Is erotic plasticity like yoga in bed?

Schmigid racey but that’s only because my grandfather’s a republican. This is my sexual perspective write up for MFT350

Is erotic plasticity like yoga in bed?

Questions 1/2 addressed

I’ve been eating ice cream for a long time. I’ve probably had at least 100 different flavors of ice cream. Over the years I’ve fine tuned my preferences: mint chocolate chip, honey cream, cake batter. Delicious. Nothing could be better then an enormous waffle cone filled with my favorite chilled treat. Then a few years ago my friend Josh ruined it for Ice Cream and I. “Try this,” he said. With one fail swoop my palette was exposed to an entirely new chilly treat, frozen yogurt. Could I like it better? I may need to try another bite, test the waters sortaspeak.

This is the analogy I used to explain to my mother I had spent the night with a girl. I used frozen dessert to break it to my conservative best friend I was dating a lady. I compared my girlfriend with sugar-free blueberry swirl yogurt to my ex-boyfriend. “It’s not that I don’t like ice cream anymore. I just may like fro-yo a little more right now.” Realizing he was the ice cream required some backpedaling. Ice cream has feelings too you know.

The great part about being a student at a liberal arts university is the exposure to a variety of subjects, including psychology. After a chapter on the five senses was a chapter on human sexuality and in laid the academic equivalent to Jillian’s Sexual Sweet Shop analogy, erotic plasticity. A bolded vocabulary word that seemed to quite cleanly explains my current state of limbo? Brilliant. Erotic plasticity refers to the degree to which a person’s sex drive is shaped by more social and cultural forces. Women in general are more flexible with the gender of their romantic affections. I am attracted to people, not just their sexual organs and Y/X chromosomes. If the best kind of lover is your friend, it doesn’t make sense to shut out the people that I tend to make very close friend with just because they were women. Although I’ve always been attracted to men, my situation and cultural circumstances have changed drastically in the last year and so has been opinion of appropriate romantic partners. I suppose I would check the bi-sexual box if I had to categorize myself. A year from now, I couldn’t be sure. Since my own sexual identity is currently under a transformation, I would be of the thought that a person’s identity does change over time.

The only thing that never changes is change. Our perspective on sex will only continue to develop over time. Hopefully not as drastically as the gender preference, but knowledge and appreciation for sex should suffer from chronic adjustment. A woman’s sexual peak is in her thirties and forties. How she appreciates sex physically and emotionally in her twenties will probably be more shallow then when her physical sex drive and experience works to benefit her overall experience later in life. Which makes me extremely hopeful for the future as a young budding woman. If our physical reaction to sex changes and or experiences add up our sexual understanding and identity will slowly or rapidly change or deepen. A gradual transformation of a person’s sexual identity is just as important as a sudden flip in a personal understanding of

sexuality, both are part of the natural growth as adults. As the years progress everyone ideally will only learn new techniques to love more sincerely and unconditionally.

My recent transformation of my sexual identity has been personal proof that perspectives on sexuality are malleable and constantly growing. Different flavors work for different people at different times in their lives. Before I believed I was a very open and accepting person of all types of lifestyles. When I was faced with having to embrace a part of me I had never had to identify before a new level understanding was reached, just as I think with years and relationships can bless people with new levels of appreciation and knowledge of their sexuality.