Chapter
5
VARIATIONS
OF SEXUAL ORIENTATION:
HETEROSEXUAL,
HOMOSEXUAL, BISEXUAL
Our sexual orientations derive from our
imprinted sexual fantasies.
At special times during the first two decades of each of our lives,
we have several moments of sudden input into our
‘sex-files’.
This random imprinting creates our sexual responses and
fantasies.
And our brains form these fragmentary images and ideas
into coherent sexual stories or scenarios
that become permanent parts of our personalities.
There are thousands of possible imprinted
sexual fantasies
—given the variations of partners, settings, objects, activities,
etc.—
that go together to make up each sexual fantasy.
And any individual can have many different imprinted sexual
fantasies.
Most of these sex-scripts can be divided into
two major groups:
(1) heterosexual sex-scripts, with partners of the other sex,
&
(2) homosexual sex-scripts, with partners of one’s own
sex.
Sexual orientation is fundamentally
independent
of the five other phenomena described in this book:
(Ch. 1) biological sex, (Ch. 2) male/female self-designation,
(Ch. 3) sex-roles, (Ch. 4) gender-personalities, & (Ch. 6)
cross-dressing.
But sexual orientation and male/female self-designation are both
imprinted.
This means that we had no choice in the matter of either
our male/female self-designation or our sexual orientation.
We just grew up knowing that we were either boys or girls
and either heterosexual or homosexual (or perhaps
bisexual).
Future research into the imprinting of sexual
fantasies
will explain the origins of both heterosexual and homosexual
fantasies.
Such research will be similar to investigating
handedness.
We notice that all people are either right-handed or left-handed
(with a few exceptional people being ambidextrous
—which comes from the Latin for being right-handed with both hands).
But no one proposes that we try to explain only left-handedness,
because it is ‘natural’ to be right-handed.
Just because most people are right-handed
does not mean that left-handedness is a ‘deviation’.
Likewise, we cannot explain homosexuality as a ‘deviation’.
When we understand the processes that imprint sex-scripts,
we will understand why our fantasies differ so much from one another.
Ch. 5 VARIATIONS OF SEXUAL ORIENTATION: HETEROSEXUAL,
HOMOSEXUAL by James Park 21
Created
1-11-2009; Revised