sexual identity
Mar. 19th, 2005 03:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snugglekittyI 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?
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?
no subject
Date: 2005-03-21 05:12 pm (UTC)