Sexual inclination spectrum
Stub • 245 Words • Sexuality, 2024 • 02/20/2024
⚠️ This post contains a rougher cut of my thoughts on the topic and may be updated in the future. Please forgive any mistakes or lack of polish!
This article is part of the Perspectives on A-Spec Identity Anthology.
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Toward more exhaustive taxonomy for an attitude toward engaging in sexual activity.
There are 252 words in this article, and it will probably take you less than 2 minutes to read it.
This article was published 2024-02-20 00:00:00 -0500, which makes this post and me old when I published it.
Sexual inclination is a sexual attitude about someone’s inclination to participate in sexual activity. Sexual attitudes are people’s attitudes (mixture of beliefs and opinions) towards the idea of engaging in (types of) sexual acts. Everyone has sexual attitudes because even having no opinion is a sort of opinion! People can value (or not value) sexual activity for any number of reasons like pleasure, reproduction, religion, etc. All of these things are wrapped up into someone’s sexual attitudes.
Sexual inclination is not determined by sexuality or sexual orientation. Asexuality is not defined by sexual inclination but by sexual attraction. There are asexuals who like having sex and allosexual people who don’t like to have sex.
In the early days of asexuality discourse you had sex positive and sex repulsed aces. Sex positive is already associated with the Sex Positivity movement, which would make it seem like asexuals don’t like other people having sex.
To visualize this spectrum and to provide slightly more exhaustive taxonomy I have created this diagram:
People fall in between these labels all the time, but these labels are much more precise than what is traditionally used (Sex Positive, Sex Neutral, Sex Repulsed)
As a native English speaker I’m not entirely sure why I started with Sex Seeking on the left side, I think that most LTR language writer would have put Sex Repulsed on the left side. However, the orientation of it doesn’t really matter because the ordering relation is still preserved.