ThisisBigBrother.com - UK TV Forums - Does sleeping with Courtney act make you bi?

No. Do heterosexual pornstars that have to film scenes with people of the same sex consider their sexuality changed? I very much doubt it, they're being paid to do a job. Taking this to its logical conclusion, it is and would be perfectly possible for anyone to be intrigued enough to want to "try" something without it changing their sexual orientation. If a gay guy was drunk with his lesbian best friend, and they both wondered what it'd be like to sleep with the opposite sex - why would they have any cause to consider themselves bi or even bicurious? This all works exactly the same way as sleeping with someone you don't find attractive. You can still do it even if you're not attracted to them.

This is without even considering that there are a multitude of other things that can encompass one's sexuality, narrowing it down solely to gender and/or genitalia preference is actually very delimiting. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet is an enlightening and thought-provoking read on this matter:

Quote:

It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another (dimensions that include preference for certain acts, certain zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species, a certain number of participants, etc. etc. etc.), precisely one, the gender of object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as the dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of "sexual orientation". This is not a development that would have been foreseen from the viewpoint of the fin de siècle itself, where a rich stew of male algolagnia, child-love, and autoeroticism, to mention no more of its components, seemed to have as indicative a relation as did homosexuality to the whole, obsessively entertained problematic of sexual "prevision" or, more broadly, "decadence". Foucault, for instance, mentions the hysterical woman and the masturbating child, along with the "entomologized" sexological categories such as zoophiles, zooerasts, auto-monosexualists, and gynecomasts, as typifying the new sexual taxonomies, the "specification of individuals" that facilitated the modern freighting of sexual definition with epistemological and power relations. True as his notation is, it suggests without beginning to answer the further question: why the category of "the masturbator", to choose only one example, should by now have entirely lost its diacritical potential for specifying a particular kind of person, an identity, at the same time as it continues to be true - becomes increasingly true - that, for a crucial strain of Western discourse, in Foucault's words "the homosexual was now a species". So, as a result, is the heterosexual, and between these species the human species has come more and more to be divided.

(pp. 8-9)

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It is certainly true that without a concept of gender there could be, quite simply, no concept of homo- or heterosexuality. But many other dimensions of sexual choice (auto- or alloerotic, within or between generations, species, etc.) have no such distinctive, explicit definitional connection with gender; indeed, some dimensions of sexuality might be tied, not to gender, but instead to differences or similarities of race or class. The definitional narrowing-down in this century of sexuality as a whole to a binarized calculus of homo- or heterosexuality is a weighty fact but an entirely historical one.

(p. 31)

Further reading:

Spoiler:

Quote:

In the particular area of sexuality, for instance, I assume that most of us know the following things that can differentiate even people of identical gender, race, nationality, class, and "sexual orientation" - each one of which, however, if taken seriously as pure difference, retains the unaccounted-for potential to disrupt many forms of the available thinking about sexuality.

Even identical genital acts mean very different things to different people.
To some people, the nimbus of "the sexual" seems scarcely to extend beyond the boundaries of discrete gential acts; to others, it enfolds them loosely or floats virtually free of them.
Sexuality makes up a large share of the self-perceived identity of some people, a small share of others'
Some people spend a lot of time thinking about sex, others little.
Some people like to have a lot of sex, others little or none.
Many people have their richest mental/emotional involvement with sexual acts that they don't do, or even don't want to do.
For some people, it is imporant that sex be embedded in contexts resonant with meaning, narrative, and connectedness with other aspects of their life; for other people, it is important that they not be; to others it doesn't occur that they might be.
For some people, the preference for a certain sexual object, act, role, zone, or scenario is so immemorial and durable that it can only be experienced as innate; for others, it appears to come late or to feel aleatory or discretionary.
For some people, the possibility of bad sex is aversive enough that their lives are strongly marked by its avoidance; for others, it isn't.
For some people, sexuality provides a needed space of heightened discovery and cognitive hyperstimulation. For others, sexuality provides a needed space of routinized habituation and cognitive hiatus.
Some people like spontaneous sexual scenes, others like highly scripted ones, others like spontaneous-sounding ones that are nonetheless totally predictable.
Some people's sexual orientation is intensely marked by autoerotic pleasures and histories - sometimes more so than by any aspect of alloerotic object choice. For others the autoerotic possibility seems secondary or fragile, it if exists at all.
Some people, homo-, hetero-, and bisexual, experience their sexuality as deeply embedded in a matrix of gender meanings and gender differentials. Others of each sexuality do not.

...

To alienate conclusively, definitionally, from anyone on any theoretical ground the authority to describe and name their own sexual desire is a terribly consequential seizure. In this century, in which sexuality has been made expressive of the essence of both identity and knowledge, it may represent the most intimate violence possible.

(pp. 24-26)