been reading about sexuality and sexual arousal, it's absolutely fascinating stuff, definitely rewiring my brain.
- Saw someone argue that thinking about things in term of heterosexual, homosexual, etc., is reductive, that at best gay and straight are labels we use to categorize ourselves rather than things that actually exist ('we are gay because we experience same-sex attraction', not 'we experience same-sex attraction because we are gay').
- Also said that categorizing ourselves by which sex we are attracted to is reductive because we aren't attracted to that sex, we are always only attracted to some people of that sex, and that factors like age, race, gender identity, gender performance, body-type, and physical features are just as important (nevermind personality, relationship dynamics, clothing, personal habits, personal grooming, occupation, location, power dynamic, cultural and historical backgrounds, etc.,)
- Same book argued that there's no meaningful distinction between fetishes and the 'ordinary' mechanisms by which people experience sexual arousal. That anything that elicits sexual arousal is a fetish and that some are just more accepted than others.
- That procreation is not the purpose (or rather, sole purpose) of sex, and that we should move away from thinking of it as such. The book didn't say what other purposes it may have, but I can only assume social bonding must be up there. Accepting social bonding as just as valid a reason to have sex as procreation would mean we no longer have to view same-sex attraction as deviant, as something that has to be explained.
- Another book argued that by creating the labels of 'homosexual,' we essentially created the gay community, that sexuality is an invention of the 19th c., as is sexuality as an identity (gay sex used to be something you did, now gay is something you are.) At the same time, it's a mistake to think that historically, sexual acts couldn't be seen as being informed by someone's identity or morphology.
- Both books pretty much outright state that sexuality, race, and gender are historically linked, and that you cannot consider one without considering the others. Which is to say, they're all flawed attempts to categorize and explain human differences.
Anyway, you should read them.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt2204r8x
see also: The Invention of Heterosexuality