From: J.W.Harley@newcastle.ac.uk (Jon Harley)
Newsgroups: soc.bi
Subject: Re: First Post! (was FAQ)
Date: 22 Jan 93 18:40:38 GMT
Organization: University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, NE1 7RU

cjmchale@dsg.cs.tcd.ie (Ciaran McHale) writes:

>ebail@ctp.com (Erik Bailey) writes:
>>It's a funny thing -- I very much want to have a sexual experience with
>>another man, to be tender with another man, but I'm not particularly
>>attracted to other men. Does this make me really shallow? I'm not sure. I
>>can certainly appreciate male beauty (and hotness!), but I'm infinitely
>>more attracted (both sensually and sexually) to the female form.
>
>The last sentence also applies to me.
>
>I think a large part of it, at least for me, has to do with the of
>heterocentric imagery which we see day-in, day-out throughout our
>childhood. Through many media---books, films, advertisements, songs
>etc.---we are constantly bombarded with images of how men and women
>should relate to, and feel for, each other. Thus, when I am attracted
>to a woman I have all this accumulated imagery to guide me in how I
>should feel and behave. But when I am attracted to a man... I don't
>know how to react since the media never offered me any guidance in this
>aspect of sexuality;

I find this very strange. Of course, there are lots of images of mixed-
sex couples, but I've never got much of a message from them about how they
are supposed to *feel* - to me they are mostly just flat images. I don't
see how one can understand feelings from an image.

> I know that I like him and would like to do
>_something_ with him, but I don't know what it is. [...]
>I have little experience of
>this myself and no even less acumulated imagery/guidance from different
>media, so it is not surprising that I find myself not knowing how I
>should react

I find it surprising that you have learnt how you should react so wholly
from the media; I can't clearly trace anything about how I react from
anything around me.

Teenagers, being inexperienced, show the same characteristics of being
indecisive and not knowing how to react with MOTAS. I'd have said it was
experience, rather than further exposure to the media, which resolved this.

> and also not automatically feeling the same sexual desire
>for a man I am attracted to as I would for a woman I might be attracted
>to.

We happened to be talking about this at a recent bi group meeting I went
to, and the consensus was that sexual desire was usually innate, not learnt
(the exceptions being, for instance, women who chose lesbianism through
feminist politics/philosophy rather than from innate desire). I'm sure
my attractions are - I had the attraction to both sexes long before I
worked out what they were, let alone the implications. I felt first, thought
afterwards.

>Actually, I now rather relish this feeling of indicision/confusion
>since it gives me an incentive to explore how *I* feel and what *I*
>want to do rather than be influenced, or "guided", too much by the
>heterocentric images which I have absorbed throughout my life.

Interesting perspective... I'm stereotypically indecisive, maybe I should
learn to relish it more. (Or maybe not:-)


/jon

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Newsgroups: soc.bi