2022 Will Be the Year of the Heteroflexible Man
Heteroflexibility is here, and it's a wonderful thing.
Amidst the backdrop of chaos, political fighting, and turmoil of the past few years, a sexual revolution has been taking place. That sexual revolution is multifaceted and emergent — there is no one singular cause, but many different causes, like an ocean of currents, winds, and gravitational forces that create ripples — which eventually become waves.
Over time, those waves erode the old order, eating away at the geological rock formations that stood for centuries, changing the landscape forever.
While the causes are indeed legion, the root of it all has to do with society finally shaking off many of the puritanical religious values that have kept sex locked up tight and under the control of judgmental neighbors.
We like to think of modern society as being rational, intelligent, and secular — but as recently as 2006, in the United States, a student was expelled from school because the parents and the school board believed she was a witch.
They accused her of successfully casting a spell that sickened a teacher.
America, the world’s oldest democracy, might be 245 years old, but it’s been a long, hard battle to try and realize the liberty and secularism we were promised.
Poll after poll shows that religious non-affiliated persons are on the rise and Christianity is on the decline, particularly Evangelical Christianity, a group that’s always tended to have a troubled relationship with sex.
As this transformation happens, people are finally waking up to the fact that we’ve got a terrible hangover from the controlling religious traditions of our ancestors that we still need to shake off.
Homophobia is but one component of that hangover, but it’s the one that’s dying a much-deserved and painful death the quickest. People are tired of being judged for their natural desires and impulses, especially their impulses to love and give one another orgasms. Of all the things you could do to someone, sharing an orgasm with them is hardly destructive.
Over the past decade, the binding chains of homophobia have started to become undone in a massive way. Part of this has to do with the shaking off of the religious order. There’s also the fact that we’ve been given new terms with which to define ourselves.
The Love Languages We Speak With
The term heteroflexible has entered the contemporary lexicon, erasing the binary that tells us that one must either be entirely heterosexual or entirely homosexual. New terms like heteroflexible have given people the freedom to identify with one type of sexual orientation while dabbling elsewhere.
Heteroflexible men aren’t always bisexual. They often don’t have enough of an inclination to engage in same-sex relations to identify as truly bisexual. In some cases, they may not even find men attractive, but engage in same-sex encounters nonetheless.
As LGBTA Wiki says:
Individuals who identify as heteroflexible may identify with this label only, or they may also identify as straight. Heteroflexible individuals may also identify as or be considered bisexual (otherwise multisexual), however for some heteroflexibles, their attraction to the same gender is so uncommon that they do not consider bisexual to be an accurate description of their orientation in most situations.
An example of this would be the men who are faithfully heterosexual in their relationships, guys who would never dream of having an active sexual relationship with another man, one-on-one, but they do enjoy multipartner encounters where same-sex contact is involved.
The rise in bisexual cuckold porn popularity (and the popularity of cuckold relationships or porn more generally) stands as a testament to this.
Some guys need a woman to be involved, some guys need their spouse specifically to be involved, and other guys are willing to have solo male-on-male encounters, albeit very infrequently enough as to not necessitate the bisexual label.
Heteroflexible might also include men who are bi-curious but don’t have any meaningful experience upon which to judge exactly how into male-on-male sex they are.
Because it wouldn’t make much sense to identify with a type of sex you’ve never had, especially when it stands in opposition to your usual sexual orientation.
Heteroflexible in 2022
Kate Moyle, a sex and relationship expert for Woman & Home, tells us we can expect heteroflexibility to be on the rise in 2022. People are starting to wake up to the sexual desires they harbor inside themselves, and they’re taking the eraser to the hard, fixed lines that force them into a caricature of their true selves.
Even viewing sexuality in terms of three orientations, heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual is a little restrictive.
This is nothing new. Reaching all the way back to Kinsey’s research in the 1950s, Kinsey outlined 8 gradations along the Kinsey Scale:
Exclusively heterosexual
Predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual
Predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual
Equally heterosexual and homosexual
Predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally heterosexual
Predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual
Exclusively homosexual
No sociosexual contacts or reactions (marked X)
Why the Need for This Precision?
I understand that a certain portion of men (and women) out there may balk at this level of delineation. Why on earth do people require all of these orientations?
Just hear me out…
Suppose you drink alcohol, but only about once a month. You have three drinks, max, with your friends when you get together at the local bar. You exist on a spectrum, somewhere in between alcoholic and non-drinker.
Neither word suffices to describe how you drink.
And if you have three drinks, max, once every six months, even the term “drinker” doesn’t really apply to you. When people think of drinker, they think of your regular weekend warrior, throwing down on Friday and Saturday nights, all just to shuffle into work hungover on Monday.
Similarly, there are a lot of people out there who don’t (want to) engage in these kinds of actions all the time. They are men who might not fantasize about male-on-male contact without a woman being involved and even then, the woman is usually the center of attention, while the men get to dabble here and there in the heat of passion.
Sexual orientation is a way of orienting ourselves. It’s directional. Sexual orientation is a way of orienting ourselves towards an object (of our desire).
The Rise in Male Bisexuality
All of this is corresponding with the rise of bisexuality (and non-heterosexuality) in general.
Bisexuality, in general, is on the rise and has been for some time. Bisexuality was on the rise back in 2016, when the CDC asked 9,000 Americans about their sexual lives.
The General Social Survey found, in 2019, that the rise had continued, as more and more Americans continued to identify as bisexual (though it should be noted that after 2016, men identifying as bisexual declined while more women were identifying as bisexual through 2018).
This brought the total population identifying as bisexual to around 7–8%.
Then came 2021, and the CDC announced that bisexual identification was soaring. LGBTQ identification, in general, skyrocketed, jumping from 4.5% to 5.6%. Bisexual people make up 54.6% of the LGBTQ population.
The first question on many people’s minds was whether these people were newly LGBTQ, or whether they finally just felt safe enough to identify as such.
And I’m tempted to say it’s the latter. How do I know? Well, if you’ve read my work before, you know I like to reference porn statistics. I believe it gives us a glance into the sexual minds of people all over, and it allows those people a judgment-free forum where they can express their sexual selves.
And wouldn’t you know it, our porn-viewing habits saw a massive shift towards male bisexuality. PornHub’s 2021 Year-in-Review lists “bisexual male” as the second top gaining category.
The category grew by a massive 288%.
This is important. It serves the function of a scientific control. It shows us that not only are people identifying as LGBTQ more, but that people’s sexual habits behind closed doors and under the cloak of anonymity are also reflecting the transformation.
In other words, it’s not a facade.
This is all very good.
Because it would be a hellscape of a world if we lived our entire sexual lives in fear of judgment, hiding from the prying eyes of our peers. Homophobia amongst heterosexual men is a strange thing to watch. It’s like a game of hot potato, where everyone is afraid of “looking” anything other than heterosexual, and they’re so afraid simply because everyone else is afraid.
We can imagine a scenario where ten guys go to a bar and one of the ten is really homophobic. The other nine either don’t care or are bi-curious or bisexual behind closed doors, but they collectively fear the wrath of the one, so they keep it to themselves. They might even chime in with homophobic jokes to try to keep the spotlight off of themselves.
You can extrapolate this analogy onto the entirety of American society if you’d like.
We still face witch trials, both in public schools and in the court of an often homophobic public opinion.
But considering the radical shift that’s taken place over the last decade, it appears that people are fed up with having to pretend to be someone they aren’t just to fit in or to avoid the harsh judgments of others. It seems people are finally saying, “You know what? I’ve had enough of this. I’m going to be me and fuck anyone who doesn’t like it.”
And that’s a beautiful thing.
Thank you for reading. Sign up to my Medium email list if you haven’t already.
Three books I recommend checking out:
Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships
A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells Us About Sexual Relationships
The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People
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Joe, I really resonate with your words here. In my past I clearly identified myself as card carrying full fledged Evangelical, replete with all kinds of sexual negativity and harshness towards the LGBTQ community...but no longer. I still consider myself to be an ardent following of Jesus and His way of love for all people, but I want nothing to do with organized religion, religious practices, religious vocabulary, and all of its negativity towards things sexual. We came to a clarity of understanding that God Himself is the author of our sexuality and thus, unless it wounds a person, He is just fine with us enjoying orgasms from a broad spectrum of other humans and sexual activity. Thankfully Evangelicalism is breathing it last dying gasps of air and will soon be in all of our rear view mirrors. The problem was NEVER God Himself, but a twisted approach to reading the Bible and imagining Him to be such a prude.