Exclusive: What Are Your Sexual Prototypes and How Do They Affect Your Life?
What’s the mold for forging your sexuality?
Close your eyes and imagine you could take all your thoughts, fantasies, and daydreams of the perfect partner and assemble them into one person in your mind. We’ll call it your dream partner.
Close your eyes and solidify that image in your mind. How tall are they? What do they sound like? What’s their voice tone like? What’s their skin like or their movements? Picture them in vivid detail.
You’re constructing a psychological prototype, and psychological prototypes profoundly influence our behaviors.
According to a grip of research in psychology, we each have a prototype for what we consider a “normal” human. This can be based on our own experiences, the people we know, the media we consume, or other factors. And, of course, our perceptions of what's “normal” can change over time.
This perception of normal, our prototype, is composed of all the significant data we’ve filtered through our minds up until the present moment. We also have a prototype of what the optimal human is like. We even have prototypes for the optimal human in each category we have for humans.
If I ask you to imagine a professional basketball player, your mind will conjure up some prototypical traits that you associate with basketball players. The player is probably tall and might be wearing a sports jersey and athletic shorts.
A prototype is a central figure in a concept. It’s how we categorize things.
Sometimes, these can come into conflict. If I ask you to imagine a perfect bird and a perfect chicken, you’re most likely to picture something like a crow and your typical fat farm chicken. Crows are better prototypes for birds than chickens in most people's minds, even though chickens are birds.
We categorize them differently because we encounter them in different ways. Chicken gets filed away in our minds as being more “food” than “bird,” while “birds” are often the birds we see sitting on a power line.
This shows you how easy it is to have a psychological blind spot.
A 1996 study found that our prototypes influence our prejudices. If our prototypical victim of police shootings is black, we’re less likely to detect white victims of police shootings, for instance, and we’re more likely to be skeptical of such cases.
How we see ourselves in relation to these prototypes further influences our prejudices and assumptions. Women and black Americans were more likely to detect racism than white men were, regardless of who the victim was (race or sex).
We also have prototypes for everything sexual.
Sexual Prototypes
You already know we have prototypes for the typical sex partner. The central figure we have in our minds signifies sexual attraction. We each have this experience on social media, whether we admit it or not. Someone’s profile picture might catch your eye, and you think, “They’re cute,” and your brain stops for a moment. The closer the person is to your prototype of what an “attractive” person should look like, the more likely you are to stop and notice them.
They say that people have a “type,” and prototype theory explains why. It also explains why the “type” isn’t always accurate. We have many types.
Prototypes go much deeper than that.
We also have prototypes of what “normal” people are doing sexually. We have prototypes of what “normal” dating looks like. If we’re the type of people who like to fit in, we might find ourselves trying to emulate the sex and dating behaviors we envision as “normal” behaviors. If we don’t want to fit in, we might do the opposite.
These concepts can influence our expectations and our behaviors.
Many men who enjoy cuckold fantasies have a particular prototype of what a great male lover is like in their minds. Sometimes, a man hits middle age, his body starts changing, he no longer has the ripped abs of his twenties, and his sexual energy is diminished; but he doesn’t want his wife to miss out on the “prototypical” amazing sex partner. If he’s secure enough to know she’ll stay with him, the couple might open up their relationship to a hotwife dynamic.
This is incredibly sweet and romantic.
The hotwife also personifies the prototype of what a liberated and unapologetically sexual woman is like.