Episode 382: Understanding Sexual Fluidity
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You're listening to the Sex and Psychology Podcast, the sex ed you never got in school and won't get anywhere else. I am your host, Dr. Justin Leigh Miller. I am a social psychologist and research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and author of the book, Tell Me What You Want, the science of sexual desire and how it can help you improve your sex life. Think for a moment about all of the ways that your sexuality has changed over time. For example, are you attracted to different types of people than you used to be?

Has there been a shift in your go-to fantasy? Do you prefer different activities in the bedroom than you did before? Odds are you probably answered yes to at least one of these questions. And that's because most of us don't have a sexuality that is completely static and never changes. Sexuality is fairly flexible in a lot of ways, and it can evolve over time. However, this flexibility sometimes shows up in unexpected ways.

For example, it can even extend to shifts in the sex or gender of the partners that you're attracted to, a phenomenon known as sexual fluidity. For example, maybe you were only attracted to men previously, but now you find yourself attracted to men and women. In today's show, we're going to dive into the subject of sexual fluidity. We're going to discuss what it means to be sexually fluid, why our sexual attractions might change, how sexual fluidity is different from bisexuality, whether women are really more sexually fluid than men, and more.

My guest is Mark Cusack, a sexuality and relationship coach supporting people who may have complex, fluid, or undefined sexual orientation or gender. Mark is also an author, lecturer, and content creator who loves to educate audiences about the less understood parts of the LGBTQ plus spectrum. Mark's latest book is titled Fluid, a guide for people with flexible sexuality, which is what we're going to be focusing on in this show.

This is going to be another fascinating episode. Before we dive into Mark's new book, however, I have a bonus segment for you in which my pal Ashley and I will share some tips for embracing your sexuality and the fluidity that many folks experience.

Here is today's top three segment presented by Field. Field is the dating app for the curious where you can go on a journey of self-exploration. It's a place that recognizes that change is par for the course when it comes to our sexuality. In fact, Field offers more than 30 different ways to identify your gender and sexuality, as well as the ability to indicate your desires and interests, which you can change as many times as you want as you come to better understand yourself.

It's an app that doesn't tell you what you want and instead leaves you in control because after all, the only person who can determine what you really like is you. To that end, our top three segments are here to equip you with the knowledge you need to assist you on your own journey of sexual self-discovery. In these segments, my friend Ashley Weller, host of the amazing What's Your Position podcast, is joining me to discuss our top three tips for exploring different aspects of your sexuality.

Today, we're diving into the subject of sexual fluidity and embracing your sexuality. Are you ready to dive in, Ashley? I'm ready to ride. All right. Lay it on me. What is your first tip for learning to embrace your sexuality?

Explore fantasy and kink. Now, if you've been listening to these top three segments, you know that we have covered both of those in previous segments. And I really think it's important for individuals who are questioning where they sit on the sexually fluid scale to look at what you are drawn to in fantasy and in your play to understand a bit more in-depth truth about what your desires may or may not be.

When you let yourself explore these fantasies and these kinks in a solo situation or with a partner, you really are letting yourself explore without the pressure of labels.

Yeah, I love that. And speaking of the pressure of labels, one of the tips that I had on my list was to recognize that it's okay to try on different sexuality labels and see what works for you. And to also recognize that unlabeled is a valid sexual identity, right? Sometimes certain identities might feel a little limiting or restricting because they can put us in boxes and that

kind of dictates how other people see us and the expectations that they have for us. So don't be afraid to go outside of the box and to maybe be unlabeled for a while or to try on some different identities and experiment with that and see how different ones feel to you.

I think it's important to remember that attraction, as much as we live in a very binary society and in a very heteronormative, homogenous society, it's really important that we see attraction is about chemistry. It's about the energy that we get from another person. It's about desire and it's about the connection that we make with those people, regardless of what's between someone's legs and regardless of what an orientation or a gender label might show you.

Yeah, so true. So what's your second tip for embracing your sexuality? This is a hard one. This was the hardest one. This one took me forever. Educate yourself. And I said this before, but as a sex educator, I can't help it. Educate yourself on understanding what traditional norms and values look like in this society and getting outside of that box.

Educate yourself by listening to podcasts, by reading books, by reading articles, by people who you respect and know and understand. Educate yourself by engaging in discussions with people who understand what sexual fluidity means and understand the broad scope that is human sexuality.

Yeah, I think that's great. And it very much aligns with the second tip I had on my list, which was, you know, really about expanding your definition of what is normal when it comes to sex and sexuality. And the way that we do that is through educating ourselves, right? So we need to recognize that sexuality is fluid and it can potentially change over the course of our lives and in ways that might be somewhat unexpected.

Now, something that Field has found in their state of dating report is that it's actually pretty common for people who are members of this app to experience changes in their sexuality. And specifically, they found that about 15% of Field members have changed their sexuality at least once since using the app.

So if you're interested in and curious about exploring your sexuality field can be a great place to go about exploring that. And that ties in with my third tip, which is about recognizing that fluidity might be difficult for some other people to understand, right? Some people might not get this concept of fluidity and, and,

That's why I think it's really important to surround yourself with a supportive network. And again, that goes back to where a place like Field can be really helpful because other people there are likely to get the concept of sexual fluidity. I think it's beautiful to surround yourself with people who understand not only what you're dealing with, what you're going through, but what you like, what you dislike, what you fantasize about. Field sounds like an excellent place to not only find other people who want to play and be part of your pleasure and desire, but also to find a community of individuals who you can

join a chat room with or experience. I saw that they do meetup events where you can go and talk to other people who may have similar feelings and desires as you. To get outside of your echo chamber is excellent. My last is to kind of get a little bit more inside your echo chamber. Journal your thoughts and desires.

When you write down your feelings and your desires and what turns you on, you are actually helping your brain process how it is evolving within this space of sexuality. So getting into the habit of writing down what you recently masturbated to or writing down a person that you saw

in passing that turned you on and what about them turned you on and understanding that we are excited and aroused by things other than genitalia or gender labels. Journaling your thoughts can be a very important step to understanding we all fall on a sexual spectrum.

Yeah, I love that. So it's basically keep a sexy diary, right? All right. Well, thank you so much for sharing your tips for exploring your sexuality with us, Ashley. That wraps up our top three segment presented by Field. A huge thank you to our friends over at Field for sponsoring the segment and for helping us to expand our horizons in the dating world and on this show. We have much more ahead on today's episode, so stick around and we're going to jump in right after this short break.

Applications are now open for the next Human Sexuality Intensive course at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. This course takes an interdisciplinary, evidence-based approach to exploring foundational concepts in the study of human sexuality, as well as recent developments and research in the field. This course is relevant to professionals, academics, and individuals in any field where a foundational understanding of human sexuality is beneficial.

This course is open to both emerging and established professionals looking to specialize their knowledge, as well as those seeking new career directions. To learn more, visit KinseyInstitute.org and be sure to follow at Kinsey Institute on the socials. Hi, Mark, and welcome to the show. Hello, Justin. Thank you so much for having me.

Thanks so much for joining me. So you have a new book out called Fluid, which is all about fluid sexualities. So as a starting point, can you give us the brief story behind the book? So in other words, why did you decide to write a whole book on the topic of sexual fluidity?

Yeah, well, the simple answer to that question is because there isn't one. There have been a few things that are more kind of academically focused, which are really helpful, but I kind of realised that

There's no real accessible guide for kind of explaining what fluid sexuality is so that just the average person can pick it up and learn about it and kind of get that guidance. So I really wanted to

create that. I grew up being fluid in my sexuality and in my gender and some other things. And it's really the book that I wish that I'd have had when I was younger to kind of guide me through the sometimes complex experience of having a more fluid sexuality. So yeah, I'm really, really pleased to share it with

with everyone and I hope it'll be helpful for people.

Well, thanks for sharing that and thanks for writing this book because you're so right that there isn't another great accessible guide out there on this particular topic. I've seen some of the other books that are out there, actually have some of them on my shelf behind me right now, that are much more academic. And your book definitely reads in a very accessible way that I think is understandable to the average person, whether they're fluid or not, if they just want to better understand this concept or if they want to better understand their own sexuality.

So just so that everyone who's listening is super clear before we really dive into the meat of this, how do you define sexual fluidity and what might this look like in real life? You know, I know the experience of it can be highly variable from person to person, but can you tell us what sexual fluidity is and maybe give us some examples?

Yeah, absolutely. But it's kind of a difficult thing to define, I think, as with all of the terms that we use in sexuality, gay, bi, straight, asexual, even gender terms like trans, non-binary.

they're not kind of really specific limited terms. So they might mean something slightly different to each person. And I think that's really important to say. There's no council of elders who can sit there and say, you are fluid and you are not. It's just not the way it works, particularly for fluidity. It's kind of a definition between definitions. So it's kind of tricky to pin down. But what I would say is,

It's basically, if you have had kind of significant change or shifts or evolution in the way that you feel about the types of people that you're attracted to, then that would be what I would define as fluid. That might be that you are attracted to different genders at different times, but

but it might also be something other than gender. So anything that feels significant to you and you feel like it's really changed, then that's kind of what we could...

call fluid. You're fluid in your attractions. That's what we talk about when we talk about sexuality, isn't it? It's your attractions, who you're attracted to. A lot of people are very, very stable. You know, ever since puberty or whatever, they're attracted to one gender or one type of person and they don't really feel like it could change. Like it's just always been that way and they feel very, very kind of stable in that. So that would...

be not fluid. But for a lot of other people, it's a lot more complex than that. There may be different feelings at different times. And so that might be something that you could describe as fluid. And then in terms of different types, I think there's so many different types of fluid.

I talk about a few of them in the book. They are not in any way exhaustive or like official, but you might have fluid people like myself, for example, who are kind of constantly in flux. So like I could get out of bed in the morning and I could be super into guys. I could be super into women. I could be into like everyone and everything non-binary androgynous, you know,

whoever, or I might be kind of

not really interested in anyone and it can change over days, over weeks, months. And so some people are like that. They're just very, very fluid. And that's kind of fun. But then there are other people who they might have like maybe one or two major fluid episodes kind of throughout their life. And so they might kind of get to a certain age or a stage in their life and like

They really feel like their attractions have shifted or changed or something like that. And then there are other people who have maybe some kind of event or some kind of relationship or some thing that happens to them, which kind of makes them feel different about things. And then there are other people who

maybe they have like less frequent changes, but they kind of understand their capacity for that. And there's everything in between. So really it's a broad category and it's very fluid.

Yeah, so it sounds like fluidity is a pretty amorphous thing, you know, in the sense that it can take on a lot of different forms and can look very different for different people. And you already kind of answered my next question, you know, I was going to ask, is fluidity something that happens gradually or very suddenly? Do people tend to experience a lot of shifts over time or do some people only experience a handful of them? So it sounds like all of that is a pretty amorphous thing.

All of these things are possible. You know that some people, like you said, like yourself, are kind of constantly in flux, whereas for other people, it's a much more limited thing where maybe it only happens once or a handful of times. And sometimes it plays out very gradually. Sometimes it's very sudden and quick in terms of how things change.

And it also sounds like you're defining fluidity more specifically in terms of the attractions that people feel. In some of the other research that I've seen on this topic, they talk about shifts in attraction, identity, and or behavior. And I think it's important

to highlight that just because somebody experiences shifts in their attraction, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to lead to shifts in their identity and or their behavior. Attraction, identity, and behavior are all different things. They're all overlapping to some extent, but I think we need to talk about them all as separate concepts because one does not necessarily dictate or change the other.

You see, Justin, this is why I love talking to you about this topic, because you absolutely get it and that is absolutely right.

You know, there's behavior, there is identity and attraction. And, you know, even within attraction, I mean, what is attraction? Is it like affection, intimacy? Is it like your fantasy or like some kind of fetish that you have? Or is it something that you would actually go and do or you could imagine doing? Is it romantic? Is it sexual? Is it what? Like there's so much to it. And if you think about it, this is what I think happens.

We are all fluid

in our attraction, like we all are, like even if you identify as straight or gay, the types of people that you're attracted to and the ways in which you experience sexual attraction and physical attraction, romantic attraction, like it changes, right? It all changes. No two straight people or gay people are the same. And we do shift. It's only because in society we've decided that gender is something important to state and

in our sexuality, in our identity, that people for whom gender is changeable kind of have to talk about it. They have to say, oh, you know, this happens for me, this is me. They might have an identity and they might have to come out about and tell. So in a way, fluidity is not really a very kind of interesting or different thing because we all have it. It's just how you define it. And of course,

There are a lot of people who will have experiences with different genders or different types of people, but there's a whole load of reasons why they might do that. And it's not necessarily because their identity changes. The final thing I'll say, which is really, really interesting, I talk about this in the book, there's been some really interesting research on people's identities and

And they found that so, so, so many people actually do change the way they identify their sexuality over the course of their life. And you might think, oh, well, that's just kind of people going from the hetero side to the kind of gay side, right? That's the linear progression. But actually, it's fairly balanced. There are almost as many people going the other way and back and forth.

And it's not just young people as well. It's people of all ages, actually older and younger people are the biggest groups of like changes. Whereas like middle-aged people, maybe they're more kind of set in their ways, but it's just, it's so fascinating and it's really common. So I just wanted to like talk about it and get it out in the open, you know?

Yeah, there's so much interesting research in this area and so many different ways in which our sexuality is fluid. And, you know, as you eloquently explained, like it's not just about fluidity in the gender of the partners that we're attracted to. We're fluid in a heck of a lot of different ways.

And something else related to that that you kind of hinted at is that, you know, when we're talking about this fluidity in sexual attraction, is there also fluidity in romantic attraction? So do people experience shifts in both of those or maybe only in one or the other? Can you be more romantically fluid versus sexually fluid?

Yeah, absolutely. And even with romance, you know, how do we define romance? One person might define it in one way and someone else might define it in another. But absolutely. So there are people who might be bi-romantic, for example, where, you know, they can be attracted to different people romantically. But then when it comes to sexual attraction, they're kind of set with just one or it could be the opposite.

And then it can also change. So like for myself and a lot of people that I speak to and coach,

it can change. So you might feel that, okay, well, I'm only sexually attracted to one gender, one type of person, but I could understand like that I might have a capacity to feel romantic attraction to different people. A lot of people that may be kind of easier to imagine, but then at some point they could have an experience or they could just

you know, have the passage of time and their sexual attraction starts to change or their behavior starts to change or the way they want to identify changes. So it's really, really open. It's just a very, very open, broad category.

Yeah, different strokes for different folks. So something I'm sure that many of my listeners are wondering about is how sexual fluidity is different from bisexuality. So I have many bisexual friends and a common experience is that there will be times or periods where they're more attracted to men and other times where they're more attracted to women. And for example, it can shift across different contexts or situations.

or it might also shift based on the relationship that they're in at a given point in time. And some people might consider that to be fluidity, others might not. So what do you think? How are bisexuality and sexual fluidity similar or different? Yeah, I think that bisexuality has always been, you know,

quite fluid orientation. I think it was in the original kind of bisexual manifesto that was really like kind of trying to define, you know, what is bisexuality? They put the word fluid in there, you know, it's a fluid orientation. Of course, you get bisexual people who aren't fluid. Maybe they're attracted to more than one gender, but it stayed the same and that's the way it is. So that would be a bisexual person who is not fluid.

but for a huge amount of bi people, bi plus multisexual people, as you said.

It changes. And we talk about things like the bi-cycle, which is kind of where you go from one gender to another and then it comes back around and that's always a fun ride. That is fluidity. Whether you actually want to use that term or not is another question. I think most people don't go out into the world and say, I am fluid. I identify as fluid.

because terms like bi or whatever are much more well-known. I identify as bi and that's what I use, but I also identify as pansexual or multisexual, fluid, you know, all of these things. So it's not necessarily the term that we've used, but yeah, you can be bi and not fluid or fluid and bi and there's a big, big, big crossover.

Yeah, you know, when it comes to bisexuality, that just like fluidity is an amorphous term because bisexuality also just means different things to different people. You know, there's this paper that I always assign when I teach a seminar on the psychology of sexual orientation where it talks about 13 different definitions of bisexuality. And it's probably not even an exhaustive list, right? There's probably many more than that.

And lots of people, when they think about bisexuality, they think about it as meaning equal attraction to men and women. But that's not necessarily how bisexuality is experienced by most people. Oftentimes there's more attraction to one gender or another. And again, it can overlap with fluidity where those attractions can shift or change.

Also, being bisexual doesn't just mean that you're attracted to cisgender individuals. You might also be attracted to trans and non-binary folks. So yeah, whenever we're talking about these terms like bisexuality and fluidity, it's complicated because it means different things to different people and people experience it in very different ways.

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Something else I wanted to get your take on is how asexuality and sexual fluidity overlap. So, asexuality is often defined as a lack of sexual attraction or as having little to no sexual attraction. And like many other sexualities, most people look at it as being something that is pretty stable over time. But asexual people, as you discuss in your book, can also experience sexual fluidity too, right?

Yeah, and thank you so much for raising that. I think a lot of time when we talk about fluidity, we kind of talk about the bi or the multisexual spectrum, and that is a big part of it. But I wanted to highlight the fact that the asexual spectrum can also be fluid. Sometimes we call this ace flux. Some people like that term, but just like the bi spectrum,

asexuality is a spectrum. So there are, of course, some people who never have any sexual thoughts or sexual attraction or sexual experiences, and it's been that way forever. And that's the way they'll always be. And that, you know, that's it. So, but there are so many other people, demisexual people, you know, people who might only have sexual attraction when they have like a really close bond or gray, ace, gray sexual people. That's the kind of space that I fit in. It's like you,

You can experience sexual attraction and you might have sex and sexual experiences, but it's really at a very, very low, low level. And there are so many other kind of points along the spectrum. And wherever you have a spectrum, then you can have change and fluidity. You can move up and down. For example, my bi and asexuality issue.

kind of flows, the two of them work together because, you know, I might be attracted to one gender or another gender. And then there will be periods of time where there'll just be nothing. And I will really just genuinely not experience anything. And even when it is flipping between genders, it's always at quite a low level.

And then you have that kind of romantic fluidity coming in, which is like, okay, well, if I meet someone who's very special to me, then I might be able to have some kind of more physical connection with them. And so it's all just this big mishmash. And I think it's really, really important to talk about fluidity because fluidity

I think in our society, we're like, okay, we're either gay, we're straight, we're bi, we're asexual. And it's these like finite terms you either are or you're not. And people come to me in coaching. They're like, what am I? I don't know what I am. You know, I'm attracted to men. Does that mean I'm gay? Or like, I don't always want sex. Does that mean I'm asexual? And it's like,

this kind of death knell forever. And it's like, no, beneath those labels, there's so much change and fluidity. And like, you can be a little bit of this, a little bit of that at this time, and maybe it can shift or change. And that's the beauty of it. So asexuality, i.e. the level of attraction that you experience or the level of interest that

And then, of course, the different types of people as well. So, yeah. Yeah. A lot of us like to try and put sexuality into neat little boxes that are easy to understand. But anytime we try and do that, we find that it doesn't work very well because we're much more complicated than that. And I think in discussing sexual fluidity, a helpful way to think of it, and I learned this from Dr. Lisa Diamond in a talk that I previously saw her give, where she talked about how we

We should think about sexual orientation as one thing, and then fluidity as something that kind of operates and works alongside of it, right? So you've got your sexuality on the one hand, like your patterns of attraction, and then fluidity

Fluidity is something that runs on the spectrum where you're either high in fluidity or low. And so if you're higher in fluidity, you're going to experience more shifts and changes in your sexuality or sexual identity or potentially even your behavior over time versus whereas if you're lower on fluidity, you're going to experience far fewer and maybe no shifts or changes at all.

So yeah, instead of thinking of fluidity as like a separate type of sexual orientation, like it's something that kind of just works and exists alongside our sexual orientation. So to the extent that that's helpful to people in terms of contextualizing and understanding what's going on here might be helpful.

Now, in early research on sexual fluidity, it was conducted entirely on women, and that work kind of gave the impression that this is something that is unique to women's sexuality. But as the research evolved, we started to see that men can be sexually fluid too.

And I distinctly remember going to another conference talk about a decade ago by Dr. Lisa Diamond, where she gave a presentation titled something along the lines of, "I was wrong. Men are pretty darn sexually fluid too." So, you know, she had done a lot of the early pioneering research on sexual fluidity and, you know, had often talked about it as being this feature of women's sexuality. But once she started collecting data on men, she found that, you know, this isn't unique to one gender.

So, you know, it certainly seems like it's something that potentially anyone can experience, but are women more likely to experience it than men?

Well, thank you for bringing up the wonderful Dr. Lisa Diamond, because I'm a huge fan girl of her. Of course, she did amazing research on sexual fluidity. And one of the things actually that I learned from her, which was really, really interesting, is actually the fact that when we talk about even sexual arousal,

It's not just one thing that's happening in the body. And so you've got these kind of like two processes. One, I think she refers to it as like perceptive attraction. That's the kind of attraction that you would have when you're fantasizing. Like you're really imagining it. It's coming from you. It's something that you really kind of feel inside you.

of what's going on around you. And that might be your kind of your stable orientation, like the thing you generally tend to. And then,

On the other hand, you've also got a different type of arousal. And nobody speaks about this, you know, in common language, but this other type of arousal, which is like receptive arousal. And that is where you kind of respond to your environment. So something sexy might be going on or there might be some situation or some person, again, that you really like, maybe romantically. And so the body can actually create arousal.

arousal from that, whereas you might not actually have proactively thought about it. And neither one of these are more important than the other. And I'm not an academic, but what I understand of the research is that women generally are

people who have menstrual cycles can experience a lot more receptive attraction. So that's more of the kind of changeable environmental based attraction, because a lot of it has to do with hormones and like cycles and that kind of thing. And so I think that's why

women tend to show like a slightly higher rate of fluidity because they may experience more receptive attraction. However,

Everybody has both of those and men can experience it to a pretty significant degree, as you said, as well. There's also stuff about the stigma of same gender attraction and with women, it tends to be slightly more acceptable if women are going to be intimate and stuff like that. So there's all kinds of things around that and we don't know exactly what.

what the differences between genders are. But definitely, I mean, I see a lot of men, a lot, a lot, a lot of men, a lot of women as well, people of all genders. And it definitely, definitely exists in all genders, for sure.

Yeah. And, you know, this idea of gender differences in sexual fluidity, it's something that has sparked a fair amount of research attention and debate over the years. Some researchers argue that women's sexuality by nature is just more flexible than men's, whereas men's tends to be more fixed. And so, for example, they'll point to research findings like the fact that

you know, men are much more likely to develop fetishes than women are and to have like very strong, persistent fetishes that are lifelong. They also point to other research on, say, sexual fluidity, finding that there are higher rates of women who seem to experience this over time.

And lots of different explanations have been proposed. We don't necessarily know why the gender differences exist. You know, some people frame it through an evolutionary lens and talk about how maybe it was more adaptive for women to be able to reorient their attractions than men in an evolutionary context where, say, if the

provider for their children was out of the picture because he died or abandoned them, then maybe it would be adaptive for women to reorient their attractions to other women in the interest of rearing their children. I don't know how much I believe that idea, but it's one of the ideas that's out there. You know, there's also some who argue that maybe there's a sociocultural explanation and that women's sexuality has been policed and controlled much more than men throughout human history, and that maybe this has had an effect

on the evolution of women's sexuality to be more adaptive and flexible, precisely because it's been the subject of greater control. So who knows what the actual explanation is behind the gender differences, but just putting it out there in case people find it interesting.

So a topic we're increasingly hearing more about is gender fluidity. So tell us a little bit about gender fluidity and how it's different from sexual fluidity. And also, is there any connection between them? Do we know are people who are more fluid in one way likely to be more fluid in other ways? Yeah. So, I mean, the first thing to say is that gender fluidity and fluid sexuality are not the same thing. So sometimes when we talk about fluidity or I'm fluid,

I think people might assume that you're talking about gender fluidity because it's slightly more known in society, which is great. But if you are gender fluid, it definitely doesn't mean that you are fluid in your sexuality and vice versa. They are two separate things. Gender is what you are and sexuality is what you're attracted to. So,

Although they're not necessarily linked, if gender fluidity exists, then fluid sexuality kind of has to exist by definition, because if you're talking about the genders that you're attracted to, then, well, if there are gender fluid people...

If gender is a spectrum and it's fluid, then sexuality is the two-go-hand-in-hand. Although, of course, there's not a direct link between someone being gender fluid and having fluid sexuality, actually what we do see is a lot of people who have a more, let's say, expansive or broad definition of their gender tend to be, and I

not necessarily always, but do tend to be maybe on the bi spectrum or the pansexual kind of spectrum. For example, trans people, trans is a gender identity, but I think the most common sexuality for a trans person to be is somewhere on the bi spectrum. And it makes sense, right? Because if you've got a broad view of your gender, right,

you're maybe more likely to appreciate or find connection with a broader set of genders or people. And so there are links and things, but they're not necessarily the same thing, if that makes sense.

Yeah. And there, like you said, can be a linkage. And I think it makes sense, you know, that if you're somebody who is actively exploring your gender, then that might open up the possibility of you exploring your sexuality and vice versa. And, you know, I often talk about a similar idea when

We discussed research findings showing that queer people are more likely to be kinky. And a lot of people question, well, why is there that association? Well, maybe it's something about queerness that opens the door to exploring your sexuality in other ways, right? So I think it makes sense that if you're open to the idea of being fluid in one sense, that that might open the door or possibility of being fluid in other ways. So yeah, there can be a linkage, but there isn't always a direct linkage for everyone.

So thanks for sharing all of this information, Mark. I'm really looking forward to continuing our conversation in the next episode and diving into the politics behind sexual fluidity. Can you please tell my listeners where they can go to learn more about you and your work?

Yeah, absolutely. So my channel is called at not defining, not defining or one word. And we're on YouTube. We're on threads. We are on Instagram. We're on TikTok. We also have a Patreon group where I provide one-on-one mentoring and we have group sessions and everything.

I have a podcast of my own where I go really deep into things. So that's patreon.com forward slash not defining. And I also offer one-on-one coaching as well. So you can go to www.notdefining.com and you can find out information there. You can drop me an email. I'd love to chat with you. And you are not alone. If you feel like that, I would love to hear from you.

Well, great. I will be sure to include links to all of that in the show notes. So thank you again so much for your time. I really appreciate having you here. Thank you so much, Justin. I appreciate it. Thank you for listening. To keep up with new episodes of this podcast, visit my website, sexandpsychology at sexandpsychology.com or subscribe on your favorite platform where I hope you'll take a moment to rate and review the show. If you listen on Apple Podcasts, please consider becoming a Sex and Psychology Premium subscriber to enjoy ad-free listening for just $3.99 a month.

You can also follow me on social media for daily sex research updates. I'm on Blue Sky and X at Justin Laymiller and Instagram at Justin J. Laymiller. Also, be sure to check out my book, Tell Me What You Want. Thanks again for listening. Until next time.