Quote Originally Posted by Zrak View Post
This is my fault for using "valid," which was a poor choice; I didn't mean to question whether either was an acceptable/respectable thing to be, and apologize if I gave the impression of questioning the validity of either in that sense. Perhaps "real" would have been a better qualifier, though that's still ultimately troubled. What I intended to ask was what establishes one as an identarian category and the other as, I suppose, something more along the lines of a preference one happens to hold. Both terms ultimately signify (largely) exclusive attraction to a specific group of people, yet one reads as an Orientation and the other does not. This may still not be the best place for the discussion, but I nonetheless wanted to clarify.
Defaulting to validity was me hoping that I could get folks to move on due to a technicality if they didn't agree. The original hot topic was "what's the difference between a fetish and an orientation", and tread a lot of this same ground.