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

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.