It starts at 0, corresponding to calm winds with a speed less than 1 knot. Related: Teen Vogue Wants to Hear Your Coming Out StoriesĬheck out Teen Vogue’s October issue cover star, Elle Fanning. The Beaufort scale is primarily based on wind speed, but also incorporates descriptions of wave height, sea conditions, and land conditions. Our society has definitely come a long way in understanding sexuality, sexual orientation, and gender identity, but we still have a long way to go as well - and things like the Purple-Red Scale can help us educate ourselves and others. But it does help show us that the range of sexuality and attraction is vast, and anything but black and white. As far as Langdon’s Purple-Red Scale goes, it’s not necessarily so cut and dry: It doesn’t mean that every person falls cleanly into one lettered and numbered scale. And then there are people, like Miley Cyrus, who identify as pansexual. Anthony Bogaert, a psychologist and professor who penned the book, Understanding Asexuality, approximately one in 100 people, may be asexual.
But, as the Purple-Red Scale shows, there are so many other shades of, well, purple and red (Langdon used those colors because purple is the official color of asexuality, while hypersexual people are often referred to as “red-blooded.”) when it comes to relationships, sex, and attraction.
Many of us like to put on blinders, and assume most people we encounter are straight or gay, and nothing else. Everything else is just a consolation prize or means to an end.”Īnd, on a grander scale, things like this can be really helpful in understanding the range of human sexuality that exists. People who choose letter F, on the other hand, feel “Hyper Sexuality,” meaning “sex is the be-all-end-all purpose of any relationship. For example, people who choose letter A feel “Aromantic Asexuality,” or experience “no attraction, besides friendship and/or aesthetic attraction,” according to the chart description. To determine where you fall on this new scale, you assign a number from zero to six to represent your level of same-sex or heterosexual attraction (like in the Kinsey scale), and a letter from A to F to represent your level of interest in sex. His Purple-Red Scale takes into account not only who you’re attracted to (men, women, or both), but also how you’re attracted to them or your level of sexual attraction. But the way Langdon saw it, that scale left out a big factor: how people feel about sex. Langdon Parks created the scale as an alternative to the Kinsey scale, which was developed in 1948 to identify people’s level of attraction to the same or opposite sex on a scale from zero to six (zero being exclusively straight and six being exclusively gay).