Bisexuality

 January 1st, 2013
gender
We treat sexual orientation as categorical in a way that we don't treat other mate preferences. If Pat is most strongly attracted to mid-30s atheist Greek-American men who are witty and good swing dancers, one of these is a sexual orientation while the others are just "turn ons" or "having a type". Our expectation is that if Pat met someone who was perfect in all other ways except that they were female that would be a absolute deal breaker in a way that being the wrong age would not be. Being the wrong race or ethnic group might be -10 points but being the wrong gender is something like -10,000. Why is gender preference special? Is this just cultural? Should we stop? In the ideal future is everyone bisexual?

(I can imagine a society where the idea of being attracted to people of a different race/caste is like being gay in our society. Do any like that actually exist?)

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

LLMs roleplay characters

I. I’m going to talk about the persona selection model, which in my opinion is one of the most important concepts to understand if you want to understand large language models’ psychology.

via Thing of Things May 1, 2026

You should try contra dancing

a story of middle school Ben • a not-very-illuminating description of the mechanics • flow, joy, and community • the antidote to the rest of life • how to try contra

via benkuhn.net April 24, 2026

On AI writing in 2026

I use AI to write a little bit: I ask it for high level feedback on blog post drafts, make mechanical edits, and sometimes use it to brainstorm options for wording at a paragraph level. It’s unusual that I accept its wording or changes without modificatio…

via Home April 16, 2026

more     (via openring)