Hi all. I hope you are doing well. I have come to the realization that, although I may be bi, I am feeling lately that all the questions I have asked make me think I am closer to gay. Most of the porn I watch does not have a woman, I have lots of fantasies with a penis, and I have always found it easier to talk to guys. What should I do? Peace and Love to you all!
Porn is a very poor indicator of sexuality, there are lesbians who watch gay porn even though they are not men nor are they attracted to men at all. The fantasies can be a bit more telling. If you really believe that you are attracted to men why not try actually dating a few and see how it goes?
As @QuietPeace said porn is not a good reliable indicator, but i understand your confusion, i have confusion with porn too, i only watch girls in porn but there are moments when a guy maked a sound bc hes feeling pleasure from the girl or makes a expression, i kind get some arousal too, not everytime but sometimes, and when this happens i get very confused if this is a good indicator or not. But you should not rely on porn.
I am officially "bisexual," but it doesn't capture the many layers to my sexuality. Queer is the label I use. I would agree with @QuietPeace in that porn isn't going to tell you all that much about what would make you happy with another person. I watch porn sometimes, but it frustrates me because it only presents pre-packaged scenarios that (I suppose) excite a lot of people. In fact, I would say that a lot of people's desires are programmed by porn. That's not a terrible thing. But if you want to discover inner parts of yourself, see if you can meet some men that you like. Who knows what you'll find.
For what it's worth, it's very, very common for people who are gay to start out labeling as bi. This is in large part because labeling as gay closes a door; we essentially acknowledge that we'll never have the "normal heterosexual life" that the majority of people experience, and as we are processing that loss, the stages (denial-anger-bargaining-depression-acceptance) we go through are a normal part of that. So the bisexual label is often a bridge through the bargaining phase. This isn't to say that there aren't people who are bisexual... lots of them, very well documented. But there are many more who eventually figure out that the 'bi' label isn't really the right fit. So in your case, if you masturbate without porn and compare fantasies when thinking about women vs men, or think about where your eyes wander when you aren't paying conscious attention if you are out at the beach or in the gym or wherever... those tend to be pretty accurate gauges, because they are less influenced by your conscious mind. Also, keep in mind that sexual orientation is not a binary or trinary, but a spectrum. So you can be, on the Kinsey 0-6 scale, a 5 (which is mostly gay) but still be attracted to the occasional opposite sex person. Only a small % of peopel are at one extreme end or the other; most are somewhere on the spectrum.
Thanks for your thoughts. I don't put all that much stock in the Kinsey scale, or most measurement systems for sexuality. I experience my sexuality as something multifaceted and complex, something knowable intuitively rather than empirically. But I appreciate that a person might prefer to approach it scientifically. Much can be gained from that, I'm sure. I was out as gay for a number of years before I realized that, for stretches at a time, I desired women more than men. But what I soon discovered was that I desired women differently from how I desired men. It wasn't that I was somewhere between straight and gay; it was that I desired a range of different things and had a variety of different fantasies. Some involved men, some involved women, and some involved both. What matters for me is the type of men and women I desire (thin and androgynous, except in certain situations when I fancy something else) and the type of activity I desire (based mostly in kink and fetish). These things, rather than gay/straight/bi, speak more to how I experience my sexuality. At the gym or at the beach, my eyes wander toward both men and women. More toward women, as I am attracted to a much wider range of women than men. And, yet, there is a certain type of man that attracts me most of all. When I see that sort of man, I experience myself as gay--in that moment. I understand that a scientifically minded person might consider my subjective understanding irrelevant to what's really going on and prefer instead to gauge my sexuality according to established means for assessment. Who knows? Perhaps my murky, intuitively based understanding of myself is distorted. I do know that objective personality and sexuality measurements make no sense to me. They don't fit with my understanding of what is real and true. Nor does certainty. I can't prove that my way of knowing is correct, and I like it that way.
I have thought alot about this. I took an online test to see what my sexuality was. It came back bi, but one test came back with gay. I felt some relief when I saw gay. I became happy. I have an appointment woth a therapist next week and we will talk about it.
I think that this is very telling. It is sort of like using any random method to decide something. Rather than see what the answer comes out as see how you feel about that answer if you are really happy or disappointed about the random answer that tells you more about what you really feel on the subject than the random answer actually does.