Preference vs. Orientation
Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 05:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerI'd always assumed that "sexual preference" and "sexual orientation" meant more-or-less the same thing, with the exceptions that "sexual preference" may be broadened to include things not usually covered by "orientation" (e.g. latex fetishes) and that people who like to think we choose our sexuality prefer "preference" over "orientation" (which, despite the inclusion of bisexuality, for me conjures up an image of a person placed in a spot where they can gaze only upon men or women, unable to turn their head). However, it has occurred to me that there are situations where the two may not only be different but opposite.
Consider that you are playing a role-playing game and create a character of the opposite sex to play. This would mean that for your role-playing character to have the same sexual preferences as your real-life character, they would have to have the opposite sexual orientation. "I'm heterosexual" would mean completely different things according to whether you are in or out of role, while "I fancy women" would mean the same.
This raises the question of how to describe the overall sexuality of someone whose orientation matched but whose preferences therefore didn't. Let's say Fred is a heterosexual man who regularly plays D&D as a female elf called Tinúviel. Tinúviel then cops off with a hunky male ranger. Let's also assume that Fred (and not just Tinúviel) is actually stimulated by this encounter, and is not just doing it to keep the story-line going and thinking "When are we going to get on with it and kill some orcs?" Nevertheless, when out of role, Fred is completely uninterested in man-on-man sex.
The simple explanation is that Fred has just discovered (probably to his surprise) that he is actually bisexual, but that doesn't seem satisfying unless you're an old-school psychologist who could have fun describing how Fred's repressed homosexuality was triggered by Tolkien. Maybe we would need a new term, like "bi-gendered heterosexual". And of course there are other possibilities raised by the fact that people also role-play members of other species, but let's not go there just now.
Consider that you are playing a role-playing game and create a character of the opposite sex to play. This would mean that for your role-playing character to have the same sexual preferences as your real-life character, they would have to have the opposite sexual orientation. "I'm heterosexual" would mean completely different things according to whether you are in or out of role, while "I fancy women" would mean the same.
This raises the question of how to describe the overall sexuality of someone whose orientation matched but whose preferences therefore didn't. Let's say Fred is a heterosexual man who regularly plays D&D as a female elf called Tinúviel. Tinúviel then cops off with a hunky male ranger. Let's also assume that Fred (and not just Tinúviel) is actually stimulated by this encounter, and is not just doing it to keep the story-line going and thinking "When are we going to get on with it and kill some orcs?" Nevertheless, when out of role, Fred is completely uninterested in man-on-man sex.
The simple explanation is that Fred has just discovered (probably to his surprise) that he is actually bisexual, but that doesn't seem satisfying unless you're an old-school psychologist who could have fun describing how Fred's repressed homosexuality was triggered by Tolkien. Maybe we would need a new term, like "bi-gendered heterosexual". And of course there are other possibilities raised by the fact that people also role-play members of other species, but let's not go there just now.
