Senate Homosexuality: the Thread

Yeah man, I'm sorry, but literally anyone who is attracted to anyone can feel that exact same way. And it is difficult to explain... Because you're just describing what love feels like. That's just love.

You're attracted to someone's essence. Cool, but "essence" isn't a gender. Sexuality describes the gender you're attracted to. So straight, gay, bi, asexual. Those describe that. "I'm attracted to someone's essence as a person" does not, and is certainly not unique to you and other so-called pansexuals.

There have been cases, by the way, where one person in a previously cis couple (both gay and straight couples) came out as trans and transitioned physically. And you know what? Sometimes their partners have said, "though I'm not usually attracted to this gender, I am still attracted to this person, because I fell in love with them as a person. The parts aren't as important to me."

I'm sorry, I try to be understanding, but I think by declaring that your attraction to both men and women is somehow different than that of bi people because you are attracted to a person's "essence", and by assuming that's somehow different than everyone else on the planet, it really is kind of insulting to others.

 

Love's exactly that. But love wasn't what I was talking about. I guess I should just hold back the reservations, then. I was talking about sexual arousal when I said that, and I'm not putting it as I mean

I believe the anatomical terms are not disallowed words

I don't care if a penis looks/functions like an extremity or an orifice. It offers the exact same feeling
Likewise, regardless of if a vagina is an orifice or extremity, it offers its own style

Let me ask - take a hetero guy who sees a cis woman. Capable of attraction. If that same hetero guy sees a transgender woman unclothed, is it still going to do the same thing?
Take a bisexual person. Show them a cis woman and then a trans guy. Yes, both will elicit sexual arousal but in the same way, because it's, to the eye, similar body. Then take a cis guy and a trans woman. Of course a bi person can be attracted to both, but in a different way from the previous example and equivalent to the factors in this example
Take a pansexual person. Attraction to a cis woman and a trans guy are different. To a cis woman and trans woman are the same. Cis guy and trans woman, different. Cis guy and trans guy, same



There, now that I've made myself look like some licentious perv, I guess the ropes are broken, and it's unlikely I've been able to make it any clearer despite nearly my best attempts. This is not how I expected this conversation chain to go at all lol

 

Seagoat don't take this the wrong way, but you're losing me and I'm pretty sure we have the same sexual orientation. Pansexual is, in my experience, essentially interchangeable (albeit a more gender inclusive turn of phrase) with bisexual because it's fairly rare for the latter to be put off by agender or genderqueer individuals, and it's kind of strange to start declaring arbitrary walls on "how" people are attracted to others for the sake of classification.

This, for example

I mean, what? Unless I'm severely misunderstanding, you're essentially declaring that if a person is bisexual they're only attracted to trans guys because they seem like attractive women. Which is bonkers.

 

Putting walls isn't my intention. It's not my place at all to tell others whom to be into or how it should go. I'm doing horribly here lol

And that is not what I mean, not at all. However, I wouldn't say you misunderstand; I'm just explaining terribly. I meant the sensation of the arousal itself like- I'm probably just making myself look like an ass, so I guess I should just stop

Lol it's amusing that my intention was just to be like "Hey, folks, it's pansexual day, have fun" and it turned into this. Whatevs, though

 

I think it's a bit of a bad angle to try and classify sensations of arousal when that's already a bit psychologically slippery. That there are multiple conflicting theories of arousal and the brain chemistry thereof should give us immediate pause, and trying to decisively cleave pansexuality from bisexuality on those grounds (for no good reason at that, IMO) seems futile at best.

Senate_thread.txt

 

Count me in if you decide to spend the rest of the afternoon posting about the nature of arousal.

 

Personally I'm just a fan of the fact that our arguments are about stuff like that rather than New Mexican photographers.

 

Seagoat
I'm maybe more confused than before...

You seem to be saying that bisexuality is exclusively concerned with physical attraction, but I know people who identify as bisexual who certainly do not choose partners based on primarily looks, and who I'd struggle to describe a physical 'type' that they prefer. Is it possible that you're using the term pansexual to distance yourself from negative perceptions of bisexuality?

You seem to come back to trans attraction. Being frank, is pansexuality mainly about attraction to trans/genderqueer people? If so, what is the difference between orientation and preference?

 

Yeah, again, I think you just quite mistakenly believe that most people are attracted to others in a very different way than you are.

I mean, to be honest, you seem to be making this way too much about genitals and bodies. I don't know if you're aware of this, but a whole lot of people who are attracted to men don't find a penis to be a particularly arousing or aesthetically pleasing thing. That's not why most of them are attracted to men. And if some are attracted to men for that reason, it also doesn't mean they are of a different sexuality than others.

Also, that division would mean that people who are attracted to women would no longer be attracted to a woman who's had a double mastectomy and no reconstruction. And frankly that's more shallow than anything. On the flip side, if someone is attracted to women but particularly attracted to women with no breasts, that also isn't a new sexuality: that's a fetish.

At best, as Ramza said, you're talking about just your personal preferences vs. others. And we can't have an individual new sexuality based solely on every possible preference. I mean, that really leaves the door open to the notion that people could be labeled as having a certain sexuality based on things like what race or hair color or height of person they prefer.

Again, I really don't think what you're describing as your sexuality is any different than being bisexual.

 

But the acronym isn't anywhere near long enough yet.

 

GSM 4 lyfe.

 

You aren't hetero, you're a cis woman. I don't know why that changed, but apparently it has.

 

It didn't change, those aren't the same thing. Cis is a neologism meaning not trans. Heterosexual means you're primarily attracted to the other gender.

 

Intersex people.
(But I don't think you missed that bcs you're a breeder heterosexual.)

 

Some societies -- and some within our society -- don't see gender as binary thing.

There are some societies that have 3, 4, or 5 genders, and these are not simply extra genders that people are forced into because they seem different (although there usually is social ostracism). Rather, people actively identify as one of those extra genders.

It seems to me that a bisexual would only be attracted to males and females, whereas a pansexual would be attracted to any gender -- for instance, someone who is happily intersex (a person who has physical characteristics of both sexes).

I bet there are a lot of bisexuals who wouldn't be sexually attracted to a person who has the physical characteristics of both sexes. They like what our society defines as a "handsome" guy and a "pretty" girl, and would be very uncomfortable with someone who has features of both sexes at once.

There are probably some who call themselves bisexual who actually would be attracted to an intersex individual, but maybe it would be better (or fine) to call that bisexual person a pansexual instead.

I'm getting the feeling that the latter idea is closer to what Seagoat is saying.

Regardless, I think it's uncool for anyone to be met with hostility for expressing the way they think of their own sexuality -- not that everyone here is doing that. Sexuality is a hard thing to put into words. Maybe he's just having a hard time expressing himself.

I know a woman who takes roids, has women's naughty bits, looks more male than female because of the masculinizing effects of the roids she takes (and she likes the way she looks), she's sexually attracted to men, but romantically attracted to women. I think she fits pretty well under the umbrella term "Q," and she says that she feels rejected by the local LGBT community because, at least according to her, she doesn't fit in any of the categories well.

So, maybe, Seagoat's definition of pansexuality might be a subcategory of bisexuality, or maybe it isn't because of binary vs. nonbinary differences, or maybe Seagoat isn't able to express well what he thinks makes his sexuality different but it still is different, or whatever.

However, if you look at how Seagoat was met initially, it was clear he was met with hostility, and the further questioning of how he defines himself sexually only further served to make him feel unaccepted. Isn't that exactly the opposite of what the LGBT community is supposed to be about?

 

So pansexual would apply to those societies. But we're talking primarily here about people and labels used in the West.

Also, as Ramza said, I would assume that most bisexuals would still be attracted to people fitting into a third or fourth gender in another cultural construct. Because bisexual in a defecto manner in our culture means "can be attracted to people of any gender".

 

Here's the thing: in my experience, and based on scholarly observation of patterns amongst self-identified bisexuals, this seems to not be a distinction that exists in a large, meaningful way. That is to say that while one can imagine a bisexual-identifying individual who exclusively favors binary expression, they seem to be a statistical minority, or at least rather uncommon. Not to say they don't or can't exist, but more as an explanation for the fact that there are a lot of arguments against the unnecessary segmentation of the label along those lines because it seems unnecessary. Arguments in favor of the pansexual label similarly focus less on this difference and more on not reinforcing the notion of a gender binary.

Where it gets weird is that there are then multiple vectors along which the discussion, consequently, becomes a niche political football - gender spectrum vs no spectrum, descriptive labels vs commonly understood labels, inadvertent segmentation of the movement vs inclusivity, and on, and on. It's a thing. It's a to do. It getting muddled down in a hard-to-understand minute differences of kinds is going to get some raised eyebrows from the straights and some "ahems" from the queers and some "well actuallys" from the, shall we say, anti-big tents. I don't think it's unreasonable to have these discussions in here. And, for the record well-meaning allies, getting my own sexual preferences spoonfed to me, intentionally or otherwise, is insulting and vaguely infuriating. I know it's not anybody's objective, but man.

Now that said:

Yeah, I agree, it is, and that was lame.

 

I don't know. You may be right. It seems to me just from lurking threads like this one that many bisexuals have very specific ideas of what features they are attracted to in men and woman -- "I like men who are muscular, but I like women who are curvy" or "I like men who are thin and tall, and I like women athletic." etc. Then there seems to be others who say, "I'm attracted to men and women who look androgynous."

I'd guess people who say the 2nd might be more likely to be attracted to intersex people, while those who say the 1st wouldn't.

As a straight guy, I really don't have sexual/romantic feelings towards women I don't find at all attractive.

If some of those in the 1st group of bisexuals I mentioned are like me, then intersex and/or 3rd genders wouldn't do it for them simply because they wouldn't have that sense of attraction that kick starts everything else.

 

And see as a straight woman (albeit a very "masculine" one who wears men's clothing and has typically "male" interests all around), I am pretty much only attracted to people once I really know them. I am not really attracted to men just purely based on looks and never have been. So it felt to me that Seagoat was basically saying that this would make me a different orientation, and that seems a bit extreme.

I hope I did not contribute to such a feeling for him, and if so, I apologize. I think like a lot of people here, I was feeling pretty confused by the descriptors I was getting. To me they ran the risk of him mischaracterizing what bisexuals feel, or also of inadvertently implying that trans men and women should be considered as different than cis men and women.

 

Man. LGBT topics are difficult topics.

 

DaddlerTheDalek The challenge of navigating a society where distinctions are what define us as people not shared qualities. There is a tension between that and the need for seeing people as equal. Distinct yet equal.

 

Sometimes I wonder why people even both with it. I think "Let them do what they want, it's none of our business." I suppose it grosses people out enough to protest it, though I don't know why they can't just mind their own blasted business. Why such a need to fight it?

 

As Dan Savage put it, they are "externalizing an internal conflict."

I once thought "it" was wrong, too. I didn't accept others, bcs I wouldn't accept myself. I overcame that fortunately.

 

This is dated, but it illustrates some of the absurd beliefs of some homophobes. So ridiculous...