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Do you believe sexuality is fluid or fixed?

Discussion in 'Chit Chat' started by Kodo, Oct 1, 2015.

  1. XenaxGabby

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    Chip knows all.
     
  2. gravechild

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    I don't think that's what people mean when they say "fluid" (I certainly don't). First, we need to separate attraction from behavior and identity. It's fluid in the sense that not everyone is aware from the day they're born, and all aspects of their sexuality don't stay "fixed" in terms of preferences, understanding, and labeling. Orientation might be fixed for most people, but the fact that it's only one part of sexuality, and many on this site do fit the narrative of your last example, should be proof enough that not everyone is built the same way.

    Sexuality is incredibly complex, but some people seem to want it to be reduced to something black and white. If it's that way for them, that's fine and dandy, but when you start applying it to others, expect disagreement. Why is it latent in some, but more obvious for others?

    Perhaps I'm too much of an idealist for my own good, but I tend to see it as something constantly evolving. Few people are 100% self-aware, especially when you take into consideration environment. If someone had told me I'd be having this discussion a couple of years ago, my reaction would have been disbelief.
     
  3. Justinian20

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    I think sexuality can indeed be fluid for some but it is totally hardwired for others. I would never say it's 100% fluid or 100% fixed, because out of a population of say 100 thousand people, not all of them are going to have a fluid sexuality but it goes the same way for fixed sexuality. A hundred thousand may be a too small population size to get the real idea that sexuality is a gray area.
     
  4. RawringSnake

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    The way I see it, some people just take longer to figure out where they stand in terms of their own sexuality. Because this process of self-discovery can take place across several years for them, it creates the illusion that their sexuality is "fluid" or "changing," when in reality is just becoming clearer as they get to understand themselves better.
     
  5. guitar

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    I think the only thing that's fixed is that human beings are hardwired to be sexual. Orientation is almost always fluid. Some people are always and will always be straight, others are completely gay. A LOT of the population is fluid to some degree or another.
     
  6. C P

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    Are we even reading the same thread here? Because it seems you've missed a number of posts here, such as these:

    Ignoring that the bolded here is ignorant as is.
     
  7. acciocarrie

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    (disgusted noise.)

    THANK YOU.
     
  8. Lone Dragon

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    Totally fixed. I find some women attractive and I'm not attracted to every guy I see, but I'm totally gay. And I don't think that will change. I mean everyone is different, but I don't think a person can change their sexual orientation over time. It sounds a little silly to me that someone who struggled with coming to terms with their sexuality their whole life could still say that one day they could be straight.

    So I think your orientation never changes.
     
  9. Libra Neko

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    It's fluid for some, fixed for others.
    For me it's 100% fluid. I have been everything on the Kinsey scale from a 2 to a 5, depending on what year of my life.
     
  10. Creativemind

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    Both. It's been proven that some people are fluid/changing, and other people are rigid. Take it the same as any other preference. Food can be fluid. I might have hated pepperoni pizza in the past, but now maybe I enjoy it. However, others will always dislike it no matter what. That's okay. They shouldn't feel forced to be open to every food there is. Same with gender or biological sex.

    I never understood this logic. Of course people can be 100% straight or gay, as you said sexuality is a spectrum and spectrums do not exist without also including the more extremes.

    The only time you can say that nobody is 100% gay, is if you do not understand what being gay is. A lesbian for example, can admit men are "cute" or good-looking, but that doesn't make her "a little bit bi". This woman can still be 100% rigid gay in the same way that thinking kittens are adorable and fun to play with doesn't make you a 1% zoophile. Zoophiles need to want to stick their dicks in cats to be what they are, and likewise a woman also needs to want a man inside her to be "even slightly bi". But yet, not all women desire sex or relationships with men, and this, by definition is "100% gay".

    Also, why is it that the phrase "sexuality is fluid" is only aimed toward gay people, to force them to open up? You could also say that "sexuality is fluid, so bisexuals are going through a phase and could be completely gay or straight in the future". After all, fluid means "changing", not "open-minded". And bi people can definitely "fluidly" turn straight just like gay people can open up to the opposite sex.

    Another funny thing about this quote is that people only use it for orientation. Sexual preferences are fluid too, so why don't we also say that everyone can open up to hairy women, bald people, elderly people, scarred people, BDSM, watersports fetishes, anal sex, etc? I could say that "Nobody is 100% opposed to BDSM, we all like bondage in some way", the same exact way.

    So bi people who tell gay people that they can't be "100% gay" first need to prove they are open to every single kind of person, physical appearance, and fetish there is. After all, "sexuality is fluid" so you can't knock any of those things; you don't know, you might like it in the future.
     
    #30 Creativemind, Oct 2, 2015
    Last edited: Oct 2, 2015
  11. Yami

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    I think while one persons sexuality is fluid, somebody else's not. You can't simply put an answer that fits everybody.
     
  12. AJ56

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    I think it depends on the person. For some, like me, it's fixed. For others, it's fluid.
     
  13. Bismuth

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    I think it depends on the person. Some people will go through their whole lives only sexually attracted to a single gender. Some people's sexuality will shift throughout their lives and it may change wildly in a single year or change only a smidge over the course of decades.
     
  14. RemakeJake

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    Perhaps fluid WITHIN a certain threshold.
     
  15. Pseudojim

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    https://www.newscientist.com/articl...-is-fluid-its-time-to-get-past-born-this-way/

    Sexuality is fluid – it’s time to get past ‘born this way’

    Gay rights shouldn't depend on how a person came to be gay, and we should embrace the fact that sexuality can change, says developmental psychologist Lisa Diamond

    Much of your work explores what you call “sexual fluidity”. What does it mean?
    It means that people are born with a sexual orientation and also with a degree of sexual flexibility, and they appear to work together. So there are gay people who are very fixedly gay and there are gay people who are more fluid, meaning they can experience attractions that run outside of their orientation. Likewise for heterosexuals. Fluidity is the capacity to experience attractions that run counter to your overall orientation.

    How did you end up doing this kind of research?
    The classic answer is, well, I’m a lesbian and I’m a developmental psychologist, so I guess I’ll study the development in this area. People ask me if I am a really fluid lesbian, and actually I’m not: I’m a garden-variety lesbian and initially I had a lot of trouble understanding that people had very varied experiences. After I had interviewed women in depth and followed them over time, I just found these unbelievable twists and turns in their experiences that were fascinating and contrary to what I had come to believe based on the scientific literature. As a scientist you look for those opportunities.

    Many advocates of gay rights say people are “born this way” – which is at odds with the idea of fluidity. Where did this view originate?
    It really dates back to a campaign against the gay community back in the 1960s and 70s, led by American singer and activist Anita Bryant. Her whole argument was that gay people were a threat because they were going to recruit young people to be gay. She specifically said homosexuals are made, not born; they can’t reproduce, so they’re trying to recruit our children. Gay people said, that’s ridiculous, we’re not trying to recruit your children – that wouldn’t even work! This isn’t something you can be recruited into. It’s just the way we are.

    Did that argument feature in the recent Supreme Court case that legalised same-sex marriage throughout the US?
    What was interesting was that Justice Anthony Kennedy actually said, almost as an offhand comment, that studies suggest sexual orientation is immutable. It’s kind of hilarious because he doesn’t elaborate: he sort of throws it out there – like “oh, we all know that” – but importantly, that was not the basis on which the ruling was made. That shows conventional wisdom still holds the idea that sexual orientation is immutable, but that’s not the basis for legal reasoning in the US. And it shows that we don’t need to be considered a protected class in order to make strong and successful arguments about civil rights.

    What other arguments do opponents of same-sex marriage make?
    They are concerned that children would grow up seeing, wow, gays can get legally married, that must mean our society thinks that being gay is okay. So people will then be more likely to consider gayness themselves and over time there will be an increase in the number of gays out there. And frankly, regardless of the basis of their fear, they’re right about the result. Over the past 20 years, every survey repeated over time has shown that the number of individuals who self-identify as gay has been going up, especially people who identify as bisexual or who identify as heterosexual but who have had some same-sex sexual experiences.

    So what is behind the increase in people reporting same-sex sexual experiences?
    Probably there’s a core part of the population that is about as gay as the day is long, and they don’t appear to be affected at all by social acceptance, whether you put them in South Africa or America or 1920 or 1980. They’re like, “I am gay and I’m going to find some way to be gay”. But the most common form of same-sex attraction is not exclusive attraction but a bisexual form. You can imagine that these people are likely to be influenced by social acceptance of same-sex sexuality. If you are bisexually attracted you may think, “Wow, the world is going to hate me if I end up with someone of the same sex, my life is going to be a lot easier if I end up with someone of the opposite sex.” So you end up focusing on that.

    How does science support these ideas about the rise in same-sex sexuality?
    For a start, same-sex attraction does not appear to be contagious. There have been a number of really cool social network studies done over the years looking at whether some traits, such as obesity, can spread through social communities. And they can. So researchers used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, took the same analytic technique and applied it to same-sex attraction. If a lot of your friends are same-sex attracted, are you more likely to be same-sex attracted? Are the attractions themselves spreading? And they found that they were not.

    So it’s not the attractions that are growing, it’s the awareness of them and the ability to articulate and act on them. It’s social acceptance that is contagious.

    Does this mean that many people are born with an inclination for same-sex attraction?
    Yes. I think all the evidence suggests that we’re born with an underlying capacity, and then that capacity interacts with a whole bunch of other influences. Some of them are prenatal; some maybe in the first year of life. We still don’t know whether there’s a point at which things become more fixed. We’re clear that there is some environmental input, but there is absolutely no evidence that the family dynamic, in terms of closeness or distance with mom or dad, has anything to do with same-sex sexuality. I think it’s an important finding because a lot of parents think they are the cause – what did I do? I think we can pretty much say you did nothing. People hear the word “environment” and think family environment. When scientists talk about the environment, they’re talking about things like the amniotic fluid the fetus grew in. We’re talking about everything that is around you. Even a genome is not as fixed as we thought.

    But there is a genetic component to sexual attraction…
    Yes, twin studies show that there’s a genetic contribution to same-sex attraction – but that is not the only thing going on. There are so many interacting causes for sexual orientation that two different individuals can be gay for a different combinations of reasons. Some people know at earlier ages than others, some are bisexual rather than gay, some show more change over the course of their life. All this means that whenever someone comes up with a tag line like “we’re born that way”, they ultimately do everyone involved a disservice.

    What would you like to happen to that tag line?
    It is time to just take the whole idea of sexuality as immutable, the born this way notion, and just come to a consensus as scientists and as legal scholars that we need to put it to rest. It’s unscientific, it’s unnecessary and it’s unjust. It doesn’t matter how we got to be this way. As a scientist, I think it’s one of the most fascinating questions out there and one that I will continue to investigate. As a lesbian and a progressive, I think it’s totally irrelevant and just politics.
     
  16. KaySee

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    I always saw sexuality to be as fluid as personality. Non-existent when young and shifting with each new thought and experience. Heck, I see no one as sexy, but there is always that "first for everything". I could die before I get to that, but as long as I am still alive I think it is possible.

    There might be points where it is or seems unchangeable, but anything is possible.