Sexual Labels are Fun(ny)

On and off I’ve debated sexual labels with people. I’ve enjoyed writing about them(and Yahoo may still have me listed as an authority on metrosexuality).

• Sapiosexuality: attracted to intelligent people.
• Faumosexual: straight men who act gay to seduce women.
• Metrosexual: straight men who care about personal grooming.
• Retrosexual: essentially just anti-metrosexual.
• Ubersexual: recent nonce word coined by marketers.
• Cybersexual: only want sex on the web, not in “meat life.”
• Pansexual: see my definition.
• Omnisexual: Like pansexual but I don’t fancy the sound.
• Bisexual: obvious? Maybe.
• Not to mention heteroflexible and fag stags.

Genderqueer is sort of a meta-label. And people can be quite fussy about how Transgendered, Transvestite, Transsexual are used.

Alford Korzybski’s famous old saw: the map is not the territory. OK, but often you’d get lost without your map.

Labels are fine if you think of them as a sort of signpost. A label is a starting point.

Rejecting sexual labels is an ambiguous practice at best. Like many words they are needed to communicate. You have to be wary less your personalization of a word degrades it into meaningless.

Engagement with sexual labels is a dialectical process between your personal sense of the word and the generic dictionary usage. Working out the specifics of how it seems to apply to or eludes your nature. Often a label may do both. The word captures something of who you are but not quite.

There aren’t any inherent nuances in erotic labels: once you chose one you have to work out for yourself and any potential partners what that designation means.

Having worked out my own sexual identities I’ve sometimes gotten a kick out of playing them.

Pity though, people don’t seem to be coming up with as many silly sexual nonce terms as they once did. Or I’m just not seeing them.