Orientation, as a concept, is sort of a strange thing.
Usually, when people hear “sexual orientation,” they think gay, straight, omni… that sort of thing.
Sexual orientation describes an enduring pattern of attraction—emotional, romantic, sexual, or some combination of these—to persons of the opposite sex, the same sex, or to both sexes, as well as the genders that accompany them.
I like the phrase, “an enduring pattern of attraction.”
I’ve had ”an enduring pattern of attraction” to bondage and masochism since childhood. My first sex dream at 11? Featured a lot of rope and threats. Pain and orgasm were good buddies in my mind before I could vote.
Now, I don’t know if that’s an “orientation.” So far as I can tell, usurping the phrase hurts people’s feelings. I don’t really want to hurt anyone’s feelings over this. But, I think ”an enduring pattern of attraction” describes what I’m talking about.
I hear a lot of people that self-describe as kinky say they were always this way. And, I hear a lot of people, particularly women-people, say that it’s learned, it’s trained, it’s aberrant. It’s patriarchal play-acting. That sort of thing. Like cultural Stockholm Syndrome.
I also don’t know where it comes from, specifically.
Maybe they’re right.
Maybe it is all misogyny and self-loathing.
This is at least post-polka dot bikini.
I do know that it doesn’t really matter.
I am what I am.
I can’t live outside society. I can’t just not have my own personal history. The wank bank wants as the wank bank wants. The things that we fantasize about are often both involuntary and carefully honed and cultivated.
You run into Free Will pretty quickly with this line of discussion. It’s sort of an enduring human mystery. Maybe in hierarchy-less utopia, on Planet Thought Experiment, everyone has “functional” and “healthy” and “non-exploitative” sexuality. Maybe in that magical land, everyone is into the gentlest of touching and loads of loving eye contact and sex that only happens in a dense cloud of mutually tensionless energy exchange.
Maybe.
But, I kind of doubt it.
