When did I realise I was straight? Kink, orientation and gender

In thinking about my BDSM as an orientation that functions alongside of, or instead of, conventional gender-based orientations, I started to think back and wondered, "when did I realise I was straight?"

This is also kind of like my musings on the question of when I realised I was cissexual. Here's what identifying as cissexual feels like for me, taken from a piece I wrote maybe 5 years ago (I forget where or if I published it online):

I was born with a willy and testicles, and on that evidence, the doctors and my parents declared me a boy. Being far too young to question their decision, I guess I've been stuck with it ever since. Not being much of one to raise a fuss, most of the time I've gone along with it as the easiest option.

Being cis male was just a thing of not having any particularly strong pull in any particular direction. Except, of course, that sometimes when it comes to gender I do feel a strong (albeit sporadic) pull in the other direction. It just took me a long time to heed that call.

So, asking "when did I realise I was straight" is slightly the wrong question. As it happens, people will note that these days I identify as heteroflexible or bisexual (my choice of which term to use tends to be political, or even rhetorical). But my predominant preference is for female-identified persons. As far as my actual sex life goes, I am what might be termed "functionally straight" - I've only ever had sex with women, and spend most of my time actively seeking female partners rather than male.

In that, there lies a clue as to what I found out.

As I sent my memory back, seeking for the feelings surrounding sexuality, I realised that I couldn't really think of a time when I started noticing the girls or women around me as sexually attractive "as such". It would have been about age 14 when I started thinking about asking girls out and that sort of thing - "having a girlfriend" and so on. can't unravel in my mind ow much of that was pure peer pressure, how much was "well, this seems to be the thing that boys do", and how much was my actual self-originated desire. In my discussion of my relationship with pornography, I talk about starting with the lingerie pages in mail order catalogues as my introduction to the female form as sexual. It clearly did work, because I got aroused enough to learn to masturbate, so I guess there is something innate going on there. But it definitely feels to me like a lot of what I did back then was "following the path of least resistance".

For example, from my "introduction to dating" post:

Sex was something we were first taught about in science classes when we were 12-13, I think. Dating wasn't covered until a year later. By that stage, I was beginning to get interested but was also painfully shy about the whole thing, convinced I was unattractive and hopelessly naïve. I remember Vanessa asking me to have sex with her when we were 14 and being a) convinced she was just teasing me and b) not actually that interested in having sex.

(Emphasis added to highlight the relevant part).

In that same post, I discuss being interested in a couple of women on television from about 10 or 11, and also more about not being that interested in sex (with girls) until a bit later. Somewhere around age 15 it started to become something I actually wanted, but until then it seems to have been just "going along with it". Elsewhere, I described my reaction to Vanessa as being "I panicked and fled", because mentally that's what it felt like.

It really seems like I learned to be attracted to women, because that was the dominant discourse around me as I grew up and went through puberty. When I started to question the assumption of my heterosexuality, I found that some guys are sexy and I have no difficulty with the idea of having sex with a man: the origins of my hetness seems to be more a question of convenience, and I wonder now whether it might be possible, if I wanted to, for me to reprogram myself to be not interested in women - not that I can think of any reason why I would want to, and frankly, the experiment would be extremely damaging and risky, especially if it turns out that no, I can't. It's just that the idea that my gender preferences seem to be flexible, while my kink really isn't so much, seems to make that question possible.

Perhaps it is more telling that the earliest sorts of images that excited me, that told me what sexuality is for me, were "damsel in distress" type images: the female sidekicks in tv shows needing to be rescued from bondage and peril situations, such as death traps, tied to the railway tracks and so on. It seems to me that that is why I am as straight as I am. I am left wondering what my sexuality would look like if society had been different, if the tropes on those action serials had been differently gendered, and so on.