> Seth,
>
> What is your answer Joseph Noonan's question below ["What *is* sexual orientation?"]? That is what this dictionary definition ["The direction of one's sexual interest toward members of the same, opposite, or both sexes"] was in response to. What *is* sexual orientation ? Is your answer, there is no such thing as sexual orientation ? What is
> the point of the hypothetical example you give below with respect to Joseph Noonan's question, what *is* sexual orientation ?
I don't object to the dictionary definition, but I think "sexual orientation" may not make sense in every cultural context.
Historically, many real cultures, like the hypothetical Freedonians in my last methods, have "berdaches" -- biological males with the social status of women. Some men in these cultures would marry and have sex with berdaches, but it's not known how often, if ever, a man in such a culture had sex with a non-berdache man.
In classical Athens, sex was something that an adult male citizen *did to* someone else (a woman, a slave, or a minor). According to David Halperin ("One Hundred Years of Homosexuality"), one of these Athenian men would not have imagined that he shared a "sexual orientation" with a man that he screwed.
There is (or was) a culture in New Guinea where the expected sexual behavior of men was age-graded: the younger ones only with other males, after marriage with either one's wife or with other males, and exclusively with one's wife after the first child was born.
Did Mojave Indians, classical Athenians, and New Guineans have "sexual orientations", even though their cultures' models of sex didn't classify people in this way? Perhaps -- after all, they had vitamin C in their diets, even if their culture had no concept of vitamins. But until we have more cross-cultural research on lust, it seems premature to treat "sexual orientation" as a universal attribute of human beings. Maybe the contemporary American system of {hetero,homo,bi}sexuality is a borderline, anomalous state.
-- perl -le"for(@w=(q[dm='r 0rJaa,u0cksthe';dc=967150;dz=~s/d/substrdm,\ (di+=dc%2?4:1)%=16,1ordi-2?'no':'Perl h'/e whiledc>>=1;printdz]))\ {s/d/chr(36)/eg;eval;}#In Windows type this all on 1 line w/o '\'s" == seth gordon == sgordon at kenan.com == standard disclaimer == == documentation group, kenan systems corp., cambridge, ma ==