Sexual fluidity is one or more changes in sexuality or sexual identity (sometimes known as sexual orientation identity). There is significant debate over whether sexuality is stable throughout life or is fluid and malleable. Scientific consensus is that sexual orientation , unlike sexual orientation identity, is not a choice. While scientists generally believe that sexual orientation is usually stable (unlikely to change), sexual identity can change throughout an individual’s life, and may or may not align with biological sex and sexual behavior or actual sexual orientation.There is no consensus on the exact cause of developing a sexual orientation, but genetic, hormonal, social and cultural influences have been examined. (Wikipedia)
Diversity – defines individuality through the unique kind of the individual, the perceptions, the feelings, the decisions on their sexual identity and fluidity
The sexual identity issue has been debated for so many times during the past decades.
The sexual fluidity it is a sum of these factors : physical – genetic, hormonal, aesthetic + emotional and rational : you know your own persona and understand your feelings and decide one way or the other or none, just go with flow of changing attraction-the marks of personality within social and cultural influences.
Sexual fluidity can occur in people who are definitively heterosexual or homosexual, but simply experience a change in their sexual response. For example, you may have a preference for a more feminine type of person, but then discover someone who pushes your buttons in a new and exciting way. You may still prefer partners of the same gender with the same feminine leanings as before, but with more masculine features. Not to be compared with bisexuality.
Bisexuality is defined as the romantic or sexual attraction to other people who identify as either male or female (“bi” meaning two genders). If you ask people who identify as straight, but then have sex with someone else of the same gender, this experience does not necessarily make them “bisexual”, but it does make them sexually fluid.
LGBTQ+ movements and organizations typically define sexual identity as one (but no more than one) of the following: heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual, asexual and pansexual. More niche, often online, communities add other identities: demisexual, sapiosexual, lithosexual, and many others.
What most communities share in common in conceptualizing sexual identity, however, is a belief in its fixed nature. From the “born this way” rhetoric of the mainstream gay rights movement seeking to root gay and lesbian identity as established at birth, or the search for a “gay gene” seeking to legitimate gay and lesbian identity through biology, sexual identity – more colloquially described as ‘sexuality’ – is cast as a characteristic or trait that does not change. Mainstream LGBTQ discourse subscribes to a model of identity formation and development that assumes an early discovery of same-gender attraction, a period of hiding that attraction (being “in the closet”), an explosive coming-out process by which that attraction becomes a publicly held identity, and finally a stabilizing of that identity over the long-term – typically, the remainder of an individual’s lifetime.
Human sexuality, however, is understood currently as more complex than either of these binary depictions typically show it to be. We now often differentiate sexual, romantic and aesthetic attractions and identities from each other, framing each as a constantly-changing characteristic shaped by past and current experiences, other held identities (whether racial, class, gender, ability, religious and/or others) and an individual’s own agentic desire. An individual may, for example, desire to have sexual relationships typically with women, but find themselves romantically attracted to people of all genders and aesthetically attracted to more androgynous forms of gender expression. Many years later, the same individual may find that their sexual, romantic and/or aesthetic attractions and identities have changed –perhaps as a result of living in a different environment and interacting with different communities, personal and/or spiritual exploration, a significant formative sexual or romantic experience, personal choice, some combination of all of these or for a different reason altogether.
Another related concept, erotic plasticity, is defined as change in people’s sexual expression – that is, attitudes, preferences and behavior. In other words, someone’s sexual response can fluctuate depending on their surrounding environment.
Sexual fluidity is just one of the many unique ways in which people experience their sexuality over a lifetime.
In the words of Lisa Diamond, “one can ‘fall in love’ without experiencing sexual desire.” The processes of affectional bonding (or romantic love) are not oriented specifically toward other-gender or same-gender partners. This is one of the big challenges to studying sexual orientation in general—it’s not as simple as saying, “you can love boys or girls or both.” The Slate article makes it seem as if some people happen to be bisexual, which then influences their attraction to both male and female gendered partners, and that psychologists have mislabeled it “fluidity” simply because women are more likely to be bisexual than men. But in fact the truth is that people who identify as straight can wind up experiencing a romantic infatuation (love) for someone of the same gender, and as a result, produce sexual desires that were not present before. This is sexual fluidity.
Both men and women can be sexually fluid, but women are more sexually fluid than men.
If you look at the data, a picture starts to emerge that women as a group tend to be more sexually fluid than men. Here are just a few examples: Lesbian identifying women are significantly more likely to have heterosexual sex (with men) compared to gay men having heterosexual sex (with women). Heterosexual women are significantly more likely to have consensual sex with female partners in prison compared to heterosexual men in prison. Another example is the effect of education, which is linked to increased sexual activity for women more so than for men (highly educated women are more likely to be sexually active than less educated women, but education level does not make much of a difference for men). Religion has similar effects, linked to significantly lower masturbation rates for women (but not men). Basically, men’s sexual response tends to be more constant regardless of their environment or situation.
But certainly these are statistical associations that are entirely relative, and the results say nothing about all women or all men. There are many women who show no signs of sexual fluidity at all; likewise, there are some men who are very sexually fluid!
There are many examples, but three true life stories come on my mind : Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson book and tv series about their controversial real life story
The two chapters written by Vita sometimes seem to be a diary and sometimes a self-confession. They are centered in herself and her violent passion for the wild Violet Trefusis , who loves her, gives her intense pleasure, both physical and intellectual, and drives her to hurt intensely and briefly abandon Harold Nicolson, Vita’s bisexual husband, and her two children, Nigel and Ben.
The three chapters written by Nigel Nicolson are also very strong but in a different sense. Reading about the sexual and emotional life secrets of a mother by the hand of her son is strange, uncomfortable and in certain occasions it even seems cruel: ”I did not know Violet. I met her only twice, and by then she had become a galleon, no longer the pinnace of her youth, and I did not recognize in her sails the high wind which had swept my mother away […]. I did not know that Vita could love like this, had loved like this, because she would not speak of it to her son. Now that I know everything I love her more, as my father did, because she was tempted, because she was weak. She was a rebel, she was Julian [Vita’s alter ego], and though she did not know it, she fought for more than Violet. She fought for the right to love, men and women, rejecting the conventions that marriage demands exclusive love, and that women should love only men, and men only women. For this she was prepared to give up everything. Yes, she may have been mad, as she later said, but it was a magnificent folly. She may have been cruel, but it was a cruelty on a heroic scale. How can I despise the violence of such passion?”
Nevertheless, these are important chapters to understand the big picture. Vita writes mostly about herself and her emotions. Nigel speaks about Harold and the rock solid love between him and Vita, that grew more and more important for them as their life progressed, and was the base to which each of them returned after Vita’s strong passions for other people, including the famous Virginia Woolf and Harold’s adventures with men. Nigel also puts Vita’s writings into context, by stressing the advanced and liberal nature of Vita’s and Harold’s views and actions about marriage and sexuality in the early years of the 20th century, but also by bringing forward Vita’s intense snobbism and coldness about the lower social classes.
Daphne du Maurier’s life long secret:
There was one secret that was only made public in 1994, with the publication of Forster’s biography. It revealed that although du Maurier was married (and never walked out on her husband) she was bisexual, with a strong lesbian side. A famous early photograph shows a girl with bobbed hair and a string of pearls. The expression on her face is aloof, clear, undeceived. An unflappable flapper. She was the granddaughter of novelist George du Maurier and daughter of actor-manager Gerald du Maurier (who wished, in a poem, that Daphne had been born a boy). Her father’s relationship with her was claustrophobically adoring (he once said he wished he could be reborn as her son). But he claimed to be thrilled when she got engaged, in 1932, to Tommy Browning, a Grenadier Guards officer. ‘Pleased?’ said Gerald. ‘My dears, I am delighted – I thought she would have had a baby by a Cornish fisherman by now!’ In the du Maurier household, according to Margaret Forster, ‘everyone acted all the time’. There were jokes galore and a private language. ‘Venetian’ was family slang for lesbian.
Du Maurier’s most profound ‘Venetian’ passion was for Ellen Doubleday, the wife of her American publisher. She once said she wished she could be Ellen’s child – a strange companion piece to her father’s fantasy about wishing he could be her son. The two women became great friends but Ellen, even when holidaying with Daphne in Italy, would not do as the Venetians did. It was with the actress Gertrude Lawrence that Daphne had her most passionate lesbian affair. Gertrude became a substitute for Ellen. She was acting in du Maurier’s play September Tide, playing Stella, a character based on Ellen. It must have been a headily seductive situation.
Ellen was also, according to du Maurier, the inspiration for My Cousin Rachel (1951). This seems, re-reading the novel, the coldest of compliments. Rachel has big eyes, small hands, killing charm. She is as unknowable as Rebecca, a riddle with a countenance that is sometimes ‘small and narrow, a face upon a coin’. (Rachel is also that rare thing: a dangerous gardener.)
The Danish Girl :
A fictitious love story loosely inspired by the lives of Danish artists Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener. Lili and Gerda’s marriage and work evolve as they navigate Lili’s groundbreaking journey as a transgender pioneer.