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JA Brown (@jaybeebrtweets) asked me and @MCSeto, “What is a ‘sexual orientation’, anyway?” Here is my answer. Mike Seto’s might be somewhat different. #humansexresearch 1/9
The term sexual orientation is used by human sexuality researchers in two different ways, depending on their intended meaning of “sexual.” 2/9
If “sexual” is used to mean “male vs. female,” then sexual orientation simply means “heterosexual, bisexual, or homosexual.” (One might also refer to asexuality as a sexual orientation, but that would be a bit like calling atheism a religion.) 3/9
If “sexual” means “erotic,” then sexual orientation refers to any strong, sustained target choice (adults or children; males or females; humans or animals; living things or inanimate objects) or activity preference (mutual fondling, coitus vs exhibitionism, voyeurism, etc). 4/9
Some civil rights legislation uses “sexual orientation” in the first sense, which causes activists to regard it as a “reserved term.” Thus they object to phrases like “pedophilic orientation.” (Even in legal sources, however, one finds hilariously inconsistent definitions.) 5/9 
For people who insist on sensu 1, it is irrelevant whether pedophilia (zoophilia, shoe fetishism, or other paraphilias) are similar to teleiophilia in terms of age at onset, clinical course, mutability, common etiological origins, and so on. 6/9
I prefer to sidestep these semantic disputes and use terms like erotic age preference (pedophilia, hebephilia, teleiophilia, gerontophilia), erotic object preference (humans vs shoes), or erotic activity preference (consensual intercourse, exposing, peeping, lust-murder etc). 7/9
An earlier generation of gay liberation activists forbade the term “sexual preference” on the grounds that “preference” implies free will whereas “orientation” does not. (I doubt whether this distinction derives from philosophical writings on free will vs. determinism.) 8/9
Conclusions: If you are writing about paraphilias (strong, sustained, unusual sexual interests) and want to compare them with common, socially desirable sexual interests, it’s probably safer in 2019 to use “erotic preferences” than “sexual orientations.” 9/9
