Gayness is hard, lesbianism soft
<p>Fascinating.  <a href='http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/05/health/05sex.html?hp&#038;ex=1120536000&#038;en=fe092b89e149e2d4&#038;ei=5094&#038;partner=homepage'>This NYT article</a> bears out a suspicion I&#8217;ve held for a long time about the  plasticity of sexual orientation.  The crude one-sentence summary is that, if you go by physiological arousal reactions, male bisexuality doesn&#8217;t exist, while female bisexuality is ubiquitous.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve spent most of my social time for the last thirty years around science fiction fans, neopagans, and polyamorists &mdash; three overlapping groups of people not exactly noted for either sexual inhibitions or reluctance to explore sexual roles that don&#8217;t fit the neat typologies of the mainstream culture.  And there are a couple of things it&#8217;s hard not to notice about them:</p>
<p>First, a huge majority of the women in these cultures are bisexual.  To the point where I just assume any female I meet in these contexts is bi. This reality is only slightly obscured by the fact that many of these women describe themselves and are socially viewed by others as &#8216;straight&#8217;, even as they engage in sexual play with each other during group scenes with every evidence of enjoyment. In fact, in these cultures the operational definition of &#8216;straight female&#8217; seems to be one who has recreational but not relational/romantic sex with other women.</p>
<p>Second, this pattern is absolutely not mirrored in their male peers.  Even in these uninhibited subcultures, homoerotic behavior involving self-described &#8216;straight&#8217; men is rare and surprising.  Such homeoeroticism as does go on is almost all self-describedly gay men fucking other self-describedly gay men; bisexuality in men, while an accepted and un-tabooed orientation, is actually less common than gayness and not considered quite normal by anybody.  The contrast with everybody&#8217;s matter-of-fact acceptance of female bisexual behavior is extreme.</p>
<p>It is also an observable fact that many women in these cultures change either their sexual orientation or their sexual presentation over time, but that this is seldom true of men.  That is, a woman may move from being sexually involved mostly with other women to being mostly involved with men, and back, several times during her  adolescent and adult lifetime; nobody considers this surprising and it doesn&#8217;t involve much of a change in either self-image or social identity.  Not so for men in these cultures; they tend to start out as straight or gay and stay that way, and on the unusual occasions  that this changes it tends to involve a significant break in both self-image and social identity.</p>
<p>Until I read the abovementioned NYT article, I thought these were peculiar, contingent traits of this group of subcultures (which are influenced by each other). That is, I thought that (in the jargon of postmodernism) SF fans, neopagans and polyamorists had arrived at a common social construction of sexuality with no privileged relationship to the biological substructure.</p>
<p>Now I wonder.  If the studies the article references are correct, the distribution of behaviors I&#8217;ve been describing is exactly what you see when you bypass self-consciousness and social construction entirely, and just measure how aroused people get when they look at pictures of other naked people.  This actually is how our biology &#8216;wants&#8217; us to be!  Who knew?</p>
