Sexual Orientation: Modal or Probabilistic? (900 words)

A Thorn Amidst the Roses, James Sant (1820-1916)

In philosophical logic, modality describes truths about possibility and necessity: things that could, must, or could not possibly be true. It must be true that 4 + 4 = 8; it could have been true that I have four children (although I don’t); and it could not possibly have been true that I have negative four children. I experience my sexual orientation as a modality, meaning that my orientation seems to be determined by facts about which people I can possibly find attractive.¹ Even if I’m not attracted to a man, I experience him as being eligible for attraction—he’s the sort of person I could find attractive, but don’t. On the other hand, even if I think that a woman is beautiful and charming, I experience her as being ineligible-–it seems that she’s the sort of person I could never find attractive. 

(There’s another modality which occurs before the level of conscious thought: If someone is too young or too old, then I don’t experience them as eligible or ineligible; they slip past my radar entirely.) 

Some people experience their orientations probabilistically: Their orientation depends on which people they are likely or unlikely to find attractive. If I experienced my sexual orientation probabilistically, then this statement would feel highly intuitive for me: “I’m extremely likely to be attracted to some men, but extremely unlikely to be attracted to any women.” For other people, this looks like “If I’m attracted to someone, then it’s very likely that person is a woman, but it could be a man, too.” Note that the same orientation can be described in either style, but that people differ in which facts feel significant in determining their sexual identity. 

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The modalizing perspective is not only a way of experiencing sexual identity, but also a way of constructing it. From this perspective, sexual orientation labels can be clearly defined:

 

Lesbian: A woman who can be attracted to women, must be attracted to some women, and cannot be attracted to men. 

Bisexual: A person who can be attracted to both men and women, and who must be attracted to some men and some women.

Asexual: A person who can’t be attracted to anyone of any gender.²

Since this definition of ‘lesbian’ can be easily adapted for straight people and gay men, the modalizing perspective yields a simple taxonomy that makes it easy to label almost anyone. I think that a version of this approach is intuitive for many people, and that it is dominant in at least some social groups. Still, I think we should worry about this approach for a few reasons:

First, it creates some extremely impractical conclusions. If a woman is strongly attracted to women, pursues relationships with women, and has no serious interest in men, then she will probably find it useful to describe herself as a lesbian. Even if she does experience fleeting or very mild attraction to men, it would probably be significantly more misleading than helpful for her to identify as bisexual.

Second, it creates needless anxiety among people who currently identify as gay or straight. I identify as gay because I am extremely attracted to men and because I have no serious interest in women. But am I attracted to women at all? It’s genuinely hard to say. There have been moments where I thought I might be mildly attracted to a woman, but even on reflection, it’s very difficult to distinguish attraction from pseudo-attraction. Am I really attracted to her, or am I attracted to the abstract concept of sexuality (e.g., when watching a movie)? Did some neurons in my brain misfire, or do I just think she’s pretty? From the modalizing perspective, these fleeting experiences are enough to provoke a crisis of identity, even though it’s totally unproblematic, on a practical level, for me to identify as gay.

Third, this approach cheapens bisexuality by treating it as a catch-all for people who are excluded from homosexuality and heterosexuality, rather than as a distinct orientation whose members share important similarities. 

If we construct sexual orientation probabilistically, then we might use this procedure to figure out how to label someone’s orientation: First, I look inside myself and try to identify patterns in my experiences of attraction. Then, I compare my experiences to those of other people in order to make predictions about who I will be attracted to in the future. Finally, I choose a label that reflects my best predictions about my future pattern of attraction. This approach bypasses questions about whether I’m “really” attracted to women and assumes that this question only matters if it has a meaningful impact on my life. I think that this approach is also more useful to people who are unsure about their orientations (they won’t feel constrained by technicalities or edge cases) or whose pattern of attraction places them firmly on the boundary between categories.

I started this post by describing my own experience of a homosexual modality, but I think that the probabilistic framing is actually superior. I will experiment with adopting the probabilistic view of my own orientation, shifting from “I couldn’t possibly be attracted to women!” to “Given my past experience, it seems very unlikely that I would ever want to have a relationship with a woman, but I might be surprised someday.” Experience will tell whether it’s even possible to re-orient (!) my perspective in this way, and whether this strategy has any benefits at the individual level. 

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1 The comparison to modality is entirely figurative. Of course I could, in some logically possible world, have been attracted to different people. ^↩
2 In reality, asexual people acknowledge several levels and varieties of (non-)attraction, but I don’t think it’s possible to represent this modally. In order to keep this post short, I have not unpacked the implications of my view for asexuality, although I think you could easily guess what they are. For the same reason, I've decided not to address nonbinary people in this post. ^↩