Daniel, Author of Relationships and Sex
Sexual Preferences: Finding Your True Tastes
- Explore diverse media: Watch, read, and listen to content that explores various sexual themes and scenarios.
- Reflect on fantasies: Pay attention to recurring themes and characters in your sexual fantasies.
- Experiment with different activities: Engage in new experiences with informed consent and prioritize safety.
- Communicate openly: Talk to partners about desires and boundaries. Active communication is key.
- Avoid labeling: Don’t feel pressured to define your sexual orientation rigidly. It can evolve.
- Seek professional guidance: If unsure or grappling with your sexuality, therapists can provide resources. https://www.apa.org/topics/sexuality
- Embrace curiosity: Be open to learning about yourself and exploring without judgment. https://www.scarleteen.com/
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How to understand your sexual preferences
Mate or partner choices go through brain connections that are sometimes really hard to understand and track. First, sexual preferences go through chemistry, smell, aesthetics, intellectual understanding, and experience. Smell, for example, is received and given, transmitted and received. Apparently, the sexual preferences have a biological component that is reflected both in the production of different body odors and in the perception of and response to the odors of others.
The preference patterns of homosexual subjects are different from those of heterosexual subjects: in general, homosexual males prefer odors from other homosexual males and heterosexual females, while their odors are least liked by heterosexual males and homosexual females. These are simplifications, as each of us has characteristics and tastes different. Suffice it to say that what we eat and how and how much we exercise determines so much the type of odor we give off. Overall, preferences always turn out to be related to the perceived pleasantness or unpleasantness of odors, but not so much to their intensity. This means that some of the chemical attributes that contribute to human body odors are associated with an individual’s sex and sexual orientation.
One big telltale, then: smell. Another big spy: the feeling in your gut. This is something that you can decode by going and honestly investigating how you feel, what moves, what happens to the breath, how much it shortens. A person, regardless of gender, can move things that other people don’t even remotely move you. Other factors for figuring out what you like: discard thoughts, select those that seem imposed on you by the social set-up, try to do everything in a neutral way, and never stop dialoguing with those you like and value.
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Understanding your sexual preferences should be a journey, not a forced end point, not a hard, rigid barrier that materializes into a question that we summarize in the cold, icy, “So what am I?” It takes a lifetime to understand each other and just as long to love each other. Understanding sexual preference also comes through this path global existential.
Attraction, definitions and identity
It must be said that about being gay there are no instruction booklets or rules. For a long time the opposite was thought: that sexual orientation was a less healthy deviation from a physiological process in which heterosexuality coincided with the final culmination, maturity and mental health. Homosexuality is simply a variant of human sexuality. There are so many ways of being gay and lesbian, bisexual, of being attracted/attracted more by the mind, by some aspects that other people don’t consider. And people are often mistaken in believing that the field of understanding is all played out between the sheets. Sex remains one component. The best thing you can do to figure out what you like? Experimenting with respect for those you love and in an authentic way, trying to get in touch with what you feel knowing that there is no right or wrong answer, failure or victory.
You must then also consider. an important factor: An attraction does not necessarily have to define identity. Every person starts from a different point: you can guess what you like right away but not have the courage to admit it, you can get closer to who you are in adulthood. The really important condition? Live peacefully whatever you want to live, don’t throw away fantasies and try to give a damn about other people’s thoughts and pressures.
Fluctuations in sexual orientation
When we feel compelled to give a definitive answer to the choice of our sexual preference, we are in fact forcing ourselves into a decision and definition that responds to a precise social necessity: to frame yourself in a category and allow others to do the same under the illusion of understanding you and making you better understood.
As human beings on a simplistic level we think we need to use grids within which to organize data. The terminology in use by the LGBTQI community is used to date as a collective name denoting a community consisting of: lesbian (L), gay (G), bisexual (B), transgender (T), queer (Q) and intersex (I, formerly hermaphrodite). It must be said that even these categories start from a divergence from a certain heteronormativity that makes all diversity minorities. You may not want to belong to any of these categories or you may want to support them as a convinced heterosexual precisely because of the strength you place in the rights of all
In this regard, let us conclude with a beautiful reasoning by Wark Mc Kenzie, queer theorist and writer says on the subject, “You don’t do someone a favor by giving them a name they don’t want. (…) For this is ultimately the violence of community: it forces reality to conform to representation, excluding themes, bodies and possibilities that do not accord with its image. In every community, each without exception, there is a closet in which are locked those who feel they must hide their imperfect correspondence with the image that defines their belonging (…). I do not belong to belonging, but perhaps I belong to non-belonging.”
Remember that first and foremost you belong to yourself, and your strength lies in always remembering how unique and special you are, regardless of what is deemed normal. Whether in the heterosexual or homosexual or bisexual or other dimension, always try to act according to how you feel and in the confidence of yourself.
