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Originally Posted by SATCHMO
It's not that cut and dry of an issue. There is just something very awkward about the situation for me. It feels like having sex with her would just be... 'invasive' of me. No pun intended at all. I'm very attracted to her personality and we have a great rapport, but I don't think there's really a lot of sexual chemistry there (well that may be one-sided. I'm not feelin' the sexual chemistry). Suffice it to say, without divulging any details of her history, that life has given her ample reason to never be with another man.
Which brings up another facet of this whole debate...
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SATCHMO
Does a history of sexual abuse play a part in one's sexual orientation?
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I've done a little reading into this issue, SATCHMO, and my feeling is that no, sexual abuse doesn't cause people to define themselves later as feeling heterosexual or homosexual (or bisexual or pansexual!):
The issue gets a little more complicated than quoted above, because people's sexual behaviors don't always match what they feel their sexual orientation is, for example. Also, people of different sexual orientations may have different likelihoods of remembering or reporting sexual abuse, or even viewing the sexual conduct as sexual abuse.
About the issue of "turning" someone. One of my frustrations with the whole terminology of human sexuality is that it seems to oversimplify people's sexual feelings. For example, if people were to label me "heterosexual," this makes it sound like "I am sexually interested in men," when in reality I'm not interested in 99.9% of men sexually...so it seems strange to label me "heterosexual" because I might find 1/1000 men interesting in a sexual way.
I think the idea of turning someone from homosexual to heterosexual, or vice versa, sounds as implausable as someone trying to get me to feel sexually interested in the 999 out of 1000 men with whom I only feel friendship or only want to feel friendship. It's kind of like you commented: sometimes there may be chemistry, sometimes not. I feel you really can't force yourself to feel what you don't, or to change people, if there isn't much sexual interest there to begin with. Maybe other people have had other experiences, though.
My other comment on this issue of childhood sexuality and adult sexual orientation is that I've read that quite young children (age 5 or so) early on know they are sexually interested more in same-sex people or in opposite-sex people (or neither, or both!). I think sexual leanings occur quite early, based primarily on the person's physiology, long before most children are ever sexually involved with anyone.