by Crystal Raypole
At this point in time, experts have disproved many of the myths surrounding sexual orientation.
Like the color of your eyes or the shape of your nose, orientation is a trait many are born with or grow into over time.
Maybe in high school, for example, you developed crushes on people of one gender only. In college, you found yourself attracted to people of different genders.
Now, as an adult, you mostly date people of one gender but occasionally feel a flash of sexual attraction for people of other genders.
Does that mean you’re confused? Can’t make up your mind? That your college attractions were just a phase? No, no, and absolutely not.
No one can define your orientation for you, but the concept of sexual fluidity can help explain your experiences.
Sexual fluidity, in short, means your sexual orientation isn’t permanently fixed.
Yes, everyone has an underlying orientation — asexual, pansexual, or heterosexual, for example. Yet there’s room for it to expand a little, based on your experiences and current situation.
It can help to think of orientation as a spectrum that includes people of all genders. Sexually fluid people tend to experience attractions at different points along the spectrum as they go through life.
Maybe you grew up thinking you were only attracted to men, until you had a few flings with people of other genders. After a few years, you felt most attracted to men again, but you couldn’t say for certain whether that would always be the case.
These changes in how you experience romantic and sexual attraction are totally valid.
“Fluidity is an absolutely normal aspect of sexual orientation,” explains Will Zogg, a Washington therapist who specializes in gender affirming counseling.
“Attraction is far more complex than many people can communicate,” says Zogg. “And fluidity and the presentation of sexuality vary widely across cultures, age, access, and region.”
He goes on to say people sometimes interpret fluidity as confusion, or betrayal of an allegiance to a specific community.
“As a result of the stigma around fleeting same-sex attraction and consequences for that ‘betrayal,’ normal feelings of love and sex and curiosity often get swept under the rug, where the limits of Western societal norms keep them hidden,” explains Zogg.
If you’re sexually fluid, you might notice most of your sexual experiences and attractions fit under the label you use to identify yourself.
The key word here is “most,” since you’ll probably have a few outlier experiences that fall elsewhere on the spectrum.
Here’s an example:
You’ve only ever felt attracted to women. Then you develop a close relationship with a nonbinary friend. Your physical and emotional closeness eventually lead to a crush.
You think about kissing, touching, even having sex with them. Maybe you act on those desires, maybe you don’t. Eventually, you spend a little less time together, and your attraction fades, leaving you primarily attracted to women once again.
This one experience may not lead you to redefine your sexual orientation, but it does suggest some fluidity.
Close friendships sometimes fuel romantic feelings that lead to sexual desire, but attraction can exist without you acting on it.
Fluidity, by definition, changes over time, so you could develop a similar attraction in the future.
Though fluidity adds an extra factor in the equation of attraction, it won’t necessarily change your sexual behavior.
“What Westerners refer to as fluidity in sexuality (and in gender) is not a new idea for many cultures,” Zogg notes.
Researchers and anthropologists have explored fluidity across cultures and history. In terms of Western research, this concept has had many names, including erotic plasticityTrusted Source.
The term sexual fluidity comes from the research of psychologist and professor Dr. Lisa Diamond, who drew attention to the concept with her 2009 book, “Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire.”
In theory, yes, anyone can experience this fluidity, but not everyone does. Plenty of people only ever feel attracted to one gender.
While people of any gender can be sexually fluid, existing research suggests women tend to experience the most fluidity. Of course, this doesn’t mean all women are sexually fluid.
“Some sexually fluid men may feel more reluctant to talk about the range of attraction they experience, in part due to gender and sexuality stereotypes,” Zogg points out.
“They might avoid commenting on masculine celebrities they consider attractive, for example, or hesitate to express closeness to a male best friend,” says Zogg.
Most definitely, yes. Attraction, like orientation, is something you can’t control.
You might feel more attracted to one gender for a while, then your attraction might shift elsewhere on the spectrum.
Maybe you choose not to express or act on certain attractions, and that’s OK. All the same, you typically can’t pick and choose what part of the spectrum your attraction settles on at any given point in life.
Sexually fluid people might notice attraction shows up in a range of ways.
You could feel sexually attracted to people of one gender but develop stronger romantic feelings for people of another gender.
Maybe one specific person brings out feelings you’ve never had before. Though their traits don’t align with what you’d normally consider your “type,” you feel drawn to this specific excitement or arousal response.
You might also notice the characteristics that appeal to you in more masculine people are completely separate from the characteristics that you look for in more feminine people.
It’s pretty common to act differently on varying types of attraction.
You might:
- enjoy kissing and cuddling partners of one gender but only have sex with people of another gender
- enjoy a specific type of sex with one gender, but have different kinds of sex with other genders
- develop romantic attachments with people of one gender and pursue physical relationships with people of other genders
These are all valid relationship styles. Just take care to practice good communication!
On the surface, sexual fluidity might seem pretty similar to bisexuality and pansexuality. Remember, though, bisexuality and pansexuality are orientations, and sexual fluidity is not.
Bisexuality doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone, but it’s typically recognized as a fairly consistent attraction to two groups: people of your gender and people of other genders.
Some people who identify as bisexual might only feel attracted to people of two genders. Others might develop attractions to people of multiple genders.
Pansexuality, on the other hand, means you might experience attraction to any person, regardless of their gender. In other words, you’re attracted to people of all genders.
You can be both sexually fluid and bisexual or pansexual. For example:
- Sexually fluid pansexual people might occasionally feel most attracted to people of one gender, then more attracted to different genders again.
- Sexually fluid bisexual people might temporarily feel more attracted to one gender over another, but this won’t permanently alter their overall attraction to people of other genders.
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You might describe yourself as sexually fluid when you generally identify with an orientation that doesn’t consistently represent every attraction you experience.
Say you primarily feel attracted to women, but you’ve had a few relationships with men. You don’t identify as bisexual, but you consider yourself somewhat fluid, since you’re not exclusively attracted to women.
Maybe you’ve never had a romantic or sexual relationship with someone of your gender. Still, straight doesn’t entirely resonate with you as an orientation because you feel open to the possibility of a non-heterosexual relationship. It just hasn’t happened yet.
Generally speaking, sexually fluid people have an orientation that remains roughly stable over time.
So you might use this term if you mostly feel attracted to one gender but want to acknowledge the way your attraction and responses sometimes shift.
As Diamond and other experts have pointed out, fluidity offers a better, more accurate explanation for what people have, in the past, stereotyped and stigmatized as “confusion.”
As you go through life, you gain plenty of experience, both personally and from relationships with others.
This expanding knowledge can have a pretty big impact on self-identity, including your understanding of your orientation.
As awareness of your orientation develops, you might land on a different way of describing your attractions, and that’s just fine. You’re always free to use whatever term you identify with best.
Interested in learning more about sexual orientations and identities?
- Start with our guide to key terms here.
- Check out the It Gets Better Project for a glossary of LGBTQ+ terms.
- Visit Identiversity, a nonprofit website that provides factual, expert-informed education about gender and sexual diversity.
Complete Article ↪HERE↩!
No lust at first sight
Why thousands are now identifying as ‘demisexual’
For those who are not asexual but not celibate either, the new label is helping to define their love lives
Lidia Buonaiuto was 27 when things finally clicked and a lifelong weight was lifted: she wasn’t a freak, she wasn’t a weirdo, and she wasn’t alone in feeling the way she did about sex and relationships. She was, she discovered, demisexual.
“I don’t fancy people,” she says, almost apologetically. Demisexuality, she says, is a relatively straightforward term to describe how she identifies herself in the world: “I don’t have a primary sexual attraction to anyone the way most people do, ever. I identify as straight and I’m not in any way a prude, but I need to have a deep emotional connection with someone before any sexual feelings appear. Demisexuality is not a preference or personality trait.” She likens it to a neurological block in which she can’t form romantic and sexual connections in the “normal” way.
Scepticism abounds around emerging sexual identities, and in the case of demisexuality, which falls on the halfway mark on the asexual-to-sexual spectrum, the research is slim. Yet awareness has rocketed in recent years; according to Google Trends, searches on “demisexuality” have surged since 2009, with the most interest coming from Australia, Canada, the US, Britain and the Philippines.
Last month, in her standup show Venus, the comedian Sophie Duker discussed demisexuality with her audiences night after night at the Edinburgh fringe festival; the demisexual hashtag now has more than 2 million posts on Instagram, and almost 12,000 members on Reddit’s demisexuality sub-group. But how does it affect growing numbers of young people who identify as demisexuals?
“I understand the perspective of people who ask ‘why do you need to label everything?’,” says Buonaiuto, “but it’s been really helpful to identify with something that makes me feel comfortable about my sexuality. I’ve put a lot of pressure on myself and have had a lot of pressure from friends and family to be a way I’m not.
“I can’t have one-night stands or sexual escapades or fancy a random person who is interested in me. I don’t have that desire at all, my brain doesn’t work that way and I forced myself into situations that just ended up giving me a lot of emotional distress.”
Buonaiuto is now 30 and works as a project manager in the media. She grew up in south-east London to Italian and Jamaican parents “at the lower middle class end of things” and attended an all-girls comprehensive, where she struggled to work out why she couldn’t be like her peers; she didn’t have crushes, couldn’t relate to their conversations about sexual desire and didn’t feel anything for “objectively hot” boys who tried it on with her. Instead they tended to get “hung up” on her, she says embarrassed. “I was seen as a challenge.”
Buonaiuto is keen to stress that demisexuality does not mean she never wants to have sex.
“I’m not celibate,” she explains. “I have sexual urges but it’s only when I’m in a relationship that has come out of an intense emotional connection first. I don’t have a physical ‘type’, it doesn’t matter what they look like. My sexual fantasies are never physical, it will be about a guy coming over to me in a library, having the same favourite author, talking, bonding … I can’t feel an urge for anyone without that, and it’s so rare for me to find it at all.”
Demisexuality was first coined in an online forum in 2006 by a member of Asexual Visibility and Education Network (Aven), a website designed in 2001 to provide a resource on all things asexual – asexuality being the description for a person who does not experience sexual attraction at all.
By 2004, Aven had 1,000 members; today there are more than 100,000 registered users. It is defined as an attraction model: “primary sexual attraction is an instant attraction to people based on instantly available information such as their appearance or smell, which may or may not lead to arousal or sexual desire. Secondary sexual attraction is considered to be an attraction that develops over time based on a person’s relationship, an emotional connection with another person… Most sexuals in romantic relationships feel both primary and secondary sexual desire. The term demisexual, under this model, tends to refer to people who experience secondary sexual attraction but not primary sexual attraction.”
In 2017, Dan Savage, the sex and relationship guru behind the column and podcast Savage Love, was scathing about demisexuality, despite being considered a progressive beacon on understanding identity and sexuality. He wrote: “We used to call people who needed to feel a strong emotional bond before wanting to fuck someone people who, you know, needed to feel a strong emotional bond before wanting to fuck someone. But a seven-syllable, clinical-sounding term that prospective partners need to Google – demisexuality – is obviously superior to a short, explanatory sentence that doesn’t require internet access to understand.”
Professor Anthony Bogaert, a Canadian psychologist at Brock University, who studied the phenomenon in 2004, concluded that although less than 1% of the British population identified as asexual, more people were likely to fall into the area Buonaiuto occupies, and younger people especially.
“Demisexuality is a sexual orientation like gay or bisexual,” says Brian Langevin, executive director of Asexual Outreach. “It’s very true that demographics skew far younger and the primary reason is that the asexual community grew up on the internet. It wasn’t until 2001 that asexual people came to discuss what had always existed but now had a language.”
Buonaiuto has had two significant relationships, one for nine years and another for 18 months, but it has taken her years to get over only ever having sexual desires for her ex because it was so rare she felt that way in the first place. “When I first read about demisexuality, I felt embarrassed and sad I identified that way,” she says, “but it made sense for me.”
Freedom from sexuality is still deemed radical in a way that freedom of sexuality isn’t, but Buonaiuto thinks it’s only possible to have these conversations as younger people become more progressive and accepting. “For older generations who don’t understand, well, if it doesn’t concern them, who does it hurt?” she asks. “Let young people understand themselves better and have things that help them navigate through this crazy time.”
Complete Article ↪HERE↩!
What Does Demisexual Mean?
Could this sexual orientation apply to you? Here’s how to know.
Ever take one look at someone and suddenly feel completely smitten—maybe it’s their eyes or smile, or just the adorable way their hair falls in front of their eyes? Or you find yourself physically close to another person, and something about their touch or kiss makes your pulse pound with sexual chemistry?
Most of us have experienced this kind of instant, almost primal attraction. But a small number of people never have; they’re incapable of it. To be attracted to someone, they need to develop a mental or emotional connection to the other person, not a physical one.
That’s a demisexual in a nutshell.
A demisexual is someone who is hardwired to seek an intense, solid, securely attached relationship before they can even think about sexual intimacy, Holly Richmond, PhD, a sex therapist in Southern California, tells Health. For a demisexual, intimacy is on a platonic level—at first. Sexual attraction develops as the relationship deepens.
“A demisexual is not going to walk down the street, see a hot guy, and think, I want to sleep with that person,” Richmond says. Celeb crushes, romcom flicks, love (or lust) at first sight? None of this resonates with a demi. “it just doesn’t make sense to them,” she adds.
A relationship for a demisexual typically starts as a friendship and may blossom into something more. Sex is still important; there’s nothing wrong with their sex drive. But what turns them on has to do with brains and personality rather than a toned physique. “They really need to know someone to feel sexually attracted to them,” Dr.Richmond affirms.
How would you know if you’re a true demisexual, rather than a person who just isn’t into hooking up or getting sexual with someone early on? Think about how your romantic and sexual relationships have started. If it took time to get to a place where you felt chemistry, and the lead up to becoming a couple involved lots of talking and platonic time together, you might be a demi.
It’s hard to know how many people are demisexual, especially since the term has only recently entered the lexicon. But Richmond believes that in the past three years, more people are using the word to describe their own sexual orientation. It’s similar to the recent uptick of people who identify as asexual (feeling no sexual attraction at all to anyone).
Yet just like those who identify as asexual, people who are demisexual can still develop serious, fulfilling, long-term relationships with others. They just get to that place in a different way that doesn’t rely on physical chemistry.
Complete Article ↪HERE↩!
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