The initial thought I had for this article (which will now be a series of posts) was to look at some of the taxonomic (classification) systems I've come across in my studies of love, attachment and eroticism, particularly the proprietary ones, and see how they may line up with one another or be pieced together in some holistic sort of way.
This lead me to start thinking about all the ways in which a person may be categorised in terms of sexuality and identity.
I have discussed these things in previous articles to some degree (The Dynamics of Desire, Part 1, The Dynamics of Desire, Part 2) and this also relates to the "puzzle of type" (The Puzzle of "Type", Part 1). But I wanted to see if the pieces can be assembled, if they fit together at all, and if there's any way to unify them all into a complete picture.
There are two things I want to note before I go further into this, and that is the concepts of spectrums and fluidity which have both entered into sexuality classification models in more recent times.
Spectrums refer to the idea that identity, sexuality and these things are not a binary proposition. They are not simply a "one or the other" type thing, but something that spreads across a range or continuum and includes a multiplicity of types and variations.
Fluidity refers to the idea that one's gender, identity or expression thereof, and sexuality, orientation and such, can change and in some cases does change (or shifts on the spectrum) whether by time or other particular factor, and is not a fixed or a static thing.
The spectrum idea may still be a limiting model, because it puts two things at each end, as opposites, and then includes everything else in between. It is still somewhat binary or linear (one-dimensional) in nature.
A gender model, for example, in binary form is just male or female. As a spectrum, it puts male at one end and female at the other end and includes an intersex type or a "non-binary" type in the middle. In this case, it is merely extended to a three-type model instead of two.
Likewise, sexuality is usually considered in binary form as gay or straight. In a spectrum form it became straight at one end and gay at the other, and bisexuality is included in the middle. Again, this is essentially a three-type model.
The ancient Greeks had this idea as far back as Plato's Symposium, when one of the party attendees, Aristophanes, poses his arguments about love in a comical story of three kinds of "humans" (with four arms, four legs) – male, female and androgynous (ie male-female) – that were divided in two by Zeus to make them less powerful. Thus, explaining same-sex and heterosexual love as one half seeking its other half to form that original whole. The Greeks (well, Plato and his cohorts at least) with their unabashed penchant for homoerotic love, recognised there were more than two types when it came to identity and sexuality. Incidentally, this myth, told with much mirth at a drinking party of mostly aged Greek men, also infers a purely monogamous ideal of love.
Alfred Kinsey, in his research and publications in the 1960s, came out with the Kinsey Scale which represented a sexuality range divided into seven types from exclusively heterosexual at one end, through varying degrees of bisexuality, to exclusively homosexual at the other end (and asexuality as a footnote). This may have been where the idea of a spectrum emerged into our collective thinking on sexuality.
A two-type concept of gender is a fundamental concept found in Taoist teachings in the Yin and Yang principles. These are not said to be opposites, per se, but they are contrasting elements of which one is identified as feminine and the other masculine. Perhaps the idea of male and female as two opposite ends of a spectrum derives from the philosophy of Yin and Yang.
It seems that the Taoist idea was not necessarily binary though, and that Yin and Yang were considered to exist in symbiotic relationship, mixed or alloyed together, as represented in the Yin-yang symbol.
This idea is elaborated by Sheri Winston in her book Women's Anatomy of Arousal, in which she asserts that a person has some amount of endowment of both yin and yang in their make-up.
But the concept of a spectrum, still retains a binary or polar aspect with two types, one at each end. This seems to be assumed and taken for granted in most of the models used to represent types of gender identity and sexuality.
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