Sexual Diversity: A Mere Sampling Of Possibilities
What follows is excerpted and slightly paraphrased from Epistemology of the Closet
by Eve Sedgwick copyright 1990, Univ of Cal Press, Berkeley
- To some, the focus of "the sexual" seems scarcely to extend beyond the boundaries of discrete genital acts; to others, it enfolds them loosely or floats virtually free of them.
- Even identical genital acts mean different things to different people.
- Sexuality makes up a large share of the self-perceived identity of some, a small share of others.
- Some spend a lot of time thinking about sex, others little.
- Some people like to have a lot of sex, others little or none.
- Many people have their richest mental/emotional involvement with sexual acts that they don't do, or even don't want to do.
- For some people, it is important that sex be embedded in contexts resonant with meaning, narrative, and connectedness with other aspects of their life; for other people, it is important that they not be; to others, it doesn't occur that they might be.
- For some people, particular sexual preferences are so fixed in memory and durable that they can only be seen as innate; for others, they appear to arise later or feel discretionary.
- For some people, the possibility of bad sex is aversive enough that their lives are strongly marked by its avoidance; for others, it isn't.
- For some people, their sexuality provides a needed space of heightened discovery and cognitive hyperstimulation. For others, sexuality provides a needed space for routinized habituation and cognitive hiatus.
- Some people like spontaneous sexual scenes, others like highly scripted ones, others like spontaneous-sounding ones that are nonetheless totally predictable.
- Some people's sexuality is intensely marked by autoerotic pleasures and histories. For others, this possibility seems secondary or fragile, if it exists at all.
- Some people, regardless of orientation, experience their sexuality as deeply embedded in a matrix of gender and all that entails. Others do not.
- These differentiations can occur not just between people, but within the same person during different periods.