Tuesday, July 05, 2005

Straight, Gay or Lying?

Straight, Gay or Lying? Bisexuality Revisited - New York Times: "The study, by a team of psychologists in Chicago and Toronto, lends support to those who have long been skeptical that bisexuality is a distinct and stable sexual orientation.

People who claim bisexuality, according to these critics, are usually homosexual, but are ambivalent about their homosexuality or simply closeted. 'You're either gay, straight or lying,' as some gay men have put it.

In the new study, a team of psychologists directly measured genital arousal patterns in response to images of men and women. The psychologists found that men who identified themselves as bisexual were in fact exclusively aroused by either one sex or the other, usually by other men.

The study is the largest of several small reports suggesting that the estimated 1.7 percent of men who identify themselves as bisexual show physical attraction patterns that differ substantially from their professed desires."

1 comment:

Jobe Lewis said...

It's interesting (though not surprising) that the studies focused only on physical attraction.

I'd be interested to see a follow up study to determine how many of these men had been saturated with images of nude women over the course of their lives. My guess is that most of them had, and that boredom and curiosity, above any other factor, drove these results.

But I'm certainly not a "team of psychologists directly measuring genital arousal patterns.."

Interesting Stuff