Bisexuality

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A baker's dozen on sex
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Bisexuality (also known as swinging both wayz, or playing for both teams) refers to romantic or sexual attraction to both males and females. Contrary to popular myth, bisexuals rarely are attracted to both genders equally, and normally have preference for one or the other. For example, a person may be happy to have homosexual encounters for fun or just sex, but not as a relationship. The Kinsey scale, developed by sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, provides for these sort of variances in attraction for one sex or another; 7 points ranging from purely heterosexual at 0 to purely homosexual at 6, with 3 in the middle. Although this is a quite simplified model and doesn't take into account special exceptions (such as the "I'd go gay for..." game), fetishes, or the like, it works well enough to indicate preferences, and show people that sexuality isn't a binary.

Contents

[edit] Attitudes

The conventional wisdom on the matter is that women are more likely to be bisexual than men.[1] However, this may be due to the fact that bisexual women are more "socially acceptable" than bisexual men in the modern world. It's certainly true that whenever the word "threesome" is bounced around in popular culture it invariably implies that the third person is female.

Some detractors of bisexuality believe (a stance generally considered incorrect by sex educators and psychiatrists, not to mention bisexuals themselves) that bisexuals are actually homosexuals in denial, or perhaps homosexual or heterosexual but too confused to admit either way, or heterosexuals going through an experimentation phase. These negative attitudes often come just as much from the "gay community" as they do from the "straight community", and thus B in LGBT can often be a very separate issue to the others.

[edit] Science

Bisexuality in certain animals has been shown to be evidence of flexibility of gender—a form of chemically-induced hermaphroditism that many species of frogs and fish[2] retain but mammals appear to have lost.

In humans, studies further reinforce the idea that sexuality is not binary. Women tend to be more flexible in what they find "sexy" than men.[3][4][5]

[edit] Relation to reparative therapy

Joseph Nicolosi, Ph.D., in his book Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality; a clinical approach,[6] seems to advocate for a very similar scale to Kinsey's. He states, "Each individual falls somewhere along the heterosexual-homosexual continuum, possibly moving from one direction to the other during different life stages." This heterosexual-homosexual continuum is remarkably similar to Kinsey's, and suggests that reparative therapy does not involve changing homosexual orientation, but simply changing the activities of bisexuals, a theory supported by follow-up studies.[7]

The concept of bisexuality is related to pansexuality, which assumes more than two genders or gender expressions.

[edit] Game-theoretical considerations

According to Woody Allen,[8] bisexuality doubles your chances of getting a date on a Saturday night (see, they're not confused, they're just greedy).

According to many disgruntled bisexuals, bisexuality lets you explore how the gender not usually desired can be duplicitous fuckwits just as much as the one you were used to.

[edit] Amusing offshoots

Some straight women (at least, in Western countries) are admitting to being "barsexuals", a term used to describe girls who make out and fool around with other girls at bars to activate the imaginations of straight guys and/or free drinks (in other words: attention whores).[9]

Comedian Andy Dick admitted to being "trisexual", as affirmed by the statement, "I'll tri anything!"[10]

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

  1. Although this may be skewed by the existence of the Suicide Girls, for whom bisexuality is a prerequisite.
  2. http://www.sefsc.noaa.gov/sedar/download/S22_DW_14.pdf?id=DOCUMENT
  3. Study Suggests Difference Between Female And Male Sexuality, ScienceDaily.com
  4. Bisexuality Not A Transitional Phase Among Women, According To New Research, ScienceDaily.com
  5. Women's Bodies and Minds Agree Less Than Men's On What's Sexy, ScienceDaily.com
  6. http://www.narth.com/docs/repair.html
  7. http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/html/facts_changing.html
  8. BrainyQuote:Woody Allen quotes
  9. [1]
  10. [2]
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