My previous post linked to an article on kink and sexual orientation by Jillian Keenan. One bit of it caught my eye in particular.
For years, I identified as bisexual because I’m sexually attracted to both men and women and have acted on that attraction. But in recent years, as I explored my own sexuality more, I’ve realized that’s not quite accurate. I’m not attracted to men or women as a group—I’m attracted to “tops,” or sexually dominant people, as a group; their gender is irrelevant. Many kinky people describe similar feelings.
I thought that was an interesting statement, although I do have a couple of questions about it. Firstly, if a man is attracted to primarily dominant women, is he no longer heterosexual? Or is he’s attracted only to submissive guys, is he not homosexual? I don’t think we define D/s attraction as mutually exclusive with gender attraction in those situations, so it seems odd to do so in the bisexual case. Secondly, if you read the other article she wrote about her spanking history, she clearly identifies that her husband is vanilla. Yet she still fell in love with him, which seems to be slightly contradictory to the above quote.
Those niggles aside, I do think there’s something in what she’s suggesting. I’m not sure if there are a lot of kinky people who match the exact profile she describes, but there’s definitely more fluidity around sexual identity. Partly this might be because it’s a self-selecting group of people with an obvious disposition to try new things and experiment sexually. However, I also think that dominance and submission can sometimes create such powerful feelings and emotions that it can override or short circuit someone’s common gender preference. I can’t image myself in a romantic relationship with a man, or having a conventional sexual relationship with one, but I can imagine trying a FM/m dynamic. Or even even doing a M/m play scene, provided the kinky dynamic was set up in such a way to override my inbuilt sexual preference for women.
I’m not sure where this image is originally from. I found it on the Alternative Female Domination tumblr.
Human beings love to categorise and classify the things that they encounter in the real world.
They also like to organise their perceptions neatly in terms of cause and effect.
You could argue that that’s what we are programmed to do. It’s part of our ‘mind design’.
However, given the richness, complexity, and sheer fuzziness of reality, including sexual reality, plus the fact that human beings develop and grow over time, these categories and classifications are frequently inadequate. That’s when we run into a thicket of apparent contradictions and semantic riddles.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t be discussing these issues, but we should be doing so rationally and pragmatically.
Non-sequiturs, mutually contradictory propositions, and paradoxes should set the warning lights flashing , activate the crap detector, and tell us that we probably need to reset our thinking.
I couldn’t agree with you more. Humans are absolutely predisposed to categorize and label, and then get upset when their categorization system gets messy or inadequate. I love discussing an arguing about the semantics, but the language and labels need to serve the people involved. They’re a starting point, not an ending point.
-paltego