At this risk of making pointlessly technical and obscure what is already elegantly represented by this nice rhetorical question in the post, this was interesting enough that I cannot resist. It is interesting to model sexual "orientation" as not a position along some axis but rather as a vector in a high dimensional space of many axes, none of which are mutually exclusive. This is a much more intuitively fitting model indeed
At the risk of doing this much more so, allow me to disagree in detail.
I think modeling sexuality (or rather attraction) with many dimensions makes it much less understandable for me. Try visualizing a 10-or-so dimensional space.
Of course, every model is wrong. That's the definition of a model after all, simplifying an infinitely complex reality until it is usable to get information.
The most dimensions I feel like you need for most attraction modeling is two: X-axis: male <---> female, Y-axis: male-presenting <---> female-presenting, plus maybe a third dimension for attraction strength (modelled as color). Also, attraction would be an area instead of a point. Also also, this doesn't account for those whose sexual and romantic attraction differs; they get two plots.
Counter argument, attraction exists on an infinite dimension hyperspace encompassing all of time and space and all past, current, and future configurations of matter and energy. We try to fit the world to our models but the world doesn't concern itself with our musings. Attraction is on a case by case basis for all of us anyway.
What if I am attracted to trans girls with huge cocks, or beefcake lumberjack guys who are into chastity?
Gender itself isn't a neat tidy line from Male to Female that people fit on, it's more complicated. And if gender itself is more complicated than a line, how can we use a line to model attraction to it?
At this risk of making pointlessly technical and obscure what is already elegantly represented by this nice rhetorical question in the post, this was interesting enough that I cannot resist. It is interesting to model sexual "orientation" as not a position along some axis but rather as a vector in a high dimensional space of many axes, none of which are mutually exclusive. This is a much more intuitively fitting model indeed
At the risk of doing this much more so, allow me to disagree in detail.
I think modeling sexuality (or rather attraction) with many dimensions makes it much less understandable for me. Try visualizing a 10-or-so dimensional space.
Of course, every model is wrong. That's the definition of a model after all, simplifying an infinitely complex reality until it is usable to get information.
The most dimensions I feel like you need for most attraction modeling is two: X-axis: male <---> female, Y-axis: male-presenting <---> female-presenting, plus maybe a third dimension for attraction strength (modelled as color). Also, attraction would be an area instead of a point. Also also, this doesn't account for those whose sexual and romantic attraction differs; they get two plots.
Counter argument, attraction exists on an infinite dimension hyperspace encompassing all of time and space and all past, current, and future configurations of matter and energy. We try to fit the world to our models but the world doesn't concern itself with our musings. Attraction is on a case by case basis for all of us anyway.
What if I am attracted to trans girls with huge cocks, or beefcake lumberjack guys who are into chastity?
Gender itself isn't a neat tidy line from Male to Female that people fit on, it's more complicated. And if gender itself is more complicated than a line, how can we use a line to model attraction to it?