Straight/LGBT: how do you pick your label?
87 % of students identified as heterosexual. 3.5 % identified as homosexual; 6 % identified as bisexual; and 2.2 percent were undecided.
13 percent of campus (10 percent of men and 16 percent of women) say they have had a homosexual encounter. Looking for the gayest/most questioning major? CMS wins: 42 percent of students who listed CMS as their primary major said they had a homosexual encounter. The second gayest major is Course 11 at 35 percent and Course 9 at 20 percent. The least gayest major? Course 3, where only 9 percent of students say they have had a sexual encounter with someone of the same gender.
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I’m intrigued by the difference between the proportions of people identifying as straight/homosexual/bisexual, versus the proportions of people with same gender encounters.
Again, I’ll like to seek your, the readers’, opinions on this.
What i’m specifically curious & hoping you’ll share with us all (anonymously) is this:
How did YOU decide which sexual orientation to identify/label yourself with? Am really curious to hear personal experiences & personal decision-making thought processes, rather than theories……..
Straight & LGBT etc all invited & most welcomed to share!
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Edited 10 min after original posting:
OK just realise that my maths FAIL. The overall numbers do square up, but the intriguing question still remains.
Perhaps I’m thinking of personal stories I’ve heard from people who have had same gender encounters, but vehemently identify as straight… They claim its not because of social prejudice or religious leanings, but something they’ve experimented with and decided they weren’t really that way. I’ve also heard stories of the opposite way around : where people identify as homosexual, even tho (or because of?!) they’ve had opposite gender encounters…..
Is there validity in this whole “experimentation” accusation after all?
Tell me what you think?
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Source:
http://tech.mit.edu/V129/N49/survey.html
Sex@MIT: The SurveyBy Jeff GuoNEWS EDITOROctober 30, 2009Earlier this month, we [The Tech, MIT's newspaper] asked all [MIT] undergraduates via e-mail to take a sex survey. We asked you if you were having sex, when you were having sex, what kind of sex, and how good it was. About forty percent, or 1729 people, responded. We present the results here. Some of the statistics will not surprise anybody. Some surprised us all.
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OK just realise that my maths FAIL. The overall numbers do square up, but the intriguing question still remains.
Perhaps I’m thinking of personal stories I’ve heard from people who have had same gender encounters, but vehemently identify as straight… They claim its not because of social prejudice or religious leanings, but something they’ve experimented with and decided they weren’t really that way. I’ve also heard stories of the opposite way around : where people identify as homosexual, even tho (or because of?!) they’ve had opposite gender encounters…..
Is there validity in this whole “experimentation” accusation after all?
Tell me what you think?
[...] Pink Issues – Mathia Lee: Straight/LGBT: how do you pick your label? [...]
Mathia
Why are you surprised, logically speaking, if people can identify themselves from conservative to liberal spectrum who may have previously identified themselves otherwise. would not be the same for sexuality except for those few which the nature hardwire overrides the nurture.
Regards
I realised, a couple of years ago, that it I couldn’t classify myself under any of the aforementioned categories as that would reduce me to little more than one having a preference for particular genitalia, whilst diminishing the potential of wo/man to be defined by more than their nether regions. I recognised that as ‘racism’ in the sexual sense. ‘Woman’, ‘Man’…means more than the possession of a clitoris or an elongated version of it.
For instance, if i was to be attracted to a woman, but she scores high on masculine traits as opposed to feminine ones, wouldn’t it make me a homosexual in persona? And as for myself, having scored a 107 in feminine traits and 105 on masculine ones in a test I took in England a decade ago, wouldn’t that make me ‘transgender’? Also, looking at present-day Confucianised singapore, where men seem more like women and women more like men, wouldn’t that render many men heterosexual by virtue of their playing the role of the ‘weaker’ sex in the face of a belligerent woman?
It is factors such as these that render such classifications quite meaningless, unless one is taking on board the mere fact that it requires a female and male of the species to reproduce their mistakes into the next generation. But then again, such classifications can be meaningful only if we are reduced by the perspectives imposed by such classifications to be less than we could actually be.
If I was to classify myself under any category, i would classify myself a ‘Lesbian’, in that, despite my being a male by my possession of an elongated clitoris, I am attracted to those whom are high in empathy and relationship, as opposed to ‘activity’, focused. And given that I too embody such tendencies, which have been traditionally classified as ‘feminine’, I would say that my pairing with such a wo/man, if i ever come across one, would make us Lesbians in persona, if not in genitalia.
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