thing (it's possible to share a pair of pants with someone without actually having sex with them. I mean, probably. It would be easier on the pants, unless they were really loose).

It further occurs to me that it might be possible to assemble these things into a code (like the Geek Code or RP Code), since I think that notation already has variability, range and multiple-point markers built in. There are some things that could be problematic to represent, like the potential infiniteness of some of the axes.

The word 'axis' is now meaningless to me, and I'm going to bed, having stayed up until nearly seven in the morning just, apparently, to disagree with Brooks, the poor man.

Re: Oh, and another thought.

[kiya]

For completeness we need to posit a system of axes for gender (or a system of letters; the Geek Code thing might work well), and a system of same for relationship orientation -- I'd call distance-preference something about relationship orientation, except in the case in which someone is, say, strongly oriented towards phone sex, which in my sexual orientation system would probably go down as a fetish. ;)

Re: Oh, and another thought.

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

Oh, relationship orientation. You're right.

Hmm. My blithering looks a lot less coherent this morning than it did last night.

[brooksmoses]

It rather randomly occurs to me to ask: have you seen this article: Annals of Improbable Research Discovers the Third Sex? It struck me as something you might find entertaining.... And it's really a great symbol if one were to use it in seriousness, I think.

- Brooks

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

Ow. Too funny. Ow. That's so much better than the Drecker cube.

I once spent weeks designing a plausible anatomy for the third sex of one of the races in a game system Tom and Vlad and I were working on. It was pretty hard coming up with something that was anatomically possible but didn't look like some flavor of normal intersexuality (particularly considering that the species was biploid, and for cultural reasons we didn't want thirds to be able to engage in intercourse without a doctor present and a lot of specialized equipment). That system is shelved but, hmm; I wonder if I could get something out of all that damn work I did.

This total digression brought to you by the I'm Listening to O Vis Aeternitatis Foundation.

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

Necker cube. Necker. Damn it.

Re: Oh, and another thought.

[mikz.livejournal.com]

Yes! A geek code-style sexuality code! Surely it's been already done, but is it as complete as this? You should write it!

The trouble is, for me all of those things would cover a range, because the answer depends on my mood, the partners I'm with, which room of the house I'm in, etc. If you take any three of the aspects you mentioned, and I plotted all of the points where I've been in the last five years, you'd end up with a blob with bubbles in it.

Actually, as Klein observed in his grid, sexuality changes over time for most people, so that would be another axis already. I imagine that I'm not unique in the way that my sexuality changes according to my partners either. For example, there are some people who I love having anal sex with (either way), while the thought of having anal sex with some other people doesn't seem, well, "normal" to me, even though I get totally turned on by them.

BTW, your paragraph of Gibberish, despite the fact the sentences are as long-winded as an insurance contract, is excellent. It's a more elaborated version of what I said to a gay guy once when I was coming out as bi, when he asked me which gender I really preferred: "so do you prefer men who are circumcised or men who are not? Do you like long-haired men or short-haired men better? What colour facial hair do you like? No! You must choose! You must have a preference!"

Oh, and an extra axis that I'd add: exhibitionism.

Re: Oh, and another thought.

[kiya]

The trouble is, for me all of those things would cover a range, because the answer depends on my mood, the partners I'm with, which room of the house I'm in, etc. If you take any three of the aspects you mentioned, and I plotted all of the points where I've been in the last five years, you'd end up with a blob with bubbles in it.

That's the tricky bit with anything, I think; I don't know how much range-encompassing is possible to do meaningfully with this many axes. Not to mention people with different modalities who have strongly different interactions within them, or the like.

Actually, as Klein observed in his grid, sexuality changes over time for most people, so that would be another axis already.

A whole bloody set of axes; some people change their place on one axis and not another, or shift in linked ways, or discover something new that has in some sense always been there and untracked, or . . . .

I believe it may have been oneironaut with the gibberish; I may point out to gtst that we should do a geek code for this stuff when gtst turns up online. If I manage to create such a thing, I'll comment here. (It'll probably do sexual/relationship/gender orientation, given how tangled-up they are for at least some people.)

At this point I'd probably collapse exhibitionism into the generic kink axis, though in a geek-code-style thing it should get its own letter.

Re: Oh, and another thought.

[mikz.livejournal.com]

I see how exhibitionism could be a generic kink, but I think it says more about a person's personality than other kinks. Whether somebody is into canes or paddles is more a matter of personal preference, while I think exhibitionists are generally more extraverted and more likely to be open to talking about their kinks in the first place. Just a thought.

But yes, if you develop such a code, please do keep me posted.

Re: Oh, and another thought.

[kiya]

I don't see that it's necessarily more dominant (heh) than, say, someone who is psychologically predisposed to take the submissive role, someone who wants to be struck in the first place, or someone who wants to do roleplay scenes. They all say _something_ about someone.

I can't personally justify putting in a separate axis for exhibitionism without putting in axes for d/s tendencies and traits, roleplaying tendencies, at a bare minimum, with strong consideration for s/m practices and bondage. Setting aside infantilism, excretory sexual practices, the sexual practices of furries and specific fetishisms. And, uh, all the stuff that I can't think of off the top of my head.


In any case, oneironaut and I are poking around the edges of assembling a code. Gtst is doing the sex and gender aspects, because gtst is the uebergendergeek. Eventually it'll get done, go into betatesting, and at some point wind up a comment in my livejournal. :}