sexual identity

[snugglekitty]

I have been thinking a little bit about how we define our sexual identities, and how that changes over time. I am curious to find out what aspects of their identities people see as most important, and what has changed for them since their identities became relatively fixed around or before entering adulthood. (Or maybe that doesn't fit for you, in which case, please comment too!)

I thought about filtering this post, but decided not to - my sexual identity is reasonably public, and I'd like to get a good cross-section of responses. I hope that y'all will respect that decision and make sure your comments are adult and respectful.



Ten years ago, I knew that I was a poly person. I defined myself as bisexual. I didn't define myself as kinky - I hadn't come to terms with that aspect of myself yet.

Now, I am still very much poly, but that seems to feel less important to me than it once did. It's a more solid part of my identity, maybe. And it's become at least a bit more mainstream, I no longer feel like I come from a different planet just because I'm poly. (Or this feeling could have to do with immersion in the poly community.) Also, I have come to feel that identifying as poly doesn't necessarily tell people that I'm round-heeled, which was part of what I liked about the term.

And I don't feel that being poly sets me apart from "regular folks" as much as being kinky does. Given ten minutes, I can generally give someone a very basic understanding of why and how I'm poly, as long as they're not dead set against it. But being kinky? A lot tougher, unless the person you're talking to loves super-spicy food or deep tissue massage. Also, I am more invested in the kinky community at this point than the poly one (although there's a whole lot of overlap). This suggests that, for me at least, adversity is part of how my identity is formed and maintained. I like being touched gently, yes, but that is widely accepted and therefore I don't have to defend it or warn people about it before I start dating them... there's no oppression/suppression/repression of people who like being touched gently, so it's never needed to be a part of my identity.

I don't really think of myself as bisexual anymore. I mean, technically, yes, the term applies - I sleep with boys and girls. But it's not a label I still attach to myself. For one thing, I no longer believe there are only two genders. :) For another, I don't feel that I am "on the fence" - I have a strong affinity to the queer community and that is where I choose to hang my hat. If I do sleep with boys, chances are excellent that they will be queer, genderqueer, or otherwise signficantly non-conformative about gender. So these days I would mostly say that I'm queer, or a dyke. (In the community where I came of age, "lesbian" meant you only like other girls, but "dyke" was a non-exclusive term.) This gets amusing when PC folks try to make comments about my identity describing me as gay or lesbian, since there is mutual non-fitting between myself and those labels.

The idea of being kinky has changed for me in the past ten years from an identity piece I didn't even have, (at the time, it was only a scary dark secret about fantasies I was sure made me a bad person), to being pretty central to my sexual identity. Perhaps because now that I am embracing it, I can admit that it gets me the hottest? Perhaps because it is the newest solidified piece of my identity?

Although I do have some less-solidified identity pieces. I have come to identify as femme (which does have a sexual component, at least for me), and realized that I very much appreciate and enjoy trans folks (although if there's a good identity label to describe that, I haven't heard it yet - as someone commented wryly in the book Genderqueer, the term transsexual is already taken). Neither of these feel central to me now, but who knows what time will bring?



What sexual identity labels do you embrace? How have they changed over time? How would you rate their relative importances in your life, and why?

Comments

[gothtique.livejournal.com]

Having never fit neatly into any of the usual pigeon holes, this is something I think about rather often.

I am a woman... An Artist...a jewish mother... and a self-identified goth/poly/dyke.
How can I be a dyke? I am, afterall, married to a man...
I think of myself as a femme/domme, but I make art with a torch and a hammer and sub to my life-partners.

I define myself that way because I feel that the labels are meant to demonstrate my preferences, my "spirit" if you will... not necessarily your practice...And my preferences are CLEAR!

In spirit I am a total goth... but in practice I am a Soccer mom.... ( admittedly a soccer mom with a shaved head and Dr. Martin Mary Janes... but I drive a mini-van!)
In spirit I am a starving artist... in practice I am relatively sucessful, own a big house by the ocean and belong to a yacht club.

I choose my labels for myself... I own them... If someone else had imposed them I would argue the opposing view point on principle! :-) LOL

[beowabbit]

Pardon the off-topicinality, but Hi!

[beowabbit]

I’ve known monogamy didn’t click for me for as long as I’ve thought about romantic relationships — which is to say, for a few years longer than I’ve been interested in having them. I tried to be in a monogamous relationship on and off in my first long-term romantic relationship, and I was miserable. (She was hard-wired monogamous, so one or the other of us could be happy in the relationship, but not both at the same time. There are even more amusing things about that relationship that I’d be happy to share sometime.) So being poly (although it was years later that the term was coined) is a really deep, core part of my sexual identity and my notion of myself as a person. If my choices were monogamy and celibacy, I’d choose celibacy. If my choices were monogamy and death, I’d probably choose monogamy, but I’m not entirely sure.

I realized around the start of college that I could be comfortable around some men, that there were men I had something in common with and felt like I could be good friends with. It followed from that, in my own personal logic, that I could at least theoretically be attracted to men. It was about eight or nine years later, shortly after college [I was an undergraduate for seven years] that I started using the label “bisexual”. That was mainly because I had encountered a community of people who identified as bi (and poly), and I recognized them as my tribe, as people who felt like I did. That was an incredibly powerful experience, feeling like I had a community and a home (although I’d been lucky enough to meet a fair number of people in college who were open-minded about the non-monogamy thing). The vast majority of my lovers have been women, though, and most of the people I’ve been attracted to, so I’m pretty low on the Kinsey scale. Can’t imagine not identifying as bi at this point, though.

There’s a connection in my head between being poly and being bi, and it is this: Both of those, for me, are about letting my connections with people be what they want to be, and not putting arbitrary constraints on how I feel about somebody that aren’t based on who they are as people and who I am as a person. It means being open to a romantic relationship with somebody new even if I’m already in one, and not needing to figure out what gender somebody across the street is before I decide they’re cute. It means letting my friendship with somebody blossom into something else if the soil is fertile, whether or not they’re partnered, and not feeling like somebody’s plumbing rules out thinking they’re an amazingly hot, fascinating person. Now, realistically, there are only so many hours in the day, so if I already have time commitments with three lovers (only hypothetical at the moment :-) it’s going to be hard in practice for another relationship to take root, and I do seem to tend to be attracted to more women than men, and to be more attracted to the women in my life than to the men, but still, I don’t feel like people are arbitrarily ruled out a priori. For me, it’s about treating each person as a whole person and an end in themselves.

I’ve been aware for a few years (maybe eight) that I was interested in BDSM, but it was a pretty theoretical interest for a while, just because of not being plugged into the community. (I was aware of it, and had friends and acquaintances who were plugged into it; I just didn’t have a lot of experience myself.) It’s not something I fantasized about before encountering it. It’s not as fundamental a part of my identity as being poly. But I think it flows out of some other things about my personality. I’m definitely a sensory slut: I love roller-coasters, spicy food, deep-tissue massage, and floggings (from both directions).

[Hit comment length limit; cont’d.]

[beowabbit]

[Cont’d from previous comment:]

I’m a top who happily bottoms. I guess I’d identify as a switch, but I feel toppier than bottomy. (Unlike some switches, I’m happy to bottom to strangers on occasion, and I have no problem bottoming in public.)

I am much more into SM than into DS, but I’m not a sub at all in the scene. (I joke that I get enough of that in real life. :-) I can imagine domming somebody, but so far that hasn’t been something that has held the visceral appeal that flogging does; at this particular stage in my life if I dommed somebody it would probably be because it was important for them rather than because it was important for me.

Bondage doesn’t do anything for me, really. I’m interested in cuffs or binding as a way to keep the bottom in the right place, and that’s about it. I find fancy Japanese rope bondage pretty in the same way I find a spiderweb pretty, but I find it about as erotic as a spiderweb (except that it usually happens on naked people). Of course, ten years ago I would have been able to see what other people found appealing about flogging but wouldn’t particuarly have thought I’d be interested in it myself, so who knows, maybe in five or ten years I’ll be seriously into DS and bondage, but I sort of think that won’t ever be as meaningful to me as SM is.

So, I identify as a poly, bi [low-Kinsey-number], [toppish] switch.

(In terms of gender, I’m perfectly content with identifying and being identified as male, but it’s not something I particularly care about.)

One other interesting component of my sexual identity is that for a couple years I was considerably more plugged into lesbian communities than into straight, gay male, or bi communities; for that time most of my friends were lesbian and it wasn’t very uncommon for me to go to parties or meetings where I was the only non-lesbian. I certainly don’t identify as lesbian, or “lesbian in a man’s body” [gag], and I didn’t then, but that experience has coloured my identity and my expectations and my norms.

[ceelove.livejournal.com]

Ten years ago, I was scared of sex and shuffling my identity around, trying to come up with a categorization that worked. I was conceptualizing myself as bisexual, then, but because sex with men was a big threatening thing and sex with women was barely even theoretical at that point, I felt largely asexual. I decided for a while that I just couldn't deal with men at all, which made me homosexual by default. And then I began facing down my phobias: by age 25, I'd tackled sex with men, and by age 27, sex with women stopped being theoretical.

Now that my energy isn't so much expended just trying to figure out the basics, I think of myself as polyamorous, bisexual, and fairly lightly dommish. The domme part is not particularly important to me and doesn't come out all that often - it's more like a flavoring than an important ingredient in my identity. Poly is quite important to me, but how that part of my identity is realized has become less important.

Bisexuality - my concept of myself as having the capacity to be partnered with men or women - is still very important to me, so much so that poly is somewhat of a vehicle for manifesting bisexuality: I can't handle defaulting to heterosexuality, so I'm uncomfortable being in a monogamous relationship with a man. I could possibly be comfortable in a monogamous relationship with a woman: it would feel more long-term balanced, as I've invested a lot more of my sexual identity with men.

[beowabbit]

And then I began facing down my phobias: by age 25, I'd tackled sex with men, and by age 27, sex with women stopped being theoretical.

Out of curiosity, how old are you now? (I.e., how long ago were these events?)

[ceelove.livejournal.com]

32 next week.

[beowabbit]

Oh! Happy birthday!

[cathijosephine.livejournal.com]

I find that my mind doesn't bother with labels. I pursue whatever feels good. This applies to all sorts of things...not just who I have sex with, but what defines sex as well (i.e. some people define it as piv, genital touching, intent to orgasm or cause orgasm, etc.). Sometimes breathing is sex in my world.

The only times I have adopted labels for myself were when I was pressured by others to define myself for them...usually by primary partners who wanted to know what to expect. Now that I've extricated myself from that relationship dynamic, I hope to never adopt a label again, except perhaps to use bi and poly to come out to my folks in simplified language that hopefully they can understand.