Married Men - A Gay Lads View - Have you ever had an experience?

Well actually to take your question from the other direction - it is actually a known fact I think that not all the people who sexually abuse children are pedophiles. Often it is a crime of power - taboo - opportunity - or something else. The simple fact they had sexual activity with a child does not in and of itself make them a pedophile.

Once again this is because the actual definitions of things like sexual orientation are distinct from sexual behavior and sexual identity. One of the definitions I quoted even made that word for word explicit. The actual sexual activity you engage in does not necessarily have to map onto your sexual orientation.

The "sex is where the rubber meets the road" or "the mickey either works or it doesn't" thinking is just wrong therefore and conflates things that the actual definitions explicitly move to separate.

For the latter idea - for many guys the mickey leaps to attention with a minimum of input. How many of us remember erections sitting in class in school. Even a lack of stimulus and input is enough to set it off. Someone sitting on your lap can set it off. This concept that attraction and arousal is required is simply not true for many men. What I feel (again) is going on is one or two individuals know what they themselves feel or think or need - and are simply assuming everyone else must work the same as they do. This "I as a straight person can not even consider the idea of it without revulsion therefore that must be what it means to be straight" thinking. To the point some straight guys even presume to know the minds of lesbian women and are psychic :p

Tongue out of cheek though: For the second idea more seriously though there have been homosexual men who hid their sexuality from the world - maybe even trying to deny it in themselves - and they settled down into a heterosexual relationship and even had children. They either managed this for life - or eventually the turmoil of it broke them and the relationship down. Often with outcomes that were emotionally damaging to all concerned. They functionally managed physical arousal and sex for all that time however.

So this need some people have to force black and white very rigid labels and definitions - purely of their own invention - onto the deep and diverse world of human sexuality is simply doomed to fail. Especially if they get haughty and upset with the people who dare to mention what the actual definitions are and what they mean.

But once again: Human Sexuality is, by the actual definitions (which I have even cited unlike the people complaining about definitions), based on the "enduring patterns" and "typical" attractions of the person involved. So as much as the "if you even think about sex with someone of your own gender you are gay/bi" people are simply wrong in that light. Isolated events in your life - or even a single exception relationship which could be a long term relationship of years or even decades - do not relabel your sexuality in the light of those definitions. And calling yourself heterosexual - while it might be intensely triggering to a small couple of sexually conservative older males - is actually linguistically valid, coherent, and correct.

But as I keep saying - there is nothing wrong with having ones own definitions for words and being clear what those definitions are! That is fine and understandable. But as I said in my first post and I repeat it there - that understanding has to go both ways. And it appears to me by the conversations I had on this thread since last night that for some individuals - it doesn't.

Again you are relying too heavily on words like "daft" (or earlier words like "waffle" or "word salad") to stand in lieu of an argument. But calling it daft over and over will not make it so. Calling it linguistically incoherent over and over will not make it so. And appealing to "definitions" over and over when you have not offered one, cited one, or referred to one - when I have - is unhelpful.

I have cited actual definitions from an established dictionary on one hand and from wikipedia on another hand. I have explained why the existence of such a person as you describe is linguistically coherent and congruent with all those definitions. I am doing the exact opposite of "Throwing the definitions to the wind". I am in fact the only one of us citing the definitions and using them as part of my argument/position/prose. It is you - not me - throwing definitions to the wind and acting like your own one (and I have no problem with your own one I repeat once again - once we are clear it is your own one) is the actual one.

As I said in my response to you, a response you ignored and have not replied to, when you shout the words "by definition" at me - which definition exactly? You have not offered one! And the last time we had this conversation I had the same issue. I asked you multiple times to provide one. You failed to each time. I can dig out a link to that thread if anyone requires it.

If the best you can do in response is shout "daft" I am not sure how to progress the conversation therefore other than to repeat myself over and over at you?

And contrary to your claims at this all being said just to be "right on" - quite the opposite is true. I share much of the despair Dunne describes in post 182 above about how anyone is able to define themselves as anything at all. I have no dog in any of the Transgender debates for example - but when I see what is going on there politically as well as linguistically I just despair to be honest.