What's your thoughts on the origin of sexual preferences?

Personally, I honestly believe it's simply a developed attraction, and can change over time. Just like taste buds. As a child, I enjoyed the taste of spinach, but now I don't. A person could spend high school being attracted to one sex, only to go on to college contemplating trying out the other sex and they figure out they currently like the other side more. But then as an adult, they may start going back to the sex they desired originally, because their brain simply desires differing people as they get older.

Now, I won't just present my opinion on the side I support, I'll also present my rebuttals against the opposing sides:

Born: From what I know, this is impossible. Babies aren't "born" anything. Your personality is a learned behavior (even though everyone likes to argue otherwise). Your likes and dislikes are learned behavior. Babies are a blank slate. Babies aren't "attracted" to anything. That's why we make up the "cooties" idea until we reach our teens, because kids don't respond to sexual stimuli of any kind until around puberty.

Learned: In my opinion, preferences can't be "learned", they're entirely personal. Someone can tell you for days that pizza is disgusting, but until you try eating it yourself, you won't actually know. And if you eat pizza, and it disgusts you, then that's that. But if you like it, then it doesn't matter how long someone tries to "brainwash" you to think the opposite, you'll always know that you enjoyed eating pizza.

Choice: Personally, if your "preferences" can change on a dime, I don't think you "prefer" them at all. I would feel you treat preferences as if they're simply ideas that you can try when you want to and ignore them when you don't. I can't see how science would back up sexual preference as a choice, but then again I may be missing something.

Also, this is just my opinion. Open to hearing other opinions.

While I get that for some people their sexuality label might change with time, I honestly think that has more to do with learning more about yourself and your preferences than it has to do with your sexuality actually changing, especially with how being gay was really looked down upon until recently. Of course you'd want to explore that part of yourself that you were barred from exploring, and of course there will be confusion about whether you're actually attracted to men/women or if you just managed to trick yourself into thinking that way since that was the only socially acceptable choice. It's just a lot of layers to go through, and it's hard to figure something like that out when there's just so much muddying up the waters.

The one exception that I can see is born from trauma. There are lesbians that are lesbians because they've had so many terrible experiences with men that they just can't be attracted to men anymore. But in my opinion that's still just an extreme exception.

I believe it's something that's ingrained in you when you're born. Yes, babies aren't attracted to anything. That's because they're babies, and sexuality doesn't really manifest until around like, age 5 where crushes happen and sexual feelings don't develop until puberty. That doesn't mean that being gay isn't something your born as, just that it won't manifest at all when you're a baby for hopefully obvious reasons. And you know, there's also several other aspects that you're born with that isn't apparent when you're a baby either.

Homosexual behavior has been observed in like, 200+ species so I highly doubt it's possible to be taught to be gay, and makes it possible that it's inborn.

I don't think there's any like, gay gene that will suddenly turn someone gay, but there's also studies that show that prenatal conditions (the womb, basically) can affect sexuality. There's nothing that's concrete as there's still much to learn about how the brain develops and how much to impacts things, but it's there.

One last thing though, can you explain why two of your counter-arguments to two different views are, well, contradictory?

"Your likes and dislikes are learned behavior."

"In my opinion, preferences can't be "learned", they're entirely personal."

Aren't preferences basically just likes and dislikes? I mean, the definition is literally "a greater liking for one alternative over another or others" so...

It's probably a combination of both, just like all aspects of who you are. Part of what makes you you is genetic, part of it is due to the environment in which you grew up. That being said, I don't think it really matters either way. Regardless of whether you are born with a certain sexual preference or it is developed over time, just mind your own business and let people do what they want.

To the people that think it's a learned or chosen behavior, food for thought.
I get harrassed, teased, told off by many 'well meaning' people about being gay. In some areas, if people find out your gay, they'll beat the hell out of you, or kill you. Now, knowing that, and your families, friends, and everyone elses reaction....(this is all just the tip of the iceberg), WHO would choose to be gay? If I could, I would choose to be straight. Trust me. However. It don't work like that. If it did, a lot less folk would be gay, bi, or trans. We are born as we are. It is what it is.

ZeroTails : Yeah when I typed them I figured it sounded contradictory. I'm basically referring to two different things but using similar wording. "Likes and dislikes" being the actual entities that create dopamine flooding in your brain. And "Preferences" being the general leanings you turn towards as a blanket answer to certain situations. I'll use food to explain this, as I'm currently hungry lol.

I like pizza. A lot. The reason I like pizza has to do with how my brain translated the different stimuli I had received across many years, as is the case with many people's specific likes. As a child in a poor family, Marco's and Little Caesar's were relatively easy to get, it was plentiful enough that it was an entire meal with one purchase, and didn't taste immediately disgusting to my mother and father. So, whenever extra money came around, and they wanted to "treat" their kids, pizza was a popular-enough choice among the other schoolchildren that we interacted with in public school, and it was cheap enough to my parents, that it was presented to me at first in a very favorable light by many different people. My brain learned that pizza = a good thing. My current situation (adult and poor because it's hard to be a good adult) shows me that pizza, as it was during childhood, is relatively easy to acquire when there's a few bucks of extra money, and it creates more than a single meal by itself. And it doesn't taste terrible. So I'll say to this day, my favorite food is pizza.

Preferences are the leanings of curiosity. You can't teach your brain to be curious. Again, as far as the food analogy goes, I was taught about pizza at a young age, but I then realized everyone else was calling it Italian Food. Well, what OTHER Italian food is there, if pizza tastes good? So I searched and discovered. And it turns out, I don't enjoy the taste of that much Italian food. I only really enjoy pizza. But I don't prefer Italian food. I also like tacos, and I've experienced enough Mexican food that also tastes as good as tacos that I can honestly say I prefer most Mexican food over most Italian food.

Put in the context of sex: I get aroused by women because I prefer women that are comfortable enough to be sexual around me. I find it a rare occurrence, most women I talk to are genuinely fun and interesting, and I want to eventually find one that I'm compatible-enough with to make our relationship lifelong. Men being sexual around me isn't comfortable to me because I haven't enjoyed the company of many men in my life to the point that I've ever formed an attraction even remotely sexual to him. So I can honestly say that I sexually prefer women as opposed to men. As for what my experiences have taught me to LIKE, that's the less descriptive "sex with a vagina attached to a woman that expressed interest in sex with the penis attached to me".

Was that an arousing statement? Didn't think so. But that's the difficult-to-explain psychology of it. At least, that's some of it. My mind can only translate "curious about sex" to "sex is enjoyable" after experiencing it. It was learned. There's a difference between dopamine created by the idea of something, and dopamine created through the experience of something.

Kinda like how one of most women's top fantasies is to be ravaged, but rape has a history of being undesired by almost every woman.

Does this explanation make any sense to you? I hope it does.

I've known my fair shair of gay and bi people, and one thing is absolutely certain. They knew they were like that from a very young age. It came about before they could even tell what feelings were. That's not a "choice."

But in the end, whether you believe that you can be born gay or not, probably depends on how strongly you feel about genetics. I feel like a lot of people find genetics as a concept to be scary, because it takes away their feeling of free will.

pennylessz : That's because they were too young yet to have internalized straight bias the family, school, religion, tv shows, whatever had.

To a kid, a friend is a friend. There is no reason they cannot be together if they wish to.

As an adult, they have the possibility of losing a job, being thrown out of their family, even treated as mentally ill.

Genetics affect many aspects of our health, but become irrelevant to whether or not a man wants to be with a man, or a woman wants to be with a woman.
No matter how horny you are, you wouldn't want to be with someone you hated.

On3On : If being gay is a choice, why are there people who earnestly wish to be straight but can't?

Gay conversion therapy is laughable and not a solution. Just as it shouldn't need to be. Someone's sexual orientation is their own business.

pennylessz : Not all relationships are for the sex lol

Don't ask me why, I don't get it either. There's more important things to worry about honestly.

pennylessz : Psychologically, I might have an answer to your question. On average... it's because they themselves don't actually want to be straight.

Hear me out. You brought up Gay Conversion Therapy, which is another version of what I'm talking about. The brain enjoys what it's experienced to enjoy, and it doesn't enjoy what it hasn't enjoyed in the past. So when an outside force is telling you (for example a religious parent) that being gay is wrong, your brain understands the difference between:
- A trusted figure telling you that behavior is negative, and
- Your brain's actual lived experience of enjoying it.
The standard psychological compromise is "I still want to do this, just not in a way in which they'll find out."

Interestingly enough, this might also be how behaviors like kleptomania and rape-interest develop as well. At least, there's an argument for it.

Think about it. If you enjoy playing a certain video game, and your friend says "No that game sucks" then you'll typically just ignore that friend, right? After all, YOU enjoyed it. Who cares if they don't enjoy it? The best you'll do is just not mention it to them and not play it around them. But that doesn't mean you stop playing the game.

Same thing here. Pressure can come from every direction and from every person around you, but if your brain developed to enjoy one type of genitals over the other, then you'll only get aroused by THOSE. No matter what outside factors are telling you that's not ok.

I laugh just imagining a guy having sex with a girl, repeatedly failing to climax while shouting "Why am I not attracted to you?" but, like, he's the one who keeps trying.

IMO: it really doesn't matter, because sexuality is just a "it is what it is" thing. i don't care what you like, as long as you stay off the sidewalk when i'm driving.


in all honesty, I think it's something that's always been there, that you just learn as you go along. When we start out in life, we're guided by our parents/caregivers who try to aid us in "finding ourselves" so that we can develop the skills necessary to maneuver through life. if your parents teach you that it's wrong, it may be more difficult to explore that part of yourself. where as somebody who's in a nurturing environment would have an easier time.

i think sexuality is a lot more fluid than people will want to admit, but that's another story for another time.

Zeldisaster :
"Personally, I honestly believe it's simply a developed attraction"
I think so too.

Going by my opinion, I don't think people are born gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, or heck, even straight, but it also isn't because that person choose to be gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, or straight, it's mostly based on that person's lifestyle over their entire life, especially their kid and teen years.

Ok, taking me for instance, I know when growing up, especially my teen years, I have always been rejected by a lot of females at a point that it leads me go with the male gender (not saying that I'm gay, I'm actually bi, and yes, you heard that right, The IB is a bi-sexual), being 26 years old (as of this post), I got used to being a bi, and trying to change my orientation to either gay or straight can be extremely hard, because the older you get, the harder it becomes to change your orientation

I usually keep extremely quiet regarding me being a bi-sexual (after nearly 7 years on here, this is the first time I mentioned me being bi on here), because it really doesn't matter on the person's orientation, they are the same on the inside, and I know that they can be some homophobic and hetrophobic places out there, and if you're gay/lesbian/bi going to a homophobic place or if you're straight going to a hetrophobic place can be difficult to nearly impossible, but the person can't really help it that they are gay, lesbian, bi, or straight.

pennylessz : I know I'm like 6 months late to the party, but coming from a bi person, it's not really a person's choice, it's mostly because people are forced into this position by other means, either if it's from their parents, constantly getting rejected by the opposite gender (like me), or other things.


So, as for people being born gay/lesbian/bi, that isn't really true, either is those people choosing to be gay/lesbian/bi, it all reflects on what they grew up with and what lifestyle was placed on them.

Even modern science can't seem to be able to determine it (although the existence of a "gay gene" seems unlikely).

I am gay myself, and I was certainly not taught about it. My brother and my sister are both straight (as far as I know; my brother hasn't had a declared relationship in well over 10 years), and we had pretty much the same rearing from our parents. As far as I remember, I always had an attraction to other guys. At age 6, I thought about this guy in my sister's class (he was 2 years older), and how interesting it would be to participate in this French version of Double Dare. That attraction (to other guys) only grew with time.

My personal belief? Yes I think people can be born with their sexual preference. Just like I think people can be born with gender dysphoria. In this day and age I cannot honestly believe people with such old world views can be taken seriously anymore. Eventually those people will die out and we well all live together in acceptance of each others preferred sexuality and gender.

I personally think that it is something that you are born with maybe. I am bisexual and it's more like I am just naturally attracted to both genders rather than just me deciding it.

Born gay/lesbian, etc? No. When you are a kid, you don't really pay attention to that. I mean sure you flirt with whatever gender you are into, but nothing comes to it until you get into the low teens. It's kind of the same way with the whole gender thing. Sadly we live in a world where the parents try to force it on a kid, who has no clue what is going on, and I don't agree with that one bit. I know that could be a controversial opinion, and I get it. I don't know of any person that is gay, that knew when they were 5 or 6 years old. It was around the teenage years. Which if that is their choice, more power to them. I have nothing against that. What is that saying? Live and let live.

I can only truly speak on my own experiences but from what i've seen i believe it's a bit of both.

Some people truly just have a defined gender that they find attractive, it could be from childhood experiences for sure and personally i think a bit of it comes from how humans are quite stubborn to change things they like when they "like" them. By that i mean stuff like childhood traits and the such.

As for me personally i have no idea. I grew up feeling the same way towards everyone, naturally i probably dated more women than men. Nothing really seemed to feel right though. I could and still have great friendships with some of these people. but i never really felt sexual attraction to them which took me a while to figure out.

I've been told i'm asexual but it's a concept i can't get to grasps with honestly. I'm more inclined to say that due to childhood trauma i can't really reciprocate feelings of "love" but that's a different barrel of fish and i'm getting off topic here.

TLR I feel people are attracted to whatever they are, upbringing probably plays a role, but so does generic human stubborness honestly.