Julia Shaw: evaluation

Transcript context

…Do you like the Kinsey Scale as a very simple reduction, that there’s a spectrum? I also saw the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid that adds a few parameters like who you’re attracted to, how you’re actually behaving, the fantasies you have, social preference, lifestyle preferences, all that kind of stuff. Self-identification, what you actually say publicly. All those different dimensions. Or is the Kinsey Scale a pretty damn good approximation? The Kinsey Scale is a good start, and the Klein Grid, I think, is much more fun in some ways. So the Klein Grid came out of research by Alfred Kinsey and others like Havelock Ellis, but we won’t get into him. Fritz Klein was a male researcher doing research also on sexuality. He was specifically a therapist, and he was looking at people who were struggling with their sexuality. So people would show up in the 70s and 80s in his practice, and they would say, “I’m struggling with my sexuality.” And he would say, “How can I help you?” And they would say things like, “I wish I wasn’t interested in men, and I’m a man.” And he would then work through what that means. Does that mean you don’t want to have these feelings? Does that mean that you don’t want to have these attractions? Does that mean that it’s the implications of how your friends and family will see you that’s the problem? So he created this much more complex scale, which I think is really interesting for everybody to do, no matter what their sexuality is. Because what it is, is it gets you to think about things like, yeah, your sexual identity, easy. Not just that, but in past, present, and ideal. So if you say, “Well, I used to identify as straight. Now I identify as bisexual.” And then I have in my head… This doesn’t mean that other people think this. In my head, I have an ideal, which could be straight, because that’s what maybe society’s told us we should be. But it could also be something else. And so I’ve also had friends who’ve gone, you know, past, present, straight, straight, but ideal bi. So you get into these interesting dynamics where sometimes people just wish they were a different sexuality than they were for other reasons. And then there are other things in the scale that ask about your lifestyle. So, for example, if you are going to queer parties, if you have queer friends, then you might have a homosexual lifestyle, even if you’re straight. But then again, it’s how much lifestyle would you like? And so for me, that was a real moment where I was looking at that going, “Wow, my lifestyle’s really straight.” Um, “And maybe I need to change this.” And so he was using these attractions and fantasies and identities and the past, present, ideal to help people to think through all these complicated feelings we have around our sexuality, and to identify sticking points. Yeah, that’s fascinating. So maybe the presumption there is if everything’s aligned, the fantasies, the ideal partner, all those things, that’s probably the healthiest place to be?…

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