If “the only constant is change,” why has it taken us so long to understand sexual fluidity?
The question deserves an answer, and yet, here we are, still trying to figure it out. While there once was, and in some cases still is, a “strong trait” view around sex (and gender) that permeates certain sectors of society, it’s getting harder to ignore the idea that “always and forever” is not actually always and forever when it comes to sex, or anything really.
When it comes to sex, this subject to change exists in a way that could be defined as sexual fluidity. The concept of sexual fluidity, popularized by sex researcher Dr. Lisa Diamond in her 2008 book Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire, was studied long before the internet provided space for more marginalized sexualities. In the US, it was Alfred Kinsey’s groundbreaking scientific research in the late 1940s that highlighted the sexual continuum. His Kinsey Scale, with seven points on it, not only challenged the notion that most of us are exclusively gay or straight, but it also blew that reality to bits.
‘Sum of Its Parts’ (2019) from the collection of aRhyme or Reasona • ©Brooke DiDonato.
After Kinsey (but before Diamond), the concept of erotic plasticity was introduced into our sexual lexicon by social psychologist Dr. Roy Baumeister. Baumeister correlated that more women than men have the capacity for sexual variation. He also noted that women tend to experience more latent sexual awakening than men, and that this plasticity serves as a tool for navigating social and power dynamics.
Where erotic plasticity describes the capacity for change, sexual fluidity is that change in action. It can refer to a situational flexibility where an event, person, or circumstance allows us to be like Gumby and bend a little. It can be an identity, used in lieu of another term to describe an evolving, pliable sexual orientation that doesn’t need to be labeled as binary but rather acknowledged as evolving.
While the two are sometimes conflated, bisexuality and sexual fluidity are distinct concepts. Bisexuality is a stable orientation —a consistent, enduring attraction to more than one gender. Sexual fluidity, by contrast, describes the capacity for that attraction to shift over time. It better fits people whose desires are situational or evolving, rather than fixed — a spectrum of experience rather than a defined identity.
Photo: Elena Molchanova.
Diamond’s research also upended an earlier assumption, that erotic plasticity was primarily a feature of cisgender, heterosexual women. It turns out a significant cohort of gay men report experiences of ‘slippage’: Moments where desire drifts beyond their primary orientation, pointing to a broader human capacity for fluidity than previously recognized.
The concepts of erotic plasticity and sexual fluidity aren’t new, but our ability to study them rigorously is improving. With larger, more diverse sample sizes and a cultural climate more open to nuance, research is consistently confirming what many have long experienced: Most of us are more malleable than fixed. Sexual fluidity reminds us, once again, that attraction is not exclusive, and that the belief we can velvet-rope off parts of who we are is limiting —and overdue to be unhooked.
Jamye Waxman, PhD is a sex and couples therapist based out of Los Angeles, CA.
