Jones: The important reason to talk through how you're feeling and work with someone that you feel safe with is because in many cultures, and I don't know the culture of this young woman, being gay is considered not okay. Interviewer: You put a lot of emphasis on making sure that she has someone that she can talk to. So the place that I wouldn't talk about it is all over school or even with one person at school unless you think that person is really safe. And most importantly, you need to be safe. This is an important thing for you to talk about and think about, but you need to find someone you can talk to. So the most important thing is if you don't know right now, don't tell, meaning you don't have to commit right now. So we tend to, as women can, inflate our romance and our relationship with sex, whereas men do that a little less than women. So for many women, and particularly young women, it's more about the relationship, the person, than it is about the sex.
A young woman may have a very close personal friend and that person might be gay or might not be gay, and what becomes a very personal relationship starts to feel like a romantic relationship. So some people, all their lives, will have a preference for one or the other or equally for both, but some people move from one sexual preference to another through their adolescence. But in fact, we're finding more and more that, once again, particularly for women, it's not so simple. You're either gay or you're straight, and you need to stick with it. The old paradigm, the old way of thinking was that you were born one way or the other and you need to just pick one. In young people, particularly young women, sexual preference is rather fluid, meaning the kind of people someone might want to have sex with kind of changes a bit, a bunch. So I don't know what normal is, but you are certainly, this young woman is not alone. It's so common that it's normal by numbers. And often, we use the word "normal" as what we think as okay, so that a lot of people would do things that we think are not okay, like have sex outside your marriage, that's like not okay. Now, the cultural, when it comes to normal, it's really very difficult to know what normal is because one culture or subculture may consider one thing as okay. So normal, we consider anything that at least 10% of the population would be, so we're struggling here because a lot of people don't tell, so the "Don't ask, don't tell" has been around a long time both in medicine and how do we begin to actually get this information. Now, about 7% of millennials will tick that box as "Not straight" and about 12% of Americans in this age group have had some same sex sexual encounter. The scientific number, which isn't very scientific, is about 4% of people, 18 to 45, identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered, meaning not straight. And when it comes to sexual preference or sexual identity, it's both a scientific number, and I can give you some numbers, and it's neither because, in fact, we live in a multi-cultural society and people don't always tell the truth, so we may not even have the right numbers.īut let's just do some numbers. So sometimes normal is a scientific number, and sometimes normal is a cultural construct, meaning the culture tells you what's normal and what's normal when culture may not be normal or another. Well, first of all, I'm glad she emailed, but I hope she also has somebody that's safe to talk to. She's wondering, is this a normal thing to be experiencing?ĭr. But she doesn't really know what her sexual preference is because, again, she's never had sex. She says that she is confident that she likes guys, but she might also like girls. Jones, we have a letter here from an audience member that's a little bit younger than our typical listeners. It's a personal question, but how do you figure out your sexual orientation and what's considered normal? We're going to talk about this right now on The Scope.Īnnouncer: Questions every woman wonders about her health, body, and mind, this is "Am I Normal?" on The Scope. Interviewer: You like guys, but you think you might also like girls.