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On orienting oneself sexually
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, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
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.
Re: Oh, and another thought.
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
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.
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.
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,