Lex Fridman

So there's social elements.

I don't know, this might be anecdotal, but I know a few women...

friends of mine who identify as bisexual, I don't know a single guy friend who identifies as bisexual.

They're either gay or straight.

So there's still a social thing going on.

Do you like the Kinsey scale as a sort of very simple reduction to that there's a spectrum?

I also saw the client sexual orientation grid that adds a few parameters, like who you're attracted to, how you're actually behaving, the fantasies you have, social preference, lifestyle preferences, all that kind of stuff, self-identification, what you actually say publicly, all those different dimensions.

Or is the Kinsey scale like pretty damn good approximation?

Yeah, that's fascinating.

So maybe the presumption there is if everything is aligned, the fantasies, the ideal partner, all of those things, that's probably the healthiest place to be.

Meaning there's some puzzles that you haven't quite figured out.

Maybe you haven't been honest with yourself about your preferences, all that kind of stuff.

How obvious, when a person is bisexual, how obvious is it to identify, like, the sexual orientation grid?

Like...

How big is the sign, whatever you are?

Since we're on the topic of sexuality, one of the things you touched on in your book on evil was kinks, sexual fantasies.

I think the point of describing that was that we often label that as evil or bad.

What can you say about what you've learned from kinks and sexual fantasies from writing that book?

I really liked what you wrote about, I guess it was in the context of BDSM or maybe sadomasochism or maybe just the submissive dominant dynamic, like why that might be appealing, the disinhibition hypothesis.

I guess this applies generally to sexual fantasies, is if you live them out, that you could just let go of all the bullshit that we put up in normal society, that you could just be all in, fully present to the pleasure of it.