Pansexuality can be broadly defined as an attraction to other people regardless of their sexual or gender identity.
Where Did ‘Pansexuality’ Come From?
The word was originally a psychological term with a kind of inverse meaning of the modern sense. Appearing around 1917, it referred to the idea that our sexual impulse permeated everything we did, everything we thought, every decision we made – it underpinned everything. It’s a concept attributed to Freud.
The modern sense is the product of convergent evolution: it’s not that the word changed its meaning over time, it’s more that it was reformulated independently from the earlier one. It’s the same word, it was just invented twice to serve two different psychosexual concepts.
It arose somewhere around 2006, probably born on the early internet from the dark fetish groups of the mid-90s. Thanks to the propagation of social media and the general advance of the internet, interest in the subject has risen dramatically since early 2015, and it was given a huge boost in October 2016, when Miley Cyrus came out as ‘pan’ or pansexual.
But, is pansexuality real? Is it just bisexuality rebranded?
What’s the Difference Between Pansexual and Bisexual?
Bisexuality is an attraction to either gender, pansexuality is an attraction with no regard for gender at all.
Bisexuality is an attraction to men or women, it assumes two genders. That’s where pansexuality comes in. It completely disregards gender or sexuality as a component of sexual attraction – pansexuality is more liquid, more inclusive, and less binary than bisexuality.
It’s hard to compare two different psychosexual conceptual frameworks because they are fundamentally different. Pansexuality is not a rejection of the binary, it’s an acceptance of fluidity. Bisexuality accepts the binary, while pansexuality doesn’t acknowledge gender at all, and lives somewhere outside it entirely.
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