Chapter
5
VARIATIONS
OF SEXUAL ORIENTATION:
HETEROSEXUAL,
HOMOSEXUAL, BISEXUAL
Our sexual orientations derive from our
imprinted sexual fantasies.
At special times during the first two decades of each of our lives,
we have several moments of sudden input into our
‘sex-files’.
This random imprinting creates our sexual responses and
fantasies.
And our brains form these fragmentary images and ideas
into coherent sexual stories or scenarios
that become permanent parts of our personalities.
There are thousands of possible imprinted
sexual fantasies
—given the variations of partners, settings, objects, activities,
etc.—
that go together to make up each sexual fantasy.
And any individual can have many different imprinted sexual
fantasies.
Most of these sex-scripts can be divided into
two major groups:
(1) heterosexual sex-scripts, with partners of the other sex,
&
(2) homosexual sex-scripts, with partners of one’s own
sex.
Sexual orientation is fundamentally
independent
of the five other phenomena described in this book:
(Ch. 1) biological sex, (Ch. 2) male/female self-designation,
(Ch. 3) sex-roles, (Ch. 4) gender-personalities, & (Ch. 6)
cross-dressing.
But sexual orientation and male/female self-designation are both
imprinted.
This means that we had no choice in the matter of either
our male/female self-designation or our sexual orientation.
We just grew up knowing that we were either boys or girls
and either heterosexual or homosexual (or perhaps
bisexual).
Future research into the imprinting of sexual
fantasies
will explain the origins of both heterosexual and homosexual
fantasies.
[If you
believe sexual orientation is genetic, go to Best
Books on
Sexual Orietation.]
Such research will be similar to investigating
handedness.
We notice that all people are either right-handed or left-handed
(with a few exceptional people being ambidextrous
—which comes from the Latin for being right-handed with both hands).
But no one proposes that we try to explain only left-handedness,
because it is ‘natural’ to be right-handed.
Just because most people are right-handed
does not mean that left-handedness is a ‘deviation’.
Likewise, we cannot explain homosexuality as a ‘deviation’.
When we understand the processes that imprint sex-scripts,
we will understand why our fantasies differ so much from one another.
Ch. 5 VARIATIONS OF SEXUAL ORIENTATION: HETEROSEXUAL,
HOMOSEXUAL by James Park 21
CONFUSIONS ABOUT SEXUAL ORIENTATION
1. “SEXUAL ORIENTATION” IS BETTER THAN “SEXUAL PREFERENCE”.
“Sexual preference” suggests that people with
certain sex-scripts
made a choice about their internal sexual responses and
fantasies:
People with heterosexual sex-scripts chose to be aroused by the other
sex.
People with homosexual sex-scripts chose to be aroused by the same
sex.
Whatever orientation we have, we know from inside we did not choose
it.
Rather, our sex-scripts were imprinted during our first 20 years of
life.
And later we choose how to cope with our sexual imprinting.
[Imprinted
Sexual
Fantasies: A New Key for Sexology by James Park.]
This is similar to discovering which hand is
dominant.
We had no choice in becoming either right-handed or left-handed.
We just discovered ourselves to be one or the other;
and we made adjustments as necessary.
Handedness is not a preference we choose but a fact we discover.
2. GENDER-PERSONALITIES DO NOT CREATE SEXUAL
ORIENTATION.
For years, popular thinking has associated
homosexuality
with shifts in gender-personality.
When boys show personality-characteristics such as being
charming, soft-hearted, long-suffering, emotional, &
religious,
some parents worry that their boys will become gay in later
life.
But the enculturation of these personality-characteristics
is completely independent of sexual imprinting.
Parents basically create their children’s first personalities.
But they need not worry that they will turn their boys into
homosexuals
by reinforcing admirable qualities conventionally associated with women
(eg tactful, gracious, considerate, cooperative, adaptable, &
communal).
Nor should they worry that they will make their girls into lesbians
by reinforcing admirable qualities conventionally associated with men
(eg strong, decisive, independent, committed, assertive, &
autonomous).
Our understanding of how sex-scripts get
imprinted is incomplete,
but we know that sex-scripts are not learned by modeling or imitation.
And we know that people with unusual sexual fantasies
often have completely conventional gender-personalities.
On the other hand, we know that people with unusual
gender-patterns
often have heterosexual sex-scripts.
One qualification of this independence
of
gender-personalities and sexual orientation:
Once an individual discovers his or her homosexual sex-scripts,
he or she might join a sub-culture of people with similar sexual
fantasies.
And the resulting interactions might affect one’s
personality.
22 VARIATIONS OF SEX & GENDER: SIX
PHENOMENA FREQUENTLY CONFUSED
by James Park
Lesbian and gay sub-cultures sometimes have
definite traditions
about how people with lesbian and gay sex-scripts ought to
behave.
In some lesbian sub-cultures, women must be either butch or femme.
And among male homosexuals, several personality-types are
recognized.
This enculturation following the discovery of homosexual
sex-scripts
sometimes creates stereotypes of lesbians and gays.
But such personality-characteristics did not come
with the sexual imprinting of the homosexual sex-scripts;
rather the conventional lesbian or gay personalities were added
later
by the socializing influences of a particular homosexual
sub-culture.
And people who find themselves with homosexual
sex-scripts
often do not join a sub-culture of others with similar sexual
responses.
They do not become conventionally gay or lesbian in their behavior.
Their individual personalities develop independent of their sexual
fantasies.
And their gender-patterns remain diverse.
3. MOST HOMOSEXUALS ARE NOT TRANSSEXUALS.
Another common confusion holds
that people with homosexual sex-scripts want to become the other
sex.
This is true only of transsexuals—discussed in Chapter 2.
Imprinted homosexual fantasies clearly depict oneself
as his or her birth-sex and the sex-partners as the same
sex.
Gay men desire to remain men as they have sex with other
men.
And lesbian women desire to remain women having sex with other women.
As far as we can now tell, the process of
imprinting sexual fantasies
is independent of the process of imprinting male/female
self-designation.
In most cases, the imprinting of one’s male/female
self-designation
(“I am a boy.” “I am a girl.”) probably comes first.
At later critical moments, these children (knowing which sex they
are)
are imprinted with sexual fantasies
that portray their sex-partners as either the same sex or the other
sex.
4. TRANSSEXUALS ARE NOT HOMOSEXUALS.
As explained more fully in Chapter 2,
transsexuals believe they are the other sex than their bodies:
Transsexual men believe that they are female inside.
Transsexual women believe that they are male inside.
On top of this imprinting which defines which sex they are,
they receive the imprinting of which sex ‘turns them on’.
So when a male-to-female transsexual gets imprinted with male
partners,
she does not think of this as a homosexual sex-script
but as the most common way for women to relate with
men.
Ch. 5 VARIATIONS OF SEXUAL ORIENTATION: HETEROSEXUAL,
HOMOSEXUAL by James Park 23
Likewise when a female-to-male transsexual
‘turns on’ to women,
he does not think that he has a homosexual sex-script,
but he thinks he is responding to women in an ordinary heterosexual way.
Observers who reject the transsexual’s
male/female self-designation
see these as homosexual patterns of behavior
because in the first case, a man is having sex with another man
and in the second case, a woman is having sex with another
woman.
But as felt from within, these are heterosexual encounters.
A few transsexuals do have homosexual
sex-scripts.
But this is very confusing to the general public:
They see a man (who believes she is a woman) having sex with a
woman.
To the casual observer, this does not seem unusual.
But to the male-to-female transsexual, it is a homosexual
relationship
because she feels like a woman having sex with another
woman.
Likewise for the female-to-male transsexual
with a homosexual sex-script:
The public sees a woman having a sexual relationship with a
man.
But the transsexual believes he is a man having sex with another
man.
And, again as explained in Chapter 2,
transsexuals might or might not
show gender-personalities markedly different from the expected
patterns.
What gender-personalities they develop depends on their
sex-of-rearing
and (later) on which sex they present themselves to be in public.
5. “COMPULSORY HETEROSEXUALITY” IS A CONFUSED
CONCEPT.
When thinkers refer to “compulsory
heterosexuality”,
they are defending the right to be homosexual.
And they are objecting to the pressures they feel to be
heterosexual.
But people do not become hetero- or homosexual by choice or
pressure.
Receiving one’s sex-scripts is not a process of
socialization.
However, people with imprinted homosexual
fantasies
might feel pressure to pretend to be heterosexual.
This pressure usually comes from outside:
The society expects women to have sex with men.
But the pressure might also come from within:
Even tho one has been imprinted with a homosexual sex-script,
one might have been enculturated toward heterosexual
relationships.
Homosexuals by orientation might wish that they were heterosexual.
“Compulsory heterosexuality” is a mistaken
concept
because sex-scripts are imprinted rather than learned.
And when people accept their handedness or their sexual
orientations,
they no longer feel any compulsion to change to the other
pattern.
“Compulsory heterosexuality” would be like “compulsory
right-handedness”.
24 VARIATIONS OF SEX & GENDER: SIX
PHENOMENA FREQUENTLY CONFUSED
by James Park
Created
1-11-2009; Revised 1-4-2012
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