sexuality is more than gender preferences
there’s been some great research done to investigate whether a person’s brain (and thus their gender) is effected in any significant way by their anatomy or dna. as i discussed in this post here the human brain is a unique mosaic of nonbinary-ness. according to science: gender is unique and cannot be determined by appearance or biology.
people usually refer to their sexual orientation using words that refer to attractions to gender but their real world experience implies they often have primary attractions that have nothing to do with gender. for example, many people find that they are attracted to someone else based on that person’s appearance even before they’ve had a chance to ask the person what their gender is. if you’re one of those people you are not primarily attracted to a person’s gender because it’s impossible to tell a person’s gender on sight.
in fact it is impossible for any external force to detect a person’s gender because gender being unique can only ever be truelly determined by the person who’s brain has developed it. so whatever it is that is being found attractive it is not gender. and the only way being attracted to someone’s appearance could be an attraction to their gender is if a person had a transphobic lie (that gender can be detected externally) built in to their perception of their own sexuality.
Yet most of the words society uses to describe sexuality have implications that are impossible to be true because they rely on information that is hidden from the observer when they feel that attraction. Now if you correlate gender and biology you can claim attraction to a gender but in reality it’s attraction to a body configuration with the gender being irrelevant. Now I’m not saying gender is always irrelevant to sexuality but it is irrelevant to attractions where you don’t know what a person’s gender is (like seeing a stranger in public).
This will be my attempt at making sense of things and trying to find words that work. I’ve got no formal education in any of this and I’m not sourcing anyone’s studies, this is mostly my own pondering and facebook discussions distilled into a prototype model of sexuality that doesn’t associate biology to gender. I might change my mind later or find someone else’s better model but this is still better than anything I’ve come across so I think it’s worth writing down.
Ways of attraction
There are at least three meaningful ways attraction is experienced, there is a magnetic type of “pull” you feel towards someone, there’s arousal which is more like a state of elevated energy, and then there’s desiring to perform related actions for real. Of course it’s possible for a person to experience fluidity on each of those or between them, or feel none of them or something else entirely. But those three seem to be the most common from what I can tell.
Attraction. So if we took an example of say, sexual attraction towards a person, the magnetic / “pull” feeling would be attraction. Being drawn to someone else sexually, like there’s a gravity pulling you towards them. You might describe that person as hot, or sexy, or something else with positive sexual connotations.
Arousal. Again looking at sexual attraction, arousal would be what people sometimes call being “turned on”, but there are varying degrees of arousal so it might be just that electric feeling you get when physically near to someone attractive. Or it might be causing significant physiological changes in your body.
Desire. This is the want or wish for something to happen, for there to be actions of the sexual nature in your future. It can accompany one or the other or both or none of the other feelings of attraction. It is not a state of compulsion or a need but rather a wish or hope.
Some people can’t tell the difference between these and feel them in whatever measure as one single feeling, this is just an attempt to describe things not a determination of what should be.
types of attraction
One of the distinctions that’s often made regarding sexuality is sexual vs romantic, for example asexual and aromantic are often used to describe different ace experiences.
Sexual. Sexual attraction has to do with an experience of a “pull”, arousal and/or desire of a sexual nature.
Sensual. Sensual attraction is physical / emotional intimacy but without sexual activities. There’s no set line between what is or isn’t sexual, no doubt it is something unique between each person.
Affectionate. Affectionate attraction is when you like someone, admire them, or desire to show affection to them. Holding hands, hugging, and non-sensual kissing are examples of actions of affection.
Romantic. Romantic attraction is related to the feelings that range from infatuation, to wanting to date, to wanting to commit to, and even life partnership for some people. Like everything else it’s a range of intensities and combinations. But as a rule of thumb if it involves an emotionally intimate action, feeling overwhelmed / swooning, or wanting to be emotionally intimate with someone it is in the romance department.
Again some people may experience some or all of these as one single feeling, others might feel them all distinctly, others might not feel any of them, and may or may not feel something else entirely. But these are the vectors that made sense to me and seemed to be quite commonly experienced.
targets of attraction
Existing sexuality terminology is predominantly oriented around gender, the confusion produced by associating gender with biology sometimes leads to expanding the definition of gender even further, with one false foundation under it’s belt the cisgender binary model may as well add more and so gender roles / normativity is imposed to assign aesthetics, values, personality types and interaction types to genders.
This is clearly not the case and sexuality is so much more than gender, but there is no reason to rule out attraction to gender, we know that attraction goes beyond gender for many people as they feel attraction towards people they’ve never met and thus learned which gender they identify as, but what people identify as can play a role in attraction. The “affinity” category is where gender fits in, as genders are social constructs based on affinities, but there are other affinities besides gender that may be important to people as well.
So with a person’s gender being only relevant to those who need to get to know more about a person before feeling attraction to them, what are the other things people find attractive in others?
Aesthetics. A person’s aesthetics would include things like physical appearance, body, clothing taste, style, performance and self-expression. Although certain aesthetics can be indicators of other “attraction targets” this is more about their expression than what it implies.
Affinities. Affinities are things like common interests, activities, sub-cultures, fandoms or gender. Whenever the attraction is influenced by the person’s affinity to something instead of something unique to them it could be considered an affinity.
Values. Attraction to a person’s values is to be attracted to the things a person finds most important, their reaction under stress, the principles they follow, their own code, their beliefs, faith, or ideology.
Personality. Attraction to the personality, mind and/or uniqueness of a person. It’s the feeling that someone is special to you.
Interactions. Attraction to interactions is when the way a person interacts with you is attractive, they interact with you in a way you find attractive. This can but doesn’t necessarily have to correlate to how they treat you and how they respond to your treatment of them.
There are of course infinite divisions you could make but there’s a limit to how complex a model a person can parse at once. These categories cover some of the most common but there is effectively no limit to how many you could list.
trying to put names to things
So another reason to try and keep the number of options low is that the amount of information you require a person to learn increases exponentially with any added option.
The chart above doesn’t even include the distinctions between ways of experiencing attraction I mentioned in the beginning (attraction / arousal / desire) and yet is already 20 different categories.
To help reduce the complexity further we can try to establish patterns of words, so if we use the same word to indicate “sexual” attraction across all the attraction targets then you might need 6 pieces of information instead of 10 (two words per combo), but when you do the same with sensual, affection, and romantic the total information reducing the total unique words from 20 to 9. So if the words we use are combinable with each other it is a lot less to remember.
Also worth remembering that the purpose here is just to communicate the model so new and better names could exist or be invented and I’ll update this post with those changes hopefully if i come across them.
The 9 words we need are correlated to the rows and columns in the chart above.
Type’s of attraction first…
sexual. we want to imply sexual attraction without actually saying “sexual attraction” here, simply leaving it as sexual wouldn’t indicate that it was about attraction. there is the word Eros which is the name of the Goddess of sexual attraction in Greek mythology. I wouldn’t really want to name things after Greek mythologyical God’s because it’s awfully eurocentric, but erotic is similar and commonly used so people could pick up the association through that. i’ll split the difference and use ero.
sensual. following on with something short and indicating the beginning of a word that carries the meaning, we could use sen here. there’s not really any other word for sensual i could find.
affection. not really a word i use much but i found the word fond, shortened to fon which does the trick.
romantic. just gonna smash that rom button here.
So that’s ero (sexual), sen (sensual), fon (affection) and rom (romantic). Now to have a look at targets of attraction. And now that we have words for types I can try to make sure the choices fit when combined to the words already chosen.
appearance. i really like the concept of aesthetics in this area, i feel like aesthetic would capture this perfectly, but saying the whole word “aesthetic” is a bit of a chore (i’m super lazy, sorry), so how about just “aesth”, it’s kinda strange i know, but hear me out, aesth is aesthetic, for example when combined it kinda sounds like “ass”, which should probably have disqualified it but tbh that’s what qualified it for me, lol. ero-aesth, sen-aesth, fon-aesth and rom-aesth.
affinity. ok, i’ve already made the disclaimer that these aren’t intended to be the final words used so i’m just gonna go ahead and shamelessly self-plug here and make this genre (because genre-gender). ero-genre, sen-genre, fon-genre and rom-genre.
values. don’t want to use the word values, don’t wanna shorten it to val because i know people who have that name, so i’m thinking code, because values are kinda like your own personal code, for example think of the jedi code. so that would give us ero-code, sen-code, fon-code and rom-code.
personality. i think it’s fair to say that a person’s personality is mental, it involves the mind, there is already a term for attraction to the mind (noetisexual) so i think using that same word makes sense here, specifically noetic. that would give us ero-noetic, sen-noetic, fon-noetic and rom-noetic.
interaction. the word that comes to mind here is chemistry, not because it’s a cliche but because chemistry is actually a good description of interaction, it’s not descriptive on what the nature of those interactions need to be, and shortening interaction to inter or action gives it a different meaning. shortening chemistry to chem keeps the meaning. so ero-chem, sen-chem, fon-chem and rom-chem.
So the point of creating this words is so that there is a linguistic entity that you can learn which is relatively unique to the thing it is describing instead of calling it by the row / column name which doesn’t really work that well as for it to really make sense it would need to include the word attraction somewhere and it gets messy. Here they have names and can be discussed as their own construct.
And let’s not forget each of these can be experienced as any combination of attraction (pull), arousal or desire.
There’s a lot of these (20) so if you’re not really interested so far you can pretty much bail now lol.
1. Ero-Aesth / Aesth-Ero
Sexual attraction to a person’s aesthetics, this is fairly common in my opinion as it has widespread representation in popular culture. Aesthetics is where a person’s body would fit into this model, so finding one person’s body more attractive than another would be an ero-aesth attraction.
2. Sen-Aesth / Aesth-Sen
Sensual attraction to a person’s aesthetics would be a deep enjoyment of the sensory experience that witnessing that person gives you. I would suggest something similar to seeing an amazing sunset.
3. Fon-Aesth / Aesth-Fon
Affectionate attraction to a person’s aesthetics would be a respect, admiration or strong liking of said aesthetics. Finding a person attractive because of how “cool” they are would be one example of fon-aesth.
4. Rom-Aesth / Aesth-Rom
Romantic attraction to a person’s aesthetics would be to love something about them, to feel especially fond of something aesthetic, if a person’s voice has ever made you want to date them that would be an example of rom-aesth attraction.
5. Ero-Genre / Genre-Ero
Sexual attraction to a person’s affinities would be a sexual desire that you feel towards people of a specific “type”. This could be something like being attracted to gamers, or punks, or people of a specific gender. Sexual attraction to gender is actually the predominant language used today with regards to attraction, so this includes things like heterosexuality and homosexuality (although these words are commonly misused by those who still think gender and biology are somehow correlated, using them to describe attraction to aesthetics despite gender being a non-aesthetic property [gender can have its own aesthetic associations but it isn’t itself an aesthetic as it is merely an affinity, shared affinities to aesthetic things has further added to the confusion]).
6. Sen-Genre / Genre-Sen
Sensual attraction to a person’s affinities would be the sensory pleasure in their specific expression of those affinities. This would be for example finding someone attractive because of the accuracy in their cosplay, or being attracted the reflection of the things you like about that affinity in that person. Or even attraction to a person’s roleplaying of a particular affinity or their take on that affinity (eg. “your nyan-cat impersonation gives me sensory pleasure” — don’t judge me).
7. Fon-Genre / Genre-Fon
Affectionate attraction to a person’s affinities would be liking or feeling affection towards a person because of their affinities, or towards their affinity to something like a gender. When someone says they like women more than men they’re expressing fon-genre attraction and it gives me a sen-genre arousal (using a word for the first time is really awkward wtf).
8. Rom-Genre / Genre-Rom
Romantic attraction to a person’s affinities would be having romantic attraction(pull), arousal or desire for someone because of their affinities or affinity to something. Only being romantically attracted to a specific gender or type of person would be rom-genre. The phrase “i only date women” would relate to rom-genre.
9. Ero-Code / Code-Ero
Having a thing for jedi? Sure. But also sexual attraction to a person’s values would be finding the things that them sexually attractive because of what the think is important, what they value most. A person’s beliefs, faith, or ideology making them more sexually attractive to you would be ero-code. So quite literally being sexually attracted to someone because they’re a communist would be ero-code.
10. Sen-Code / Code-Sen
Sensual attraction to a person’s values would be something like basking in their virtue or being mindblown by their personal ideology.
11. Fon-Code / Code-Fon
Affectionate attraction to a person’s values would be something like admiring their willpower or caring for someone because of a certain ideology they have (or their own personal ideology).
12. Rom-Code / Rom-Code
Romantic attraction to a person’s values would be wanting to have emotional intimacy with someone because of their values, beliefs or ideologies. This includes crushing on someone more because their an anarchist.
13. Ero-Noetic / Noetic-Ero / Noetisexual
Sexual attraction to someone because of their mind, personality or uniqueness. This is a mental attraction but it is not attraction to any specific mental ability, rather attraction to an individual person’s mental mosaic. The Ero-Noetic and Noetic-Ero names are the result of the word combinations but Noetisexual was defined previously here and as it’s not uncommon for people to mistakenly confuse feelings of noetisexuality for “sapio”sexuality because the understanding that the concept of intelligence itself is ableist hasn’t been widely discussed, so if you have thought of yourself as sapiosexual but haven’t yet heard of noetisexual then please consider using this as sapiosexuality is problematic (AF).
14. Sen-Noetic / Noetic-Sen
Sensual attraction to a person’s personality, mind or uniqueness would be the enjoyment of their mental makeup, or finding the workings of their mind pleasurable to explore.
15. Fon-Noetic / Noetic-Fon
Affectionate attraction to a person’s personality, mind or uniqueness would be admiring their personality, finding them particularly interesting, or being impressed by their perspective.
16. Rom-Noetic / Noetic-Rom / Noetiromantic
Romantic attraction to a person’s personality, mind or uniqueness would be wanting more emotional intimacy, or wanting a relationship with someone because of their mind, personality or uniqueness. For example only wanting to date people who’s personality you find attractive would be noetiromantic.
17. Ero-Chem / Chem-Ero
Sexual attraction to the way a person interacts with you is kinda self-explanatory, part of the reason I chose to use the cliched term chemistry is because it kinda makes sense and I don’t want to be descriptive on what this could be. Being turned on by how a person flirt’s with you would count as one example.
18. Sen-Chem / Chem-Sen
Sensual attraction to the way a person interacts with you would be like really finding someone’s company enjoyable, or wanting to interact with someone because you find it pleasing to do so.
19. Fon-Chem / Chem-Fon
Affectionate attraction to the way a person interacts with you would pretty much be equivalent to liking a person’s company. But it could also be admiring or being impressed by their interactions, perhaps this would include liking a person’s sense of humor too.
20. Rom-Chem / Chem-Rom
Romantic attraction to the way a person interacts with you would be something pretty common, there’s a well known trope of the first date being to find out if you have “chemistry” but it’s usually portrayed in a simplistic way. I think it’s possible to have a completely awkward, “disastrous” and “boring” date but still have felt chemistry, maybe ya’ll just both introverts, it’s cool. And a person only wanting to date people who’s interactions they find attractive is still a valid and common form of attraction in my opinion.
That was the briefest of descriptions but this stuff takes a long time to write lol and I think simplicity can be more accessible than verbosity which is important when you’re discussing social issues / topics. So where do we go from here? Well I’m going to figure out which of these I personally experience. And if this continues to be a solo project I will be using these terms in the games and books I make so it’s worth to me doing this for myself. As I think about and use these weird ass words some more I’ll see if any better names pop into my head and give them some character.
The idea is for better words to be found and for this just to act as a framework with which to describe sexuality ideas. If other people want to help with better names or even want to use this model themselves then I’ll be interested in learning from them and improving my own conception of sexuality so that the pesky confusion can be mostly dismissed :3
Thanks for reading, it’s really an honor, if you’d like to read something similar there this post I wrote the other day about gender. And I have a facebook group for anyone who identifies as having a unique gender (the group’s membership is influenced by neuroscience and max stirner). You can ignore those links if you want but I wouldn’t write shit if I didn’t think it was worth reading ;)
