litphoria

As someone who's new to the website, I found it incredibly difficult to find out the sexual orientation of characters. I now know that apparently its indicated by the hearts at the "gender" part of the proile, but to me this feels very unintuitive.

A simple "Sexual orientation" under the "Sex" tab (or somewhere else) would make it so much easier to quickly tell what someone is into. Straight. Bisexual. Gay. whathaveyou.

I would like this.

Sexual orientation does part of the job, but we can be clearer than that. There's a lot of situations it can be confusing, and those are: when it's on any character who isn't a straightforward male or female. Various persuasions of transgender, creatures that don't have a gender or sex at all, and herms and newhalves can find "gay" or "straight" being ambiguous. (Many people on F-List in particular started developing some idea that a gay female-herm is only into other female-herms, as opposed to females, female-herms, and shemales - by their gender/sex terminology.)

It's no particular coincidence F-List's gender kinks tended to be more reliable than anything else, so I think that's what was being recreated here.

Only, F-List's gender kinks might be a bit clearer, because they just have you say what you're into. Going beyond their limited scope of options, that'd be: Males, Females, Female Herms, Male Herms, Female Newhalves, Male Newhalves, Agender.

Only, there's some nuance lost there. Since all that terminology around newhalves, transgender, and so on comes from real life, where women aren't born with dicks and men aren't born with vaginas, those terms tend to imply change, which isn't a good match for the literature sexual fantasy world which contains those people born that way to begin with. I'm not sure what to do about that bit.

(Newhalves might be better known as "shemale" or "cuntboy", 'cept I'm avoiding those because they come from the porn industry and aren't very welcomed by the individuals they apply to. I think we've got an official stance of just flat-out not using them in site features ever.)

I forgot to mention, that thing where you just say what you're into is what those various persuasions of transgender just tend to go with. They bypass the labels which only tend to work for cisgender individuals, and just go for: "I like chicks and some dudes", or "I like people who look masculine", or so on.

Preferences are for this, yes. In the same way we don't have an "age range" trait or "preferred species" trait, or another trait for every trait we already have to indicate what we'd like to play with.

Additionally, "straight", "gay", etc assume two genders, with no bleed between them. Since this site recognizes more than just these two, we run into a problem. Even if we managed to find meaningful, immediately identifiable terms for all of the possible orientations from our four gender traits, it would clearly be much more unwieldy than just setting preferences directly.

Well, people not understanding preferences is a problem that will only dog them as long as they use the site. The solution to that problem is to make it easier to understand and use preferences, not to compromise the system with half-and-halfs.

There's a suggestion somewhere else for "half-heart" preferences, also.

A problem that you have even if you understand how preferences work is, you can only express simple gender preferences. You can select, penis=dislike. But you cannot select man-with-penis=like and woman-with-penis=dislike.

That is definitely a relevant breakdown in how gender/sex preferences currently work. ^

@Desdemona, there's a few proposed way to tackle that, such as profile inspirations. However, I don't think that is currently all that relevant to this current conversation, since we'd have the same problem with "straight", "gay" etc.

Correct for "straight" and "gay" but he also mentioned "Bisexual". "Bisexual: Prefers characters who don't mix female and male gender trait-categories or gender traits with the opposite genitals." Something you cannot express with preferences.

That's not a definition of bisexual I'm aware of (nor one that I'd think most bisexuals would find acceptable), but something important to keep in mind is the whole "straight", "gay", "bisexual" etc. labels totally break down when we have more than two genders, like here. You can attempt to impose more meaning on the labels, but ultimately, people will bring their own understanding of labels to the table. What is "straight" for a person with a penis who identifies as a woman? Is it "straight" based on their genitals or their identification? If they have sex with a man, does that make it gay sex? What if that man has a vagina?

There is no definitive answer for these things, and tons and tons of opinions about what each mean. That makes them extremely problematic to use for categorization on a site like this.

So the take away from what I've read:

• The current system is confusing, especially to new players and even to some experienced players (I'm confused often for what that is worth).
• the current system lacks a degree of fidelity that is desired, particularly in the various combinations of traits we already have defined.
• the use of terms like straight, gay, bisexual isn't favored because it's as vague or worse than what we already have.

Bisexuality is romantic attraction, sexual attraction, or sexual behavior toward both males and females.... Bisexuality (en.wikipedia.org)

This certainly got more attention than I thought it would get!

Personally I would still prefer to see the standard "straight, "gay" or "bisexual" tags, even if they dont fit into all scenarios (I can imagine this being a bit confusing for shemales, as what does gay or straight mean for them?). Maybe there should be an additional option there to add more details?

Like lets say I am a shemale and identify as woman (since that is the main crux here with dual gendered characters). Since I identify as a woman, ticking on straight would obviously mean I'd prefer being with men. But to others this might mean I prefer other women. So what if there's a sub-preference where I could use the current like and dislike system to add penis to likes and vagina to dislikes.

Its probably still not ideal, but to me this would make it a lot easier to read what a person is into from the get-go.

@Evelynn: The problem is not your characters gender. Instead of "gay" and "straight" we could use "prefers male" and "prefers female", then your gender is of no importance anymore. Even without a defined gender you can work around this. For example:

Sexual Orientation: Male (Accepts sexual partners with male gender traits and a penis). Female (Accepts sexual partners with female gender traits and a vagina) . Male and Female (bisexual) (Accepts sexual partners with male gender traits and a penis OR female gender traits and a vagina). Male preferred and female (Prefers sexual partners with male gender traits and a penis but accepts ALSO female gender traits and a vagina). Pansexuel (Has no preference for gender traits and genitals at all). Female gender (Accepts sexual partners with female gender traits with penis or vagina).

The problem here is "It is not intuitive for new users to list their sexual preference or see it on other profiles." The proposed solution is the creation of a new trait. I agree with Samus that using interests instead of a trait would be preferable, especially because of the nuance you can add. Someone can be crazy into guys, but just so-so into girls. or vice versa. Or all the other things.

Still, burying orientation in the big lists of interests isn't perfectly ideal either and the preference system is there for a reason. I think the best thing would be to make preferences more intuitive, both when adding them and when viewing them on other profiles.