Scarleteen

So, I'm an 18-year-old cis girl who currently identifies as bisexual. To make it clear, I've never had sex with anyone else, never dated anyone else, no real experience with anyone romantically or sexually. So most of my sexuality has been in my head, which I'm not ashamed of. Had that inevitable phase of "nuuuu there's no way my obsessive gravure watching habit could say anything about me being not-straight" but I am pretty sure I am attracted at least to women, sexually. Romantically is a whole 'nother can of worms that isn't relevant but to be clear all terms of orientation in this article refer to sexual orientation. (Oh and also when I say "man" or "woman", at least in the context of bodies, I'm referring to cisgender people/AMAB-AFAB. Nothing against trans people, but going on about that would make this post longer and probably inadvertently offensive due to the subject matter.)

The problem comes with men. I am also pretty sure I am attracted to men. Had sexual fantasies about them (albeit my definition of "sexual" is very wide—basically anything I think of as a "sex thing" is a sex thing, even if it involves nothing in the ballpark of intimacy at all). However, I absolutely haaaate dick. Cannot stand the sight; even the thought of a man having a penis can occasionally send me into overdrive. The thing with most (not all, I am well aware) men is that they have penises, and most male-centric sexual output focuses on... that! So for men, my sexual interests usually focus on more, for lack of a better word, fetishistic things. And it's hard navigating a world so coo-coo crazy for cock when you just! Can't! Stand it!

It's gotten to the point where I've started relating a lot to the asexual community on certain matters, at least regarding my attraction to dudes. On the other hand, the thought has come across my mind several times: if you're a girl asexual for men but sexual for women... don't that just mean you're homosexual? (To be clear, what I'm saying is not that my attraction when it comes to men is 0—that would make this a lot easier—but that it's, so to say, less conventional...? than my attraction to women? And so it feels 'lesser,' and I'm having a hard time.) So I've been having this very pleasant (sarcasm) identity crisis for the past few years because of my disliking for dick. I feel like part of this issue comes from how I feel I've been repressing my attraction towards women until recently, and how I feel like I need to LIBERATE MYSELF!!! by being attracted to women more often. But there's only so much time in the day and some days, y'know, I don't feel like it.

Hi there makeiitlemonade!

We get a lot of questions from people who are feeling pretty stressed out about labels and the thing it always makes me want to say is "remember, the label is supposed to serve YOU, you are not supposed to serve the label!" In other words, every person is a unique and wonderful constellation of preferences and desires and attractions and interests that no single word could ever describe. But, many people find sexual identity labels useful as a way to talk to other people about what they want, whether that's in order to find partners or find community or just share the intimacy of knowing things about ourselves with other people. But the labels that people choose for those purposes are never going to be a perfect fit, because we are all just too nuanced to be described with single words! And that's completely okay, as long as we're thinking about the label as a form of communication and not a perfect representation of ourselves.

So that means that a person might identify as a lesbian even though they have occasionally had sexual thoughts about men, because they are only interested in actually dating and having sex with women and identifying as a lesbian is a way to communicate that to other people. Or another person might identify as queer to signify "I want you to know that I'm not straight, but the details of my sexual preferences are too complicated to get into." After all, most people have many many more preferences regarding who they are attracted to than could ever be encapsulated by any sexual identity label. Two people could both identify with the same label and have NO overlap in what specific people they're attracted to, right?

So for you, it sounds like you have a lot of knowledge about what you are attracted to and not attracted to. That's great! That knowledge is meaningful in itself, regardless of how it fits into typical definitions of various sexual identities. That knowledge will likely help you make decisions about what kinds of sex you want to have in the future and with whom. For that purpose, the more detailed your knowledge of yourself is, the better! That knowledge is for you, and for you (since my guess is that you enjoy thinking about this and puzzling it out, even if aspects of it are stressing you out right now), I think it could be a great idea to do some journaling or art making or whatever way you like to explore your ideas and feelings where you just explore your attractions and preferences and orientations without judgment or without trying to fit into any particular label. Just see how much of it you can articulate and how much you can learn about yourself!

And then, as a separate project, you could think about what you want to communicate to other people about your orientation. Think about it as a practical problem, as something that's about using this language as a tool to meet the kind of people you want to meet and have the kinds of experiences you want to have (and that can be about finding platonic community with likeminded people, it doesn't have to just be about finding a sexual partner). If bisexual is a label that serves you in that way and feels good to put on, then it is a great label for you. And if it's not, if another label makes more sense for what you're going to use it for, that's totally okay too.

Okay, that was a lot of philosophizing! How do you feel about all that?