Covid Lockdown Gives Folks Time to Change Their Sexual Identity

 The insanity continues!  This BBC article is explaining how people were locked up during the pandemic they finally had the time to reflect and dig into themselves.  The alone time made lots of people uncomfortable in their own skin.  So as they say and reflected on their sexuality (maybe because of countless hours of watching porn?) many decided that they were no longer heterosexual but had really become something else!  Like maybe bisexual or non binary or queer or trans?  The list is limitless!  So exciting to be a woman and change your Tik Tok and dating app settings to “bi”!  Think of the attention they will get!  Think of the fun comments you will get like, “you’re so brave!”  Also of note is that this strange phenomenon has seemed to infect the weaker sex at a higher proportion.  Maybe this points to the lateness of the hour as well because Paul reminds us that societal breakdown has its signs when “even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones”.  Yep

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According to Blair’s research, this experience is relatively common. With people spending more time “courting” online before meeting up in person due to pandemic-related restrictions, “it may have been more likely that people would toy with the idea of ‘checking the other box’ when asked who they were looking to meet”, she says. Dating someone of a different gender than people were used to became “a bit more approachable”.

Both experts and daters alike told BBC Worklife that media also contributed to people re-thinking their sexual orientations, including social networks, podcasts and television shows – which people were consuming at higher rates while isolating indoors. Guttman even advised some of her clients to listen to podcasts and watch shows “with more LGBTQIA+ interactions” to “normalise” it for those newly testing out those identities. 

At the same time, many TikTok users like Violet Turning, a New York City-based sex educator, saw a swell of young women discussing their shift from identifying as straight to lesbian, queer or bisexual during the pandemic.

“My whole feed was young women who were like, ‘I entered the pandemic straight, and now I’m in a lesbian relationship’,” says Turning. Some mentioned having “suppressed” those desires until the pandemic gave them space to explore, while Turning saw others say they’d taken time to discover the history of heterosexual relationships and began newly questioning their sexuality after learning more about female oppression in those contexts. She sees the spread of this information on TikTok as “validating for folks… exploring sexuality beyond the binary”.

This was true for Lauren, who downloaded TikTok during the pandemic, and was immediately confronted with videos of people who, like her, had identified as bisexual before coming out as lesbian. She attributes this to more people getting involved with online conversations at a time when pandemic-based restrictions severely limited in-person social lives. (There are several reasons why more women seem to embrace sexual fluidity than men, a ratio reflected in Guttman’s clients – of the roughly dozen who explored changes to their sexual orientation during lockdowns, just two were men.)

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220224-why-sexual-identities-shifted-during-the-pandemic