The wind-up: I’ve done some reading about the statistics and biology (or at least, what little we know of the biology) behind homosexuality. Not enough to rattle off facts, but enough to remember bits and pieces. From what I remember, homosexuality is roughly twice as prevalent in men as in women, and men are also more likely to be completely homosexual, as opposed to attracted to both sexes.
My actual question: From personal observation, it seems like a woman is more likely to be bisexual than a man, but a man is more likely to be homosexual than a woman. So my question for everybody is (1) Is this true? and (2) If so, why?
I think your question assumes something not at all in evidence: that we can distinguish between inclinations that we’re intrinsically born with and how those inclinations are filtered by our social context.
In short, we don’t know and don’t have the ability to know.
(1) Seems to be true, at least according to several studies.
(2) That’s a darn good question. No one really knows.
One of the theories that I have heard relates to the fact that human sexuality seems to be partly biologically based (i.e. you’re born that way) and part developmentally based, either through natural development or environmental factors. With respect to women, the theory is that the biological influence over sexuality isn’t as great as compared to men.
Another theory relates to the fact that women in many societies are sexualized, and this over-sexualization leads to an increase in the developmental aspects of sexuality in women. In other words, women are often taught to compare themselves to other women and look at other women’s attractiveness, where men aren’t.
There are probably other theories out there as well, but at this point they are all just theories.
I’m not sure why I would expect rates of homosexuality or bisexuality to be the same in men and women. The fact that over 90% of people, of both genders, are heterosexual would seem to be a strong indication that at least on some level, sexuality works very differently for men vs. women (i.e., most men are sexually attracted to women, while most women are sexually attracted to men). Whatever mechanism governs sexuality, it has to be different between men and women, or we’d all be sexually attracted to the same people.
IMO the vast majority of heterosexuals (along with some homosexuals) are really bisexuals forced into an artificial dichotomy by societal pressure. This pressure is much higher in the case of men than women, whose societal perception and identity are not determined by their sexual orientation to nearly the same extent as for men.
I think this is best expressed as a continuum between total homosexuality and total heterosexuality where most people lie somewhere in between. I think for practical reasons people are more weighted toward the heterosexuality end of the scale, it helps to propagate the species, but how much so is highly open to question. In our culture that for so long has considered sexuality to be binary you would expect people closer to either end of the range to not exhibit much bisexual behavior, but culture also may be more tolerant of female bisexuality these days and explain that difference between male and female observed behavior.
A recent poll (NOT a peer reviewed study, so don’t give it a ton of weight) of 3721 US adults conducted by YouGov.com indicated that 66% reported they were purely hetero, 25% indicated they were somewhere on the bi spectrum, and 9% reported they were exclusively homosexual.
Millenials reported in as 46%, 38%, and 16% respectively.
Like many other things, it kind of depends on how you define it. I have nerve endings and the erotically responsive ones can be found in the predictable places. There’s quite a range of possibilities between the ones most immediately suggested by that and being innately inclined to find folks of the male-bodied persuasion sexy on the basis of how they look (or smell or move or sound or whatever) and hence preferring my sexual experiences to be with folks of that shape.
I don’t think that for me, exploring sexual experiences with others of the male sort would be a good idea for anyone (potentially) involved.
But does the potential exist? Of course. And if I explored it enough, I suspect it would become more erotic for me, the same way that anything you associate with erotic experiences becomes suggestive of it, subjectively, in the future. There are guys who get an erotic response from seeing a pair of panties. That’s learned conditioning, not a built-in attraction to nylon and elastic.
This is GQ, not IHMO. So it’s ok to say that the “vast majority” of heterosexuals are really just bisexuals with zero evidence whatsoever? Should someone also be able to say in General Questions that homosexuals are really just heteros who are going through a phase?
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I suspect this question may better suited to IMHO or great debates, as I’m not sure there’s a definitive answer. But if I can drift into opinion for a moment, one thought I’ve often had on this subject is that ‘swapping sides’ is a much bigger deal for men, as it flies in the face of machismo, so they’re more likely to go all in, whereas women can have a few flings with other women without feeling they’ve ditched their feminine identities.
(Full disclosure, I’m no psychologist, but do identify as a gay woman, so have some anecdotal experience).
Many years ago, I was briefly acquainted with a “straight” married guy who would go out at night and have every conceivable kind of sex with as many guys as he could get. But he refused to kiss a guy, because as he put it, “that would make me gay.”
Well FWIW, my position is largely based on the fact that many otherwise heterosexuals will engage in homosexual behavior if they find themselves in single-gender environments for long periods of time, which suggests that they have some latent attraction in that direction which doesn’t express itself ordinarily. Further, ISTM that the bifurcation into homosexual and heterosexual categories is a relatively recent phenomenon historically, and that for almost all of human history homosexual behavior was something that any person might engage in given the right circumstance.
Re the OP, I’ve seen a study which measured people’s physical arousal to sexual stimuli versus their declared preferences. They found that male physical arousal was largely in line with their declared preferences, but that women tended to get aroused by all sorts of stimuli regardless of their “official” orientation. Can’t find the study online just now, but I may look around a bit more later.
Of course, human sexuality is too complicated to fit neatly into three categories of “heterosexual”, “homosexual”, and “bisexual”. Clearly, someone who is absolutely 100% only attracted to the opposite sex is heterosexual, and someone who is exactly equally attracted to everyone regardless of sex is bisexual, but there are going to be a lot of people who prefer one sex or the other to some degree, perhaps even to a very strong degree, but who are nonetheless not quite 100%.
If your point is just that most people aren’t 100% hetero (or homo), then I don’t think that’s very controversial. The point of disagreement is just whether that means they fit the definition of “bi”.
My point is that there’s a disconnect between how people think of themselves and what their actual (possibly latent) attraction is. So that there are a lot of people who think of themselves as being completely heterosexual (Kinsey 0) but are actually on a different point on that scale (e.g. 1 or 2).
In the context of the OP, my point was that men have more societal pressure to self-identify as either 0 or 6, so more 1s and 2s (or possibly some 5s) do this and suppress their true inclinations. In the case of women there’s less of that pressure, so more are willing to consciously self-identify as bi to one extent or another.
There’s also the issue that sexuality and sexual attraction don’t necessarily coincide. Some gay males are attracted to men of hyper-macho body type and behavior, while others may prefer those who appear or act more feminine. Likewise some lesbians may prefer masculine-looking women, others who are more feminine. (Of course, there are many homosexuals who don’t have such clear preferences.)
While this is not based on any data, my impression is that most heterosexuals, whether male or female, are more consistently attracted to the body type of the opposite sex. It would be interesting to see what the correlations are between sexuality and sexual attraction.
Man, I actually sat staring at my computer, mentally waffling about whether I should put this question in IMHO or not. I actually did initially, then changed my mind, and basically thought about it for a while before finally thinking “You’re making message board categorization into a much bigger deal than it should be” and posted the question. I was thinking that if there was a good bit of statistics and science out there on this, then I’d rather read that than a bunch of people’s opinions. But after reading through these replies, it doesn’t look like there’s too much peer reviewed research on this subject.