Title: Sexual Orientation: The Attraction View

Abstract: Traditionally, sexual orientation has been taken to be a matter of the biological sex and/or gender of the people we are oriented toward, often in relation to our own sex/gender. In this talk, I explore an alternative approach: sexual orientation is fundamentally about the sorts of sexual interactions that someone wants to have—where the biological sex and/or gender of the people we desire to interact with is often (although not always) settled by this. I then characterize one view along these lines: this is the Attraction View, according to which sexual orientation is constitutively related to sexual fantasy. I argue that this view makes new and useful connections between the literature on sexual orientation and other central questions and debates in the philosophy of sex and sexuality.