When I first spoke to medical professionals of “Don’t offend” at Charité Berlin after my coming-in, they would frequently ask me to quantify my own experiences and emotions. Later, in therapy, the Sexualpräferenz-Männchen (German for “sexual preference figurine”) was repeatedly used as a worksheet (see here in Sexuologie 15 (3-4) 2008 on page 102). With this post, I’d like to throw a few questions into the round about the expression, perception and scientific exploration of a person's preference structure. And to suggest a possibly new idea that I have not seen anywhere else yet.
I'm specifically asking for feedback on these thoughts and questions from personal experience as well as self-help and therapeutic contexts. What I find out I'd like to work into a new post later if possible.
Since this first diagnosis with “Don't offend”, I always describe my experience as 70:30: I feel 70% attracted to girls before or around puberty and 30% to adult women. So clearly more to girls, but definitely also to women. But my ex-girlfriend once asked me what this figure meant: that as a woman I couldn't even desire her half as much as a girl? How could she even keep up with any of the girls out there if they were so far ahead of her in terms of attractiveness to me as her partner! I was speechless at first: that was an absolutely logical thought. Yet the moment she uttered it I knew it wasn't right. So I wondered what exactly it was that was split 70:30. Do I find women less attractive compared to girls or only less women at all attractive compared to girls? Or less women as attractive as girls? And since I am also attracted to teenagers (it's complicated), how exactly do they fit into that mess?
In online communities, the AoA is commonly used), which stands for “age of attraction”: the age range of the people you find most attractive. User profiles and signatures show that even in this non-clinical context, you quickly reach the limits of such a highly simplified information: People sometimes get quite creative to express further details like different AoA per gender or that they have more than one major preference group.
Then there are the ambiguities that are built into the question: if we compare adults with children, where do teenagers fit in? Is it about the desire for sex or more about romantic closeness, which can make a big difference for many people? In a clinical or scientific context, these questions can be phrased with any degree of specificity. But for everyday use, such as with loved ones?
Many people don't have a good relationship with numbers and arithmetic. For instance, I've heard several times that even the pain scale that is widely used in medicine (from 0 (pain-free) to 10 (worst pain imaginable)) simply doesn't work for some patients. Regardless of whether this has actually anything to do with math at all: Is it to be expected that everyone will then be fine with giving percentages for feelings? I am quite close to science and math, but if I put myself in the early days of therapy: if I had to divide more than 2 preference groups to 100%, I would have felt that this was unnecessary brain acrobatics that only makes an already emotionally charged question even harder.
And finally, percentages imply a dependence between different preferences. The pie chart that the Sexualpräferenz-Männchen uses is actually very well motivated: the worksheet explicitly asks about percentages of the entirety of one's sexual fantasies as well as different levels of behavior. But here, too, the following can occur in the course of therapy: Let's say at the beginning one person states that they are 50:50 into women and girls and later they find out that they are also a bit into boys, but only half as much as the other two groups. A little calculation leads us to the numbers 40:40:20 for the pie chart. This can create the impression that the “new” preference proportion takes something away from the responsiveness to women and girls, while perhaps nothing has really changed in terms of how they feel about them. According to experience, the strength of different preferences does not depend on each other.
At least one questionnaire that I saw when participating in a study solved this in such a way that on at least 4 pages there was a list of age groups and each page asked about the strength of sexual-erotic or emotional-romantic feelings towards male or female people. Each age group was scored independently from 0-100%. Similar to the 2nd self-test at SuH.
Thus, points that I think are important or could be improved:
To achieve this, I suggest using the image of small groups of people and adapting it to the question at hand (a supporting visualization with pictograms would be conceivable). For example, for a very simple comparison between female primary school children, teenagers and adults:
The answers can also be interpreted as percentages, but per group individually without requiring mental arithmetic or creating the image of a limited total size of the pie. It is possible that test subjects who are only attracted to rather few people would answer very differently than someone who finds many people attractive or often falls in love (even if their percentages are the same).
Many aspects can be customized:
Above all, however, this approach avoids using the usual pigeonholes such as “exclusive”/“non-exclusive” or homo/hetero/bi. Our work is actually based on the realization that in reality there are no discretely defined pigeonholes. Nevertheless, language always creates them and many people also want to be able to categorize and label themselves in some way. A survey like this, I think, only uses simple practical categories but does not create any apparent boundaries that restrict the individual.
Please let me know your experiences with finding and expressing your sexual preference.
What has helped you to understand your own preference structure more clearly? How do you usually express it and how do you feel about that? How have others understood or misunderstood it?
What are your experiences with tests, diagnostic assessment and interviews, for example when taking part in a study?
And for professionals: what are your experiences with various survey instruments in a clinical or scientific context? Are there any reading tips on studies or articles? Any personal observations you may share?
I would love to start a conversation about these questions and ideas.
(Translated using DeepL.com and the practice in English I gathered while on VirPed)