The Limoncelli Scale of Sexuality

[yesthattom]

I've reformatted this and re-written parts to read better. The link remains the same: http://whatexit.org/tal/mywritings/scales.html

Feedback is appreciated. (but please remember that it's supposed to be funny.)

Comments

[playboybunny18.livejournal.com]

fuck you asshole

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Wow! That's home schooling really pays off!

• "Fuck" should be capitalized.
  
• Should have a comma after "you".
  
• No period at the end of the sentence.
  
• Not really a full sentence.
  
• Not a well-developed argument. Totally fails the generally accepted debate rules and/or rules of rhetoric.
  
• WHY ARE YOU READING MY LIVEJOURNAL IF YOU ARE A BI-PHOBE? DON'T YOU KNOW WHO I AM?
  

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

Oh, right, you're *that* Tom!

;)

[jss]

No, he obviously meant "fuck your asshole" as an expression of intent: He wants to.

[lovefox1.livejournal.com]

Sorry Tom, that was probably my fault. I have you on my friends list, and a few teenagers list me as their friends...and so on. But you are right. She needs to go away! I like you scale though! Hugs, Gina Marie

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

I like the Blah bits best.

[emmett-the-sane.livejournal.com]

hehe, I like it.

Of course, one could always just down-shift the usual scales so that bisexuals are at 0. :)

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

I found that non-funny (as opposed to "unfunny"), not because of a lack of amusement value, but because my gut reaction to it was to analyze it seriously and react to it with serious commentary instead of just chuckling and saying, "good one."

I got frustrated with the Kinsey scale quite some time ago. I haven't thought linearly about orientation in a decade or two, though I do translate into Kinsey sometimes when speaking to others. Instead, I use a two-dimensional model and label that "way too simplified to be more than a starting place" --

X-axis: attraction to women
Y-axis: attraction to men

This puts asexuals (or extremely paraphilic) people at "zero", and measures everyone else from that. So bisexuals lie in the fuzzy broad area near the line through the origin with slope=1, except for the area "too close to zero to count", and monosexuals lie close to the axes at varying distances from the origin.

What this does:

• Describes bisexuals in a way that's consistent with "both" as well as "in between" ways of thinking/identifying (though it does lean towards thinking "both"),
• Acknowledges the existence of not-highly-sexualized people,
• Completely sidesteps the question, "which is the opposite sex?" for transgendered/intergendered/intersexed individuals,
• Attempts to duck the culturally-loaded terms "het", "bi", and "gay" because the words themselves sometimes affect how honest people are willing to be in their answers.

Where it fails:

• Okay, doesn't duck identification-stigma effects as well as it tries to,
• It doesn't handle attraction to transgendered folks regardless of the gender identity of the respondent,
• It completely ignores attractions based on things other than gender, such as paraphilias,
• It has no way to count phenomena such as, "will perform BDSM activities with either sex but only only interested in fucking one sex",
• It doesn't measure the importance of gender in relation to the importance of other attraction-criteria, and
• (I know at least one person for whom this is true, so the incidence is non-zero) it has no way to report "physically attracted to one sex but romantically attracted to the other".

Every few years I think about the limitations of the two-axis model and try to figure out how it might be improved. I don't usually get very far. Trying to describe the further thinking on this quickly takes me past the length limit on LiveJournal comments.

I figure the point is not to be able to precisely describe each person's orientation with a group of numbers, but rather to identify and show relationships between broadly useful categories of orientation and get some idea how common each is in a population. So the categories have to wind up being things where folks will say, "Yeah, that describes me." When I say the two-axis model is insufficiently complex, it's because I see something missing in how it describes me or someone I know. For example:

On the simple two-axis scale described here, I'm right there on the X axis, with some ambiguity over whether I should report how attracted I am to women or how likely I am to act on it (hey, low-ish sex drive most of the time). Plus there's the "I'm not attracted to men" (based on observed evidence so far) but sometimes fantasize about being anatomically female and submitting to an unspecified man. (So far this doesn't come up in any fantasies where I have a penis, which is kind of interesting.) And there's the fact that although topping a man in the BDSM sense isn't something I fantasize about or hunger for, it is something that I may get inspired to help with "in the moment" if I'm present where others are playing, especially if I'm there for the purpose of providing advice and instruction (wow, it's been a while since that's happened). So the feeling that all of these are "left out" of where I plot myself on the simple two-axis model are why I feel that model is not sufficiently complex to describe the phenomenon (cluster of phenomena?) I see as "orientation".

So where do I fit on your scale?

[rampling.livejournal.com]

Hey, it made me laugh!

[ex-mommabear187.livejournal.com]

gee, wait til I show you my 17 axis scale of personal orientation....

it lists such major things as: sex, gender (yes two different things), sexuality, butch<->femme, top<->bottom, Dominant<->submissive, sadist<->masochist..... and so on....

scary stuff, the point of the whole thing is to say that identity is so much more than a one dimensional scale, and how can "scientists" even conceive things that way. Kinsey's scale is a joke IMO.

[quirkstreet.livejournal.com]

What *I* find funny is, I'm a Kinsey 5 AND a Limoncelli 5, if I'm doing this right. Thank goodness I'm not "blah"! :) "Number 5 is alive!"

[roosterbear.livejournal.com]

Heh, me too, on all counts.

[catya.livejournal.com]

does it make sense to take it up to 6, or just 0-3?

it's cute... :)