Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Archives of Sexual Behavior (2022) 51:1201–1219 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-02202-6 ORIGINAL PAPER Sexual Orientation Across Porn Use, Sexual Fantasy, and In‑Person Sexuality: Visualizing Branchedness and Coincidence via Sexual Confgurations Theory Aki M. Gormezano 1  · Emily A. Harris 1  · Stéphanie E. M. Gauvin 1  · Jude Pinto 1  · Greg van Anders 2  · Sari M. van Anders 1,3,4 Received: 3 May 2021 / Revised: 19 October 2021 / Accepted: 20 October 2021 / Published online: 2 February 2022 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2022 Abstract Sexual orientation describes sexual interests, approaches, arousals, and attractions. People experience these interests and attractions in a number of contexts, including in-person sexuality, fantasy, and porn use, among others. The extent to which sexual orientation is divergent (branched) and/or overlapping (coincident) across these, however, is unclear. In the present study, a gender/sex and sexually diverse sample (N = 30; 15 gender/sex/ual minorities and 15 majorities) manipulated digital circles representing porn use, in-person sexuality, and fantasy on a tablet during in-person interviews. Participants used circle overlap to represent the degree of shared sexual interests across contexts and circle size to indicate the strength and/or number of sexual interests within contexts. Across multiple dimensions of sexual orientation (gender/sex, partner number, and action/behavior), we found evidence that sexual interests were both branched and coincident. These fndings contribute to new understandings about the multifaceted nature of sexual orientations across contexts and provide a novel way to measure, conceptualize, and understand sexual orientation in context. Keywords Porn · Fantasy · Partnered sexuality · Sexual confgurations theory · Sexual orientation * Sari M. van Anders sari.vananders@queensu.ca 1 Department of Psychology, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada 2 Department of Physics, Engineering Physics and Astronomy, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada 3 Department of Gender Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada 4 Centre for Neuroscience Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada Introduction Sexual orientation is a central focus of sexuality research, and it describes sexual interests, approaches, arousals, and attrac- tions (van Anders, 2015). People experience these attractions and interests in diferent sexual situations or contexts, including in-person sexuality (sexual interactions in which at least one partner is physically present), fantasy (auditory, visual, and/ or sensory thoughts about sexuality), and porn use (auditory, visual, and/or written sexual media), among others. While these three contexts overlap and connect, they are also understood very diferently. In-person sexuality is often treated as more meaningful or important than sexuality that centers around porn or fantasy. With porn use, for example, it is common for researchers to ask questions about how the frequency or content of pornography use impacts in-person behaviors (e.g., Braithwaite et al., 2015; Donnerstein, 1980), relationship satisfaction (for a review, see Campbell & Kohut, 2017), or sexual scripts with in-person part- ners (for a review, see Carrotte et al., 2020) than it is to conduct research that investigates the reverse or just use of porn alone. In addition, and somewhat paradoxically, these three con- texts—in-person sexuality, fantasy, and porn use—are often seen as interchangeable in terms of sexual interests, or that sexual interests in one translate to the others. This is evident in general understandings and in research. Many studies use porn as “sexual stimuli” to assess gender/sex orientation as a broader construct (e.g., Chivers et al., 2010; Jabbour et al., 2020). It is also common to use the frequency with which people fantasize about diferent gender/sexes as a measure of their sexual orienta- tion (e.g., Rieger et al., 2005; Rosenthal et al., 2012). Because porn and fantasy are given less primacy than in- person sexuality, and because sexual interests are assumed to be the same across these contexts, we know less about how central each of these contexts are to people’s sexuality, and the extent to