Abstract
Sexual orientation describes sexual interests, approaches, arousals, and attractions. People experience these interests and attractions in a number of contexts, including in-person sexuality, fantasy, and porn use, among others. The extent to which sexual orientation is divergent (branched) and/or overlapping (coincident) across these, however, is unclear. In the present study, a gender/sex and sexually diverse sample (N = 30; 15 gender/sex/ual minorities and 15 majorities) manipulated digital circles representing porn use, in-person sexuality, and fantasy on a tablet during in-person interviews. Participants used circle overlap to represent the degree of shared sexual interests across contexts and circle size to indicate the strength and/or number of sexual interests within contexts. Across multiple dimensions of sexual orientation (gender/sex, partner number, and action/behavior), we found evidence that sexual interests were both branched and coincident. These findings contribute to new understandings about the multifaceted nature of sexual orientations across contexts and provide a novel way to measure, conceptualize, and understand sexual orientation in context.
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To request data or study materials, contact Sari van Anders at sari.vananders@queensu.ca.
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All code for analyses and data visualizations are contained in our supplemental material. To request the code for the diagrams, contact Sari van Anders at sari.vananders@queensu.ca.
Change history
23 March 2022
The contact name and email address for data, study materials, and the code for the diagrams was missing from this article as originally and has been added.
Notes
Lived experience refers to the ‘insider’ knowledge that group members have and the value of this information for scholars and others; this knowledge is often (but not limited to) stories and accounts of what it means to live as “a specific person within a specific set of social contexts” (van Anders, 2015, p. 1178; Van Manen, 2004).
Using language such as “branched” and “coincident” instead of alternatives (e.g., “discordant” or “concordant”) reflects the reality of sexuality, whereby many people’s orientation, identity, and status branch and does so in neutral ways that do not fall into valenced notions of “alignment normativity,” or assumptions of coincidence (van Anders, 2015).
Pornhub.com, for example, has a distinct website for their “gay” content; “feminist” and “queer” porn (e.g., ErikaLust.com, CrashPadSeries.com) advertise their websites as predominantly featuring queer and feminist content.
Rather than using minorities and majorities to mean statistical frequency, we mean to distinguish between people who experience minoritization (e.g., discrimination, stigma) and those who experience majoritarian privilege and status because of their sexual identity/orientation/status and/or gender/sex. There are, however, many other axes of power (e.g., wealth) through which individuals can experience majority privilege.
Our primary consideration when deciding sample size was that we were conducting in-depth interviews. An N of 30 for in-depth qualitative studies is large (Braun & Clarke, 2013) but limited our ability to detect within and between subjects differences of a smaller magnitude (please see Discussion section for details).
Of the 24 participants that expressed interest but did not receive an invitation to participate in an interview, two were not invited because they indicated they were only sexually active within one of our three target contexts (porn, fantasy, and in-person sexuality) and 22 met our eligibility criteria but were not invited because of our diversity goals. Midway through recruitment, for example, we had more cisgender women that had participated than men and non-binary participants across our gender/sex/ual minority and majority samples, so some cisgender women that completed our background questionnaire after that point were not invited to interviews even if they were interested.
We decided not to conduct one of these interviews when, just after arriving, the participant asked the interviewer whether we would be obligated to report them if they were to hypothetically disclose sexual interest in children. We decided to not move forward with the interview because we were not apprised on the conditions under which we would have a duty to report (for a discussion of and recommendations around some of the issues involved, see, e.g., McPhail et al., 2018), and discussed this with our university’s ethics board.
One participant set their porn circle to 0% for gender/sex orientation as well as partner-number orientation. We coded this participant as missing data for the standardized overlap between porn and fantasy and porn and in-person because it was counterintuitive to compute the overlap between two circles in cases where one of the contexts had been removed by being set to zero.
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Acknowledgements
This research was undertaken thanks to funding from the Canada 150 Research Chairs program to SMvA, an Ontario Trillium Scholarship to AMG, and an Ontario Women’s Health Scholar Award awarded to SEMG. The Ontario Women’s Health Scholars Award is funded by the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. The views expressed in the publication are the views of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. GvA acknowledges the support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).
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This research was undertaken thanks to funding from the Canada 150 Research Chairs program to the last author.
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Gormezano, A.M., Harris, E.A., Gauvin, S.E.M. et al. Sexual Orientation Across Porn Use, Sexual Fantasy, and In-Person Sexuality: Visualizing Branchedness and Coincidence via Sexual Configurations Theory. Arch Sex Behav 51, 1201–1219 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-02202-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-02202-6