Before I even start into the topic, I'm going to make a DISCLAIMER here: In this blog I will be talking about "private" parts and I intend to refer to them by their names. I don't be using slang for them but not using the actual names makes things even more confusing and given the nature of how confused people seem to be about it the argument is better suited with real terms.
Now that it's out of the way, I plan to discuss the variant types of sexuality by breaking them down into the following elements:
1. All People Are Sexual
2. Rules of Attraction
3. Conditioning
4. Pools of Availability
5. How Choice Works
Rather than discussing each type of sexuality I will make here a list of types that all conform to the same set of rules:
1. Non-Sexuality -uninterested in any sexual activity
2. Asexuality -only interested in sexual activity by ones self
3. Homosexuality -having interest solely in the same gender
4. Heterosexuality -having interest solely in the opposite gender
5. Bisexuality - having interest in both genders
In these categories, there really isn't any such thing as 3 or 4, but I will discuss this later. Instead, for right now, let's just use the logical argument that they are a possibility simply because they are options rather than considering the real world application of them being entirely unobserved. On to the point.
ALL PEOPLE ARE SEXUAL
In all of science and nature we observe things in relation to their capacity for reproduction. We generally refer to this as their sexuality. Some things produce asexually, meaning within themselves. Some things produce heterosexually, meaning with the opposite gender. Ultimately, even among all of the five categories mentioned in the list, the goal of all of nature in any of those systems is a system for reproduction.
I am going to denounce here any kind of assertion that reproduction is the value for sexuality alone. It is much much more complex than mere reproductive value, as recent science mentions that the hormones that influence attraction for same-sex features for an in-utero fetus also cause the mother to become several times more fertile. If you're conservative and latching onto the idea of reproduction, your efforts are futile. If you are liberal and claiming that it's not the only function, you are correct but don't get too hasty.
What I mean when I say that all people are sexual is actually really simple. Everyone has an personal take on sexuality. They either do or do not prefer to engage in sexual activity. If they do, then they either do with others or alone. I it's with others then there must be a method of deciding which they will have interaction with - men or women. So all people are sexual in nature. We actually have tons of proof for this in your genetics. There are actual genes in your DNA that decidedly make you sexual. Everyone is sexual.
What does this mean? It's actually really simple. Nobody "IS" gay or straight or bi. We are all sexual beings and there is a number of variations we can choose from at any given moment and they are all consistently available to us. Good. Got it.
RULES OF ATTRACTION
This is where we get into the fun stuff. I am by no means "the authority" on all things regarding attraction. Nobody is. It's still a widely researched subject, but we can identify a few simple basics. Everyone who is interested in someone else for sexual activity must have a set of criteria that separates those that they find viable from those that they do not or you would simply sleep with everyone and anyone.
RULE #1: Attraction is not set in stone. It is ever-changing.
This is actually part of the beautiful thing with attraction. This is what allows two people to consistently be attracted to one another despite that her breasts sag, his hair runs for the back of his neck, her face gets wrinkles, and he becomes a curmudgeon such as myself. The fact that she can love my fat belly and still learn to love me while I lose weight and the fact that I will love her despite her size, hair, makeup, or whatever is what makes the relationship the most viable and as a product of that reproduction most viable. Attraction, from an evolutionary standpoint is required to be changing so as to prolong the species for the most possible applications. It's a beautiful thing that we aren't all locked into thinking that the Cheerleader or the Swimsuit model is attractive. To be candid, at the moment I do not personally find those looks attractive at all, but I will talk about the why of that in a later point.
The Kinsey Scale is a good and replicated experiment that shows that people at different times change their sexuality by some element (Kinsey Scale Experiment). In the experiment it is actually only a very short period of time for anyone that they are exclusively one type of sexual and even then it's largely skewed. The results actually suggest that there is never really a moment where people are solely one sexuality type but rather we are all bi-sexually capable at most times.
RULE #2: We are not attracted to GENDER. We are attracted to features.
Science is ever confirming that what drives the attraction template is features.
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/05/17-facts-about-human-sexual-attraction_n_3817941.html)
We are not decidedly attracted to a gender. If I did makeup for a girl to look EXACTLY like Hugh Jackman and took a picture and then placed it next to a picture of the real thing, my wife would find both attractive despite that the one has a vagina and the other has a penis because the way Hugh Jackman looks has features that she finds attractive. If we were solely attracted to someone based on genitalia we would all be unable to be attracted to someone unless they were naked. Alas, here we are in a day and age where we are attracted to features and not to gender per se. That's not to say there is no balance there either. Let's say that I was attracted to skinny arms. I might find that attractive, but when the person also has a hairy face and zitted back, I've weighted those unattractive features as heavier than the attractive "skinny arms." This lends us to the next rule.
RULE # 3: Everyone is attracted in some capacity to both genders as a product of rule #2.
Features are not unique to a gender that do not define their gender. That is to say, having wide hips is not uniquely female. There are males with this feature. Being hairy isn't intrinsically a male feature. There are hairy women. For any given stimulus for attraction it can be given to both male and female counterparts. If you are sitting there as a conservative thinking, "No way! There is no way I'm attracted to the same gender at all!" you are already missing it. It isn't suggesting that you are interested in the same gender as a whole being. It's suggesting that both genders will exhibit features that you find attractive. This is actually supported by science over and over again
(https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDYQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kinseyinstitute.org%2Fresearch%2Fak-hhscale.html&ei=3mVAU6rxKces2QWrjoFY&usg=AFQjCNGoiHbeU40wSH_o5fRDVdNVE7JhQw&sig2=JPNDTnXXibHeaht7L9di9g&bvm=bv.64367178,d.b2I)
So decidedly, we all have the ability to be attracted to both genders if we are a sexual in a way that is not non-sexual or asexual.
I'm sure there are a ton of other rules, but these are ones that I can define through a vast amount of reading on the subject and going over several scientific journals to find. They all circle back to these three main points and generally try to define sub-rules within these three.
CONDITIONING
In the media there is a drastic problem with how people view this. It has widely been held to believe that you could simply condition someone to be interested in the opposite sex by exposing them to those conditions long enough. The problem with that is Rule #2 of the rules of attraction. You aren't exclusively attracted to one given gender.
There are a few different things that condition you to like a given feature and this is a part that science is particularly concerned with understanding at the moment - so forgive any gaps in the explanation. If you have more information about how conditioning happens here, please feel free to comment. Anyway, onward and upward.
The recent scientific thought is that conditioning actually begins in the womb. The hormones given off by the mother and the environment of the womb begins you conditioning to certain hormones and certain stimuli that give you a positive or negative result and those results cause you to be conditioned for that response. So if you take a given feature you can actually come up with any number of variant ways to condition that feature. This is a lot of the difficulty of science right now and them trying to find out what makes someone straight or gay - forget the fact that nobody is decidedly either for their whole life.
Let's take an example of a "square jaw line" as a feature. I might have had a lot of people who had square jaw lines reach out to me in love as a child and I could have felt those feelings. As a result, when I see the feature, my body is conditioned to produce the same chemical response in a similar way that our body is conditioned to produce dopamine when we see other people smile
(https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDEQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.bufferapp.com%2Fthe-science-of-smiling-a-guide-to-humans-most-powerful-gesture&ei=Q2hAU-H2KsT22AXF1YGwDA&usg=AFQjCNEwFZLsRq3tDDHzaZcHYoyXRdnBpg&sig2=ahg29B-SmmkCNq4pSGhWXA&bvm=bv.64367178,d.b2I).
Most recently there have been advances in the study of conditioning and sexual desires. Here are some recent studies on sexual conditioning:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14739689 (2004)
This study shows from 2004 the effectiveness of conditioning sexual response to a non-sexual object entirely - in this case a gun and it provides quite successful results
This study shows from 2004 the effectiveness of conditioning sexual response to a non-sexual object entirely - in this case a gun and it provides quite successful results
"The results provide evidence for appetitive classical conditioning of sexual response in women, and are the first to show attenuation of sexual response in women by aversive conditioning"
"Genital and subjective sexual responses were successfully modulated by the differential conditioning paradigm. This replication of our previous study confirms the effectiveness of our conditioning procedure and indicates that it may provide a fruitful paradigm for further research on associative sexual reward learning in humans."
It's not really possible to dial all of the interactions that I have with square jaw lines to a definitive action. It's also not definitive that it is only male people who have given these experiences. What is definitive in this example would be that the square jaw line would then make me feel the same feelings of love in a biochemical way and I will be conditioned to seek these features out. Simple enough but then this plays into the next point.
POOLS OF AVAILABILITY
The thing that trips people up is exactly like what I was illustrating in the last point. If I were, for instance, conditioned to be attracted to square jaw lines, there is a finite group of people who possess the feature of having a square jaw line unless we were to surgically alter everyone to have them and then I would have some remote attraction to everyone.
The uniqueness of features serves to divide people into pools for the propagation of a given species. Generally, we like to find people with features similar to ourselves, as a rule of thumb, but not everyone is conditioned that way. In the case of the square jaw line, if that was my attraction for that feature then I might be led to conclude that I am more attracted to men because more men have square jaw lines than women. That's not definitively the truth. Assume that I put that person in a room with 10 square jawed women. If one of them had enough features that I found attractive, I would be attracted to that woman. It's actually really simple how the fundamentals work. It's a balance of attraction vs unattraction. If you have more features that I find attractive than those that I do not I will consequently find you attractive.
For some people, this can become very very difficult. Let's assume that you have a trait that is very rare that is conditioned to you as attractive - say hetrachromia (having two different colored eyes). If that is something that my mother had and I was conditioned to find attractive I have now reduced my options for finding that specific feature to roughly 1% of the nation. That's not too bad because I might have other features that are more common that outweigh that need, but let's say that I am also conditioned for red hair and very pale skin. I have now given myself to roughly a 4% chance if I searched all of the continental US to find someone with all three of those features. If those are weighted the most heavily, I may well assume that I need to "settle" or that I simply won't find someone attractive.
If I were conditioned to find mostly male characteristics then I am limiting myself to a very small portion of females but a very large portion of males. This might lead me to believe that "I am a gay male" but that's not really the truth. The truth is that I am conditioned to be attracted to features that are predominantly found in men. I am not gay or straight. I am conditioned and I select partners based on the pool of availability for a given set of desired features that will outweigh the undesired ones.
HOW CHOICE WORKS
If I were to say to you, "I have blargs and splarks. Which do you prefer?" you are then instantly provided with a choice. That is to say, when you are provided more than one option for any given need/want then you are afforded choice unless you are forced into one option without the ability to go to the other. For instance, there are several options for eye color, but I cannot actually choose mine. I can cover it up with contacts but I cannot actually change my eye color. I can color my hair, but I can never actually change my hair color. Those are forced on my through my DNA and I have absolutely no choice in the matter.
In sexuality, there are decidedly elements of your DNA that make you a sexual being. We have several studies that can actually pinpoint several chromosomes that are decidedly involved with your sexual decision making and the balancing of those desired and undesired features. In the case of the blargs and the splarks, we have no actual criteria as to value one over the other, so you still have a choice, but as of right now it is entirely arbitrary as I have given no values to them. If I say that blargs make you wealthy and splarks will make you poor, you would have a large portion of people who will now prefer blargs because they prefer to be wealthy versus poor, understandably.
The good thing about sexuality is that it's not defined in terms of gender entirely because you are attracted to features. It's not really the choice of "do you prefer men or women" unless you have interacted with both a penis and a vagina and then you could make a choice between the two. That wouldn't mean that just because you prefer penis as a man that you will only like men. It only means that if you found enough favorable traits on a man and he happened to have a penis then you are with a more suitable partner for what you have been conditioned to like. It works the other way around also.
So for the most part the gender of someone is only one element of whether you are attracted to them or not. In reality, you are weighing several features simultaneously. It's not "do you find this man attractive?" because that's too vague. It's more like, "do you like this man's eyes? smile? hair? physique? height? weight? body hair? intelligence? voice? laugh? and so on for an almost infinite set." If you like more than you dislike, you would say that the person is an attractive person. Fine.
The trouble is that there isn't always only two types. Like hair. There is blonde, brunette, red, white, silver, and a few other natural shades of hair. What's happening here is that you are prioritizing the attractiveness of given hair colors. For instance, I personally find red hair to be an attractive trait. Red hair is unique and I recall several of the women who took care of me when I was growing as having red hair. There weren't a lot of adult figures who did this for me, so the ones that did have left an impression - I am attracted to red hair. That said, it doesn't mean that the others are entirely out. That would be silly. What it means is that red is the first on the list, but if that red hair doesn't match their skin then it's decidedly at the bottom of the list. So you can see even with the hair how it's conditional and ranked.
These complications are another area where science is working to improve and it is what they mean by environmental situations that help condition a given response. All of this said to say that maybe the ideal line up of all of my most desirable traits exists out there, but that doesn't guarantee that I will find that combination attractive because part of the reason you find something attractive is that they repeat conditions that you had before, and it may either not be possible to have all conditions at one time that you find attractive or on the other hand having them all at the same time creates a new condition that you may or may not find attractive intrinsically.
GET TO THE POINT ALREADY?!
Okay. My point is that nobody is born gay or straight. Nobody sits down and says, "oh I am going to be gay/straight now." Everyone is conditioned to like certain features. For some people these features appear most often in the same sex. That doesn't make them straight or gay. It means only that the features they like the most appear in their own gender.
All of the political jargon going around and people saying things is actually wildly frustrating to me. People use words like "orientation" to mean something other than what it means. Being oriented means that you are set facing a given direction. It doesn't mean you cannot deviate from that path. It doesn't mean that you won't. It means that when you were born, the conditions in the womb were already beginning to make you attracted to a given set of features that may be verified by any of our five senses.
It is frustrating to no end when I see people on either side of the fence who have a severe lack of understanding with how these things work make sweeping statements that have no basis in either science or psychology. If you are conservative and you believe that making gay decisions is sin, okay. That doesn't mean that the person is a "gay" person. The bible doesn't call anyone "gay" but it does say that laying with a man as a man does a woman is sin. Some of it comes to understanding. They very well may feel like they are not in control. If you are a male who is conditioned to liking facial hair and bulky muscles it is going to be a very narrow pool of women that fit your model and we haven't even started to factor in social cues.
If you are liberal, stop saying that people were "born gay/straight" because that's equally wrong on the same grounds. People are not gay or straight. People are people first. Then they are sexual. Among sexuality there are variant types and you are attracted to features that cross several types. Everyone is. EVERYONE is. You aren't born any one way or another.
In the end, everyone deserves the same rights because in the end we are all the same. We are all sexual people who respond by balancing features that we have been conditioned to find attractive by ranking them. If one of those people has the right to do something, then so do all of them. It makes no difference what their choices are because if you are liberal you should agree that everyone deserves rights and if you are conservative you should believe that everyone was given the same rights by the same loving God.
SIDE NOTES FOR MY CONSERVATIVE FRIENDS
I am a Christian. I do believe that making gay decisions is sin, but we are not called to hold people who are not Christian to the same standards as we are. If they do not know Jesus, how effective is convincing them that those gay choices are sin? What does that serve? Are they now getting to heaven? No. They still don't know Jesus.
What definitively changes people in our belief system is a life-changing encounter with Jesus. Will there be people in heaven who have done gay things? Absolutely there will because the blood of Jesus has more power than anything else. The only way to show people Jesus is to show them love, because God is love.
As Christians, we can be on the "right" side of a given issue but lose the battle and that is what we currently are doing. If people look at us and do not see love, even love for the LGBT community, then why would they be curious as to what we have? Wouldn't they simply wish to get rid of it?
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