Tag Archives: sexual informatics

Because sex is a lot like astrophysics…

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In the study of stellar evolution, there is this concept called the main sequence, a well-defined band that you see whenever you survey all the stars in the sky and plot their color on one axis and their brightness on the other. Not all stars fall into the main sequence, but the vast majority do; there’s even a lovely image of the graph here.

It seems the same is true of relationships. Stellar evolution and stellar nucleosynthesis map with remarkable fidelity onto relationships, I’ve observed, with a plot of “intensity of relationship” (as a function of emotional investment and expectation of continuity) vs. “sexual boundaries” showing patterns startlingly similar to the main sequence. At least to me.

So for example if you plot sexual boundaries horizontally and relationship intensity vertically, you might see something like this:

The sexual boundaries increase from left to right, with the classifications as:

A: Anything goes. Unbarriered, unprotected, full-on squishy fluid-bonded sex.
B: Barriers for anal and PIV sex
O: Unbarriered oral; no penetrative sex.
F: Fisting and/or fingering without barriers; barriers for anything else.
G: Gloves for fingering; no wet and squishy contact, even manual, without them.
P: Pants stay on; above-the-pants contact allows.
M: Makeout partners–no removing of clothing.

Now, not all the partners one can have fall in the main sequence. Along the top of the graph, we see partners distributed in Type Ia and Type Ib classifications: these are people you will schedule regular orgies with or a regular BDSM play relationship with, which may or may not involve sex (directly) but do involve a high level of emotional investment and commitment. Some of these folks might even be considered “family.”

If you’re part of the sex-positive community, you might go to orgies or play parties on a regular basis, and see the same folks over and over. These are folks you don’t necessarily have squishy sex with, but you might have some sort of irregular or semi-regular play/makeout relationship with. There’s not necessarily a high level of emotional investment, but you notice when you show up to a party and they aren’t there.

Type IV partners are most commonly found in poly relationships. These are the “Too Complicated To Explain” partners–they’re not necessarily partner partners, and they’re not necessarily part of the family, but they’re not not partners either…

A branch from the main sequence sometimes occurs for metamours, who a person might have some sort of sexual relationship with, but might not continue if that person’s partner breaks up with that person, but then again, sometimes these relationships do continue on their own, and…yeah, it’s complicated. Past a certain point, it’s not always clear from a single partner whether that person is main sequence or metamour.

A scattering of partners exist with a high level of sexual contact but a low level of relationship investment. These partners tend to scatter along the Friends with Benefits and One-Night Stand axes.

Group Sex Meets Information Theory

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A while ago, I got to wondering, as I sometimes do, exactly what makes an orgy. For example, if fifteen people are all in a room having sex, but only within existing partnerships, and there’s no “extra-partner” sex happening, is it an orgy? If four people are all fucking each other, is that an orgy, or is it just a foursome?

As it turns out, the dictionary is of precious little assistance with answering questions like this. I consulted a number of different dictionaries, and got a number of different answers–one said an orgy is five or more people having sex, one said more than two, one said an event dominated by “excessive” sexual activity (whatever the hell that means), and so on.

Now, to me, three people having sex is a threesome; four people having sex is a foursome; it doesn’t get to be an orgy until you’ve got five or more people.

But is a play party an orgy? Clearly not all orgies are play parties, but is a play party an orgy? What about a play party where people aren’t having penetrative sex? How about a mutual masturbation event…is that an orgy? My impulse is to say “no;” it isn’t an orgy unless there are five or more people and there’s fucking going on, so mutual masturbation doesn’t count. (Edit: There are many kinds of sexual activities that aren’t penetrative sex that I would consider to be an orgy, so I’m still not quite sure exactly where the borderline for the definition of “orgy” is.)

From there it was a short intellectual hop to wondering how many different kinds of group sex there are1, and what the relationship between them is.

So I started working on a Venn diagram of group sex. Then I started enlisting the help of all the people around me.

Then I started realizing that some of the potential overlaps are complicated beyond what you might at first think. For example, not all swing parties include group sex, yet most folks would probably think of a swing party as a group sex event.

And it soon became clear that certain rules of geometry2 precluded doing this as a traditional Venn diagram, because it’s not possible to show all the overlaps and exclusions with circles.

So the project got a little more complex.

Anyway, here’s what I came up with: Where group sex intersects with information theory!

Some assumptions I’ve made for this chart:

1. An orgy must involve penetrative sex of some kind (including manual sex) but can not involve all the participants being sexual with one and only one person; a gang bang and an orgy are exclusive, non-overlapping sex.

2. An orgy can never bee a threesome or a foursome.

3. If penetrative sex happens, it is no longer a puppy pile; ergo, orgies and gang bangs exclude puppy piles.

I have the feeling I missed some categories of group sex, though, and I don’t know how universal these assumptions are.

1 As opposed to how many different kinds of sexual activity you can have in a group sex situation, which is a completely different question altogether.

2 Specifically, group theory, about which I know less than what would fit in the white space of a postage stamp.

Tracking the Unicorn

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Anyone who’s been around in the poly community has met, on at least 724 occasions, a married couple looking for a hot bisexual woman to come be their “third.”

In the interests of presenting a public service, I’ve prepared this handy guide to unicorn hunting–a flowchart for people looking for that hot bi babe. You can all thank me later.

This actually popped into my head while I was in the shower this morning, and refused to quit bugging me ’til I did something about it. Clicky on the picture to embiggen.

More sexuality…it never ends!

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It seems that no matter how thorough one tries to be, the total range of human sexual expression is always bigger than one thinks it is. Even if you, y’know, keep in mind that no matter how big you think it is, it’s bigger than that.

So here’s the latest update on the Map of Human Sexuality. As before, clicking on the small version will lead to a bigger version. A much, much, much, MUCH bigger version.

I haven’t had time to put the updated map into the interactive version yet; eventually I’ll do that, and fix some problems with the interactive version,a nd probably add a new “fantasized about it but not interested in experimenting with it for real” pin.

I still want to make posters of it, though the fact that the company I work with is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy is creating a problem as far as that goes.

Still haven’t heard back from Penthouse magazine. They are talking about running an article about the map in the March edition. Guess we’ll see.

ZOMG! ZOMG! I’ve created a meme!

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And it’s taken me all day, too.

At the beginning of this day, when I woke up, everything I knew about PHP programming with MySQL would fit in the white space of a postage stamp. (Okay, so that’s not entirely true, but I’d never written database code from scratch before. Everything I’ve ever done up ’til now is modifying someone else’s code, which is a whole ‘nother ballgame.)

So twelve hours, a thousand Google searches, and a lot of head-scratching later, I’ve actually taken the map of human sexuality I created, and made it interactive! You can click on the map in a Web browser to place pins showing where you’ve been and where you want to go, and then save your map to a database so you can show other people!

Okay, so it’s still really, really crude. Scrolling around is a pain, there’s no way to remove a pin once you place it (you gotta erase the whole map and start again), and there’s no way to go back to a map and continue to edit it once it’s saved.

But still…it works! Words can not express how pleased with myself I am right now. It’s been tested in Explorer 7 and Firefox for Windows, and in Safari and Firefox on Mac. Should work in other browsers too, I reckon. And it even generates code to put into your blog automatically.

Give it a try!


Find out where I’ve journeyed
on the Map of Human Sexuality!
Or get your own here!

And now, I am going to bed. My brain is tired.

Some thoughts on human sexuality

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[Edit] The map has been updated since this post was made! The new, improved version is here.

Some time ago, a person named Katharine Gates designed a map of human sexuality. Her Web site appears to be defunct now, but the map has recently gained exposure in other places.

My first impression upon seeing this fetish map was that it was woefully incomplete. About the same time as I became aware of this attempt to map the range of human fetishes and sexual activity, I also saw a conversation on another forum in which a woman was complaining that she wanted to spice up her sex life, but she didn’t want to do too much, because if she did too much too fast then by the time she was 30 she’d have done every sexual act there was to do, and where would she be able to find sexual ideas after that?

That particular conversation, and another with an 18-year-old who claimed to be “bored with sex” because he’d “done it all,” got me to thinking about the range of the human sexual condition (vast beyond all reckoning) and the range of sexual things many people think there is (tiny).

I wanted to try my hand at designing a fetish map that would be a bit more complete than Ms. Gates’, and I thought, why not do it as an actual map? One of the ideas I wanted to convey was how small most folks’ sexual experience is, how small most folks’ conception of the whole range of sexual expression is, and how vast the actual range of sexual expression is. And, I thought, a map of an imaginary world might be a way to do that.

So here it is, the first version of what I’m sure will be many revisions of the Land of Human Sexuality. (Clicky on this map to see a bigger version. A much, much, much, MUCH bigger version.)

The land of most folks’ awareness is the Island of Mundania and the surrounding islands. Across the Straits of Fear is the portion of the continent that folks are generally aware of to some extent (gay sex, threesomes, light bondage, and so on). Beyond the Great Barrier Mountains and the Lesser Barrier Mountains, which demarcate the limits of common knowledge of different fetishes, lie the more exotic forms of sexual expression (natori, shibari, cosplay, fisting, puppy play, and so forth). In the frigid arctic wastes to the far north are those activities which only a very, very tiny percentage even of veteran, seasoned kinksters finds appealing (nullification, erotic cannibalism, necrophilia, and that sort of thing).

There’s no particular meaning to the size or color of the various areas; it’d be an impossible task to try to, for example, figure out how many furries there are compared to how many folks are into TENS units. Likewise, some of the activities listed could reasonably belong to more than one classification, and some things (like “gay sex”) are within the realm of knowledge of most folks but aren’t really activities per se (most sexual activities not requiring physical possession of a penis or a vagina can be done by people of any sex or sexual orientation). Nevertheless, when folks think of “sexual things to do,” gay sex does seem to be considered its own thing, even though it’s not actually an activity by itself, so it’s on the map–right across the Straits of Fear.

Anyway, I’d love to hear feedback and commentary on this map. I’v actually been working on it for quite a long time, and I suspect it’s still a work in progress–I know there are things I’ve forgotten. (It’s hard work trying to remember every form of fetish out there!)