Is fluid sexuality a Millennial thing?

Last updated on: September 23, 2016 at 1:16 am by Jacob Lupfer

Is fluid sexuality a Millennial thing? 2016-09-23T01:16:06-04:00 Jacob Lupfer

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Until very recently, I had not heard people talk about their sexuality as being fluid. Even now, in spite of having a number relationships with LGB people in several personal and professional realms, I have never heard anyone my age or older use this kind of language.

This brings me back to the BuzzFeed quiz item. Historically, conceptions of sexual identity formation emphasized this process only for sexual minorities. But new research conceives of sexual identity as a universal process.

It’s in this context that some traditional religious views can seem especially out of sync with current scientific consensus. Consider the reactions to Pope Francis’s recent comments on “ideological colonization:”

Today children—children!—are taught in school that everyone can choose his or her sex…God created man and woman; God created the world in a certain way…and we are doing the exact opposite.

On the one hand, it is probably a service that cishet folk have become somewhat more aware of LGB people’s experience and, in doing so, gained an awareness that their own sexual identity formation may have been more complicated than they supposed.

But acknowledging and affirming not only a multiplicity of orientations and identities along continuous spectra with infinite numbers of possible points, but also accepting and encouraging fluidity between them, seems to excessively sexualize human identity in ways that, I suspect, very few people of any sexual identity can recognize or identify with.

I suspect everyone understands on some level that sexuality is mysterious. It certainly may be more complex than old people acknowledged in their younger years. But it may not be nearly as complicated and all-encompassing as we are making it out to be.

Until very recently, I felt like I resonated more strongly with novel conceptions of sexuality. But lately, they seem a little too novel. And I sense that (perhaps with good intentions) we may have made Millennials’ sexual identity formation more difficult, not less.

It is interesting to note that cultures with declining rates of marriage and fertility are the ones pioneering ever more complicated theories of sexual identity. I think the pope, the scientist, and the sociologist would all agree that “mother,” “father,” and “child” are not fluid identities.

At least not yet.

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