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At this risk of making pointlessly technical and obscure what is already elegantly represented by this nice rhetorical question in the post, this was interesting enough that I cannot resist. It is interesting to model sexual “orientation” as not a position along some axis but rather as a vector in a high dimensional space of many axes, none of which are mutually exclusive. This is a much more intuitively fitting model indeed
At the risk of doing this much more so, allow me to disagree in detail.
I think modeling sexuality (or rather attraction) with many dimensions makes it much less understandable for me. Try visualizing a 10-or-so dimensional space.
Of course, every model is wrong. That’s the definition of a model after all, simplifying an infinitely complex reality until it is usable to get information.
The most dimensions I feel like you need for most attraction modeling is two: X-axis: male <—> female, Y-axis: male-presenting <—> female-presenting, plus maybe a third dimension for attraction strength (modelled as color). Also, attraction would be an area instead of a point. Also also, this doesn’t account for those whose sexual and romantic attraction differs; they get two plots.
Counter argument, attraction exists on an infinite dimension hyperspace encompassing all of time and space and all past, current, and future configurations of matter and energy. We try to fit the world to our models but the world doesn’t concern itself with our musings. Attraction is on a case by case basis for all of us anyway.
Agree, no model is accurate. The question is when is a model accurate enough to be usable?
Side note: hyperspace isn’t a real term, there’s nothing that distinguishes it from a “normal” infinitely dimensional space.
Side side note: The space would only need to be finitely dimensional since there are only finite humans and finitely many factors that can affect you (since you can only ever have finite experiences). The finite number for a “perfect” model would have to be incomprehensibly large though.
