more questions about sexuality

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just out of interest, what does it mean for a person to say they are bisexual but only capable of falling in love with one sex? are sex and love different? if so, how are they related? and just to pose a hypothetical situation: lets say, there was a guy who said he was bisexual but could only fall in love with men, and women he could only use for one-nite-stands, would this be sexist? and finally, why would anyone want to foreclose the possibilities of love in any way?

― di, Sunday, 21 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

new answers.

― di, Sunday, 21 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

are sex and love different?

well obviously so ignore this question, but i do want to know how they are related.

― di, Sunday, 21 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Umm... This bloke came up to me in the street.

― Chris Sallis, Sunday, 21 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I think sex can be just be sex, or the physical expression of loving someone, to sound cliched. To the rest of yr question I've done more "stuff" w/men than women, but I can't see myself falling for one. I might just be repressing that side of it, cos I seem to have the choice. I don't know, so I'm not being much use. And I have no idea why anyone would limit their chances at love, but people really do seem to. Maybe it makes things less confusing if they're "sure" of their orientation?

― Andrew, Sunday, 21 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

i guess i just don't understand, how you could be attracted to people of a gender and have sex with them but completely unable to fall in love with ANYONE of that gender. i'm trying not to judge but i really want to understand.

― di, Sunday, 21 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

am i narrowminded for asking this?

― di, Sunday, 21 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Desire is not sexist, at least not in the pejorative sense of sexism. How you act on that desire _can_ be sexist, but there's no way to control what you like and don't like.

"Why would anyone want to foreclose the possibilities of love in any way?" Any number of reasons; but this may not be a question of what this hypothetical guy _wants_ to be true, but what he _finds_ to be true about himself.

We can maybe rephrase what you're saying as: your hypothetical guy enjoys sexual contact with both men and women, but finds that he can only form longer-standing emotional attachments with men. That's not a decision on his part, it's self-analysis.

― Douglas, Sunday, 21 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

i would like to underscore that i am not asking this out of any personal disappointments. i just have a friend who is this way and i want to understand.

― di, Sunday, 21 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Well I'm not ruling the possibility out, it just hasn't happened so far. I've only been seriously interesetedin 3 women, so it doesn't happen that much anyway. I don't understand any of this anyway.

― Andrew, Sunday, 21 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

But doesn't self-analysis produce the decision? You hear what you want to hear, you find what you're looking for. Or, to put it another way, whether it's a decision or not the result is the same - the hypothalamical d00d forms "longer-lasting emotional attachments" (to someone he is fucking, we can assume) (forming! like a homunculus!) always to guys, or whatever. Surely this is a result of what he wants, somehow?

"Sex is just sex" - like saying "a view is just a view" - or "a bird is just a bird" - or anything is just anything?

― Tracer Hand, Sunday, 21 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

there's no way to control what you like and don't like.

i think we have more control over our sexualities than we believe. i'm not saying we can be in complete control over what we desire, but i think there is an element of self-fashioning about it which shouldn't be ignored.

― di, Sunday, 21 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

But can we control who we love? I don't think I can.

― Andrew, Sunday, 21 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

what does it mean for a person to say they are bisexual but only capable of falling in love with one sex?

Hmmmm. The human mind is a complex but poorly tuned device for making rational typologies and systematic rules for living for those human conditions which can never be rationalised. I have many bi friends who say they live by this exact rule, as quoted above, but - from my recollection of every one of those friends - they have broken that rule on at least one occaision. Those friends as well as, indeed, basically all the gay people I know also share this rationalisation: "One falls in love with a person, not members of a particular sex." I suspect that the latter rule cancels out the former, because it is less contrived as a coping mechanism for life as someone wants to live it, and is more related to the unravelling of real, lived experience.

― debaser, Monday, 22 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

debaser, that is also how i view the situation of being bisexual. and thats precisely why i find my friends statement so hard to understand. perhaps it is something i should chalk down to this persons youthful inexperience?

― di, Monday, 22 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Indeed. Or, perhaps, to their desire to be content about (sub- conscious?) decisions which have been made to make their life more managable.

― debaser, Monday, 22 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

jeez do you ppl ever think of anything but sexuality?

― duane, Monday, 22 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Remove a few syllabals and you're closer to the mark.

― debaser, Monday, 22 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

i think that 'love' - the desire to form a relationship rather than just bonk - is really just a convenient/synergistic/what-have-you partnering of [1] an insidious biological urge to procreate (tho modern teknology has given us the ability to override the actual baby- making bit), [2] lust[aesthetic sensory gratification]/sexual gratification, [3] desire for company, and [4] emotional support/ expression/co-dependence. all four can, do, exist seperately in different forms and degrees. and, as such, can have different targets, as it were. personally, i'm quite content to sit in a cafe or at a party and perve at hott girls, but since i find most such girls' personalities range from vapid to outright caustic, and anyway i place a higher value on the companionship and common interests than great sex, my romantic intentions tend to be aimed towards male friends. in the case of Di's hypothetical guy who claimed to be unable to fall in love with a woman, it's possible that for this person, all previous encounters with women have failed to meet the four criteria above, whereas they have with another male or males.

maybe.

i feel hypocritical postulating on sex and love anyway. i'd rather be mixtaping. i'll shut up now.

― petra jane, Monday, 22 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Remove a few syllabals and you're closer to the mark.

yes that was my little joke there, do you get it?

― doo\rag, Monday, 22 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

petra whuh, you don't know any vapid or caustic boys(/men, whatev)? ha ha 'cause i cd hook you up no troub.

― duane, Monday, 22 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

oh plenty, Duane, but they are also ugly/have ugly-ass bony knees, so they don't even figure in the equation. knees are great.

― petra jane, Monday, 22 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

oh and you shld get irc cause i can't get AIM, then i could stalx0r you and stuff.

― petra jane, Monday, 22 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I think that for some people *preference* is the key word. It is not an unusual situation for people who are married to members of the opposite sex, with whom they presumably are, or have been, in love, to choose to have extra-marital sex with people of the same sex. Their actions imply that they are bisexual but that they either prefer only to fall in love, or are capable only of falling in love, with members of the opposite sex. Isn't one of the saving graces of this sort of extra-marital activity that it is just sex?

I would hesitate to label such preferences as *sexist* - although their basis may be found in the need to fit into a heterosexual society, but then it might also have something to do with the need to reproduce and both parents' desire to actively bring up their child.

Often the sort of passion that goes along with homosexual, or other similarly traditionally taboo sex (e.g. affairs, s&m, hookers), implies a type of guilt that would preclude the possibility of love. For someone who feels strongly aligned with homosexuality, hetero sex may carry the same sort of taboo/guilt enhanced sexual pleasure, and the same preclusions to love.

― toraneko, Monday, 22 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Such a seething hotbed of passion I'm going to visit! Or something.

― Ned Raggett, Monday, 22 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Ruling out one or the other gender for love but not for sex sounds self-deluding to me. But one point is that few of us bisexuals lust after men and women equally - far more seem to have a preference, to some degree, one way or the other. I find more women attractive, and generally more attractive, than men, but I've had sex with a good few men too. This makes me find the notion of long-term relationships with women more likely than with men, but I wouldn't entirely rule either out. For the record, for what it's worth, I have had one long- term relationship, for 23 years, and that was with a woman.

― Martin Skidmore, Monday, 22 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Often the sort of passion that goes along with homosexual, or other similarly traditionally taboo sex (e.g. affairs, s&m, hookers), implies a type of guilt that would preclude the possibility of love. For someone who feels strongly aligned with homosexuality, hetero sex may carry the same sort of taboo/guilt enhanced sexual pleasure, and the same preclusions to love.

this is something i hadn't thought of.

but since i find most such girls' personalities range from vapid to outright caustic

yeah but i think this is not really where your coming from petra, because males are just as vapid-to-caustic.

― di, Monday, 22 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

just out of interest, what does it mean for a person to say they are bisexual but only capable of falling in love with one sex? are sex and love different? if so, how are they related?

i can't answer this question for myself but two different people i've known have told me stuff about it. one refused to believe that true bisexuality exists because he thinks men and women are inherently different and its not possible to be in love with both f them in one lifetime (and he hates women). The other one (who is quite active in the queer community) says he can't fall in love with a woman because of "internalised homophobia" from his childhood. i don't know what any of this means except that dating someone who hates a whole gender really sucks.

― hamish, Monday, 22 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

actually, i have known one person like this and it was in fact a woman. she claimed to be bisexual but could never fall in love with a woman. i have been very suspicious of her because i was a good friend of hers for a while but then our friendship went on the backburner, she seemed to prefer hanging out with boys than girls. then i got really annoyed with her one night when she made some snarky comment about a joke i had made - the joke being that we could both marry carrie brownstein - she looked at me disgustedly as if i was some creepy sexual predator and said she could never marry me because we had been friends for too long. i have never ever made a pass at her, so it came completely out of the blue. i never got the impression that she was overtly sexist (she was an avowed feminist) or that she wasn't really bisexual. i mostly got the impression that subconsciously she had some kind of wierd reverence for men, and naturally that made me sad and angry.

there are too many women who have that reverence for men. it always makes it painful to be friends with a girl when you know she'd rather hang out with a guy (any guy) any day.

sexuality is a funny thing though. i mean, i know someone who claims to be a lesbian but is the biggest groupie for male- rockstars i have ever met.

― di, Monday, 22 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

i don't know. i guess this is all pretty case specific and my questions can't really be answered in any one way.

― di, Monday, 22 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Amen.

― debaser, Monday, 22 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

males are just as vapid-to-caustic

i guess it depends who's in yr social circle. Your Mileage May Vary.

― petra jane, Monday, 22 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Di lives in Dunedin. i'm vapid. anton is caustic. everyone else is both.

― hamish, Monday, 22 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

who online right now has a virus-infected computer? i'm being spammed with klez-e virii from ilx-ish addresses.

― hamish, Monday, 22 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

you are not vapid hamish. anton is not caustic. there are only wuvly people in my social circle.

― di, Monday, 22 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

i used to get those too, hamish, if you ignore them they will go away.

― di, Monday, 22 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

no too many people have my email address and they are not going away. i get about 30 a day and i have to download them all.

― hamish, Monday, 22 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

seven months pass...

New random question about sexuality: What does it mean when people say that women reach their 'peak' at 40 and guys at 18? Does that mean they are more interested in sex (on average) at those points in their lives?

― Sarah McLUsky (coco), Friday, 7 March 2003 21:40 (twenty-three years ago)

I think it's more to do with confidence and physical ability. Men peak younger, they are able to have sex more often and attain orgasms more easily when they are younger. Women, as they gain in experience and sex becomes less awkward and they are more aware of what they want/what gets them off - and also, as the fear of pregnancy decreases - are able to have more and better sex.

― kate (suzy), Friday, 7 March 2003 21:46 (twenty-three years ago)

I'm not convinced that there is much useful meaning in that statement at all. I suspect it has something to do, as perhaps does Kate's response, with the notion that for men sex is an athletic event while for women it's an emotional one.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Friday, 7 March 2003 21:58 (twenty-three years ago)

I sure *hope* there's a peak of some kind coming up at 40! I need more reasons to feel okay about being 30-something.

― ChristineSH (chrissie1068), Friday, 7 March 2003 22:19 (twenty-three years ago)

i thought i'd read somewhere that the peak for women occured in the late 20s/early 30s. it seemed entirely based on physiological, not psychological circumstances of being around that age.

whatever the age actually is, it seems that sexual peak is referring to having the highest libido. a friend of mine who's thirty tends to date guys in their early 20's because she feels that they're the ones that can keep up! aaaahhhh...no pun intended, really.

― JuliaA (j_bdules), Saturday, 8 March 2003 00:06 (twenty-three years ago)

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