Fair enough, but it seems to matter. My country has released statistics claiming bisexual people are the most victimised people of all. This makes a difference in resources allocated etc.
Hahah I've got nothing against flippancy. I was only curious about the response in the first place. And I appreciated your response. Are you bisexual yourself or responding on principle?
I think your assumption that the reason is that it's immutable is false. Whether it's immutable or not is irrelevant, however much it is brought up in rhetoric. The conservatives will say something like it's a sinful choice and because the lgbt have to respond immediately the have to disagree and say it's not a choice (which matches their internal experience) rather than the more fundamentally important but subtler to argue fact that it isn't wrong for any rational reason (which many people will be tough to convince because "ew gross")
This is something I've thought about a lot and I think the problem with this line of reasoning is that it assumes a natural rights based approach from the outset where really it's a matter of consequentialism.
The short version is that the legal protections are deserved because there's a large attacking force to defend against. Without the legal protections, a substantial enough number of people would and were going out of their way to be awful to lgbt people that it meaningfully excluded them from participation in large parts of society and left them at distinct economic and social disadvantages (we called this "oppressed" for short hand)
Foot fetishists don't need legal protections because there's no large attacking movement motivated or capable of oppressing them. If there were, they would be deserving of the protections and I would be 100% behind them. This remains true for any such minority where the matter at hand is victimless. Pedophiles get no such protection because society has good reason to discriminate against them.
Now not every protection that ended up existing is necessarily appropriate or one I agree with, and the battles taking place are often as you say illiberal. I don't think anyone should be forced to make any kind of cake. Even if it really were the case that if people could refuse to make you a cake that you had no other option and got no cake, cake-having is not some important way of participating in society that we need to protect.
Employment however is, and sadly in the way we've built society employment is also largely how people in the USA access healthcare and engage in many or most of their social interactions. These are all ways of societal participation that are important and valuable both to the individuals and society and are deserving of protection, because it leads to improved outcomes in a high stakes way.
If the complaint is "but that violates my natural right to discriminate" I agree but don't care. We live in a society, delenda est. "Rights" aren't real, outcomes are what matters. Rights based thinking is a useful heuristic that we shouldn't do away with, but the outcomes is what it's all for.
I believe you’re fundamentally disagreeing with Scott’s point in this post. The post is that bisexuality is real, but I get the impression you think it’s not because most people choose not to practice it in full effect. The law simply does not, nor should it, choose which sexual preferences should be protected - just that all are. I don’t see a cost difference to a business not being able to discriminate against bisexuals compared to homosexuals. I truly don’t understand what these costs, monetary or otherwise, that you speak of are?
"You can discriminate against bisexual people but not gay or lesbian people because they can pass for straight" is going to immediately turn into "prove that you're actually gay enough to deserve protection," which is immediately going to turn into "this guy had a straight relationship while he was in the closet, clearly he doesn't "really need" protection from discrimination because he's already shown he was capable of staying in the closet." Such a policy would be seen and used as a backdoor way of discriminating against gay and lesbian people by forcing them to pass the appropriate purity tests.
Draw the borders of your discrimination protection wide, because people will inevitably try to chip away at the edges.
Thank you for this well reasoned response. Something I love about these comments is that folks take the time to actually make rational arguments for progessive stances rather than just shaming and downvoting any non-progressive comments into oblivion.
My point is that religion isn't immutable. People convert all the time. The inclusion of religion in protected categories demonstrates that a trait doesn't have to be immutable to be protected.
You can't fire gays or transes for being gays or trans for the same reason that you can't be fired for your catholicism kink.
This feels like a quite idiosyncratically American perspective, "I can fire someone for doing something I find icky in their personal life" is not, as I understand it, the case for most European countries, and would be considered unfair dismissal, and something you could be sued for.
<i>rather than the more fundamentally important but subtler to argue fact that it isn't wrong for any rational reason (which many people will be tough to convince because "ew gross")</i>
Objection, m'lud: the disgust instinct developed to protect us, and most everything we find disgusting is in fact harmful in some way.* Therefore, "ew gross" is in fact a perfectly rational reason for thinking something's wrong.
* If you think homosexuality's an exception here, I can only advise you to look up rates of STD transmission amongst gay men.
It's a reason to *check* if something's wrong, but not to assume it, especially given how far we are from the ancestral environment.
Images of gross, probably pathogen-ridden things on a screen can trigger the disgust reaction for most people, despite the fact that there is no way for the disease to spread through the intertubes.
And lest you get too hung up on the homosexuality/STD link, by the same logic, checking into the rates of STD transmission among straight people vs asexuals might convince you there is something wrong with having a sex drive at all.
This check will terminate with a different result according to the person doing it, depending on the priors, risk tolerance, past experiences, etc... We never bat an eye when a person say they don't like flying, even though the numbers clearly show that flying is very safe, much more so than cars in fact. We still respect the people who decided it's too much risk for them, despite their flawed risk calculus.
But when it comes to homosexuality, suddenly you're not allowed to even think of the naughty conclusion.
>there is something wrong with having a sex drive at all.
I mean, a sexual conservative like me will very much give you a "Your Terms Are Acceptable" meme here. STDs are downhill from promiscuity, not homosexuality per se. It just so happens that (western, mid-late 20th century and 21st) homosexuals were/are promiscuous as hell, so they have some impressive numbers. But I equally well remember reading how STDs were rampant in, say, military camps (Nazis in 1940s France, US troops in 1950s Korea) because they heavily employ prostitutes. It's not really "having a sex drive at all" that is dangerous - although sex drive is indeed a bitch of a desire and the bane of the human condition for all of history - but when it comes to STDs in particular it's more like "having a sex drive and satisfying it by being a slut". You can hump your pillow or satisfy yourself with your hands for weeks and months and you will never catch an STD.
The fundamental trap for an atheist, a very cruel and deceptive one, is to realize that Religion and Tradition may have been wrong about lots and lots of things, all too many to count. But they are extremly good at one thing : Devising rules to hold society together. We don't need to adhere to those rules unconditionally, we just have to realize that they are there for a reason, and that reason is that they have been successful at holding society together. You see those ideologies saying "a merciful god created this [aweful] universe" or "a virgin woman gave birth", and you're awefully tempted to pee on every single thing they say, but no. Those ideologies are indeed a dumpster fire of wrongness and cruelty, but when it comes to sex and sexual dynamics they are 80-90% on the money.
And the most bitter pill of all is that most people aren't fit for freedom, sexual or otherwise.
Uh, you seem to be responding to some straw version of me, or optimizing for conflict, so if that continues to be the case I'm not going to respond again, but here's an attempt at good-faith engagement:
> This check will terminate with a different result according to the person doing it
Yes, different people have disgust reactions to different things at different levels.
> We never bat an eye when a person say they don't like flying....When it comes to homosexuality, suddenly you're not allowed to even think of the naughty conclusion.
You're allowed to be disgusted by homosexuality, at least according to me. You're not allowed to shame other people for it or try to stop them. The same holds for flying - if you don't want to fly, that's up to you, but it would be widely considered crazy if you held a protest campaign against flying on the grounds that it's dangerous. (It would be considered pretty normal if it was on grounds of environmental harm, but that's a whole separate conversation.)
> I mean, a sexual conservative like me will very much give you a "Your Terms Are Acceptable" meme here.
Yeah, that's a valid way to resolve this.
> It's not really "having a sex drive at all" that is dangerous ... it's more like "having a sex drive and satisfying it by being a slut". You can hump your pillow or satisfy yourself with your hands for weeks and months and you will never catch an STD.
Yes, but that's just as true for homosexual drives as heterosexual ones.
> The fundamental trap for an atheist, a very cruel and deceptive one, is to realize that Religion and Tradition may have been wrong about lots and lots of things, all too many to count. But they are extremly good at one thing : Devising rules to hold society together.
Yes, I agree, there's a good reason the major religions were so successful for so long. I'm not sure why you brought this up, though, as I said nothing about my own religious beliefs.
> when it comes to sex and sexual dynamics they are 80-90% on the money
Maybe if you're optimizing for something very different than I am in society. Like, I don't disagree that you can run a cohesive society on conservative sexual norms, I just don't think it's the only or best way to do so. Also, these religions are optimized for a different time, in particular a time without contraception and antibiotics.
> most people aren't fit for freedom, sexual or otherwise
I empathize with this feeling - there was a point when I would have said the same, and it's still a thing I feel occasionally. People sure are imperfect and untrustworthy and irrational and self-destructive a lot of the time. I think most of the problem with this line of thought is that the alternative is putting a small number of people in charge, who are then also people with all the same flaws you're worried about in the general populace.
And when the quirks and flaws of the leadership go unchecked, we can quickly end up in some very bad places. At least when you give people freedom, everyone is pulling in different directions and a lot of the most horrible things average each other out.
(And if you're thinking "well yeah, *most* people aren't fit for freedom or leadership, but *I* am - I empathize with that too, but it's ultimately hubris, and exactly the sort of human flaw that makes dictatorship dangerous)
>you seem to be responding to some straw version of me, or optimizing for conflict
How so ?
>You're allowed to be disgusted by homosexuality, at least according to me.
The "At least according to me" part is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Certainly, when/if I get banned from a social media platform because I said "homosexuality is disgusting", telling them "Oohhh but oxytocin-love says it's okay to be disgusted by homosexuality!" won't yield any results to speak of. What good is that ? I'm sure that many Russians under Stalin were completely okay with dissing him till the cows come home, just not those with the guns or the power.
>You're not allowed to shame other people for it or try to stop them.
Eh, this is equivalent to "You're allowed to have different opinions, just be sure to shut the hell up about them", a familiar hallmark of plenty of authoritarian systems.
What *is* 'shaming other people' ? I'm not going to point and laugh at them, that's for sure. But can I point out the high rates of STD ? The rampant promiscuity ? The constant corporate pandering ? The creepy obsession with children ? The explicitly propagandistic "People will love us more if we make a lot of noise and control their favorite media" attitude ?
Is any of this shaming ? Does it matter ?
Almost every normative ideology involves "shaming" to some extent or the other. An effective altruist can be said to "shame" people who don't think carefully about spending their time and money on those in need, even the very name implies they are "ineffective" aka useless. A vegan can be said to shame meat-eaters by saying that killing animals is a crime (and I agree), calling people killers is not exactly a flattering thing. A muslim can be said to shame non-muslims just by reading the Quran. The part of the Quran that every good muslim is supposed to read 5 times a day, a part literally named "The Intro" in Arabic, contains this gem : "Those who You [God] are not angered by, nor those who had gone astray". How is that for shaming ? And believe me, "angered by" and "gone astray" are lot more harsh in Arabic than they seem in English.
If we're (generally) ok with all of this, why not with being anti-lgbt ?
>Yes, but that's just as true for homosexual drives as heterosexual ones.
Certainly, and I said as much. But in the current place and time we're in, it's a fact that homosexuals happen to be more promiscuous and less monogamous.
>I'm not sure why you brought this up
This was just a self reminder, since I'm an atheist who gradually and reluctantly came to realize that lots of religions are optimal with respect to lots of thing. I'm saying it because it's a subtle trap that's very easy to fall into.
>Maybe if you're optimizing for something very different than I am in society.
Yeah, and the million dollar question is, of course : how should we share a society then ? I don't want to be reminded of the sexual practices of people every day of my waking life for a month of every year, but saying this is apparently contraversial and will get those people doing it very mad ? I don't want kids watching cartoons to be reminded of that either, but alas, that's bigotry nowadays.
If we were living in a pre-nation-state world or in space, I can just pack up and find me another place to live. But that's not feasible in the world we happen to live in.
>the alternative is putting a small number of people in charge,
Well, clearly, some things don't need to have someone "in charge". Like I don't need an HR department and public corporate speakers to remind me of which pronouns I'm supposed to use in my everyday life, I don't need the management of social media plaforms to constantly throw rainbows at me a month of every year. People have been very okay for the vast majority of history with none of those made up bullshit authorities. And yet, as soon as we gave some group the freedoms they want, they made up those authorities and maneuvered for them to have a lot of power, and now lots of people must shut up and bear things they don't want to.
So the paradox of freedom is that more of it is less. When people weren't allowed to be a certain way, people didn't need to be worried about getting fired for using "he" instead of "she". When people were allowed the first, people now have to worry about the second. Asking for and\or giving Freedoms is a zero- or even negative-sum game, the more you play the more you lose.
<i>It's a reason to *check* if something's wrong, but not to assume it, especially given how far we are from the ancestral environment.</i>
In the absence of countervailing evidence, it's generally safer to assume your instinctive reaction is correct. Chesterton's Fence and all that.
<i>And lest you get too hung up on the homosexuality/STD link, by the same logic, checking into the rates of STD transmission among straight people vs asexuals might convince you there is something wrong with having a sex drive at all.</i>
Heterosexual sex is important for carrying on the human species, what comparable benefits does homosexual sex bring?
Sure, there's a reasonable argument (though not one I subscribe to) that heterosexual sex is better/more important/more moral than homosexual sex because it is important for carrying on the species.
My point is just that that's unrelated to whether it causes a disgust reaction or carries disease risk.
<i>Sure, there's a reasonable argument (though not one I subscribe to) that heterosexual sex is better/more important/more moral than homosexual sex because it is important for carrying on the species.</i>
It seems rather nihilistic to dismiss the importance of something which is necessary for the continued survival of humanity, unless I've misunderstood you.
<i>My point is just that that's unrelated to whether it causes a disgust reaction or carries disease risk.</i>
My point is that, in the case of heterosexual sex, there are good reasons for engaging in it even without the disease risk (which, if you live chastely, is practically zero anyway). Homosexual sex is not only more risky, it doesn't even have the defence of being necessary.
Can you support your second point? It doesn't seem in accord with Lawrence v. Texas, Obergefell v. Hodges, or, most relevantly, Bostock v. Clayton.
I understand why people invoke "born this way", but I've always thought it was weak sauce. I was born an American, I'll suck cock if I damn well feel like it.
What special protections do you think the LGBT community has over and above any other citizen? Protections for sexual orientation includes heterosexuality. You just don't hear about cases of heterosexual discrimination because heterosexuals are almost never attacked for that specifically. The problem is clearly that you think of LGBT protections as "elevated" laws, when in reality they are laws designed to bring LGBT people back to the same level as the average person.
And It's fairly obvious that people like Solana are wrong: it's much easier to attack and take rights away from a group that is smaller than one that is larger.
On the level of laws, I agree. On the level of laws, whites are also just as protected as blacks, males just as much as females. We all know that's not the case in reality. How many male-only awards, support groups, or fellowships, have you seen? How many people in liberal circles use "black female" as a derogatory term, as opposed to "white male"? In reality, women, LGBT people, and racial minorities (except Asians) *are* being put on a pedestal and treated as ubermenschen.
What percentage would we assign long covid as psychosomatic? Is media coverage propagating both bisexuality and long covid to the same people? In that case, does segmenting based on media sources affect incidence?
Speaking on the basis of one case, my sister claimed to be over long Covid long before she was. She still isn't over it (frequent memory lapses...improving gradually). So how much denial of long Covid is psychosomatic?
Perhaps 7 partners before marriage seems low to you because you don't know enough people who marry the first person they date. If anything, 7 seems too high to me.
If you (Scott) have been part of a polyamorous scene where some people have 7 partners at a time, the folks marrying high school sweethearts are part of your dark matter universe.
The range seems very, very wide. There are already many articles, posts, books, etc. out there about what happens to the dating pool when the people who want to and can get married quickly do so, leaving others with high search costs and long search times in the remaining dating pool.
Huh, as a woman who is in two 10+ years relationships with *both* my highschool sweethearts (male and female), I knew I was statistically unlikely, but now it seems on whole another *level* of unlikely.
(If anyone wonders about the variables, we're all cis, in a closed relationship, have demonstrated bisexuality for all definitions, and are tending towards being more interested in women / disliking strong masculinity in partners. And we're not in the Bay Area.)
It *is* a bit unlikely, but on the other hand "a guy with two girlfriends" is the most common quote-unquote polyamorous configuration *and* IIRC by far the most stable. Most people in your situation just don't identify with the ideology or use the terminology of polyamorism.
That's not exactly our situation, we are more like a V with me (female) in the center. My partners are growing closer over time, and we're all a family, but we started out as more of "a guy with his girlfriend, and the girlfriend with her girlfriend."
But I don't want to be nitpicky - you are completely correct that we don't identify much with poly "ideology" and we are not really in a poly scene or community. We have one or two poly friends, but we are relationship-wise more similar to our mono friends. And I do hope that you are correct with the assessment of "the most stable" configuration, that's our intention, anyways!
The thought that there are a lot more people in a similar "configuration" is actually really nice, I hope they're all very happy. :)
That's great! Here's hoping for continued stability.
And yeah, I think (agree?) that who's in the "middle" isn't much of a germane distinction here, especially since to the casual observer you guys probably still look like "a guy and his two girlfriends".
It's the most mediagenic, I guess, as it plays into a common male fantasy, but from what little I can from scraping Reddit for 'what are your demographics?' threads the most common configuration is in fact MFM, i.e. girl with two boyfriends. (Elisabeth Sheff says the same, though I don't entirely trust her.)
There's a simple combinatoric explanation. If you assume equal numbers of men and women, then the possible configurations are MMM, MMF, MFM, MFF, FMF, and FFF. But if male bisexuality is a no-no (as many people here seem to say), the extra men who would be in an MMF configuration will instead be in an MFM, raising the numbers of that configuration. Surveys seem to show more polyamorous men than women, which would further increase this effect.
I have other, less PC explanations, but I'll let those go for the moment. ;)
The most mediagenic? My intuition is that it's the *least*; contemporary media would want to portray the guy as some kind of predator almost compulsively, whereas a woman with two boyfriends would be depicted as an uncomplicated case of personal liberation, complete with jokes about how "just one man isn't enough" etc. that would be absolutely unacceptable to make in reverse.
As for the Reddit statistics I'm afraid I trust those about as far as I can throw Reddit. I think the nicest way to phrase it is to just state that Reddit draws its userbase from a nonrepresentative sample of the population, although like you I can come up with significantly more precise phrasings which are uncouth.
I was thinking more blue-collar tabloids like the Daily Mail, etc., which are ironically more conservative now (which means less misandric...funny how the world works these days). As far as a middle or upper class MSM outlet like the NYT or CNN, you are absolutely correct.
Yeah. I don't really have a sense of the larger poly world TBH. I suspect because of what you describe, vees (situations with two partners in a relationship with a third person but not each other) with a male 'hinge' will not identify as poly and be in groups, whereas vees with a female 'hinge' will, and the second will be the type to wind up in think pieces on polyamory. But since polyamory is poorly looked on and actual polygamy is illegal, I suspect a lot of poly situations lay low and keep their mouths shut.
What seems to be very common in my limited experience are extended 'Z's with numerous people each dating two, usually alternating M-F-M-F-M...
I don't think they are alien in the way creationists or the Amish are, there are lots of slow life path blue tribe, college graduates who get married at 28 to someone they have dated for 10 years
Yeah, if we are just speaking anecdotally, I would have guessed way less than 7 partners. I grew up in a stereotypically liberal setting with liberal non religious friends and family,, and I don't think I could name a person I know in real life with more than 7 partners period, but I could name a bunch with 1.
I personally married(last year!) my first ever partner, as did my sister, parents, parents in law, and both sets of my grandparents. Some aunts and uncles had 2 or 3 partners before, as did my wife and brothers in law. And with wedding season upon us, every one of the 8 wedding I've gone to/will go to this year or last, the couple are either each others first or second. And once again, these are not Amish people or Evangelicals, rather to use an example of a couple who I knew each individually since elementary school, set them up in college and know for a certainty are each others first, they are atheist vegan socialist artists in LA.
Did anyone you knew use dating apps? Did they all just prove perfectly compatible with the first or second person they met on the app for a first date, and end up marrying them? I'm really curious how this worked.
Not OP, but my family is similar. No one used dating apps (in fact, they are frowned upon). I still don't quite understand how it happened and how the divorce rate is so low (1 in 8 for couples close to me, and I can't think of any divorces in the extended family, although I may be forgetting). I can only hypothesize they have a lower threshold for what makes an acceptable partner for marriage / a higher threshold for divorce. There is definitely local cultural pressure for marrying one of your first partners. Seems kind of magical from where I'm standing, but they seem happy in general.
My first guess would be some sort of matchmaking or vetting process by older members of the extended family, possibly subtle and indirect. Usually people are better at making decisions for themselves, because they know what they want, but a teenager who's never had a serious relationship before might miss clues of a good or bad longer-term match, while the clan elders' collective algorithm has been trained on a much larger dataset, and includes data about early-childhood behavior from before the teenager in question was biologically capable of properly forming memories.
That still leaves some risk of principle-agent problems, though, if the elders' interests and those of the potential new household become misaligned.
I think this is the critical question: what is the definition of "dated"? Do high school girlfriends count? Is some level of sexual interaction required, or does "went out for coffee a few times" count? I have been in relationships where we debated whether or not we were dating, so I am leery of accepting any number without it being very clear what it means, and seeing that it was VERY clear in the survey so everyone responding is likely to agree on a meaning.
Still can't come up with a good definition. Requiring sexual interaction seems too much: imagine two people in love, who are either too young or too religious, spend three years each afternoon together, kissing, holding hands, and planning their future, then they break up... I guess this counts as "dating". On the opposite extreme, two totally drunk people fuck in a bathroom of a bar, five minutes later they do not remember what happened... probably not "dating". Exclusivity? Then polyamorous people are by definition never "dating". Are one-night stands "dating"? I think, people would probably answer differently depending on what exactly happened. Prostitution is not dating, even if the client happens to be in love. Spending an evening with someone you have a crush on, when you perfectly know that nothing more will ever happen, because one or both of you are married, and you are not the kind of person who cheats?
I think it's usually some kind of measure of *relatively* exclusive intimacy, which obviously is often physical but doesn't have to be. I say relatively because (a) polyamory exists and (b) i think it's fairly normal for a non poly person to be early dating two people at once
I think "assessing whether they want to continue being in a relationship with each other" reasonably encompasses what people consider dating. Though, of course, "relationship" is also a subjective term.
> Did they all just prove perfectly compatible with the first or second person they met
This speaks to a view of finding partners as a complex optimization problem, where you're trying to find the perfect fit for you over various factors.
In reality, it's more of a binary "is this person sane enough for me, and weird in the right ways, not the wrong ways? are our ideas about lives basically alignable?" question. Once the answer is "yes", the rest of it is about _making_ the relationship excellent, which is necessary whether or not the person seemed to click perfectly with you initially.
It also helps that most places are not the melting pots that California or NYC are. That immediately increases the chances of the answer to the above questions being "yes" significantly a priori, and then the fact that you asked them out (or vice versa) also increases that chance.
It probably also depends on the age of marriage. Younger people are more flexible. Older people have decades of habits, it is more difficult for them to adapt to someone having decades of different habits.
FWIW, my wife and I were never compatible...in all respects. There were places where we agreed, and places where we were extremely divergent. And that was an important part of what made our marriage work. She was extremely effective with people, and I am pretty good with computers. But we could support each other in our weak areas.
It's a lot more than just a binary choice. I suspect there may be a lot of pheromones involved. But you also need to be complementary. (And not have too many places where you really disagree AND feel you should agree.)
I think most fellow Millenials/GenZers I know used a dating app at some point, but were just wildly and extremely unsuccessful. I tried for a while, got a grand total of maybe 15 matches, which translated into exactly zero dates. If you'd generously include a Tinder one-night stand in the category of dating, then we might get closer to that 7 average, I had college roommates who were successful enough on the apps to have that happen a couple times.
Because all of my married or engaged friends knew each other in the real world first, I think there is a higher baseline rapport and ability to judge compatibility. The way I met my wife is actually on topic with the rest of this post: we met in a mutual friends backyard, were friends for a year, saw each other at least twice a week at events, and I developed a crush on her. Her previous partner was a woman, so I assumed she was a lesbian, until she surprised me by asking me out. Plus, it's not like people are exactly rushing into marriage. Me and my wife dated for three years first, living together for two, which was considered a shockingly brief period of dating, the least amount of time anyone in my circles spent before marriage.
A cursory search for data finds that among women who got married in the 2010s, something like two thirds have 5 or fewer sexual partners. If we pretend sexual partners and number of people dated correspond closely (depends whether one night stands versus chaste romances are more common and which count as dating), than to get an average of 7 partners, we'd need the 18% of women in the 10 or more partners group to have had an average of 25 partners, which seems reasonably Pareto distributed. (source: https://ifstudies.org/blog/counterintuitive-trends-in-the-link-between-premarital-sex-and-marital-stability)
No, they marry the first person they dated in high school. I know three friends that did this. I would bet that people that date and marry one person, have not been on apps.
Conversely, most people using apps probably don't consider their high school dates real dating.
I think this question may reflect a remarkably optimistic view of how actively the average person cultivates their own preferences/priorities/life plan, how well they vet their partners, and how willing they are to move on from a relationship that isn't well-suited to them without pressure/forcing conditions.
+1 to anecdotal agreement that <7 partners before marriage is unsurprising when compared to many of the married folks I know (or even those engaged in unmarried, long-term relationships).
I met my husband on a dating app when I was 29, and married him at 35. He's the only person I ever *seriously* dated. He'd had a couple of official girlfriends in college, but I was his first serious post-college relationship. Anyway, I think there's probably a lot of variation in how people define dating and relationships.
I'm in the same camp. I'm hardly in a traditionalist religious community (secular, atheist, western), and I don't know many people who dated more than 3 people before marriage. But Scott is in a strange Californian bubble filled with polyamory, vice and licentiousness...
But 7 as a mean does make sense, though. If any Tinder meetup counts as a date, then something like 10% of people would probably be on 20+ a year. For a sample of 12 friends in my age range, a random sample of 'partners before marriage' would look like: 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 5, 6, 15, 50.
So as someone who is more attracted to women than men, but still attracted to men, I was told to just identify as bi, and this is probably a clearer communication. That said, I honestly wouldn't date a man again; once was enough for me to appreciate why women are concerened about men being predatory. I think that women have to deal with predatory men regardless of their stated attraction, but a man is much likely to if they just go about their life as straight-passing and avoid explicitly stating their preferences. Not that all men are predator obviously, but I think that enough of them are, and men aren't conditioned for the tools to deal with it, that that might be another driver for bi-male-dating trends.
I don’t *quite* share this perspective, but my experience is fairly close. I might say my experience is “men are differently predatory and far more sexually needy / likely to be predatory /sleazy/pushy/manipulative for sexual purposes, as opposed to, say, financial gain…while also far more generous with their affection”.
For this reason, I have been known to recommend that even straight or mostly straight men —especially those without a good model of feminists misgivings about the male sex, or Untitled men who feel gross and helplessly undesirable after too many women’s studies classes in undergrad (I was once arguably both)— spend some time at gay bars to develop a better model of how the other half lives (positively and negatively). There are major pros and cons to being a piece of meat and/or appreciated for just being a person with a body, depending on how one wishes to look at it. It’s a very educational experience, especially if the experiment is conducted before one is 25 or so (“gay death”). But bring a friend.
I've had a guy (maybe two) try to wheedle their way into my pants. It really drove home what I'd already seen women having to deal with.
No, I wasn't teasing you. No, I'm not leading you on. No, I don't feel sorry for your aching loins. No, I won't screw you to shut up your guilt trip. Sorry, buddy!
And that was without a credible threat of physical domination; I was (evidently) in pretty good shape at the time.
Good on 'ya for noticing and appreciating what women in your life were dealing with before you were on the receiving end.
I was embarrassingly oblivious. Of course I knew in the abstract that (e.g.) rape was a crime that exists in the world, but I had zero ability to model the dynamics --or grasp their banality-- until I was subject to them. Oof!
A female friend who trained in an organization I dare not mention here made me aware of a subtler point I hadn't previously considered, having never been a woman, and being relatively green with respect to...uh...appreciating the subtler attentional dynamics of humans: saying no in these situations is even harder for cis women (statistically) because they often suffer from the opposite of the male disembodied nerd problem --she tells me she experiences too much embodiment for some situations, a struggle to decouple. Since affective empathy is mapped onto body sensations, my model is that this makes saying no when faced with those pressures that much harder.
Given the demographics of high-vs-low decouplers, I feel a bit daft for not putting this together until it was spelled out for me by a patient and perceptive woman, but it makes sense: affective empathy is experienced as body sensations. When a person can't decouple their thinking from visceral sensations in the body coming from another person's needs (i.e., the thing nerdy men are anomalously good at and struggle to prevent ourselves from doing), it makes sense that they are going to have a harder time with social 'soft' coercion than the aspy dudes we know and love (/are).
It's a great point. Ironically we may be partially immune to subtler forms of coercion because we just miss the signals. (There was even a rule for it in an edition of GURPS as I recall...)
> You totally miss the point of any wit aimed at you, and are oblivious to attempts to seduce you (+4 to resist Sex Appeal). The meanings of colloquial expressions escape you. Sophisticated manners are also beyond you, giving -4 to Savoir-Faire skill. You have many minor habits that annoy others (e.g., leaving the turn signal on while driving from Chicago to Albuquerque), and may take one or two of these as quirks. Most people will react to you at -2.
> Unlike No Sense of Humor (p. 146), you may make jokes – albeit lame ones – and you can appreciate slapstick and written humor. However, you rarely “get” verbal humor, especially if you are the target (roll vs. IQ-4 roll to realize you’re the butt of the joke). And unlike Gullibility (p. 137), you normally realize when someone is trying to take advantage of you, except in social situations. You are no more susceptible to Fast-Talk than normal, save when someone is trying to convince you that an attractive member of the appropriate sex is interested in you . . .
> This disadvantage is most appropriate for ivory-tower geniuses, aliens from Mars, etc.
It's a good point, and GURPS is clearly of its time, as are most things.
I don't think I ever seriously saw GURPS as a model of reality. From what I know of the indie RPG world its role has been taken over by FATE or Savage Worlds anyway. I just remember reading through the book and laughing at the disadvantage.
I don't really understand what you are trying to say here. Do you mean that women feel empathy for the men that are sexually harrassing them, which makes it harder for them to say "no"?
Thanks. I'd never thought about higher empathy making women more vulnerable.
I remember a moment long ago when it hit me that hiss and claw were part of being female-- it wasn't just about being nice. Now I'm trying to figure out what I believed before that revelation hit me.
Context: I was born in 1953, long before the idea that dangerous women were cool.
I was born long after 1953, but from my reading of old writings it seems to me that dangerous women have always been cool / highly attractive to at least a fairly large contingent of authors - I think of the grand tales of Cleopatra, of Amazon Warriors, etc - stories I always read with more than a bit of "wow she's so cool and amazing and attractive". In more modern times I think of Bonnie of Bonnie and Clyde, or Harley Quinn.
How would you describe the popularity-trend of "dangerous women are cool" over your lifetime (and history if you care to speculate)? I'd have guessed approximately flat, but always interesting to hear from those with longer memories.
I actually tried being bi on OKCupid and had some of the same dynamics, though I'm well after the point of 'gay death' so it's not the same. Haven't tried the gay bar thing except very briefly and I was there for a general event so nobody hit on me. (Or maybe I'm just that ugly.)
I've come to the conclusion women and male nerds are just natural enemies on a social level, and while you can befriend any individual one (and even have semi-stable relationships, though I have to admit I've never actually been in love--could be aromantic though) fundamentally things that help them *as a class* hurt us *as a class*, and vice versa. Their liberation is our oppression, and vice versa.
Of course from utilitarian and evopsych-based virtue ethics you should then throw male nerds (who are after all much less numerous than women) under the bus (unless you're Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, and they can take care of themselves). Nobody cares about the rights of less-successful men--we're evolutionary dead ends.
No. This frame of reference is an evolutionary dead end. Being a male nerd is not.
You are an intelligent homo sapien male: an apex fucking predator.
As an apex predator, what need have you for rights? Let the ladies have them.
As a free thinking individual, what need have you for class? Why would you allow yourself to be oppressed? Leave the categorical reasoning to the pinko identitarian NPCs, while you charm and delight their girlfriends out of their ressentiment addled arms.
Being a male nerd brings some obstacles to overcome: disembodiment, non-verbal communication difficulties, social trauma, social anxiety, inflammation issues, akrasia, and self-loathing are common. These are real and worthy challenges for our hero, but consider what your competition is up against: there is no known cure for being a midwit!
And you don't have to figure it out de novo: you are amidst a tribe of men who have faced the same, and will gladly show you a way. There are better men than me that you could read or talk to (yashkaf comes to mind), but I'm available at +17034724104 (signal) or @georgejrjrjr (twitter) if you don't have a better resource at hand.
Thanks for the vote of confidence. I've screen-shotted the number and twitter handle; you may want to remove them if you don't want random lefties prank-calling you.
As for my number: it's public, as all phone numbers were in recent memory. Worst case scenario, I get swatted...in which case I enjoy the adrenaline, share a laugh with some cops, and make some lethal drinking buddies. Or someone hacks my bank account --the joke would be on them. As for calls from lefties: they're often quite cute!
It would be unbecoming for an apex predator such as we are to mind such trivialities.
Yes! There is a *much* better, gentler, more compassionate, pro-social, and ultimately more powerful option than Nietzsche, whose views I do not hold or endorse. But:
* Nietzsche seemed sufficient as a corrective to that helpless frame,
* The humble love-maxxing option is even more taboo around these parts,
* He takes more time to explain to a secular audience than I had for in that interaction.
* Even His adherents misinterpret His teachings as "be a doormat," which is not what Anonymous Dude needed there. (So did Nietzsche, incidentally).
The characterization of men as apex predators is just a matter of biological fact, so it has the benefit of being obviously verifiably true. I could have left it apolitical and that part could have been better, but I needed some levity.
Additionally, I notice nerdy men VERY OFTEN elide the parts of themselves you appear to be calling ugly, which I believe to be the source of Aella's Werewolf effect: when we suppress and deny the existence of the priors installed by the Goddess of Cancer, they don't go away. And when they do show up, they take over in ways which are in fact ugly (polite rat man -> werewolf), whereas a well-integrated and honestly acknowledged prior for "Kill, Consume, Multiply, Conquer" binds us ever more intimately to the service of the Goddess of Everything Else.
As for ugly, women don't seem to think so. What is unattractive and also dangerous in practice is being false about who and what we are as homo sapiens.
In retrospect, I could have dropped Nietzsche completely, also omitted Wrfhf, and just stuck to GoEE, which is already well-loved and accepted around here:
That was a helpful update, Jeremy, thank-you. I appreciate the query, that's what I'll do next time I feel led to propose a similar shift in frame. Not sure how to drop the apex predator bit, though, and I'm not sure it would be skillful to do so (but I'm open to feedback and updating, of course).
>whereas a well-integrated and honestly acknowledged prior for "Kill, Consume, Multiply, Conquer" binds us ever more intimately to the service of the Goddess of Everything Else.
If I may ask, how so?
At first glance, this seems like an "at least I acknowledge that I'm bad" flavor of sentiment, which I don't see much value in, at least without further elaboration.
>As a free thinking individual, what need have you for class? Why would you allow yourself to be oppressed?
You don't 'allow' yourself to get oppressed, you ARE oppressed. I couldn't exactly will myself out of homelessness, resources did that. I couldn't will myself out of hunger, resources did that.
No, I am not oppressed. Nor would I choose that frame for myself or anyone else* if I could help it.
That does not mean I am not subject to circumstances that others would reasonably term oppression. Far from it. But I play for the people and the communities I love to win, deeply, at positive sum infinite games, and that means ruthlessly routing every trace of self-pity from my heart.
I have limited control over my circumstances, adversities, adversaries, convictions, conscience, and resource constraints, but I can always choose a frame of reference that highlights the affordances available to me within those circumstances, whatever they are. "I'm oppressed" doesn't do that, in my experience (I've tried! And I've been involved in and proximal to strains of activism that tried the same, with consistently disastrous results). It's also not a fun frame of reference to bring to friends and parties --it kills the vibe, which further isolates a person and saps their mindshare.
The counter-argument to this that I see goes something like this: but "oppression" is in an important sense descriptively correct. I could quibble, but I won't, let's take it as given that this is correct, "Oppression" is "Objectively correct", and so a maximally veridical percept classifying the situation in the brain, leading to a maximally veridical term for the situation, "Oppression".
The argument still doesn't hold, as Michael Levin's work shows: non-veridical percepts that maximize the availability of affordances available to a living organism are essential to the survival of intelligent systems. To be effective organisms, we simply must to hold the percepts that maximize our opportunities for skillful action.
This is especially critical in adverse circumstances.
*One EXTREMELY IMPORTANT caveat: when someone is accused of oppressing or victimizing someone in any way, especially when they are in charge, they need to be held meaningfully accountable to that accusation, i.e., it should be investigated, taken seriously, and corrected by whatever means are available and appropriate. Not minding that EXTREMELY IMPORTANT caveat is how NIXIVM went to shit (along with a bunch of other high demand groups that said mostly true and important things while giving their leader a pass, often by treating the leaders conduct as ethical by definition): NIXIVM guru Keith Raniere would do terrible things to people and then accuse them of sacrificing their agency by framing themselves as victims when they complained. Obviously that is incredibly awful abusive gaslighting bullshit that must not be tolerated in any community worthy of the name.
If Karl Friston is right, a person literally cannot move their own arm without adopting an action-oriented non-veridical frame. Per Friston, I have to set a counterfactual prior that my arm is above its present location for my arm to lift.
The postrat crowd talks a lot about hyperstition. Similar deal: one chooses to believe a plausible but presently counterfactual thing to make it real.
The metamodernist folks and the metarational / Chapmanite folks had a similar observation about post-modernism: sure, PoMo deconstructionism is descriptively correct in many important ways, but it's utterly useless for getting things done. Ergo, they set out to integrate those insight into an epistemically defensible that also provided affordances for skillful action (building).
Or, to take a negative example, I'll cite a personal failure of mine to select a maximally skillful frame up the thread: in an endeavor to provide a helpfully corrective frame for Anonymous Dude elsewhere in these comments, I unskillfully chose a hyper-Nietzschian frame of reference that Jeremy skillfully and correctly called me out on, when there were more agreeable and understandable tacts available to me. When I look at this in the context of my historical patterns of unskillful behavior, with a mind towards routing out self-pity in particular, here's what I hold as unflatteringly true:
I have a regrettable tendency to frame what I believe to be compassionate points in needlessly ugly-sounding ways. I one had a twitter thread that attempted to explain universal love as non-dual narcissism: I thought it was extremely funny in a perverse way at the time, but I was writing for an audience of like three people at best. Why might I do this dumb thing, repeatedly? What's the emotional payoff that would explain me persisting in my folly? My suspicion is that I'm courting misunderstanding via revulsion, which can feed an insidious pity party story that I'm just like too honest for people who haven't done their shadow work, or too clever for the rif-raff. Those disgusting beliefs that I infer I may have lurking in my subconscious, to the extent I hold them, are total horse shit: when I'm not feeling understood, it's usually because I am courting misunderstanding, writing badly, or just wrong --all common occurrences in my life.
I've read yashkaf. Good stuff--wish I'd read it 20 or 30 years ago. (Though I'm not quite as enamored of polyamory as him.)
Hey, at least I saved some dough.
It was still very kind of you to put yourself out there like that. The old masculine virtues are not entirely dead, though I fear they are their own reward only.
This seems like an empirical question to me. Let's assume my experience is irrevocably confounded by my androgyny: I have yet to meet a warfighter who couldn't get a date.
The hardest part of testing it seems to me that setting out to be 'more masculine' often ends up in a theorizing-and-larping trap instead of virtuous honesty about what we are and what we desire, coupled with a means of cultivating virtuous sincere desires --by which I mean those that would be mutually gratifying when fulfilled.
Modeling other people's preferences with 'System 1' is a relevant capability here that is rarely and ill-taught. Doing so implies internalizing others preferences. When other people's preferences are factored into one's own desires, indulging one's desires becomes self-evidently pro-social and extremely gratifying.
Being 'more masculine' usually revolves around lifting weights and doing outdoor and mechanical stuff, not theorizing. Otherwise, you're correct.
And I've read yashkaf's blog and twitter, so I know what you're talking about. Heck, I only studied PUA so I could get enough 'attractiveness points' for a long-term relationship. The stuff about social proof (yes, you DO have to conform, the ex-hippies you grew up with lied to you) and not appearing too needy was useful, evo psych was useful as it removed a lot of the resentment (it's not just some stupid social thing, they're into muscles and popularity/status/money because they have evolutionary programming JUST LIKE YOU DO for a nice body), the stuff about negging I simply ignored as I figured I wasn't smart enough to calibrate it well enough to avoid real offense. It...kinda worked. I just never found anyone I really liked all that much to take the risk of getting wiped out in a divorce.
I will agree on the warfighters: I've never seen a combat veteran that couldn't get a girlfriend, although I only looked at the ones that were more or less in one piece, physically. If you're a young man who's looking at going to war to be more attractive...even if you survive you will pay an incredible price, and your survival is by no means guaranteed. The guys I knew that chose peacetime military service were usually better off for it, though.
"Become more attractive by going to war" is a pretty dangerous meme to have floating around in an industrialized country, though.
Oh my, I still have fond memories of going to a gay bar with a gay friend. I was treated like a princess and as you say it was eye-opening. I also had fun times going to a lesbian bar with a lesbian friend. Sexual banter or joking with no hidden overtones, (none of these women were interested in me as anything more than a friend.) a bit like throwing back beers with the guys, but also totally different.
"There are major pros and cons to being a piece of meat and/or appreciated for just being a person with a body, depending on how one wishes to look at it."
Hmm... When I'm donating blood, I'm happy to play the role of "just being a person with a body" (or, an accessible bloodstream, supplied from bone marrow) for the duration of the donation.
<mild snark>
Does the Red Cross count as predatory when they are seeking donors? They are literally out for blood... :-)
> Does the Red Cross count as predatory when they are seeking donors? They are literally out for blood... :-)
Just to be super clear, I was being 100% sincere about getting a lot of value out of being able to walk into a context where I was a piece of meat. Definitely helped disarm some of my women’s studies related brain weasels to see that…actually being on the receiving end of male desire is usually awesome and affirming.
My actual hypothesis for the lesbian sheep phenomenon:
>And - this is something I’ve heard from all the bisexual women I’ve talked to - getting dates with men is easy, because men are horny and desperate and often ask women out; getting dates with women is hard, for the usual reasons that every heterosexual man already viscerally appreciates.
I have heard people on /r/actuallesbians complain about this constantly
Perhaps women find having a partner much more 'optional' than men do.
If we specify 'partner' to be 'sexual partner' I have no doubt this is so; (though I'm sure people will disagree); but even if it's 'romantic partner,' well, a long-term partner is less urgent, and one can wait.
I don't know about that. Who consumes all the romance novels? Most women's magazines are about relationships and beauty (which attracts a partner); most men's stuff is about gadgets, video games, cars, sports... there could be a substitution effect with porn, I guess, but as for the rest of it...
Today's absurd pan-adaptationist evo psych theory is that female passivity in dating is caused by the fact that 90% of women are potentially bisexual, thus those that were active in asking people out ended up with other women 45% of the time and had less children thereby.
Forget monogamy, imagine an alpha male surrounded by a group of women. Is there an evolutionary advantage in being attracted to the alpha male, and also being able to make stronger coalitions with other attractive women?
Could be something about social bonding to help with mutual aid in terms of childcare and defending against violence from males and so forth. (see bonobos, sparta, etc.)
(and of course the real answer is it's a spandrel, outside of panadaptationist story hour)
As I've heard the term used in evo psych, a spandrel is any feature that is the result of evolution but was not itself selected for.
For example, bones are white because of features about bones (ie their material composition) that were selected for, but whiteness of bones was not in and of itself selected for.
Saying here that whatever these arousal tests are measuring, it's probably a side effect of other things that were selected for (plus environmental effects), not something strongly selected for on its own.
(possible that this term is used differently in other circles)
The weird thing about this entire discussion is how much it focused on socio-psychological rather than biology. At base, this is the most important biological issues, with a gazillion years of evolution at play. Presumably. there may be some simple physiological explanation, akin to how some people can't smell the "effects" of asparagus, or dislike cilantro, or are lactose intolerant. That is, self-reporting that X might visually arouse is very different from the physical reality of whether X smells/tastes right to you when in close contact, etc. Whether it's pheromones or some other type of receptors, this could just be a simple physiological reaction that's shared across both A and B, making both "attracted" to B.
Yeah, it's stuff like that that makes me take evo psych less than seriously. They've got theories for everything, which are hard to test. It doesn't even make sense--at least some of the men you ask out would wind up marrying you.
That stood out to me, too. I have serious doubts about the correlation between genital arousal and actual "I am attracted to X" numbers for that reason. If nothing else, it bombs the notion that women shouldn't ask each other out more because apparently there is an extremely high chance other women are into that. 90% seems really high for that to me.
"getting dates with women is hard, for the usual reasons that every heterosexual man already viscerally appreciates" - someone should build an app for this.
So, regulate the matchmaking app as a public utility, funded by something sort of like a land-value tax on the sanctity of marriage? Interesting concept, but you'd have a hell of a time trying to build the political coalition necessary to actually implement anything that smells so much like eugenics.
Despite my cynicism about evo psych, I have to give Diana Fleischman credit for trying to do something about the stigma around eugenics. Always seemed to the problem with the Nazis was the mass murder, not the eugenics. The Commies did mass murder too, and they're still sending me silly videos on tiktok about the proletariat and liberals being fascists.
Well that is not what I was thinking. But I don't know how you would make it work. My 'vision' was that I promise to send (say) $100 a year to the match-making company. (lets say for a max of ten years.) As long as I'm still with this person they found for me, I keep paying them. There is an obvious incentive for me to lie and say we broke up, even if we are still together, to save the $100. I'm not sure how to deal with that.
> My friend explained that the acquaintance was *mostly* lesbian but a little bisexual and it hadn’t come up before. This distinction ended up being very important to me, and I don’t know who it serves to encourage people to hide it.
Well, if people constantly go around claiming that bisexual women are straight women trying to be trendy, and you want to signal that you actually want to date women, and are willing to reduce your chances with the generally-less-attractive-to-you gender, there's an obvious tradeoff to make here. It gets even more salient when you notice that on some parts of the internet, if you say you're a "bi lesbian" lots of people will yell at you, saying you're "gynephilic" makes it sound like you hang out with Blanchardians, and Kinsey numbers require people to actually remember the Kinsey scale to parse.
I'm lesbian but I think I've been romantically attracted to a man once or twice in my life. I only want to sleep with women, but I don't doubt that there could be a right man for me out there romantically. I do doubt I could get over my repulsion to heterosexual sex. I round this all off to lesbian unless I'm in a deeper conversation about desires, the sort of conversation where straight men admit to being "a little bit bi." I've seen women absolutely pilloried for this kind of rounding in online lesbian spaces. However, in terms of quickly communicating that I am only looking for women, lesbian works so much better as a label than bi.
I wish bi lesbian or just straight up using the Kinsey scale was more common though. Bi lesbians using just lesbian has created an impression that all lesbians are flexible.
I think the "who you actually want to sleep with" is getting discounted too much in these comments (not just willing to sleep with in extremis or otherwise, but really desire), and also "who you actually want to pair bond with" (again, not just on trial basis, but long term, whether that's one decade or many). And your comment captures the biological aspect, where some people/things are just repulsive, even if in theory you might think could work, or some people/things taste/smell/feel better, even if there are decent substitutes.
I definitely had a strong negative reaction to "this ended up being very important to me" because it screams "main character syndrome." Like, she was signalling what she wanted to signal, so what if it means you personally are less likely to get your dick wet, lol.
This seems needlessly uncharitable and rude. Not least because it seems like in this particular situation she _wasn't_ signalling what she wanted to, at least in the sense that the situation here is that _she_ was interested in _Scott_ and was at risk of missing a connection _she_ wanted by calling herself lesbian rather than bi. (If I'm understanding the subtext right, it sounds as if after the mutual friend's intervention they _did_ get together, so she didn't actually miss out -- but then neither did Scott.)
Also, the thing was literally half a sentence, in parentheses. Isn't there a useful distinction between "main character syndrome" and "sometimes mentions own experiences"?
Also also, what's with the insistence on gleefully rounding all male interest in anything related to romance or sex to "get your dick wet, lol"? IIRC Scott has described himself as something-like-asexual-but-not-aromantic, which makes this super-extra-inappropriate in the present case, but even in the general case this seems rude and dishonest.
[EDITED to add:] I should probably clarify that last paragraph. I'm generalizing when I say "rounding _all_ male interest in _anything_ ..." and of course all I've observed _you_ do is this one instance. But it seems to be a very common pattern -- in particular, a very common pattern when making criticisms of the general form "look at this man treating his wants/needs/desires as too important relative to those of women". And I think the world would be better with _less_ of that pattern rather than _more.
Okay, but if 90%+ of women are (latently, subconsciously) bisexual, then isn't the actual dating pool for them pretty much everyone? And as more women recognize/choose a bisexual identity, then the dating pools over time would skew more gender balanced, and therefore the percentage of bisexual women having non-straight relationships would grow over time instead of shrink?
Separately, I think it's possible that people use the term "bisexual" inconsistently. This post uses a definition based on arousal/attraction, but that's not necessarily the driver of partner selection. Suppose we accept 90% of women sometimes experience same-sex attraction, but suppose that of those, 90% exclusively want male partners for reasons unrelated to sexual attraction (child-bearing, non-sexual preferences, etc.). Is this a population with 90% bisexual women, or 9%?
If you agree that an increasing percentage of women identifying as bisexual should imply a growing percentage of bisexual women having same-sex relationships, what is your explanation for why we see the opposite trend in the data?
I think calling people who identify as bisexual today but wouldn't 20 years ago "fake" bisexuals is hyperbolic, but the data nonetheless seems consistent with a change in the social costs/benefits of queer identification rather than an increase in introspection or self-awareness.
I expect that long COVID self-diagnosis also correlates with political views. Is bisexual identification just a proxy for left-wing social politics & tribal pressures to emphasize the seriousness of COVID risk?
To address that last point, while I think long COVID is largely psychosomatic, the two people I know who complain of it are both right wing, one... extremely so to a unhealthy degree (and that's coming from a guy who would vote for the criminalization of sodomy to get the Pride flag propaganda out of my face.)
I don't think it's *just* a proxy, I think it's probably *correlated*.
The other thing is that ACX selects for a specific subtribe of blue tribe (people have even tried to give it its own color!), such that bi people answering are, say, less likely to believe heterosexuality is problematic, I think.
Increased social acceptance - 20 years ago a woman wouldn't have much reason to incur the social costs of identifying as 'bi' unless there was a woman they were actively trying to get with.
Bisexual is a broad identity. Thirty years ago you’d have to be pretty bi to identify that way, or at least inarguably into people of the same sex to incur the social cost, so most people who identified that way were higher on the Kinsey scale. As social costs go down, more bisexual people lower on the Kinsey scale will come out, while still, y’know, being lower on the kinsey scale and more interested in dating more people of the opposite sex than OG identified bis.
The study on attraction Scott used was testing arousal in response to porn, and it effectively found men are more susceptible to this form of arousal than women, which is what I took out of it, not that women have an inherent flexibility, but rather different mechanics for arousal.
Yeah I'm pretty skeptical about drawing major conclusions based on "blood flow to genitals". Penises and vaginas are totally different organs, and the fact that blood flow increases in response to some stimulus doesn't necessarily mean you want to have sex with it.
I probably get slightly more bloodflow to my genitals when I see the word "SEX" (or at least I would have when I was a teenager); that doesn't mean I want to have sex with the word "SEX", just that it reminds me of sex.
Agreed, though I think there's more to it than just physiology. I've been married for over a decade and my wife seems to have both a 'positive' arousal signal and a 'negative' arousal signal. If she's negatively aroused, the same things that might have made her feel positive about intimacy at another time will just piss her off.
As a man, maybe there's a similar mechanism going on inside my brain, but I'm certain she is more susceptible to 'emotional' signals in the way I'm more susceptible to 'physical' signals. So, "study found that men and women respond differently to arousal signals" is pretty close to the common complaint that, "they had to do a study to figure out common sense?"
100%. Just reading your comment got the old bloodflow going. Just kidding.
I wonder how fMRI looking at whatever part(s) of the thinking organ light up when sexually aroused corresponds to "blood flow to the genitals". What would be the "gold standard", short of actual bonking (which would introduce too many confounders - too tall, too short, don't bonk on the first study, etc; also likely cost prohibitive), for sexual attraction?
Someone did try to do a study where couples would have sex in an MRI scanner - they mostly found that most people find it too unerotic, except one couple who were really into it
Sounds like somebody needs to find some representative women at both extremes of the Kinsey scale, construct a test suite which can reliably distinguish between them (porn which excites lesbians but bores very-straight women and vice versa, different sensor setups, etc.), apply it to larger sample sizes, and iterate refinements until signals emerge from the noise.
"The sex difference reported here has important implications for future conceptualizations of women’s sexuality. Sexual arousal, especially genital sexual arousal, likely plays a much smaller role in women’s sexual-orientation development than it does in men’s. Female sexuality, in general, may be more motivated by extrinsic factors, such as the desire to initiate or maintain a romantic relationship, than by intrinsic factors, such as genital sexual arousal."
It looks like the authors agree that you should not generalize this study about response to porn into a general assessment of sexuality. (Although in the discussion they state that if you're male and report a response to homosexual stimuli you might question your sexual preferences in a way that doesn't apply to women.)
What would it mean if we have to sample 10,000 women to see signal above noise in this experiment? If we see that signal, how would we interpret it? Certainly not by applying it to the whole population. "100 of 10,000 women display clear sexual arousal after exposure to [same/opposite sex] porn, therefore ..." We should conclude something meaningful about 1% of women, but not of the other 99%. If we're interested in general trends, it seems we have a decent experiment already - the one that Scott shared.
Perhaps we could use a different method if we want to understand female arousal. We could start by asking lesbian and straight women what arouses them, instead of defaulting to whatever arouses the male researchers. then repeat the original experiment using women's preferred methods of arousal and test whether we see the same weak gender preference in women.
Open-ended questions should be part of it, but some of the basic things to try seem obvious - idealized hypermasculine (such as the helicopter pilot from the movie Inside Out) or hyperfeminine types expressing personal competence, romantic availability, and/or emotional vulnerability, rather than the sex act itself. Then do a hill-climbing search with questions like "what single change would make that last thing sexier to you personally / to a typical [x]?" Plenty of artists willing to take commissions for that sort of variations-on-a-theme work, and contribute their own expertise across the broader subject besides.
It would be an interesting study. Although not interesting enough for me to do the minimal simple Google search to see if it has already been done, LOL.
I would note that the helicopter pilot was not the preferred mate for the mom in that feelings movie you mentioned, suggesting a much more complex underlying attraction function. I wonder if the attraction function for women is separate from the arousal function in a way distinct from how it manifests in men. Perhaps you need the former before you get a strong signal from the latter?
If women are nearly equally attracted to both women and men, but men are mostly attracted to women, it will still be far easier for a woman to date a man than another woman. The women have lots of potential partners, but the men will be alone with only half the potential dating pool and will be more available.
“Maybe they tune it out because of social conditioning, or because some other arousal system besides the genital one measured here is guiding their emotions.”
I think the latter need to be given serious consideration. For example, I believe I’ve read (could be wrong) that some women experience guilt when raped because they “responded” with, say, vaginal lubrication.
Back when I was a teenager and in a vehicle driving over a particularly bumpy road, I sometimes used to get genital arousal without thinking of anything sexual, solely due to the friction of my genitals against my underpants.
Doesn't the first graph support the idea that something pretty janky is going on?
If we've gone from 87% of bi-identifying women actually having female partners to just 45% since 2008, then something has definitely happened. I don't think any of your bullet-point reasons why a bisexual might date only men has changed significantly (apart from the stigma around same-sex relationships, which has decreased) so is it fair to say there's been a significant decoupling between "identifying as bisexual" and "acting bisexual"?
I think in 2008, bisexuality was stigmatized enough that you would only identify as it if you were forced to (ie you were very strongly attracted to same-sex and definitely going to have some same-sex partners), and now it's much more relaxed and people will identify based on only a mild attraction even if they're not expecting it to go anywhere.
In that case this really does seem like a pure boundary drawing question.
Based on this essay, my impression of your definition is that "any person with latent potential sexual interest in both their gender and the opposite gender at all is bisexual". Personally I would definite it as "actively engages in or has engaged in sex and/or relationships with people of both genders, or at least attempts or has attempted to".
From my definition, based on your rough numbers above, a strong complement of "bi identifying" people are in fact straight, and therefore identifying as bi for some reason other than actually being it. So I would be correct to be suspicious that some claims of being bi are not in fact genuine.
We can both be correct given that we're using different meanings for the same word and effectively talking past each other.
Though it's very much a free country and people can label themselves however they want.
I find the idea that people have to have some experience with either sex to call themselves bisexual a little odd -- we don't hold the labels "gay" and "straight" to the same standard
Fair point, though I did edit to include 'attempts or has attempted to', which is about as far as I'd consider it. I didn't mention the label 'asexual' but I would use it as a plug for anybody you think I'm actually leaving out for not having attempting or having attempted to have sex/relationships with either gender.
Yes, thank you for making this point. Especially for those of us who are a little older, through high school and college I knew exactly one guy who was out, and it did not go well for him. Yes, I tried to drop hints to various guys, but when someone else would call me on it I'd always deny it, because it was the 90s. So no, I didn't find an opportunity to date a guy before I wound up marrying a woman.
That doesn't mean that I haven't been attracted to as many men as women, or have any doubts about being bi, it means I never found enough courage to act on same-sex attractions when it was far easier to just pretend to be like everyone else.
I mean we don’t, but on the other hand if somebody says “I’m gay/straight” but never demonstrates any interest in sex with anybody, we might say, “are you sure you aren’t asexual?”
If a person has had a dozen partners and all of them are opposite sex, never having even gone on a serious date with a same sex person - at that point is it reasonable to say that there’s something more going on then just statistical availability of partners?
I think what Jacob and others here are saying is that a reasonable definition of bisexual would mean something a little stronger than “has the occasional same-sex fantasy they would never act on IRL” - it’s reasonable to think the identity would include some intent to actually pursue same sex relations.
Or just like, introverted bisexuals, for that matter. The once a decade I can scrounge up the social effort and courage to ask someone out, at least if I pick a girl there's a ten-thousand-year-old script for her to gently reject me without confusion or miscommunication. Asking out a guy, even a confirmed homosexual guy, seems so much murkier i'm not even really sure how to do it. And I don't think that becoming less shy would change that, the existence of the hetero script is a really comforting presence.
I'm not so sure that impossibility is completely unreasonable, in a way...
Let me split a hair:
If heterosexual/homosexual/bisexual is defined by what sexes one is attracted to, it may be reasonable to distinguish between naive attraction and experienced attraction. If a 15 year old virgin who has never had sex with either men or women claims that they are attracted to both, I think it is reasonable to come back to them and say "You don't have enough experience yet to be _sure_ of your own preferences. Tell me again after you've had sex with both and can say that you've tried them and you _indeed_ like them both."
<i>Personally I would definite it as "actively engages in or has engaged in sex and/or relationships with people of both genders, or at least attempts or has attempted to".</i>
Personally I'd add something about "would attempt to if they thought they'd suffer no adverse consequences" and/or "actively fantasises about", to cover people who stay in the closet due to fear or lack of opportunity or whatever.
Arguing about definitions seems pointless, but the shifting definition might mean some concepts you used to have no longer apply.
I vaguely remember a fictional example where a bi character’s parent told them to just date the opposite sex. The character complained that being bi was part of who she was. While it may not have been the parent’s place to dictate to the character like that, the graph above suggests that for many bi people today, that particular part of the character’s complaint would not apply.
This kind of feels like a distinction without a difference? Both of you seem to agree that “some nontrivial percentage of persons who identify as bi are not actually having any same-sex sex, and this percentage has gone up quite a bit”. The only real difference seems to be whether we say that bisexuality is “trendier now” or just “less stigmatized” which are just functionally equivalent terms with different emotional valence.
It's a difference of false positives versus false negatives.
I think the "trendiness" accusation is (or should be treated as) a claim that the person is not really romantically/sexually attracted to people of the same sex at all (or at least, not at a nontrivial level). They are not disgusted by the idea, otherwise they wouldn't claim it, but they don't actually feel the same type of attraction to same sex people, which is the reason they don't end up in relationships with them.
Both sides agree that the popularity of the bisexual label has increased, and that this has caused the amount of self-reported bisexuals to increase, but the "trendy" side believes that the source of this increase is an increase in false positives, while the "stigma" side believes that the source is a decrease in false negatives.
The fact that you call trendiness an “accusation” is why I assert that the main difference here is emotional valence rather than practical impact.
Both positions agree that the rate of people identifying as bisexual has gone way up without the actual level of underlying attraction (or maybe even the amount of bisexual same-sex sex!) changing much at all. And therefore the change in identification is down to social norms.
Going back to the topic of the original post, it would be interesting to know how long covid rates are different between "active bisexusals" and "homo-celibate bisexuals" (homoincels?)
If homo-celibate bisexuality and long covid are (partially) fake conditions spread through social contagion, and actual bisexuality is not, then we might predict that long covid rates should be high among homo-celibate bisexuals (people especially susceptible to fashionable conditions) while actual active bisexuals have normal rates of long covid.
We're talking about collections of individuals here, not statistical blobs. If it is becoming "more trendy" then the fraction of individuals who are not attracted to the same sex but say they are goes up; if it is becoming "less stigmatized" than the fraction of individuals who are attracted to the same sex but say they aren't goes down. Both things can be happening at the same time, of course, but they're completely distinct conceptually.
By “attracted to” I mean “potentially aroused by”, not “willing to openly go on a date with”. Unless there has been some sort of rapid biological shift I don’t think that number has actually changed substantially since 2008. So in either case you have people who were not so attracted to the same sex that they would identify as bisexual in the social milieu of 2008 who did identify as bisexual in the social milieu of 2018. We can therefore posit that the threshold level of same-sex attraction required for the marginal individual to identify as bi has gone down (assumption - a higher level of same-sex attraction would result in a higher likelihood of engaging in same-sex relations). Whether the mechanism is reduction in negative incentive (stigma) or an increase in positive incentive (“trendiness”) the net result is the same.
It matters if you want to make a rhetorical point by declaring the marginal heterosexual of 2008 “repressed” or the marginal bisexual “faking it” in 2018, but I’m not particularly interested in either. I’m mostly interested in the fact that whichever was the dominant mechanism, bisexual self-identification appears to have a strong socially modulated component.
I really wish Kinsey could've standardized on tracking "attraction to men" and "attraction to women" as completely independent variables, rather than entangling both of them with each other AND the attracted person's own gender identity.
If I was a lesbian, how likely should I consider it that a given girl who says she's bisexual will consider dating me if I ask her out.
If it's less stigma, I should expect a lot more to consider dating me than if it's trendy. I would expect 'trendy' bisexuals to get really hesitant when actually approached.
As rationalists, aren't we supposed to regard beliefs as helping us make predictions? We should be asking what we should be able to predict based on a person belonging in category X, where here X is "identifies as bisexual".
Sure, but for the purpose of predicting whether or not a given individual is sexually active in same-sex relationships, X is a very poor predictor. EDIT in 2008 it was a very good predictor, now it’s a coin flip
You should be able to predict that they have the capacity to be attracted to people of multiple genders. Your orientation doesn’t imply that you’ve had any particular experiences. Otherwise someone would be baiting the incels by taunting them for not even being straight yet.
Absolutely happens out there in the less pleasant parts of the internet (and less commonly in real life situations). Doesn't make it correct, but that's definitely an angle terrible people use to be terrible to others.
Wouldn't that mean the potential same-sex dating pool has experienced a dramatic increase since 2008? If previously if was nigh impossible to get a same-sex date because nobody was bi, yet 85% managed it despite a strong social stigma reducing dating pools, how have we come to a situation where it's now so much harder to find a same-sex date because it's so easy to be bi? This explanation remains opposite how I would expect to interpret that data.
The population of identified bisexuals is not just larger, it includes more low-Kinsey (more hetero attraction) folks who wouldn’t have otherwise come out in a higher stigma environment. They might not view their experiences as “struggling to find a same sex date”, they may be living their best bi lives by dating the people they want to, who want to date them, and the largest population of potential mates are straight/bi people of the opposite sex.
Do you think most of the growth in low-Kinsey women identifying as bi since 2008 is coming from places where stigma against non-heterosexual identities was high among the under-30 cohort in 2008? I think it’s at least equally likely that the growth is occurring in places where adopting a non-straight identity provides positive social cachet.
The low-Kinsey explanation feels less like an explanation of the data than an attempt to explain that we should consider the data meaningless if we start by accepting an unsupported assumption.
Meanwhile, it doesn't invalidate the other interpretation of the data - that people who are not what we would traditionally consider 'bisexual' are increasingly identifying as such. Indeed, it seems to support that interpretation, if anything. In 2008, any low-Kinsey bi-identifiers would be expected to be LESS likely to have a same-sex relationship than in 2018, because the dating pool has (under both assumptions) clearly shifted since then.
The end result of either interpretation is that you have people identifying as bisexual who would not have done so 10 years ago, who remain exclusively heterosexual, and whose only change over the past 10 years is the label they apply to themselves. This seems like a distinction without a difference.
One possible explanation is the shift to modern dating apps. They were less prevalent before 2008 (and many did not yet exist, for instance no tinder). The ones that existed also didn't rely on a swipe mechanic. 2008 itself would have been near-peak Ok Cupid and it would have been mostly website usage, and perhaps largely consist of non-mainstream people (a hetero male friend described it to me as such at that time, but I never went on it). Bisexual women may have relied more on these niche apps, and especially on third spaces specific to their type, which would have fewer men. So they ended up dating more women. The third spaces would have been even more of a factor the further back you go. (Living in San Fran up until 2004, I didn't know anyone who used any kind of dating web site, it was all third space).
Nowadays a bisexual woman can go on an app, and if she doesn't exclude men from the start, she'll likely be buried in attention from them in the first hour.
--Your definition of bisexual seems to be based on feelings of arousal. I understand it as more action-oriented. That is, it's not just about an abstract attraction to both sexes, but active participation in some kind of sexual activity or at least active attempts. In that way, it's not so much "accusing people of faking bisexuality" as having different understandings of the word. I think your statistics about how it can be hard to find a same-sex opportunity make sense, but it still seems a little too cute to call yourself bisexual if you possibly have never even had any kind of same-sex sexual experience.
--Relatedly, there seems to be a conflation of "dating" and "sex." If you want to have sex within the constraints of a dating relationship, I can imagine that might be hard to arrange, bisexually. But if you're a woman who just wants to scratch your itch to have sex with another woman--that's pretty easy to arrange.
--I don't understand how the bar chart supports your point. As I'm reading it, fifteen years ago (2008-2010), 87% of bisexual women had had sex with women in the previous 5 years. Now the number is less than 50%. And as you point out, we might expect a more flexible dating pool in the modern era, so the number of bisexual women who have had sex with a woman should be increasing.
--The bisexual men I have known were the ones with an absolutely raging sex drive. I never got the sense that they were particularly attracted to men--it seemed more like they welcomed action wherever it might arise. (I am certain this isn't always the case, but I think it sometimes is.)
> Is it also too cute to call yourself straight if you’ve never had an opposite-sex sexual experience?
I mean, kind of? Saying "I'm 100% sure I would love this experience I've never had" is an odd thing to stake an identity on.
I'm 100% sure that not every person who *has* had sexual experiences with the same sex identifies as bi or gay, because doing it *and also enjoying it* are kind of prerequisites. So I'm totally fine with the idea that someone who hasn't had sex at all isn't necessarily "straight".
Hell, I've known many people who thought they were bi until they'd tried both and then discovered a strong preference one way or the other. I view all sexual orientations as tentative until people have actually tried the ones they're into.
Absolutely agree. In some ways sexuality is a form of mental quantum state. You don't know what it's going to be until you open the box. Which is an argument for trying EVERYTHING. How do you know what you will like until you try it?
My personal libido has always been pretty damn clear about which sex it is interested in. Maybe *some* people can't tell without actually having sex, but if so, their experiences must be pretty different from mine.
I wonder if at least some of the changes in reported sexuality are down to the much greater availability of porn and the much greater tendency of people to treat porn as being in any way "realistic", i.e. a good basis for what you would be really doing in an actual encounter.
Or maybe the people in California, e.g. our host, *can* treat it as relevant. Certainly I can't.
From the comments it's clear that people mean a range of things by "bisexual." Some mean "I am a woman and I find myself aroused at the sight of two women making out," which probably covers many, if not most, women. And others mean, "I would actively like to have sex with women as well as men." I take it to mean the latter, but think this is where some of the confusion is arising.
There's also a very real phenomenon of people who are genuinely bisexual but have a strong preference for a heterosexual marriage with a traditional nuclear family. I think this group is where the "lesbians until graduation" come from.
If another straight man showed up on the island and after several years, the two of them have intercourse, would that make them "gay"? I think we have to remember that human sexuality is slippery and not always reducible to an "identity".
"But doesn't that mean your identity gets decided for you by external circumstance?"
Of course, that always happens. Like, your race is an external circumstance, and for many people, it ends up being a part of their identity. Similarly nationality, class, sex, sexuality... and the random coincidences that lead to the friends you have and the hobbies you enjoy. You have some agency in deciding how those external things affect you, but identity is intrinsically a bit random - and it's outward-facing as well. The only reason we have "identities" is because we need to explain to other people who we are in simplistic, digestible ways, so that social interactions can go smoothly.
The silliness here comes from trying to describe things as "identities" that are something else entirely. A man who is secretly attracted to men, living in a society that represses homosexuality, has no "identity" as a gay man, but he still has a sexual orientation in the normie sense of the term. He's gay, and in the closet.
FWIW (to your last point): I'm bisexual, I've dated both genders, and I have a medium-to-low sex drive. I know plenty of other people like this--in fact probably the majority of bi-men I know (though not all) are this way, or at least that's what they claim. This could be self-selection bias at play.
More generally, and separate from anything you've said, I've always found it interesting how people define their sexual/dating preferences. I find it all more vague than people generally allow, and wonder if it *mostly* comes down to cultural conditioning. When someone says they *are* or *aren't* attracted to men, say, and then find themselves accidentally attracted to a man from behind or in drag, I wonder what that says about attraction. Are we attracted to our cultural associations with a certain gender, or discrete physical features associated with a gender (sharper jaw, larger frame), or their genitalia specifically? I won't make any strong claims other than to say I think attraction is generally more mystifying than we think it is. This could be affected by the sample-pool of people I know, but I imagine this will become all the more clear in coming years, assuming the last dregs of stigma goes away and experimentation isn't discouraged. I think about this as a category similar to any other (job, athletic-inclinations, food preferences)--if you take any of those from, say, the time that Shakespeare wrote King Lear, and compare them to now, I would guess our relationships to these categories have become all the more complicated/mixed/porous. Given that we're still only about a half-a-century out from queerness landing you in jail, I imagine our relationships with these things are still set for radical change.
Last point, and somewhat conversely: I think Scott's use of arousal as a metric for genuine attraction/bisexuality is a complicated subject. I remember reading a study that showed women are sometimes (physically) aroused by the idea of rape while obviously not actually wanting this to happen outside of fantasy/controlled circumstances. Although maybe, in the case of bisexuality, if there is arousal and yet no desire to try out dating/sex, at least some portion of those people may be hesitant due to the remaining stigma.
Also: this is the first time I've posted.And so I'll use it as an excuse to say how much I appreciate this blog. Thanks Scott and all the commenters who make this place so interesting!
And lastly, to echo what other people have said, including @gideon, I *definitely* would have identified as straight fifty years ago, because of the pressure/stigma/legality involved. I, personally, was not 'born that way' such that I don't have control of how I direct my urges. Still: I've been very happy with my relationships with men and am better of for it.
I have to say your are one of the few here with any kind of common sense. You make several excellent points.
- I would totally agree that being bisexual is about more than just feelings of arousal. I would go further and hold that even some same-sex experiments that you aren't ashamed of doesn't make you bisexual. It makes you human.
To be bisexual requires having engaged in, and being open to, homosexual sex. Otherwise it's all just theoretical bullshit.
- I agree that there is far to much focus on dating and not enough on sex. If you want to have sex with another guy and Tinder/Bumble/Hinge seem cold. There are always gay bars. Before AIDS there were bath-houses with glory holes if you just want to suck cock. Being "bisexual" is easy if you just want to have sex with another guy.
- On being a "bisexual" male. Hmmmm you seem "kinda judgey". But, in my case spot on. I have rarely sought out another man to have sex with and I have only "dated" two men during my life. I have had sex, both oral and anal, with several dozen other men. Mostly because they asked and it was usually at an orgy. A LOT of straight men loosen up about who's sucking their dick at orgies.
Isn't this holding bisexuality to a standard almost no one holds heterosexuality or homosexuality to? I knew I was straight long before the first time I had sex, because I was attracted only to women, not to men. And it would have been super weird for someone to tell me I wasn't, like, truly straight yet.
The difference is that if a young person says they are heterosexual or homosexual but haven't yet had sex, the clear implication is that they intend in the future to have sex along the lines of their claimed orientation. But to say you are bisexual, apparently, doesn't mean that. This makes no sense to me. If you say you are X-sexual, you have to at least, in my mind, be *sexual*, and specifically, sexual along the orientation of X which you claim. E.g., if an 80-year-old woman says: "I'm bisexual. I've never actually had sex with a man, though." then she isn't really telling the truth. At least that's my old-fashioned and probably bigoted view.
I don't think it's bigoted; I just just plain old base-rate neglect. Our intuition tells us bisexuals should date both women and men, ignoring the fact that their opportunities to do so are quite skewed (this starts to break down a bit if 90% of women are actually bisexual, but I don't agree with Scott about that part.)
> The difference is that if a young person says they are heterosexual or homosexual but haven't yet had sex, the clear implication is that they intend in the future to have sex along the lines of their claimed orientation.
Is a young, deeply religious Catholic person who has never had sex and wants to join the clergy (and therefore be celibate for their entire life), just spouting nonsense when they claim to be heterosexual or homosexual?
I agree that it only makes sense to say you're X-sexual if you are in some sense sexual in a manner that matches X. But consider a few examples that I think don't fit with the stronger claim you're making.
1. Alice describes herself as bisexual. She is 80 years old and has never had sex. This is because she is socially awkward and physically unattractive. She has approached dozens of men and dozens of women and said things ranging from "Would you like to go out for dinner some time?", through "I find you really attractive. Would you like to go on a date?", all the way to "I really want to have sex with you. Would you? Please?", but has been rebuffed every time. (She has moral convictions and/or psychological hangups and/or preferences that make the possibility of _buying_ sex unappealing to her.)
2. (This is Crimson Wool's example. It's a good example.) Bert is a Roman Catholic, profoundly religious, who feels himself called to the priesthood. He has had a few girlfriends but never had sex with them, because he and they are good Catholics who believe that sex belongs only in marriage. This hasn't stopped him very strongly desiring to have sex with them. And for that matter quite strongly desiring to have sex with any number of attractive women he has met, or just seen in the street. He has never felt any romantic or sexual attraction to other men. He calls himself heterosexual.
3. Claire is another person who calls herself bisexual. She frequently finds herself attracted to other people of either sex. The experience seems much the same to her whether the others are male or female. In some cases she's seen someone and found them very attractive without actually being sure whether they were male or female. The attraction in all cases seems definitely sexual as well as romantic in nature -- she will find her mind drifting to the thought of what her current crush would look like with no clothes on, etc., etc. Claire is shy and socially awkward, and the first time someone -- who happened to be male -- showed unambiguous enough interest in her, she grabbed the opportunity with both hands. They turned out to make a very good couple, and got married. Claire has had sex with her husband and has no intention to have sex with anyone else. She still calls herselx bisexual.
4. Dave was never very sure about his sexuality when growing up in his conservative southern US town. He wasn't quite sure what it was that his male friends were appreciating when they wolf-whistled the local girls. He always just assumed that they were pretending to be more enthusiastic than they really were in order to show off, just like he was. He found a girl whose company he enjoyed and who seemed like she was into him, and they dated chastely for a while and got married. He and his wife are devout evangelical Christians and believe that marriage is a lifelong commitment, which makes it sad for them that Dave could never really take much physical interest in his wife. They can just about manage to make sex work, but it turns out that to do it Dave has to imagine that he's with another man. (It took him quite a while to persuade himself even to consider that that might help. It turns out that it does.) The only person Dave has ever had sex with, or ever intends to have sex with, is female, but none the less he now (reluctantly and shamefacedly) calls himself homosexual, and his wife would agree.
We aren’t really talking about virgins or celibate people here though - we’re talking about people who are sexually (or at least romantically) active, who identify as bisexual, but exclusively engage in heterosexual sex/romance.
I think the topic is poorly framed. I wouldn't accuse anyone of "faking" or "just claiming to be" bisexual (at least, not without quite particular and strong evidence). The question is more subtle than that. It's something like, "Are there sexual preferences that are, in part, learned and/or chosen through social and cultural interactions, such that it may not make sense to talk about them as a crisp, unchanging part of one's identity, like blood type? And if so, could it be that bisexuality has this quality more often than other preferences?"
Am I misreading the last-5-year-only-male-partners chart? Because it seems to say that your estimate of around 50% was only achieved recently, with prior years having lower numbers. Dramatically so for 2008-2010. Your explanation would have made wildly incorrect predictions back then, but good ones now, yet every reason you provide for predicting a high number should either be unchanged (your reasons 2, 3 and 5), or have applied even more back in the past (reasons 1 and 4 and the impact of total # of partners in a given time period). If you find current numbers unsurprising, you should find past numbers completely befuddling.
My guess is that the bar for realizing/labeling oneself as bisexual is lower and awareness of the label is higher. Before, the people who thought of themselves as bisexual probably had a strong attraction to their own sex and weren’t able/willing to bury it to conform to societal norms. As a Gen Z bisexual, I’m fairly confident that if I were born 50 years ago, I would’ve ignored my same-sex urges out of a combination of social pressure and lack of awareness of something between straight and gay (I’d definitely pick straight if I had to choose).
As a Gen X bisexual, can confirm this was a very confusing several years being equally attracted to both and wondering what was wrong with me before finally hearing the term bisexual and learning that was a thing. Still took way too long to start admitting it, but knowing the term and that it was a thing some people were was a big improvement.
My impression was that the chart proves that while the numbers *are* increasing, they're only doing so because their previous values were artificially far below what should be statistically expected, and are regressing to the mean as social stigma against identification lightens.
Ironically, I think this post actually demonstrates one reason why we should consider “identifies as bisexual” as potentially socially contagious (or at least “more socially contagious than other queer identities”), which is the more charitable reading of the comments to the last post that set Scott off (the point was “if bisexuality is a social contagion and so is long COVID, that could be an explanation for why self identified long COVID is way more common among self identified bisexuals”).
It’s a relatively low-cost signal, and some of that cost will be borne by well-meaning allies like Scott flying to your defense with long essays because somebody implied that some people who identify as bisexual might have little if any interest in actually pursuing same-sex relationships. If you adopt a bisexual identity, not only do you not have to actually change your behavior, but your newly adopted community will go into attack mode against anyone that implies that you do!
On top of that I think bisexuality could fit the social contagion model Scott laid out pretty well. You’ve got some percentage of people who are “organically” interested in sex with both sexes. Then you’ve got a larger group who maybe have some occasional or mild or ambiguous feelings of attraction to the same sex that they pattern match to the social contagion.
(Caveat before anyone jumps me: as Scott covered, “socially contagious” does not mean “fake”)
The real question is whether you think "socially contagious" means "bad"? The label isn't entirely low-cost, bisexuals will be discriminated no matter how popular the label becomes. As we saw in the other thread, they will either be attacked for being not normal, or they will be attacked for being too normal. Either way, it is clearly concern trolling. There's no reasonable argument for why you shouldn't identify as bisexual even if you are never going going to be in a homosexual relationship, because if it's how you really feel then that's going to inform your behaviour regardless and thus the utility of the label becomes realised.
And I don't think Scott considers it costly to write in their defense, I think you're exaggerating the social cost of all this.
Socially contagious does not mean “bad” (I mean it could be used that way but considering our host wrote a long post about it I thought it was safe to use it as he does, neutrally).
“ identify as bisexual even if you are never going going to be in a homosexual relationship, because if it's how you really feel then that's going to inform your behaviour regardless”
That sentence doesn’t make sense. The point is that it isn’t informing sexual behavior for some large fraction of self identified bisexuals (at least not enough to result in actual sex), and this fraction has gone up a lot over a short time span recently.
I’m really not concern trolling here, if anything I’m poking Scott for being, in my opinion, too uncharitable to the posters in the previous thread. Clearly a nerve was touched - writing this many words into a post responding to a day old comment is not typical for him.
I mean he can do whatever he wants with his time. My point was that within the LGBTQ and ally community there is clearly something of a taboo against “accusing self identified bisexuals of not really being bi” and this significantly lowers the cost of claiming a bi identity (especially if you aren’t actively pursuing same sex relationships). SOMETHING has clearly changed socially between 2008 and 2018 and I think that’s one of the things (I think this has changed more dramatically than stigma against non-heterosexual identities over this timespan, but that’s just my unsupported observation).
It's beneficial for the gay rights movement to have more people identifying as non-cishet in the same way it's beneficial to keep adding letters to the alphabet soup that describes it. One of the movement's key <s>s̶o̶l̶d̶i̶e̶r̶s̶</s> arguments is that "there are more of us than you think", so any incremental increase in numbers is good. Even if members of the community know someone is bullshitting, they'll turn a blind eye for the sake of promoting The Cause.
I mean yes, but Scott has numbers that demonstrably show that the percentage of self identified bisexual women who actually have sex with other women has dropped dramatically over a span of only a decade.
I'm saving this one. It's well-written and packed with good data, perfectly explaining my own orientation and position.
Just to add, I'm also a submissive and generally kinky. I'm not sure what percentage of bi women are subs but from my own experience, it's many. I've had romantic compatibility with women who I'm not sexually compatible with (re: anything longterm or monogamous) for these reasons. My longterm partner is male but I seek female partnership as well. Because polyamory is more taboo than even bisexuality, most people (unless they get to know me on a deeply personal level) will simply assume I'm straight and have no idea what goes on in my house, or in my head.
So the Pragmatist's Guide to Sexuality (this is by the pronatalist Collins couple with the too-cute glasses, so take with a grain of salt) did a survey of about 250, and actually coded attraction to domination and submission independently (so switches exist!). 80% of bi women reported being turned on by submission, versus 62% (!) of straight women. So...you may be on to something. The book is actually fairly amusing, complete with breakdowns of how many people fantasize about sex with giants and aliens, and if you're open-minded enough to post here you might enjoy it, though when they start pontificating based on results of 2% versus 8% in a sample of 250 I really think they should shut up.
Both of the bi women I know personally are subs, but that's only an additional n=2. (There's also an additional selection-bias factor left as an exercise for the reader.)
Without judging which definition is correct, it is important to notice that the definition has changed. AntimemeticsDivisionDirector asked about Chronic Fatigue among bisexuals. I found two sources, one from 2007 and one from 2020 without opposite effects. Maybe that's because they have different kinds of bisexuals. Moreover, if you want to explain the correlation, you have to have a theory of what bisexuals are, rather than just trusting self-identification. "Psychology Is About Invalidating People's Identities"
"Without judging which definition is correct, it is important to notice that the definition has changed. AntimemeticsDivisionDirector asked about Chronic Fatigue among bisexuals. I found two sources, one from 2007 and one from 2020 without opposite effects"
I don't understand this claim. Which definition has changed? From what to what? There weren't opposite effects on what?
"Moreover, if you want to explain the correlation, you have to have a theory of what bisexuals are, rather than just trusting self-identification."
This was why I was trying to bring in the genital arousal data.
Your last paragraph is only correct if we assume that the purpose of labelling someone as "bisexual" or "heterosexual" or whatever is to classify the effects that looking at different varieties of pornography have on the bloodflow to their genitals.
It is not obvious to me that that's a good assumption.
It might be, if there were some demonstration that genital bloodflow in response to pornography were a good predictor of e.g. what sort of relationships someone would get into or find satisfactory. I'm not aware of any such demonstration, but then I'm not aware of anything much in this field so maybe that's been done?
If not, though, then a lack of correlation between (1) self-declared sexual orientation and (2) lab-measured genital bloodflow when viewing pornographic videos is interesting but doesn't tell us much about whether it's #1 or #2 that fails to correlate with _other_ things that might actually matter.
I don't think I understand your question. And, actually, I'm not sure I understood what you meant by "theory of self-identification" before. I suspect there is some misunderstanding going on here, no doubt some of it mine. (Maybe all, I don't know.)
What did you mean by "it is a poor theory of self-identification"?
I _thought_ you meant something like "it's a bad idea to decide who is bisexual simply by who calls themselves bisexual, because that fails to line up with this thing we can measure". But e.g. maybe you actually meant something more like "It's a bad idea to focus on 'genital arousal' because it doesn't match up with self-identification"? Or something else entirely?
Self-identification is a real phenomenon and we study it. In particular, we must study it because it is what we have in medical data. To answer the question of why self-identification correlates with long covid, we must have a theory of self-identification. We might also have a theory of bisexual behavior. When my first comment said "what bisexuals are," it was not clear between the two. Which is why I then moved to the absolutely precise "theory of self-identification."
I think the answer to my question of how you interpreted my statement is that you are first judging people as friend or enemy and then hallucinating their statements to match.
> "self-identified bisexuals don’t really date both sexes, and are just claiming to be bi because it’s trendy"
> Bisexuals themselves hate this
That is also presumptive, I'm also on board with calling the modern trend of 1/2 of teenagers being lbgt bullshit and I have programming socks and prefer flirting with men. I would just want to flatly draw the line capable of getting off from nudes from both.
I would never be offended from someone talking statistics, or definitions. The line should be moral pressure or direct out right denying existence. And I could always talk about porn I enjoy till any religious busy bodies go away and don't feel those links speak for me in the slightest.
I don't get off on male nudes, but I first had sex with a man over thirty years and I still love sex with men today, so I think it would be a stretch to call me straight.
"I would just want to flatly draw the line capable of getting off from nudes from both."
This is a bit of a ridiculous bar. What about people who have no sexual attraction but have romantic attraction? What about people who aren't sexually attracted to nudes but get off in other ways? How do you even test this?
Just let people identify how they feel, most of the time it's accurate and when it's not accurate it doesn't really do much harm at all. If you just want to feel special and unique, you can choose mutable characteristics like hobbies and clothes.
What I personally want is a word to cover sexual experiences instead of sexual attraction. There is a big difference between "I am attracted to both men and women" and "I've had sex with both men and women".
My ex-girlfriend identified as bisexual. She had never had any relationship with a woman despite spending four years at Bryn Mawr (an all-women's college that I'm sure has an above-average proportion of LGBT women). I believe the operative phrase is "target-rich environment."
I get where you're coming from with the math, but when I see headlines about how 1 in 4 high school students are LGBTQ, my BS detector starts screaming.
The numbers are even more staggering looking at girls. 3.7% calling themselves gay or lesbian, but 20% bisexual? 13.7% calling themselves "questioning" or using some other (non-straight) term? I think large numbers of teen girls "faking bisexuality" (or succumbing to societal pressure or contagion, or looking for "trendiness points," or signaling their politics, or assuaging their white guilt, or whatever else you want to call it) is far more plausible than only 60% of high school girls being straight. (I say that as someone who's been teaching HS for more than a decade and who's seen something like 4000 girls pass through those schools in that time.)
See Part II and III. I'm making the claim that approximately no women are straight, in the sense of lacking the biological machinery to be interested in women, and whether they choose to acknowledge and explore same-sex attraction is mostly culturally determined.
It would be somewhat strong evidence against my theory if significantly more than 10% of men started identifying as bi.
But does "sexual arousal in laboratory conditions" in a group of people willing to participate in a study that involves watching porn really reflect the entire population? Furthermore, does a woman who is aroused by watching a female masturbate (that's what was referred to in at least one of the studies you linked to) necessarily want to have sex with other women? Maybe she'd just like to go home and masturbate. I think there's probably a real distinction here in terms of how women and men react to sexual arousal, and probably more women are bisexual than men, but I don't really think "no women are straight" makes a lot of sense.
"I'm making the claim that approximately no women are straight, in the sense of lacking the biological machinery to be interested in women..."
This is the kind of thing that should eventually lead us to change the way we define what it means to be straight. If approximately half the straight people in the world are women, and that half has never been straight in the way that (male) writers have traditionally defined sexuality, then we're due for a pretty big shakeup!
If true, this makes a strong argument that we *should* stigmatize at least female bisexuality. If 50% of women ended up with other women, it would leave a huge chunk of men unmarried for life, with the attendant negative outcomes both personally and socially. (E.I. higher crime rates, suicide rates, and general risk taking behavior leading to poor health outcomes.)
I mean. Not if we explicitly stigmatize polygamy and promulgate polyandry? I agree a reversion to polygamy would be likely (and bad) if we just abstracted away the stigma without changing anything else, but as long as we're engaging in hypothetical wide-scale social engineering, I don't see that it would be at all *impossible* to nudge a society along those particular lines…
Everything in politics and society is tradeoffs; if artificially restricting half the populations dating pool from 100% of the population to 50% through social pressure gives us lower crime, suicide, and cancer rates, while having virtually no impact on their ability to find a mate because as Scott noted in OP, it's very easy for women to find male partners... it seems like that's probably worth the trade off? Particularly if we can do so without actually threatening anyone with force of law, just using social pressure.
To put it another way; what are the benefits of encouraging potentially bi women to pursue same sex relationships?
I mean... there's a whole bunch of assumptions in there that I don't feel certain about at all, so I'm not nearly convinced that your social engineering would work; plus when you say "just social pressure" I think of gay kids getting beaten by their parents and thrown out of their homes. I don't know what kind of social pressure you were imagining, but that seems like a relevant recent example to me. And I think it constitutes a very large harm, big enough that I'm not comfortable balancing hypothetical benefits against it.
The things that I'm not convinced about: I understand that studies show that single men have lots of bad outcomes. But it's not obvious to me that those outcomes couldn't/wouldn't be mitigated in lots of other ways. If there were more single men, maybe they'd form nice single men's clubs. Maybe governments would legalise prostitution and it would become more acceptable to use sex services. Maybe the increased competition for women would actually have a salutary effect and raise the average quality of men (better health, less crime) so that even the sexual losers ended up better. Any of those outcomes seems as possible to me, in a hand-wavy kind of way, as men just sinking into cancer-ridden criminal delinquency.
The benefits of encouraging women to pursue the relationships they want include the obvious higher chance of finding a really satisfying life partnership; the opportunity to experience lower risk of partner violence; the creation of more stable households for childraising... I don't have any idea how to quantify any of these. But I certainly don't share your instinct that one side of this equation obviously outweighs the other. And as I said above, I think "social pressure" is a thing to be treated with great suspicion, a dangerous weapon, not a harmless nudge.
Marriage as a civilizing factor for men is one of the most robust social studies findings I've ever heard of; from Orwell in 1984, to Johnathan Gottschall in the Professor in the Cage, (really the seminal work on the matter as far as I'm concerned).
To address some of your other points:
"If there were more single men, maybe they'd form nice single men's clubs."
What makes you think that these clubs would not be deeply anti social? E.I. violent gangs? Even the "nice" side of them is probably going to be extreme sports and racing, men without marital prospects will chase risks.
"Maybe governments would legalise prostitution and it would become more acceptable to use sex services."
How would this be good? It would not give them any opportunity for raising children, nor any opportunities for pair bonding.
"Maybe the increased competition for women would actually have a salutary effect and raise the average quality of men (better health, less crime) so that even the sexual losers ended up better."
Perhaps, but after spending a decade working on improving myself to attract a mate and still failing, I know it's only making me far more bitter than I was when I was younger. Sooner or later, somethings gonna give, either finding a wife or a total breakdown into some sort of extreme risk taking behavior, criminal or not.
"The benefits of encouraging women to pursue the relationships they want include the obvious higher chance of finding a really satisfying life partnership"
Why is this obvious? Doubling your potential dating pool does not nessacarily have this effect, there's been plenty written on this with regards to online dating.
"The opportunity to experience lower risk of partner violence."
Actually, the opposite is true, same sex couples have higher rates of domestic violence (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29994648 ) men are taught from a young age not to hit women, and that taboo mostly holds
"The creation of more stable households for childraising."
Also; it's quite disingenuous to list "The benefits of encouraging women to pursue the relationships they want include the obvious higher chance of finding a really satisfying life partnership" without noting that this possible benefit comes at the cost of the exact reverse for the men, and to a much greater extent.
Scott, please don't assume that no women are straight, this is just plain wrong. Even if I'm the only woman who is quite totally straight and absolutely sure of this fact since kindergarten, I do exist. Yourself, you feel quite sure that you are not bi. The same sentiment exists among women. Not the slightest inkling of romantic or sexual feelings towards any woman at all, either real or imaginary - that is completely straight, isn't it?
I don't mean that it's uncommon for women not to feel same-sex attraction, I mean that it's uncommon for women not to have some kind of instinctive same-sex arousal. In most people that apparently never becomes conscious same-sex attraction. The poll I posted said that 63% of women said they'd never consider sleeping with another woman, and I believe that.
I have to echo other comments that I think the study is likely picking up something more like the autogynephilia-in-cis-women thing you've often talked about. i.e. woman see images of women masturbating and imagine themselves *in their place*, as opposed to imagining themselves having sex with the woman in the video. It's not a different level of capacity-to-be-aroused-by-homosexual-sex, it's a different way of engaging with pornography.
I've said this elsewhere in the thread, but I don't think these studies are actually measuring sexual orientation in women. The studies are based off of an understanding of male sexuality where sexual attraction is the same thing (apparently) as a person looking pretty so porn acts as a pretty good proxy for that.
I personally get turned on by all sorts of porn, but in real life women don't turn me on, men I think are pretty don't turn me on, but some men who may or may not be pretty do turn me on.
Women's sexuality is a lot more situational than men's are, I think.
>The numbers are even more staggering looking at girls. 3.7% calling themselves gay or lesbian, but 20% bisexual? 13.7% calling themselves "questioning" or using some other (non-straight) term?
What do you think the correct percentage should be?
To me, these sorts of arguments implicitly assume that the stats accurately counted LGBT people in the past, and any increase since then is due to "fake" LGBT people inflating the stats.
But couldn't the reverse be true? That in the past, the number of LGBT was artificially undercounted, and now we're seeing the real number?
It's the same as those Occupy Wall Street types ten years ago. "CEO pay has increased 1000% since 1970! It's out of control!" They never bothered to establish what the baseline of CEO pay should be. For all I know, CEOs were underpaid in 1970.
From a point of observation, older generations will not generally adopt new generations' social trends and mindsets (or at least, they'll adopt them much more slowly); we can observe that boomers are, overall, much more homophobic or at least hesitant to accept LGBT ideas as compared to zoomers as well.
Yes, the stigma has faded for zoomers; we can't say the same for boomers.
I could still totally buy a tenfold difference in LGBTQ identification. Boomers are from a more conservative era, likely have more conservative social circles, and are at a stage of life where they are (a) more likely to be married and unlikely to risk that with experimentation and (b) less likely to make major changes in identity. Why blow up your life if you're not writing about it for the Atlantic?
I would think there's a bigger difference in stigma between boomers and Gen X/Millennials than between the latter and zoomers. But there's a much bigger difference in identification between zoomers and their immediate predecessors than boomers and their successors.
If this is the case, how come the fifty-something guy coming out as transexual is so common? Maybe it's just inflated by the usual distortion lenses, but my admittedly detached impression is that even younger transexuals find this troubling-to-mortifying and something that's hard to deal with in their communities.
It would be interesting to know if these numbers are different if you limit to older men who are single and actively dating. For someone who's been married since before it was socially acceptable, there's much less reason to come out as bi now if you can't really act on it.
They use different definitions. "I experimented in college" is a trope, but for an average boomer it does not change their settled self-identification, while for a zoomer it registers as a part of their identity (and continued "experimentation").
People's identity isn't something that they regularly update based on an impartial assessment of societal trends. Of you're a 60 year old man who has been married to a woman for 40 years you are not going to change your self conception and public identity because your teenage self had some confusing feelings that you suppressed
because there are social scripts and narratives and support networks and resources for coming out at 17 that simply don’t exist for 57-year-olds, who mostly have massive sunk costs in the lives they’ve already built on assumptions they formed decades ago that didn’t include or maybe even have words to describe many possibilities that for young people today do feel like possibilities.
I think it's very true that stigma in the past led to undercounting of LGBT people. But that doesn't explain the explosion of people identifying as bisexuals among younger generations, while the gay/lesbian numbers remain much closer among generations.
From the chart at the bottom of that page, 1% of baby boomers considered themselves gay, compared to 2.5% of Gen Z, a factor of 2.5. 0.7% of baby boomers considered themselves lesbians, compared to 2.0% of Gen Z, a factor of about 3. But while 0.7% of boomers considered themselves bisexual, 15% of Gen Z did., a factor of more than 20. Again, I think it's plausible that many boomers, happily married to a member of the opposite sex, might really be bisexual but have no reason to say that, but the difference here is so drastic I don't see how that can explain everything.
Doesn't seem that hard to explain, when social stigma was higher people who had a choice would have acted to avoid it. By mostly identifying as straight and dating same sex partners. But people who are exclusively or bear exclusively homosexual didn't have that choice, and their only alternative was celibacy.
When I was at school, in the ancient days of the 2000s, you could get beaten up and socially ostracized for any suspicion of being a bit gay. I think people underestimate how recent and significant the social changes have been. So our baseline for what the "normal" level of LGBTQ identities is going to be pretty skewed
> Right now I have a pretty good deal where I can self-describe as straight and guys won’t hit on me. If 5% of straight guys would say yes to being hit on by a man, men would hit on us much more often. So it’s in my self-interest for men who might like men to self-ID as bisexual […]
I don't get it; why is it bad for you if a guy hits on you? (I've heard other straight guys express something similar, so I know you're not alone, but I just don't get it.)
1. Some people do find being approached by a member of the sex they're unattracted to disgusting.
2. They may not take no for an answer, and I get the sense Scott isn't the type to lift or do BJJ. (This is, I suspect, the reason lesbians are so eager to have women-only spaces.)
Watch out, if you drop too many comments like that we're gonna get rocked one of these days by Wide Scott ripping DSMs in half with his hands, then he and Long Yud will both quit writing and start a tag-team wrestling promotion. Immense short-term utility, but the species might be doomed.
For my part I find basically all social interactions with strangers to be anxiety-inducing and discordant. If they serve some function or lead to some benefit then ok, but if they're futile and pointless from the start I'd rather avoid them.
something the other replies aren't considering is I rarely hear this from straight women (that it would be really bad if more women hit on them), only from men. I personally think this is because being hit on by men can be a bad experience regardless of gender (less willing to take no for an answer, more physically threatening) and so if you don't even want to date men you will want to avoid this as much as possible (lesbians, straight men). Even as a woman attracted to men I rarely enjoy being hit on by strange men.
edit: another possibility is that this is linked to Scott's numbers on most women not being straight? Then women wouldn't have the same disgust reaction to same-sex experiences as men would.
Surprised not to see this mentioned already: if gay men think it's legit to hit on you, this is a sign that you seem homosexual, and as noted elsewhere in the thread even the appearance of this is enough to sink your chances with a massive swath of women, typically one hugely overlapping the most attractive women. If you react to the approach with anything but forceful, disgusted rejection it's even worse.
Women tend to "like gay men" in a social sense, but that's because they see them as harmless/nonthreatening; in terms of revealed preference women, on the group level, have just as strong a disgust reaction toward male homosexuality as men do.
My experience and that of my bi friends experience suggests that —unlike, say, enby— identifying as bi is in no way hip, and is rather a costly signal (or was when I was still searching for my social niche in the DC area):
The main thing is many people assume you’re lying. That sucks. Gays find you untrustworthy, and —at least in DC— were uncomfortable with the implicit notion that some people actually do choose to engage in gay relationships voluntarily, as opposed to because they were ‘born that way’ (though I’m an elder millennial and this may have shifted since I cared). I had two friends in queer activism in DC, both were bi, both in the closet, lest they be fired or sidelined at work. Meanwhile, large swaths of the cis-het set assume you’re secretly gay, and bi is taken as a cowardly means of being half-closeted. My own father once held this viewpoint, and did when he noticed I was probably dating men —awkward! I have been told that having dated any men ever and being transparent about this is THE reason a one very large demographic of people conspicuously ghost me, when that has never happened with women of any other demographic.
I did have one minor quibble with the post:
> “I find myself intrigued by Mike’s explanation: if many people are bisexual but just don’t notice it, bisexuality might correlate with increased awareness of one’s own mental state and unwillingness to round it off to socially acceptable alternatives. If lots of people get Long COVID in the sense of some mild fatigue on the threshold of awareness, maybe people who are good at noticing their mental state and not rounding it off to something else are more likely to notice that.”
My intuition is that Mike’s hypothesis is consistent with Scott’s mental illness and state fixation hypothesis:
Noticing subtle problems others miss and becoming fixated on them might plausibly contribute to both mental illness and long COVID. I’m reminded of the famous Krishnamurti line:
‘It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society’
People who are honest and observant enough to notice issues, personally and societally, in my experience, are much more likely to have to do a lot of work to attain reasonable states of wellbeing.
Why would you be baffled by this? I think most women would suspect that if a man identifies as bisexual then he probably won't be satisfied with only having sex with a woman; eventually he'll cheat on you with a man.
Plus you're likely to wind up with some kind of horrible STD into the bargain.
So, there are, what, like 4 billion women on the planet? What is the difference between four billion people one could cheat with and eight billion?
The only context in which this objection makes sense to me is one in which someone believes that the man in question is identifying as 'bi' because he is gay or gay-leaning --the 'lots of people think you're lying problem' I noted in my original comment.
> likely to wind up with some kind of horrible STD
I mean...sure, if you're an idiot? And you don't calibrate your risk mitigation strategies to the widely known and easily referenced base rates of STDs in various populations? I can't speak for any bi men who are not my friends, but being double plus extra careful with gay guys strikes me as just standard operating procedure among reasonable people.
It is far, far easier for a man to find another man to sleep with than a man to find a woman to sleep with. Plus men are much more likely to be flirted with / propositioned by men than by woman. The kinds of women that wouldn't date a bi-man are probably the kind who hold the view that most men will have sex with someone if the option were available or if the right circumstances arose.
> probably the kind who hold the view that most men will have sex with someone if the option were available or if the right circumstances arose.
A person who can't or won't say no when sex isn't the honorable needs help (and dignity); a person who would wittingly partner with such a person needs even more help (and dignity).
Hard for me to imagine why one would want either in one's dating pool.
Is there a common view of bi people that they want to have sex with men AND women, rather than just being happy to have sex with men OR women? That would explain the "a bi guy is more likely to cheat on me with a man than a straight guy is to cheat on me with another woman" concern.
It wouldn't surprise me if there was a popular conception of "obligate bi", though I don't know that I've come across it.
What Melvin said. I went out with a (poly) gal who was only willing to continue if I was willing to promise never to date other men as MSM was too high-risk in terms of STDs etc. (She was also into gay porn, to underscore the point that real life doesn't always match your fantasies.) I also knew an older lady who said the first case of AIDS she ever saw was in a woman whose boyfriend didn't tell her he was bi. :(
Now if you're a bi man, you have a choice--chase the 47% or so of the population that's straight or bi female, or the 2% or so of the population that's gay or bi male. Unless you lean heavily gay, which one are you going to go for?
I suppose with HIV in more recent history worry about STIs makes more sense?
worry about cheating less so; I doubt there's *that* much of a correlation between bisexuality and sex drive
and while there may be more opportunity for casual sex I doubt the average mono woman is thrilled at the idea of dating a guy who only doesn't cheat because he lacks the opportunity
(as or more salient to me is "someone who has some experience as to what it is to hook up with men probably is a bit better calibrated on how aggressively to approach people?" but I don't know)
Right. This brings us to the silver lining of being a man who's had at least some sexual experience with men (or minimally some time in a gay bar):
We can empathize with having been on the receiving end of bad male sexual behavior. I had no model of this while dating only women in high school. I had a complete failure of imagination, and thought that (e.g.) my girlfriend's mother had a model of men that was just irrationally hateful. Then I learned --through some acutely unpleasant but profoundly edifying experiences in my late teens and early twenties-- that her perspective was tragically understandable. Though this had some unfortunate synergies with the women's studies classes I was taking at the time (think: gendered self-loathing), in the long term it was massively beneficial.
There is also some counter-signaling benefit in bisexuality (or just being a bit faggy): having just enough gay sex to keep my queer card, giggling now and again, and wearing a bag that is beautiful and very nearly a purse signals to the women I care to date that I'm not going to be brittle or weird in sexual contexts. You know what is gayer than men who have sex with men occasionally? And even less fun for women to date and fuck? Men who are preoccupied with their own masculinity. More generally:
Sexual normality is rare and startlingly overpowered in general, and 10x more-so in rationalist circles (at least on the east coast, I haven't spent much time in the bay). I notice I am confused about why more people haven't figured this out.
It's telling that in Aella's experience (as of a couple-few years ago when she made the tweet), every man turns into a werewolf in sexual contexts. This is not at all consistent with my experience with men (or people) in general. My actual experience is that women are far more likely to be sexually unhinged when presented with someone who can actually turn them on, because they have less experience being sufficiently aroused that sexual restraint is even required --a bit like transitioning trans men. But Aella's take is completely consistent with my experience of members of my community. As far as I can tell, all anyone proximal to this community needs to do to receive limitless amounts of sexual attention --even from people who think they aren't attracted to your sex-- is signal that one's libido hasn't been RLHF'd into some waluigi-werewolf mode collapsed monster by being honest and matter of fact about their sexual desires. Fucking a same sex partner now and then and not being weird about that fact is probably not necessary to signal that one doesn't have waluigi-werewolf genitalia, but it does seem to be sufficient.
If you're looking for a long-term partner a guy who lacks the opportunity to cheat might be right up your alley. I've read the PUA blogs but a lot of women may indeed be willing to settle for a less-sexy guy who will raise a family with them.
as a bi-ish man I note that I get hit on approximately never by women and at least a few times a year by men. it would be actively easier to date men, at least if i weren't too discerning.
This is the first time I have seen someone write about scholarly evidence, for what has always seemed like an obvious fact to me: most women are bisexual while men are more likely to be just gay or straight. Even though I was amazed at how stark the difference was.
Serious question, and if you covered this and I missed it, forgive me, but does being Bi correspond to having high levels of “openness?” Like personality wise?
I feel like all the bi people I know are very high on openness in general.
Bisexual women have way more lifetime partners than straight women. I don't have a median or a mean, but for having 10+ partners, the RR is 4. Thus they have more than 7 chances to swing both ways.
Good point. More generally, the binomial math Scott does at the top is really sensitive to deviations from "7 relationships for everyone". If its much higher, the "natural" probability of 0 same-sex relationships rapidly goes much lower. If heterogeneity is high - say 75% of women have 0-1 partners, the other 25% average ~30 each, then the reverse is true - well over half will have 0 same-sex relationships.
On the other hand, at the link you cite it still only has a median of "lifetime sexual partners" for bisexual women at (probably) 5.
FWIW, one reason to say you're lesbian when you're actually bi is that lots of actual lesbians have bad history with women who claim to be bi, but are really more like bi-curious or who think they're bi, but actually aren't. This has led to negative stereotypes of bi women in the lesbian community as unreliable and secretly straight, which bi women sometimes try to avoid by presenting as totally lesbian. This stereotyping is included in the umbrella of things labelled "biphobia".
The funny thing is it then comes back around to lesbians being mad at bi women who call themselves lesbians because it increases the impression that lesbian is a flexible identity. Bi women really can't win.
I can second that. It's a discussed topic in the community, and Cara has described it perfectly.
As an additional note: lesbian romance authors have started to use the word "sapphic" to mean "lesbian and bisexual women (including trans) dating other lesbian and bisexual women (including trans)", which is basically the maximally inclusive description of the concept of two women dating that one could conceive. In this very specific author and reader community, "lesbian" could be taken to mean "only strictly lesbian cis-women". But not every author and reader in that space understands "lesbian" to be so strict to warrant the term "sapphic" as a distinction, so it's all a bit muddy anyways. The "sapphic" label is a bit more fashionable currently, because inclusivity is a celebrated feature.
I cannot say whether a part the readership might have mixed opinions on this, as far as I can tell, most "sapphic" romance novels in this (very small) market are "lesbian" in a strict sense anyways.
It is further complicated by the fact that the word "lesbian" is a very prominent label for erotica, e.g. in the Amazon Kindle Store, often used to mislabel works, while "sapphic" isn't used for erotica, so searching for books with "sapphic" helps filter for actual romance novels, and, ironically, returns more content about "lesbian" themes.
My ex-girlfriend (I'm male) starting getting into relationships with girls after we broke up (she was lesbi-curious while we were together). She identified as (de facto) bi in the UK. When she moved to an Asian lesbian scene, she was put under pressure to identify as lesbian, because of this 'biphobia' that was totally normalised in the community. My impression is that the 'LGBT-solidarity' meme is stronger in young communities in the west, while these four groups don't naturally gel, and often actively dislike each other, in the absence of such a meme.
This is another lovely post, I just chuckled at the last footnote:
"Also, as a straight person, I want to protect the signaling value of the word “straight”. Right now I have a pretty good deal where I can self-describe as straight and guys won’t hit on me. If 5% of straight guys would say yes to being hit on by a man, men would hit on us much more often."
It's not so horrible being hit on by men. At least, not in my experience. I've only been hit on in gentle ways by nice men, so perhaps I've been very lucky. I just wanted to be a straight man who says in public: it's fine when gay men hit on us (when they're polite and friendly about it).
No doubt. My view is that half the world's population (women) already has to deal with that small fraction. If some of that fraction hit on straight men as well, straight men would have a much better idea what that's like. It might help to deter some of the straight small fraction, and it would enable the majority to act more appropriately around women when women experience that kind of harassment. So a small loss of comfort for straight men, and a gain for women (and humanity!). I think straight men getting hit on by other men more would be a net positive.
From the utilitarian point of view, sure (and I've done the experiment of being bi on OKCupid, though I'm past the age of 'gay death' as you stated elsewhere), but it's a loss for *Scott*, who's writing the essay.
I'm only rationalist-adjacent, because I'm much more cynical.
It's not just about men who won't take no for an answer. It's also about the broader picture. The female preference for males is so strongly in favor of straight men that if a whiff of a rumor gets around that a man might be attracted to anything that has ever had a penis, it can be quite damaging to that man's chances with women. It may be said to be so strongly in a man's interest to shut down that perception hard that it results in decreased homosocial behavior (men hugging male friends etc.)
This reasoning may or may not be so applicable to modern-day Scott located in the Bay Area, but it holds generally, even with "liberal" women around.
The first bar graph shows that bisexual women in 2008-10 were much more likely to have had a female partner in the last five years (90+%). The pool of women identifying as Bi is way bigger now yet the graph showed 50% have not had a female partner in the last five years. How does that make sense
Presumably the same number of people had the same preferences then as now; the small group that identified as bi back then is probably importantly different from the much larger group that identifies that way now.
The results from the genital arousal study are likely to be deceptive about women’s attraction. Women can have a reaction to stimuli that doesn’t line up with their experienced sense of attraction, so bisexual women and straight women genitally aroused by lesbian porn have distinct experiences. I can’t easily find the response articles again, but researchers have theorized that the sexualization of women in media has trained straight women to have a Pavlovian-style response to images of naked women. Someone tested this by repeating a version of the study using images of only vulvas vs images including breasts or whole bodies l. Self-reported straight women tended to experience genital arousal to the porn including breasts but not to just vulvas, unlike lesbian and bisexual women. This may be because TV and movies show or accentuate breasts much more than vulvas.
I think I would interpret that rather as a pavlovian response to the sight of vulvas in those who enjoy sex with females. Presumably biologically inherited attraction to females is based primarily on visible secondary sexual characteristics.
FWIW - bi woman. Have been asked out by 3 men (accepted 1), been asked out by 0 women, asked out 5 women (none accepted) and asked out 2 men (both accepted).
Among the women, 4 were interested in women (1 of them exclusively women) and we were just not compatible / bad timing. 1 was asexual. 3 out of the 4 interested in women I met off dating apps specifically filtering for women interested in women, the others I knew socially.
All of the men were straight. There were also bi men in my social circle but I would say they were outnumbered 4 : 1 by straight men.
"So their potential dating pool is about 90% male. So this “perfectly” bisexual woman could be expected to date about 10x as many men as women, just by numbers alone.... if our bisexual woman samples exactly evenly from her male vs. female dating pool, we would expect about a 50-50 chance (0.90^7 = 0.478) that all seven of her relationships would be with men."
Isn't there a (failure to) double-count / weighting issue here? (I think - 75% confident - the following is correct).
Suppose, for a given relationship, "our bisexual woman" has a 10% chance of it being with another woman and 90% chance of it being with a male. So 90% of her relationships contain 1 male and 1 female (and thus qualify as a same-sex relationship for 0 people), but the other 10% contain 2 females and thus qualify as a same-sex relationship for 2 people. So per relationship she has, about 0.2 "woman in a same sex relationship" events occur, not 0.1. If the representative/average member of this group has 7 relationships, then there are 1.4 "woman in a same sex relationship" events per bisexual woman. This is a bit more complex now - I don't think you can use binomial theorem any more - but the probability that the average bisexual woman is ever in a same-sex relationship should be (substantially) higher due to this mechanism.
Some qualifiers / extra mechanisms to note: If most of the females in the dating pool for the bisexual woman are lesbians (who by presumption only have female partners) then this doesn't matter very much / at all. However if most are similarly bisexual, many of the candidate same-sex relationships are with other bisexual women and thus may also get them from 0 to >0 same-sex relationships. Similarly, if there's one woman who dates a tonne of other women, and provides their only same-sex partner, the number of same-sex relationships and "women ever in a same sex relationship" are closer to 1:1 rather than 2:1.
Second, as others have pointed out, the first graph, where the "among bisexual woman, share who have only dated men in past 5 years" has gone from 10% in 2008-10 to 50% today, really works against the claim of the piece. All of the arguments given in the piece for justifying 50% as being a perfectly reasonable number given the dating pool and social phenomena suggest the number should have been higher, not lower, in the past. Rationalising this by saying "the threshold for identifying as bisexual is much lower today" is basically just a different way of framing the original claim Scott is arguing against.
I'm surprised you want to preserve the signaling value of heterosexuality. In my experience most straight men with liberal sentiments are delighted by the idea of being (politely) asked out by a gay guy(1) because:
1. It affirms sexual attractiveness
2. It gives them an opportunity to make a display of magnanimous tolerance
(1)- Of course you could always be non-politely asked out by a gay guy, but that usually happens on Grindr.
Couldn't the Long Covid correlation be mostly explained by garden-variety trauma history acting on a specific type of sensitive personality to produce chaotic, intense relationships (often with a masochistic flavor, as somebody noted upthread), unstable patterns of attraction *and* a tendency toward somatization in whatever form, Covid or otherwise?
That life history is certainly something one sees a lot in the wild, and it doesn't necessarily imply anything offensive about the many trauma-free, stable and thriving bisexual individuals out there--just that there are multiple different ways someone might end up self-consciously feeling a strong attraction to both sexes, where at least one of those routes also entails increased vulnerability to Long Covid. As an account, it's not even all that different from the neurodivergence/state-fixation theory described in the post, but has benefit of suggesting other correlations that should be testable.
I had the vague impression that some people enjoy porn by imagining themselves _interacting with_ the depicted subject, while other people enjoy porn by imagining themselves _being_ the depicted subject. If true, this seems like it could hugely distort the genital-arousal studies (e.g. by causing actually-100%-straight women to be aroused by porn of women).
Are they controlling for this in some way? Am I wildly wrong here?
I'm fairly skeptical of genital arousal studies as a measure of *real* sexual orientation, and here's why:
It's pretty common for women to experience physical arousal in these studies while self-reporting no desire or even revulsion. That leads to one of two interpretations—they *are* into it and they're ashamed/lying or the physical reaction reflects *something else.*
Emily Nagoski, the author of the very good Come as You Are (https://amzn.to/3Lybc3H), puts it this way: "sometimes things are sexually relevant, even when they’re not even remotely appealing." [source: https://enagoski.medium.com/unwanted-arousal-it-happens-29679a156b92] Physical arousal can be a way of being *ready* for sex, in case it happens, regardless of whether you *want* sex.
And, in Nagoski's cited sources: "There’s about a 50% overlap between how much blood flows to a male’s genital response and how “turned on” he feels — his “subjective arousal;” and there’s about 10% overlap for women’s genital response and subjective arousal."
This undermines my confidence in genital arousal studies as an orientation measure, and I wish it were covered in middle school health classes generally. It's good for kids to know that getting a little physically aroused does not necessarily mean you have DISCOVERED AN IDENTITY.
Yeah. Genital arousal and subjective arousal are two different things, particularly in women. I would hesitate to use one as a proxy for the other, particularly when comparing genders.
(The main reason why there is a sex difference here is that a man who is being raped only benefits on the margins from being physically aroused, whereas a woman who is being raped significantly benefits most of the time, as most female rape victims are vaginally penetrated by a penis, and lack of physical arousal during PIV carries greater risk of injury. This means the threshold for a "false positive" genital arousal should be expected to be much lower for women, as, indeed, it is.)
A male who gets raped benefits greatly by being aroused in that he may produce offspring as a result of ejaculating, at little cost. I think the real question would be whether males historically have turned down sex often enough that this has been relevant.
If an erect penis is manipulated on the wrong angle, it can be 'fractured'. There are no bones, but the corpora cavernosa (the two cylindrical areas that engorge with blood to stiffen it) can be ruptured. While generally not life-threatening, it has a high chance of causing infertility if not promptly treated.
Penis fractures are usually caused when the penis slips out of the vagina and strikes the partner's pubic bone, and is significantly more common in "cowboy" sex positions where the penetrated partner is on top. This is exactly the sort of position that is most common when the penetrating partner is being raped.
It's very hard to rupture the corpora cavernosa on an flaccid penis. So while the effect is small, there's a fitness bonus for men to NOT become physically aroused during rape. Comparing the small chance of impregnating the raper vs the risk of permanent infertility, I could see the risk being the stronger factor.
Apparently the US has a yearly incidence of 1/175k for penile fractures, which presumably means that it happens on the order of once per million acts of female-on-top intercourse. To me, that seems like a negligible effect.
Thanks. There's a general assumption that, since people can't be trusted to report on their own experience, there must be some more objective method of figuring out what's going on. This might not be true.
Seems to me that there's a crucial error in your math about bisexuals. Yes, a bi woman has far more potential male than female suitors. But she also has far more rivals for the attention of those male suitors than female suitors. Suppose a population is 92% straight, 4% bi & 4% gay. A bi woman will have 94% of the male population interested in her (counting bi men as half) and only 6% of the female population (again counting bi women as half.) But she is competing with 94% of the women for the attention of 94% of the men and only competes with 6% of the women for the attention of 6% of women. For the bi woman, the female dating pool is much smaller but much more likely to hit on her as opposed to another woman.
Simulating this seems hard, but the logic here sounds right, and assuming its true, it probably matters a lot.
One way of thinking about the math (using your numbers): take the perspective of the lesbian women, and suppose that everyone can tell everyone else's type (so the lesbian women can tell which other women are lesbian and which women are bi, etc, so there's no differential efficiency in targeting. Imperfect, but makes things tractable).
Then, 50% of the women a lesbian woman dates will be bi. Suppose the average gay woman dates 7 women (using Scott's number). Then 3.5 will be bi. Since in your example there are an equal number (4%) of bi and lesbian women, this means the average bi woman will date 3.5 lesbians (ignoring any additional bi women they may date); tough to get 50% at 0 from that.
What about if 3% are lesbian but 9% are bi? Then we still get 3.5 lesbian-bi relationships per lesbian but only 1.2 per bisexual woman. Still not easy to get 50% at 0 from that, and this is before accounting for bi-bi relationships at all!
The main reason this argument would break down is if lesbians pretty much exclusively date lesbians, not bisexual women (either due to social networks or other factors).
In what (given Scott's claim in the OP) strikes me as major irony, they are saying this happens because lesbians suspect bisexuals are "faking" bisexuality.
Suppose this is all true. It doesn't render Crouchback's point moot, but it certainly does make thinking about the math pretty hard.
This depends on what rules you use to generate interactions (opportunities to meet and date). If the bisexual woman is going to local WLW (women loving women) singles events in her area, it's true that the scarcity of WLW in the population is counterbalanced by the scarcity of rivals for their affection: once all the single ladies have been concentrated in one place, she has a good shot with any of them. If she goes to conventional speed dating events instead, the fact that there's more men available and more women after them should wash, especially since only so many of them can physically fit in the building.'
However, if she's just going to singles events for her political party or professional association or just waiting for suitors to turn up in her mixed-sex workplace, school, or hobby groups, then she should meet many more available male matches than female ones.
>Most people who notice their bisexual attraction pattern and identify as bisexual will rarely or never date anyone of the same sex, mostly because of the size of the dating pools, but also for reasons of social convenience.
Small note - the social convenience thing applies most strongly to bisexual women, since the part about women being passive and hard to get doesn't apply to bisexual men.
Which would make us expect that bisexual men are more likely than bisexual women to have any/more same-sex relationships (or at least hookups). Which does match my impression from my friend group, at least.
"Which does match my impression from my friend group, at least."
This may be culturally dependent, -especially in more traditional cultures women are harder to hook-up with because a hook-up in general is frowned on. But as Scott writes "getting dates with men is easy, because men are horny and desperate...; getting dates with women is hard, for the usual reasons that every heterosexual man already viscerally appreciates." So for a horny man who Just Wants Sex Now, it may be more practical to achieve that with another man, especially since the advent of apps like Grindr, than with a woman, even if he would rather the latter. Ironically this is accentuated in more conservative / traditional communities. This is reflected in my social group, at least.
Thank you for writing this much needed follow-up, the comments section of the last post did get a bit frustrating. I wanted to mention that for bisexual men I think the math on size of potential dating pools can actually be much more skewed in practice than the numbers would suggest, for the simple reason that there's much more pressure to be really sure a guy might be interested before asking him out, since if he's actually straight the reaction can be very negative (potentially even more so if he's closeted). So for a bi man, asking a woman is much less risky, as it's much rarer for someone to be offended that you think they might be straight. So whatever proportion of men are either bi or gay, the pool of guys you could safely ask is much smaller. I realize this is becoming less true, but it was definitely the case pre-2000, so any statistics that include people over 40 are going to be affected by this.
I'm not sure how much of this was covered by your phrase "reasons of social convenience", but thought it might be worth spelling out in a bit more detail.
These studies where arousal is measured by attaching sensors to someone’s genitalia and then having them watch porn always make me skeptical. It’s such a weirdly unsexy situation and seems rife with confounding factors. Where are these test subjects? Is it someplace comfy? Where is the researcher? What kind of porn do they use? Are the subjects people who watch a lot of porn, or any at all?
I’m sure they make note of some of this, since e.g. you wouldn’t want to show people porn with both genders since you wouldn’t be able to tell who they’re attracted to. I get that these studies are looking at involuntary physiological responses and the apparent strangeness should theoretically not matter. But the whole setup sounds kind of…I dunno, traumatic? Invasive? Not conducive to natural sexual feelings? Granted, I can’t think of a particularly good way to measure arousal, either. Maybe improved technology could at least make the data collection process more subtle.
True. If I found myself in a scenario where I had an electrode attached to my clitoris and was being made to watch masturbation videos, my thoughts would be less “Is this person attractive?” and more “What circle of hell is this?”
I always wondered about that, it sounded like a nastier version of that notorious scene from A Clockwork Orange. I guess some subs and masochists might enjoy it, which would skew...the...results.
Wait, on the last thread someone (JAZ I think) said the bis they knew were subs (I only knew 2), and there was apparently a small trend (62% vs 80%) as per the Pragmatist's Guide (women only). If only subs or masochists are willing to put up with the study, is that the confounding factor we're looking for elevating the estimated levels of bisexuality?
Personally I would expect that "bisexual" women are just kinkier overall than "straight" women, so more "submissive" but also more "dominant" as a group.
That wasn't what the Pragmatist's Guide numbers said (30% versus 40% for straight), but it could definitely be true. They only had about 250 respondents.
I wonder if there would be a difference between genders too - I'd imagine you'd need much more unusually open-minded women to sign up for these studies than men.
This is a mathematically inconsistent argument that leads to the implication that female bisexuality was at 32% in 2008 and has dramatically decreased to 5-10%.
He makes a reasonable argument that a dating pool of 90% male leads to roughly half bisexual females never having female partners because 0.9 ^ 7 = 0.48.
But if that is the rationale then we should do the same for 2008-2010 numbers, which was 0.133 never having a female partner. If we solve for x in x^7 = 0.133 we get x=0.75.
But how do we get 0.75 instead of 0.9? It would indicate that in the time prior to 2008 that 32% of women were identifying as bisexual or lesbian, making their dating pool three quarters male instead of 90% male. This would mean that the number of bisexual females has dropped from 32% in 2008 to 5-10% now.
The other reasons he lists for bisexual females to date more men were all true back then, so I don’t see how these are relevant.
This is a nice way of framing the implausibility of the numbers in that graph under the null hypothesis (thus, of course, casting doubt on Scott's null hypothesis).
Oddly, "Bisexual adults more than twice as likely to have asthma as straight adults" – or so a study I haven't scrutinized says. (It seems to comport with other recent studies claiming a higher incidence of lung disease among bisexuals).
As an asthmatic myself, I couldn't tell anyone where to draw the line between post-infectious asthma/atopy flares and a "trendier" label like "long X" for infection X. Since I'd feel silly claiming the label "long X" for multiple Xs, if I did test positive for COVID (something which hasn't happened yet), and then had what's now become my usual exacerbation afterward, I could probably meet the definition of "Long COVID" for non-psychosomatic reasons – but I wouldn't want to.
I believe people's uneven recovery from what are for most people temporary infections is a problem worth taking more seriously, but because I have underlying conditions that would already explain away months if not years of generally-worsened health after pretty much any infection, I doubt attaching a "long X" label to myself would be helpful.
But I'm also generally reluctant to attach "trendy-seeming" labels to myself, including sexual labels. (I only recently found out that one of my oddities is apparently "trendy" now, and I find this somewhat mortifying,)
I'm "cishet by default", I guess, and happy enough that way. I wanted to avoid premarital sex, and did, I had no pressing reasons to make anything other than a conventional marriage, and I don't feel like I've missed out on anything important to me by doing that.
If I had wanted multiple sexual partners, though, sticking to men seems unlikely to scratch such itches as I do have – and I wonder whether having had somewhat abnormal bodily experiences since childhood might contribute to my perception that normality just isn't for me, even if I also find claiming the "trendy" signifiers of "abnormality" for myself rather embarrassing, and therefore something to avoid, if possible. So there is a commonality underlying why I would avoid both identifying as bisexual and as having "long X" even when my post-infectious condition might qualify for "long X".
Intriguing. My grouchy old guy dermatologist had published on the connection between asthma, GERD, and ezcema. It would have been fun to suggest he look at bisexuality too. My wife and I are both bi, both have asthma, both now have long Covid.
The RCCX theory has an explanation for that; while I'm not hanging my hat on it just yet, people with at least two of "queer, hypermobile, neurodivergent, autoimmune disorder" seems to be a cluster.
I recall Rod Dreher writing a column about a "gold star" lesbian porn actress facing criticism because she refused to film any scenes with a trans performer. I don't know if there's a "gold star" equivalent for straight female porn stars.
Haven't heard of that particular incident, but (mostly unrelatedly) I recall that a Canadian porn star was bullied for her refusal to have sex with black men, after which she committed suicide. Obviously, this is a bad reason to commit suicide (they're all bad reasons to commit suicide), and her position was definitely racist-adjacent.
But. There's a whole thing, that Richard Hanania recently wrote about, that Freddie has written about, and that I swear I read some incredibly schizophrenic piece in Vox or the like about, and (to borrow a phrase from that piece) subjecting desires to discipline.
Freddie was writing about some righty pieces to the effect that the left's commitment to redistribution ended with sex. Freddie essentially threw up his hands at this and said 'it's a special case,' and that sex and access thereto will always be one of the most unequal, unfair areas of human relationships, and that redistribution in the crude 'government man sticks a gun in your face if you don't' is unworkable, tyrannical, and morally repugnant.
I agree, as does Hanania in a recent piece, who points that only the most woke-zombified people are capable of subjecting their actual behavior to its precepts. The most woke tenured professor will still treat a pretty undergrad better than a fat one, etc. Again, I agree.
As a result, I find it interesting, if not exactly unsurprising, that people in the sex trade (the most legitimate form of which is definitely mainstream pornography for paysites, etc.) are subjected to wokeness in this fashion. The inquisitors in this situation almost certainly see the context as being one where they can finally put their money where their mouth is (either implicitly or explicitly) without encountering the ickiness that Freddie can't get past.
These people might in general say that it's transphobic to refuse to engage in romantic or sexual relationships with a trans person or racist to refuse to engage in romantic or sexual relationships with other races. But for the vast majority of people, whose business such things are not, can and do have all these inviolate preferences that they are never put on the spot, social media-wise, to account for. And even if it did happen, the would-be inquisitors would still have to deal with the ick factor of essentially dispensing with the requirement of consent.
But in the end, even going after porn stars this way requires implicitly rejecting the necessity of consent. I feel like this is what people (me) are talking about when they (I) carp about slippery slopes, like with bioethics implying at best eugenics if not extermination camps.
>Freddie was writing about some righty pieces to the effect that the left's commitment to redistribution ended with sex.
While I fully agree to attack "the left" on the arbitrary distinctions made as to what is a legitimate inequality and what ought to be redistributed or not, Hanania's claim (at least as you present it) is plainly false, there's plenty of things that collectivisits don't dream of redistributing.
Well the obvious one is the direct counterpart to money: free time. If we're taxing Albert who works X hours to redistribute it to Beatrice who work X/2 hours, why aren't we also forcing Beatrice to give X/2 hours of her time in service to Albert?
It's not even a theoritical thought experiment. I have friends working at a similar job as I am, but with a passion to sometimes 70-80h/weeks (at least according to them), while I barely ever break 35. And sure, their career proress faster and they get paid more (in some cases much more) than I do, but also taxed at a higher rate. But the 35-45h of free time (and sleep) that I enjoy? Why am I not being "taxed" on it also?
Then consider Charles. Charles also works X/2 hours, and spends his other X/2 hours lifting weights instead. He's buffed, man, his arms are as large as your legs. I doubt many (if any) leftist would support compelling him into hard labor in order to redistribute his physical strength. It'd be something out of an Ayn Rand villain's monologue.
But money is different. As soon as you convert your time into work, and that work into money, it stops being yours. Why such a distinction?
The only people supporting sex workers are left-wingers (the right-wingers hate them and want to kill them in many cases, as I think Aella's said), so they have to play by left-wing rules.
Even if I mentally correct "Left-Wing" and "Right-Wing" in your comment to "Progressive" and "Conservative", which is a common conflation people do to those 2 very orthogonal axes, this still doesn't track at all. Sexual Conservatives hate **Sex Work**, not sex workers. This is the difference between hating low-wage work and low-wage **workers**. Slavery and Slaves, 2 very different things.
I once told a girlfriend I was bi to try to seem cool (and it worked, sort of; teenagers are weird). I am very confident that at least some other human males have tried this before.
While yes, the concept of "fake bisexuals" must annoy bisexual people to no end, claiming that you're bi to gain social cachet when you know damn well you're not is a real thing that real people do.
36/cis/M here. I currently (as of last few years) identify as bi; before that I exclusively said I was straight. I identify as bi now because:
a) to feel cool - there's a lot of 'in crowd' stuff in my culture where I need to feel like I can say I'm "queer" in some way
b) but, as part of wanting-to-seem-cool and talking about it with my friends, I noticed that I actually *do* have some kind of romantic attraction to guys - the kind of "ooo this is a guy friend I really like" feeling which (for women) I identified early in my life as a crush and now am only mapping similar feelings onto men;
c) but, even with those crushes, and going on actual dates with men, still not feeling excited about actual sex with men of any kind
d) and damn near nobody has ever heard the term 'biromantic' so I can't say that at parties
leads me to just say bisexual, and leave it at that, and feel 80% like an impostor and 20% like someone who has a difficult identity problem that I'm struggling with
There's always 'heteroflexible' if you're bi but lean straight. I think you still get to call yourself queer, though I'm not sure. I've read Dan Savage say people aren't calling themselves straight because it implies a conservative political stance. In the back of my mind something's screaming "that's f***ed up!", but do what you have to to survive where you are.
In my cynicism you could just say you're bi and leave it at that, and turn down any guys you're not into (which is going to be most of them). Frankly with the STD (and rape, especially if you're not a big guy) risks I'm not sure it's a road worth exploring.
"A difficult identity problem that I'm strugging with" sounds great for a progressive environment, TBH. A lot of them seem to take pride in their mental problems these days. (Compare fashionable Victorian neurasthenia...)
Yeah I've seen a few people around here making statements along the lines of "Adopting an LGBT label brings nothing but discrimination and harassment, nobody would do it just to be cool!" I don't know what rock those people have been under for the last 25 years or so but in 2023 America there are huge swathes of the country where that's the opposite of correct.
"Their male dating pool is all heterosexual and bisexual men (95%+ of men), and their female dating pool is all lesbian and bisexual women (about 5-10% of women). So their potential dating pool is about 90% male."
This seems obviously wrong to me, people select their social circle very strongly, you yourself have written about how this happens even unintentionally. Most of my friends are some flavor of LGBT, most of their friends are some flavor of LGBT, and I do in fact see bisexual people having a large, sometimes above 50% pool of same-sex partners.
Claiming you were bi was trendy and edgy in 1995, but does anyone honestly care anymore? Old guy here, so maybe there's a new wave of this I'm missing?
We know that a lot of people will have sex (or do sex-like things) with members of the same sex if you put them in a situation where the opposite sex isn't available (prison, single-sex schools). But I don't know whether these people necessarily "are" bisexual. To a certain extent sex is enjoyable because buttons are being pushed.
I've never made out with another woman, but I bet it would feel nice. And yes, movie scenes of women making out can be kinda sexy. But I've never looked at a woman and been slammed by attraction--that's only happened with men. To me, that's what "sexual attraction" feels like, and it would be silly/not very meaningful to identify as "bisexual."
For the record, I went to a single sex school and to the best of my knowledge none of my fellow students never did any "sex-like things" with each other. Not even the ones who later turned out to be gay (nobody was openly gay at high school in the 90s). As for the rest of us, we were desperate but we weren't _that_ desperate; girls were missing from our school but they could still be occasionally encountered at parties and things.
I've never been to prison so I can't comment on that.
Not sure why dating pool size should necessarily matter. Do homosexuals find it harder to find dates than heterosexuals because their dating pool is smaller?
Do people date randomly?
Perhaps the concept of bisexuality has changed a lot recently. I'm reminded of a line from Sex and The City in which one of the women pretends to be a lesbian so she can hang out with a "cool" lesbian crowd. Someone in that crowd sees through her and says: "You either eat cunt or you don't." Certainly the attitude 20 years ago was that your revealed preference meant much more than your stated one.
Perhaps that view is old-fashioned now, but I have an old friend who decided back in the '70s that he wanted to identify as bi because so many trendy rock stars like of the era: Reed, Bowie and Jagger claimed to be. So he tried his best to have sex with a guy but during the experience had an epiphany that he was heterosexual. It's one thing to say you are bi, another to prove you are able to eat cunt, suck dick, whatever. At least that's what Paul Samuelson would have probably said.
I mean, Kinsey scale shows everyone is bisexual to some extent, just strongly leaning towards one sex or another, or 'traits' or one sex, i.e a bisexual man attracted to fem people, whether transmasc, transfems, twinks, or cis women....
The Kinsey scale doesn't show that at all, it's a *scale* where you can select "exclusively attracted to men" and "exclusively attracted to women". Kinsey's findings are also of extremely dubious credibility due to his shoddy methods (for example, use of the scale *in itself* consitutes a severe case of begging the question).
Oh boy, is that bar graph annoying...as many have already said, yeah, greatly increasing the rate of bisexuality without a corresponding huge increase in "same sex success rate" would make Number Go Down. The various whys given all seem plausible; I'd also tack on the whole Young People Not Having Sex Period thing, which would neatly include the same demographics largely responsible for skyrocketing affiliation. (Yeah, I know the magnitude of this effect is likewise contested.)
In similar vein, I think the social convenience calculus has also shifted...on the one hand, stigma more generally has been going down. But on the other hand, it's (perceived to be) a helluva lot more fraught to hit on women now, nevermind actually asking them out. It's hard to tailor norm changes to solely deter predatory men. Like, being a bi trans woman...I might prefer the company of women in most regards, but the risk of flirting with female coworkers just isn't worth that greater potential reward. (Current workplace has had, uh, numerous...incidents...of such going very poorly. The North remembers.) Which is unfortunate, since that means seeking out mostly men, and the local quality just isn't very good. So I too end up dragging down bar graphs of that sort, without meaning to. Many Such Cases, I'd imagine.
I really like reading you in the comments section, and I'm sorrowed you're having a hard time. I find partners online in interest-communities, but that does lead to long-distance relationships unless I have freak luck about it, which has all the obvious problems. I can definitely sympathise with it feeling more dangerous to express interest in women explicitly in the real world. Good luck!
Oh, more of a default time really. Long-haul singledom leads to a lowering of expectations, which helps temper the disappointment. In many regards, "fake" or otherwise, I'm kinda happy that younger generations can at least pretend to be more open wrt sexuality and gender earlier...time is not infinite, and I sure spent a lot of my better years flailing about in the morass of Self-Identity Crises. Those tribulating trials were worth something, for sure, but...it's probably better overall if the LGBT life journey isn't intrinsically marked with conflict, doubt, remorse. Can't get those prime years of young adulthood back. There's less room to mess up when you're a Real Adult...
Yeah, I think finding parallel interests is easier in a lot of ways than playing the Standard Game of looks...I don't have a horrible Charisma score or anything, but it's tough to compete with youth (live and work near college = majority younger, sometimes way more) + really have no interest in cosmetics, etc. Plus some interests like gaming tend to attract neurodivergent people to begin with, which ups the odds somewhat on finding quirkyweird ones who're above-average to be some flavour of LGBT too.
"It's hard to tailor norm changes to solely deter predatory men."
It's literally impossible. Any norm change intended to do this will deter predatory men the *least* and other men more. The most functional norm is "it is 100% okay to hit on any woman above the age of consent at any time, in any place, no matter how sleazily or awkwardly you do it, *as long as you take no for an answer the first time*. You are not allowed to give someone the slightest amount of flak for attempt #1 as long as it stops there."
The curse of conscientiousness, yeah. Rules only apply to rule-followers, Nice Guys finish last. I'm not sure I'd word it that bluntly, or if that actually was the status quo in some mythical age, but in many ways that seems a preferable norm for maximum utility/dating market liquidity. (Though of course, people more on the receiving than giving end of said interactions probably feel differently.)
Genital-arousal studies might be The Best Thing We Have for "objective" sexuality measurements (are they?), but...yeah, quite a lot of possible disconnect there. Lots of ways to get aroused without the actual genitals doing much, lots of ways to rouse the gametes while feeling otherwise pretty indifferent or even opposed to incipient sex. I have no idea how common this is, but like - personally, most of my erogenous zones or other things that get me in the mood have minimal connection with genital response. The nerve streams just don't seem to cross. The inverse is also true, where purely-genital machinations might strictly technically lead to "an orgasm", but it's sure not satisfying. The same way one *can* get drunk off pissbeer, but...why would you, where's the fun in that?
Wrt footnote #3: well, that cuts both ways. "Bisexual" loses a lot of meaning if it includes nearly all women, and similar for if it includes an excess of people who really mean "I'd theoretically be into a same-sex relationship With The Right Person, but it never actually happens". The useful signal of, hey, hit on me regardless of your sex and/or gender, I'm probably fine with it - I find that valuable. This is part of the downside of spectrum-framing; it really is a (I hate using this word) privilege to just not have to worry about being hit on/potentially feeling feelings for ~50% of people in daily life. Sometimes a much higher percentage, depending on one's specific circumstances.
So guilty of not following this myself in all kinds of ways but I think this might get down to the question of “What is a thing?”
And because people can talk about internal states we have in recent times been heavily weighting how we categorize people based on those self-reports.
However, if you think about other things you are basically 1) describing constellations of characteristics 2) noticing they behave in predictable ways 3) describing them in a way you can communicate that prediction to someone else.
What is a chair? You’d say it has a seat and some legs and you can probably sit on it and if you say it somebody else knows what you mean.
If you’re a bisexual woman but not in anyway other than internally you’ve theoretically been open to having same sex relationships but in practice would never actually do it…
I can see both sides of this because it’s not like that attraction isn’t something measurable or interesting or a thing that’s very important to you but in day to day life it doesn’t really tell someone something about your actual predictable behavior. Like when someone has been married for years, has children, and then says they are now non-binary but the only actual functional change is that they get a haircut. From the outside, asking the question what is functionally different now in this system, the answer is: someone got a haircut, being non-binary means you get a hair-cut.
I would assume the overwhelming majority of people identifying as/claiming to be bisexual are, in fact, bisexual, and "they're just faking!" is wrong. However, it seems like it only takes a few percent of people being extra susceptible to socially spread conditions to explain the results of your survey. In particular, why homosexuality was not associated with long covid: if you have the slightest inclination that maybe a same-sex sexual encounter is something you would try, you can put "heteroflexible" on your dating app profile (which urbandictionary defines as "inbetween bisexual and straight" which makes very little sense to me), answer "bisexual" on surveys and act almost completely indistinguishably from straight.
As a Schrodingers' fake bisexual woman (who also has long COVID, despite it not being convenient for my COVID-related politics at all):
I spent years saying to myself that that one crush on my (female) best friend 'didn't count,' because, after all, I've never dated a woman. I've never kissed a woman. It was just that one crush.
(In the two point five years between meeting any out non-straight people at all, and getting together with my now husband. This was over twenty years ago, I should say).
Being bisexual's never impacted my life. I've never been oppressed because of it, and I'm not dating anyone because of it. I might, if I were single, but I'd been married for years before I was fully fine with doing so. So, I'm not.
But I decided to start saying I was bisexual rather than leaving that detail out - as 'personal, complicated, irrelevant' - because I was talking with all these other women. Liberal, social justice-y even, most leaning younger than me. About sexuality, and queerness, and I knew their lives, and lots of them hadn't kissed girls either! But if I described myself (perhaps more biographically accurately) as 'basically straight,' 'rounds to straight,' etc., then I'd be on the outside of that group. But if I'm 'bisexual', well, that's what they want. Because by their definitions, it's clear that any nonzero amount of attraction is not only good enough but actively should count, .... and then my opinions are valid, and, anyway, I'm as bisexual as lots of others!
Yeah, I've seen a few people in this thread denying that anyone could derive net benefit from adopting the label Bi, but that definitely can be the case in certain place and communities.
I don't like Scott's framing of people "faking" bisexuality. At least from what I could see, nobody in the comments of the previous post was accusing people of faking being something they aren't for cynical purposes. They were talking about exactly what you describe: People who are kind of on the margins sexuality-wise and could easily pass as straight if they wanted but adopt a label they don't strictly need to adopt for social reasons.
This might seem slightly off topic but I have been following the comments here with interest due to something that has been frequently trotted out in the media of my own country which has perplexed me.
Does anybody have any thoughts on why this could be true? It seems as though people identifying as bisexual claim to have proportionately higher experiences of just about everything.
There is some amount of stigma coming from both directions, from the straights and the gays. They both get to feel secure in their belief that their orientation exists and that other people believe their orientation exists. Gay and lesbian people often base their social lives in their respective communities so they can feel safe, make friends who understand them/aren’t disgusted by them, and get a date, so there is a high concentration of LG people in separate communities. As in, even in a major liberal city, it’s pretty common to have inadvertently dated one of your new friend’s exes or something like that.
Bi people kind of straddle the straight world and the gay worlds. By which I mean, they don’t fit neatly into either one, and there isn’t much of a bisexual world where they know they can mention any ex’s pronouns without fear of social rejection or confusion. Friends and community keep you safe. They warn you if the person making eyes at you from across the room is a known sketchball. They can provide validation that your new boo’s bad behavior isn’t okay, and encourage you to dump them and tell you you deserve better, which is the kind of social support people need to end relationships that aren’t quite abusive yet but aren’t heading down a safe and happy path.
Yeah, I can see that could be true socially but it doesn't seem to explain such huge differences. How would bisexuals suffer more domestic violence? General crime? Why would they have more mental illness? Or 'long-covid'? Asthma?
Where do you see robust lesbian communities that are large enough to socialize entirely in them? The lesbian identity has been almost entirely supplanted by the queer umbrella in most major Western cities, and dating men isn't a barrier to being in a queer space. I think this argument is a bit out of date at least on the women's side of things, I've been hearing it for 10 years+ but in that time the lesbian label has become less and less popular, and as a lesbian i've always been in the minority in any LGBT space I've been in, far outnumbered by bisexuals.
I think the simplest explanation is that some developmental abnormalities lead to both bisexual identification and those correlated dysfunctions. Pleiotropy is common and comorbidities are abundant, so I don't think this should be particularly surprising.
This is a very humorous angle to me because as a gay man, the trope is that actually the bisexual dudes are just in denial and are never actually dating the opposite sex. Maybe I’m just old enough to remember when bisexuality was gay denial rather than being a trendy victim of statistics.
Nah, it's cool to be bi now in the city. Or at least to be non-straight. I think it's weird too. They've reclaimed 'queer', even, which had *very* negative responses when I brought it up with an older gay man a while back--I had to remember to keep switching back and forth.
The rule is that if a man claims to be bisexual, he's really just into men. If a woman claims to be bisexual, she's also just into men. It's a rule very flattering to men.
As an alternative framing: if you express interest in men, men might hit on you, whereas if you express interest in women, nothing much seems to happen, per the post. So, the former is a more costly signal and so people use it more rarely, i.e., the threshold for publicly expressing interest in men is higher. Expressing interest in women has a low threshold because it has few consequences. So, the phenomenon is not due to men being more desirable but due to men being more aggressive in their pursuit.
I don’t think advancing beyond the necessity of reproduction the old fashion way is exciting (comment triggered by the “(for now!)” hyperlink to some 2 year old article about turning blood into eggs or something). Could you imagine the fallout of that? People no longer having to be sexually competitive? Literally anyone being able to reproduce via parthenogenesis and create copies of themselves? I think humans have introduced enough dysgenic influences into the environment via tech, I don’t think removing the primary and sole remaining check on the continuing health of the species is good, much less something that warrants an exclamation point.
I might be wrong (paging Metacelsus) but I don't think gametogenesis is useful in creating a copy of yourself - you can do that already with cloning, which is simpler and already understood. Gametogenesis could be used for (among other things) letting two people of the same sex have a child.
I think regular cloning has that issue where the clone's telomeres start out already with a lifetime's worth of wear and tear, and cloning-via-gametogenesis would avoid it.
I think this seems sociologically unlikely. Being a single parent is hard. I expect people will mostly still want to raise children in pairs (or more!), and to incentivize the other person you'll still want the baby to be a mix of the two of you. Indeed we could even imagine groups of three people raising babies that are all theirs!
Can we get a LOT more info on 'Long COVID also correlates with pretty much every mental illness, and it correlates more with psychiatrist-diagnosed illnesses than self-diagnosed ones'? To me, that's more fascinating than the article topic.
Isn't it more like bisexuality 'also correlates with pretty much every mental illness, and it correlates more with psychiatrist-diagnosed illnesses than self-diagnosed ones'?
Yeah that's the point. If it's the case (which I haven't looked into) that long COVID correlates with mental illness, then bisexuality just becomes one of a whole laundry list of things that also correlates with mental illness, and thus the connection between bisexuality and long COVID becomes a lot less interesting.
That's why I'm annoyed by "social contagion" type of theories. They sneak in the assumption that the observed changes in the number of cases are all/mostly false positive without providing evidence for it. And then just keep pointing to the observed changes: "See! There used to be x cases when it wasn't trendy and now it's trendy and there are 2x cases! What other proof do you need?".
In reality "trendiness" is not two discreet state. Ideas can be more or less widespread in the society and we do not know which level of the spread for a specific idea is optimal, leading to the best f-score. We can't just assume that whatever base line was 10 years ago was the best.
Social contagion is a real thing though. Two recent, positive, examples that have been pushed by social conformity / pressure / sanctions are decreased smoking and picking up your dog's excrement. These are good things but were pushed by society and by social groups. Backnin the 70s it would have been seen as rude to ask a visitibg smoker to stop but insane to follow your dog with a bag.
I'm not saying that social pressure doesn't exist or doesn't affect people.
But there is an obvious difference between organised campaign of imposing new norms onto peoplewith social pressure and just making information about something more available.
There is a continuum between "just making information about something more available" and "organised campaign of imposing new norms onto people". Threats and promises are a thing after all, and they are simply information. "Organised" is also not essential to the argument.
People notice when a group is elevated above all others and every criticisms or dislike of them becomes a news worthy controversy. Deliberate or not, organzied or not, they notice.
There is a key difference between imposing new requirement of "being X" onto others and making information about the "existence of people who are X" more available. Sometimes making information about "existence of people who are X" more available is coincides with imposing some norm Y, for instance "don't be a dick towards people who are X" onto others. But this is a separate thing and not relevant to what I'm taking about.
The distinction between enforcing people and not enforcing people is not always absoutely clear but in most cases it's clear enough. The irony, is that most of the time when people panic about social contagion, what's actually happening is the removal of previously enforced norm of not talking about something.
The thing is, not all information is born equal. If somebody invites you to a wedding or a birthday, and you started blasting hardcore porn on the video stream, I imagine very few people will be pleased with that or invite you to their parties ever again. Theoretically, all that you have done is "making information available", right ? You didn't persuade people to watch porn, you didn't engage in porn, you simply played porn, information, on the public audio-video stream that plenty of other people are free to play other things on.
And yet, people will hate it. And yet, people will say that you violated their right of not watching porn in a normal party. So clearly, making information available is not always a right.
Two of the most reviled and hated practices, Marketing and Spam, are literally nothing less and nothing more than "Putting information out there". I can almost imagine the marketer's or the spammer's plea for tolerance : Come on, we're just making info available, we're not forcing you to do anything, it's just 5 seconds on every youtube video you watch or 10 emails every week, it's not a huge deal, don't be a dick.
And yet, the "info" they're making available is not exactly the most welcomed, eh ?
The graph you included that shows how many bisexual women "have exclusively dated men in the last five years" very clearly shows that this number has increased dramatically in the last decade. The linked study mentions "wide error bars," but claims the trend is statistically significant.
That seems to support the idea that when people self-identify as bisexual, it's helpful to keep in mind that that word doesn't mean what it used to.
My thesis is, to be clear, not that people are lying or that the broadening application of that self-label is bad or incorrect. It's just that bisexual-identification is inherently subjective, and so the act of self-identifying as bisexual signals someone's personality and cultural context in addition to their underlying arousal patterns. (The same is true of e.g. straight people, though we could argue about percentages.)
It's important to find a way to discuss this concept without making bisexual people feel "erased," and I'm open to suggestions on how to better accomplish that end. I say it's important to discuss because it feels Beyond Obvious to me that the long-covid correlation provides evidence for long covid being correlated with personality and cultural context in addition to underlying biology, which we miss if we can't admit and discuss those properties of bisexual identification. (I also think we should be more aware of how often self-identified straight people feel same-sex attraction, though that's a separate topic.)
I think the fact that bisexuality also signals culture is consistent with the model in Scott’s post, where the underlying arousal patterns are filtered through self-realisation and convenience before reaching self-identification.
I’m a bit surprised Scott seems to dismiss how this means the culture-personality connection COVID and bisexuality is still viable, having to look for other explanations.
Agree pretty much with sections 1 and 3, but section 2 seems to presume that genital arousal correlates pretty well with actual arousal (as perceived internally by the person whose genitals are being monitored). Genital non-concordance is a pretty well-established phenomenon, particularly in women. Why this happens is unclear (one suggestion is that physical arousal can prevent further physical damage during a rape, so more cis women's bodies automatically respond with physical arousal to any sexual stimulus, regardless of whether they're into it or not), but monitoring genitals seems like a bad proxy for judging whether women are self-reporting their sexuality correctly, as it is pretty irrelevant to the question of "is this particular woman open to dating me or not".
Anybody (including me) who has ever been a middle-school-aged boy can tell you with great certainty that genital arousal and sexual attraction are far from synonymous.
This is a weird appeal to niceness at the start of a post that seeks to convince by statistics. I have no particular horse in this race - I'm actually kinda annoyed by how trite and predictable the """Bisexuals are simply faking it""" opinions were getting in the last thread - but my first reaction to "You shouldn't do X" where X is a fairly harmless action or gesture is always being suspicious and defensive. The paternalistic "No Questions Asked" attitude is a hallmark of 2 kinds of institutions I despise the most, the Military and Traditional Religion, and this immediately motivates me to start looking for reasons that I *should* do X.
And, quite frankly Scott, the lgbtq+++!@#$ folks do not seem too keen on not upsetting the straight men either, who also have plenty of problems with some of what the lgbt say and do, and the latter's universal response is almost always some variation of "Lol sucks to suck". So why the asymmetrical calls for niceness here ? You ever see an article with a title like "Raise Your Threshold For <something that annoys straight men or offends them>" ? I have never.
But anyway, let me get a bit meta.
What this post and the comment sections of the last one has taught me is that what I call "Population Thought Experiments" ways of reasoning should be banned and\or significantly curtailed, at least as hard as aristotelian teleology or freud's psychoanalysis. By "Population Thought Experiments", I mean the genre of reasoning where you start with "Imagine a population of $GENERIC_ENTITY where x% are grubs and y% are shrubs, further assume that alpha, beta and omega, here is [What I think is] a plausible scenario that can happen in this world".
The insidious thing about this way of thought is that you might be perfectly right and still be wrong. The scenario your brain comes up with *might* be in fact a plausible one conditional on the world you imagined, in the sense that if I wrote a computer simulation (after teasing out all the implicit assumptions and biases in your wording and teaching them to the silicon) I *would* indeed get that scenario..... under a specific setting of parameters, in 34% or so of the simulation runs. But what happens under other parametric settings ? What happens in the other 66% of the runs ? What happens under different interpetations of your assumptions and biases ? If you have working code, you can explore all of this. But if all you have is your faulty and slow meat brain and the vague and rhetoric-optimized Natural Language that we originally just evolved to shout "Lions!!", you will be led astray. And then there is the whole, seperate, issue of whether the world you imagine approximates the real one enough for whatever insight you derive from the thought experiment to transfer.
This is the article that informs my opinion[1] : Probability, Why Intuition Fails Us & How Design And Simulation Can Help. Recommended reading, I spent 10 minutes hunting it down just to refer to it. Take all the difficulty that Probability Theory as a mathematical field is notoriously known for, and multiply it by 10x or 12x to get the difficulty of Statistics, which is Probablity meets Real World (^TM). Multiply *that* by another 5x or 7x combo factor when the Real World phenomenon under study happens to be the high-dimensional, anti-inductive, and value-laden Social World, where semi-coordinated groups of people navigate a semi-comprehensible world to achieve ill-defined goals. Population Thought Experiments never stood a chance.
Computer simulations are fantastic because all the countless assumptions and hidden steps are - MUST BE - spelled out right there in the code. Because everything can be made a parameter and sweeped for all possible values in its range. Because the results are huge arrays of numbers that can equally well be rendered as pretty pictures or sent as input to yet other computations to milk other insights from them.
I know it's unrealistic to expect writers, readers and people who like to think about questions in general to know programming *and* craft/follow an involved code+words mixed argument just for an essay. I'm not truly saying we should treat Population Thought Experiments with the exact same suspicion teleological reasoning or sex-metaphors-heavy psychoanalysis (and those ways of thought can - against all odds - be useful sometimes) are treated with, I'm just saying that... we should Raise Our Thresholds For Trusting The Results Of Such Ways Of Reasoning, so to speak.
And what's so bad about women faking bisexuality ? It has all the advantages of lesbianism, being very hot and beautiful in ways I can't articulate, but without the drawback of those women actually being out of reach. We Should Raise The Percentage Of Women Who Fake Their Bisexuality.
I can't speak for the rest of the world but no, where I am, in a rather liberal country, I don't think anyone is especially concerned about upsetting the 'straight men'. And even if 100% of people identifying this way were lying it would still annoy them if it was mentioned wouldn't it?
I don't quite understand what you're getting at in the last sentence, but I will reiterate my point anyway.
My point is that non-straight-men do not give a flying duck about upsetting straight men, so it's rather asymmetrical and unfair to demand that straight men shouldn't use a specific phrase to avoid upsetting bisexuals.
I have never seen any of the lgbt people say "Guys, let's stop doing/saying this thing because it upsets the straights". If anything, I have seen the exact opposite. So again, to put it very bluntly, why should I care whether a phrase or an opinion upsets the bisexuals or not ? They (and the rest of the larger group they belong to) have never done the same for me.
Ah, I don't disagree. I was just confused about the last sentence in the first comment, thought I would repeat my view to make sure we're on the same page.
Respectfully I reject this particular premise. I am gay, my best friend is straight, I mind his feelings all the time, and I find mocking and provoking straight people on the basis of their sexuality to be distasteful. Many of my lgbt friends are of the same opinion as me.
People are different, and just because you see some people act a certain way online, or in particular instances in your own life, does not mean that everyone who belongs to that group is the same! Its understandable that you feel hurt by the things you’ve seen other people say, but I find it less understandable to then make generalizations about entire groups of people, and ascribe those particular behaviors to those entire groups of people (for the purpose of withholding kindness from them). It isn’t a very rational thing to do, and the reality is that people are just more complicated than that. Being kind or mindful of upsetting someone is free and needs not be transactional, its something you can even do when you feel you aren’t getting it back...
You could apply the same logic of your comment as an explanation for why some lgbt people have negative opinions about straight ppl in the first place and might be compelled to offer distasteful opinions about them.
Again, this all relies upon the choice to make assumptions about an entire group of people that you don’t know. You lumping everyone in with these “bad guys” is your choice, your behavior, not the fault of someone else. Deciding an entire group of people are “bad guys” based on some angry tweets you saw online is irrational.
Similarly, it would be wrong of me to develop prejudices toward ALL straight people, based on the fact that I have received a very large amount of direct hatred from straight people in my lifetime (i would guess more than most straight ppl have ever received from an lgbt person). It is my OWN choice if I decide to blame an entire group of people for the actions of a few — that would be bigoted and prejudiced of me.
<i>You could apply the same logic of your comment as an explanation for why some lgbt people have negative opinions about straight ppl in the first place and might be compelled to offer distasteful opinions about them.</i>
Insulting gay people is against the law in most of the western world, and given the sexual demographics of human societies, it's a crime which is enforced largely by straight people.
I don't think it's irrational to treat groups homogeneously. I agree it's not an optimal solution, the optimal solution is that if all humans live in small groups (100-10000 members) so that each member can be individually known intimately by every other member and rewarded/punished according to their own behaviour as much as possible. Human societies have left this behind long time ago with the rise of city states, the moment you get >10000 people living together you *have to* either box multiple people into groups or.... just lose your ability to reason about people at all.
So in a society of millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions, I must homogenize, and I must homogenize into boxes that are really big. There are multiple strategies for that, multiple ways and criteria to consider different people as belonging in the same group. But make no mistake, I have to pick one and use it.
Even the very people that you say want to be treated as individuals, they themselves treat their group as a homogenous block and speak for it with one voice when it suits their purpose (e.g. when they want to assert that not liking a fictional character in a TV show or a video game is equivalent to bigotry), so that's really having it both ways. If I can't get away with "lgbt people don't give a shit about me", then an lgbt fellow shouldn't be able to get away with "You're bigoted because X", because 'bigoted' is an assertion about my judgement towards the entire lgbt, but X is a personal judgement that this particular fellow is computing. So how come they decided I'm bigoted against their entire group from reasoning that only happened in their brain ? If they were serious about "We're not a monolith", they should have asked a representative random sample before labelling me.
That last phenomenon happens a lot in my #1 hated faction among progressive ideologies, Feminism. It's really common there that if a woman defends men or pushback on the crazy talk even a little bit, she's called a pick-me girl seeking male approval. This what every female Men's Rights advocate ala Karen Straughan can attest to, but I have seen it happen on the scale of a single Facebook comment section. It pushes my fucking buttons, but ignore me for a moment, doesn't it reveal a fundamental belief held by feminists that "Feminism" is in fact a single monolithic block that can be reasonably compressed to "Say bad things about men" ? If they didn't believe so, why would they call their fellow feminists or other women "pick-me"s or other such unflattering labels that all mean "You're not a true feminist, you're a fake imposter seeking male approval" ?
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Your second point is whether being kind is free, and whether transactionalism is ok. I disagree with you on both. Being kind is not free, as a minimum it takes a lot of thought and consideration, careful rewording, repeated deference and relinquishment of initiative, etc..., all hard things to do. As for transactionalism, "Do Unto Others" is literally and explicitly a transactional attitude, and it's called the Golden Rule of Ethics. I agree that the amount of transactionalism should be tuned to the particular person and\or group you're dealing with : your blood family and sibling-level friends should be given a lot more slack than your close friends, which should be given more slack than mere acquaintances, which should be given more slack than complete strangers. But surely you don't disagree that there is *always* some point - we can disagree on where exactly it lies but never on whether it exists - at which you can say to the other party "I'm sick and tired of doing things that you never give back, I'm out" ? Surely, without that, bad people will exploit good people and milk their goodwill without ever returning it ?
So here we have a classical prisoner's dilemma. An endless recursion of "(S)he Started It !", of the sort that everyone who tried to moderate fighting children or angry spouses understand. I think it's okay to be an asshole to the lgbt people and feminists because they have been assholes with me plenty of times before, but - as they will probably say - they only do this because some other straight guy was an asshole to them, but I bet this guy was resentful because yet another was an asshole to them, etc..... This is a Molochy dynamic, it can easily end with collaboration, we can make a pact right now that whoever is asshole next gets punished and banished from their group. But who will enforce this ? What can you, a reasonable lgbt guy, gurantee me about the next psycho that insults me on reddit or youtube ? nothing. So it goes.
This is why I'm becoming increasingly resentful and hateful of the modern world and really the entire idea of civilization in general. It was never a good idea to take a monkey brain that evolved to deal with 100-1000 people, maybe 10000 max, and then shove it in cities with 100s of thousands, millions, or tens of millions of people. The only thing that came out of it is that people became amorphous blobs of identities and groups that make each other's life hell. "Democracy" is a bad joke given all of this, you can never solve the communication problems involved to make it actually fair or democratic, the resulting status quo is always the loudest/richest/most-well-connected mouths imposing their interests.
Neurodiversity also correlates to a bunch of other physical disorders like EDS and digestive system problems, likely because of underlying pervasive development disorders - I'm not sure why that makes it 'more likely to be psychosomatic' rather than 'body that went slightly wrong in development is more susceptible to cumulative damage'.
It's fairly clear by now from autopsy evidence that covid does a load of subtle damage most people just don't notice because it doesn't stop them functioning, but if you're already on the edge of not functioning (or just more adept at noticing small changes) it is more likely to tip you over.
This is a really good point. It can be quite hard to tease out. ND people are more likely to express feeling pain, i.e. are "hypersensitive", but it's likely this hypersensitivity has a biological basis in the brain (more excitatory networks perhaps!). So to what extent is this "psychological?"
Or it might just be misattributing genuine symptoms. My ASD son has just been referred to a pediatrician for low energy and poor weight gain. If it weren't for the fact that I know for a fact he didn't get covid and my normal energy NT kid did, I might say it's long covid.
This is a point I made in comments on the last piece, which is to say that the CDCs list of symptoms of long COVID is so long, broad, and vague that anybody experiencing just about any disease, disorder, illness, or abnormality could probably find *something* that fits, if they wanted to. (consciously or unconsciously)
If you were less informed and/or more motivated to be alarmist, you could be posting here that your son had long COVID with those symptoms and nobody could really gainsay you.
Interestingly, "script" is also usable almost anywhere "scrip" would be more appropriate, being short for "prescription", which is also a piece of paper that can be exchanged for goods and/or services in a non-standard way.
Re: signaling value—I am considering reclassifying myself as straight on all-gender dating sites because right now 90% of my intros there are from gay men who clearly didn't read my profile and are probably just swiping right on everyone because for gay men on an all-genders site, "everyone" in your area is like 100 people. Even though I do want to remain open to male matches, my non-gender-related preferences are discriminating enough to rule out at least 99/100 people, and my intros from women are much more likely to be people with whom I share common interests just by virtue of them having so many other alternatives. I don't *want* to cut off potential matches with men, and I don't *want* to signal as straight (signaling as bi has the pleasant side-effect of filtering out homophobes), but being categorized as bi significantly lowers the signal-noise ratio.
I don't really care if people are "faking" it or not. I'm saying that people are confusing the black circle for one of the other circles.
The questions we should be asking are: "What makes some women identify as bi and others not?", "What are the different things people signal when they identify as bi and why do they want to signal those things?", "What makes people more susceptible to psychosomatic or sociogenic illnesses?"
The retreat into talking about bisexuality in the more concrete, "real-world" sense is interesting but it avoids the occam's razor explanation of the long-covid correlation.
Mike’s explanation is clever but it fails to explain higher rates of young women identifying as Trans as well. Since there are actually a lot less FtMs that MtFs in reality.
Just personal anecdata, but I have noticed some (I think?) systematic differences / strong trends semantically between women and men, as relates to sexual orientation- what people mean by 'gay', 'bisexual', etc.
In short, men have a strong tendency to use arousal-based definitions, and to use patterns of arousal as diagnostic. Whereas women have an equally strong tendency to use behavior-based definitions, where lesbianism and bisexuality to mean openness to actually dating someone of the same sex, whether or not you find them attractive. For example, I've seen lesbian friends ask their partners to stop identifying as 'bisexual' and start identifying as 'lesbian' for the duration of the relationship, because it felt to them like the girlfriend was saying the relationship was temporary.
Man was not made for the categories etc.; both of these definitions have their merits. But it's interesting to me that the arousal-based definition is something that's most useful in a community where homosexual arousal is quite rare, and there's a high correlation between same-sex arousal and same-sex activity. Contrast with the behavioral-based definition, which is more useful in a community where same-sex arousal is a poor predictor of same-sex sexual activity, that is, one in which bisexual arousal is common and same-sex intercourse is not.
(It could also speak to patterns where sexual arousal is more intrusive or acute in men than women, on average; that also seems like a pretty likely contender.)
Just want to suggest long-covid may not be psychosomatic because it's associated with being bisexual which is
associated with stress/mental illness. Consider this...
"There were positive associations between mental health disorders, all cancers and lung cancer risk, however with the exception of anxiety and lung cancer in women (Hazard Ratio [HR] = 1.67, 95% CI: 1.01–2.76), associations were attenuated with adjustment for sociodemographics, health status and lifestyle factors."
Stress and mental illness leads to higher cortisol, etc., which leads to an increased risk of a real and long-term physical disorder! Just classic mind-body connection stuff. So being bisexual could be associated with more stress, mental illness, etc., which leads to a cascade of physical and immunological changes.
So link is bisexual (or some other sexuality...) <-> stress/mental illness -> physical/life style changes (cortisol, drug use, sleep, std rate, etc.,) -> greater risk of the body having long-covid.
I also find it interesting the link wasn't seen among homosexual patients which in theory should have a greater rate of mental illness when compared to bisexual patients. For me, that's a strong signal ethier the link is a false positive or is not strongly related to mental illness (why the inconsistency?).
I think the association between mental disorders and lung cancer is mostly because mentally ill people smoke. I was able to find https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5855217/ , which doesn't seem to show much cancer difference by sexual orientation except in very obvious ones (HIV-related, smoking related).
I agree there's some chance Long COVID could be caused by smoking, although I can't figure out exactly what the pathway would be - if it was frank lung damage, I think it would mostly happen in very severe cases; it seems more immunological to me.
Oh I actually did some brief googling and found this. Not sure what this means but I'll just leave this hear for your sake. There indeed does seem to be a strange link between smoking and the dreaded long-covid.
"Desgranges et al. in a study whose objective was characterize the post-COVID-19 syndrome after mild COVID-19 and identify predictors found that active smoking was a predictor of memory impairment. Hossain et al.8 have identified smoking, among others, as a key predictor for the presence of long COVID-19, in terms of associated risk factor and also as a risk factor that was associated with a longer duration of long COVID illness."
Cool. It would be nice to motivate more people to stop smoking with the ominous warning they will develop "long-covid" if they don't stop. Maybe it might hit home better than warning them to stop for cancer, etc.
Similar might be said of immune derangement associated with reactive airway disease. Having a reactive airway disease is a sign not just of lung weirdness, but immune weirdness generally, even if the best course of treatment is to treat the lungs directly (with, say, inhaled steroid) rather than to treat the whole body.
I’m not finding where in that last linked study it says most women experience both-sex arousal, seems to mostly be about same-sex attraction being linked to masculine non-sexual traits? I’d be curious about that.
I'm sceptical those studies measure what they're actually trying to measure. Women are aroused by sexual *situations*, not aroused by looking at naked bodies, the way that men are. If you show a woman lesbian porn and she gets aroused, that doesn't mean she's a lesbian, it just means she finds lesbian porn arousing, anymore than a lesbian watching straight porn (which, btw, they do! A lot) means she's heterosexual. To me it very much feels like inappropriately applying a model from male sexuality to female sexuality.
I'm a fake bisexual! Who has actually dated women in the past. About 20% of my total lifetime partners were woman (I ended up with a man, as one does.) I would say I'm actually kind of bad at introspection? I ended up being bisexual because women are pretty and men are ugly, and when I was younger I hadn't figured out that that being physically attractive isn't the same as sexual attraction at that point. But, I primarily get turned on from having sex with men, even though they're as a whole gross looking. So, in the end, I've decided I'm straight, actually. Female sexuality is WEIRD.
"when I was younger I hadn't figured out that that being physically attractive isn't the same as sexual attraction"
What? I'm probably older than you (going purely by the statistical age distribution of this blog's readership) and I haven't figured that out *now*. Is this just another male-female difference? To me, this is basically a definitional identity. "Physically attractive" *means* "sexually attractive", it's just a slight euphemism for polite company, the way "gender" was for "sex" universally until a few years ago and still is for most people.
Yeah, as a man I'm with you here. Physically attractive and sexually attractive are total synonyms to me. Both are separate from romantic compatibility, of course. I could be physically/sexually attracted to a woman who I hate as a person. And vice versa, I can be dear friends with a woman I have no sexual attraction to. But being turned on by sex with people I find "as a whole gross looking" is a fundamental contradiction in terms from my perspective.
I don't pretend to speak for my whole sex, but yes, I do think this is a male-female difference.
I talk downthread about how I don't think the studies showing women are aroused equally by lesbian, heterosexual, and gay porn actually indicates universal bisexuality. Women's sexual arousal is more situational, it's not about how visually attractive a person is.
I think in common parlance we might talk more about "sexual chemistry." But, for instance, in grad school I knew this guy who was short, pudgy, and ugly. But we stayed up late one night having drinks on a roof and I liked him personally, and then when we got down to it the sex was GREAT.
Another dude I hooked up with later who I thought was *pretty* but when it came down to it I wasn't sexually attracted to him at all; we had sex and I was totally unmoved. Him being visually attractive wasn't enough to turn me on (and in fact, generally never is). Sexual attraction is a bit ineffable for me, but as far as I can tell it's not really correlated with someone being pretty/handsome.
That's interesting, and weird insofar as it contradicts my personal anecdata: it's always been my experience that the men around me who had the most success with women were the most handsome, and proportionally to their looks. (And it's not just some "oh, their looks just gave them more confidence to approach" thing either, this includes women hitting on *them*.)
In particular, the most handsome guy I know is completely the boss of his wife to this day, not because she's naturally weak or because he's brutal and controlling but because she's acutely aware that he could replace her in an instant if he felt like it. He doesn't feel like it, he loves her sincerely as far as I know, but the mere awareness still visibly affects the balance of their relationship.
"Long COVID also correlates with pretty much every mental illness, and it correlates more with psychiatrist-diagnosed illnesses than self-diagnosed ones, so I think that provides extra evidence that it is a neurodivergence effect, which is also sufficient to explain the bisexuality effect."
A possible way to adjudicate between this hypothesis and the 'signaling/cool points' hypothesis might be to find phenomena which are more uncontroversially just 'cool point' garnering and see how strongly correlated they are with bisexuality and long covid.
To answer as to why people don't use the term (including people who "know" they are, to some degree, bisexual and accept the definition internally for themselves), there are a few reasons I have come across, as a bisexual (my own "split" is more 90/10 straight/same).
One is that the term lacks descriptiveness. That is, even if people take the label at face value, many (especially straight people) will assume that it means 50/50, which is a different person than the one I am, or even than the more typical 75/25. It doesn't seem to describe a lot of actually bisexual people very well, because it means something to straight people in particular that is not really reflective of what many bisexual people are, in fact, in terms of their attractions.
Another is that the term is disfavored and doubted by many. Many gay men simply think bisexual men don't exist, and are gay men in denial, regardless of what we actually say (this is ironic, of course, but it is common nonetheless). Many straight people make the kind of argument that has been discussed in these last few posts to the effect that if one mostly dates people of the opposite sex, then how bisexual are you, anyway, really, because they have neither crunched the numbers and done the analysis you've laid out in this post (and, to be honest, can't be reasonably expected to do so -- I mean why would the average straight person care?), nor have they had the personal experience that results in the numbers you discuss. But it seems like in many cases the term causes more dissonance than anything else, and it is easier to assume the label associated with one's primary dating pool, which for most bisexual people is the straight dating pool -- there are exceptions, as well, as you experienced with the lesbian who was actually a very lesbian leaning bisexual woman who chose, in the same way, to identify with her primary dating pool rather than use a label which was technically correct but otherwise mis-stated her general practice and history in dating and relationships.
Finally, bisexuality is a different kind of label than heterosexual or homosexual, because there is no such thing as a bisexual relationship. It is merely an umbrella term that captures sexual orientations which are not more or less "strictly" same sex or opposite sex in nature. But the actual relationships that a bisexual engages in are either heterosexual relationships (which is the most common for the reasons you cite here) or homosexual ones, and in both cases the person slips into the norms and assumptions and mores and behaviors of that specific relationship culture -- they don't exist in a "bisexual relationship culture", because there is no such thing. I think because of this there is also a much weaker personal link to the label than there is for heterosexual and homosexual oriented people, because there isn't an entire relationship (and sex) culture associated with it -- in the end, it is an umbrella term that lumps together in one "holding" category a lot of individually different permutations of not being perfectly straight or gay, and this goes a long way to explaining why the label is often so tenuously held by people who are, in fact, bisexual to some degree, if it is indeed held at all.
Some someone explain why many conditions seem to correlate with sexual identities but are not seen in reverse?
I am beginning to feel that if somebody was to identify as bisexual I would consider them to be inherently unreliable, perhaps a liar in a general sense. I don't like feeling that way, can anyone tell me why I'd be wrong?
I'm more of the opinion that everyone is bi. No one is 100% straight nor 100% gay. What's more, if we subscribe to this idea, one's "sexuality" no longer makes any of us special. Which would be nice as the west can't stop drooling over the idea that you can be special depending on what you do with your genitals.
What makes you think that you know better than me and all the other people who believe ourselves to be attracted solely to one sex? I feel like you'd need pretty strong evidence to conclude that billions of people are mistaken about something so basic about themselves and how they experience the world.
I think there is some truth to the idea that many more people are bi than we realize. But I wouldn’t say everyone, I don’t think its quite so all-encompassing. My best friend of 10 years is 100% a straight man & I wouldn’t doubt that for a second, and speaking for myself, I am 100% gay. I have never experienced attraction to a woman. It would have made my life much easier if I was actually bisexual!
I also don’t understand the ideas that seem to be common in this comment section about “being special” — I have never been given a reason to feel special for being gay lol. There are no secret advantages, I don’t get discounts at restaurants, or a bigger tax return, or any real world special social treatment. I am well at peace with my sexuality but it’s sort of been a source of pain for me more than anything else. My teenage years were hell, and I’m glad that society has at least changed since then and I can achieve a sense of normalcy instead of being reviled or a topic of tribe vs. tribe culture war political debate, but I don’t feel like anyone is drooling over the idea that I’m special just because Chase bank runs some corny rainbow-colored television ads in June or whatever lol, or because of some militant twitter activists.
Anecdotal evidence, of course, but I'm a man who is well into adulthood now and I can say with 100% certainty that I have never once in my life been sexually attracted to or romantically interested in another man. As Roman said it is possible (perhaps likely) that bisexuality is more common than most people think but the idea that nobody is 100% straight or 100% gay is fairly absurd.
To flip the script a bit, going to a lesbian woman and saying "come on, you've got to be at least a little bit into fucking men" would correctly be viewed as insanely offensive.
Also the name of the dude in your link is Ron, not Jon.
I am reminded of the point that 0.0 and 1.0 aren't really legitimate probabilities, that they require an infinite number of bits of evidence to justify. On the other hand, "rounds to 0.0" and "rounds to 1.0" are quite common and quite useful...
As a somewhat bi man who has exclusively dated women, I've always struggled with this--am I allowed to identify as bi? I'm not taking any of the risks that come with a queer identity, just occasionally ogling guys on the subway. I found this essay validating.
A lot of your first section focuses on why bi women end up in hetero relationships--bi men have a lot of complementary problems. E.g. every time I make myself available to men, I get completely overwhelmed for the usual reasons that every heterosexual woman already viscerally appreciates.
There's also (IMO) increased social stigma against bi men than bi women. And as a bi-male-Canadian friend of mine put it: "in Canada, when I say I'm bi, it means I date men and women. In the US, it just means I'm gay."
The genital arousal stats are interesting, but I'm not sure how much we should trust them. Young teenage Catholic me felt physical discomfort when I saw two men kissing (I have one very specific memory here), enough that it would probably kill any arousal. So I wonder how much social stigma influences the results--it will be interesting to see if the numbers change over time as LGBTQ identities gain more acceptance.
I have mostly avoided identifying as bisexual, because I feel like "I'm not gay enough" to do so, even though I'm clearly attracted to men. It feels like whether I say "I'm straight" or "I'm bi", I'm being somewhat dishonest, because the situation is more nuanced than either label.
One approach I've seen used elsewhere in this thread is to attach percentages to it. If someone were to respond that they were "80% Straight" to the range of questions you might answer with some mix of bi or straight, would you feel that to answer the question well?
Yeah I do this. Usually if there's enough space for me to provide context it's nbd. But do I check the "LGBTQ" box on my employer's diversity survey? That's where I get tripped up.
Given how I feel about diversity surveys, I'd go on a few OKCupid dates and call it. I can even tell you you have a nice butt, and if you respond in kind you've now engaged in online flirting with a man. ;)
I hear ya man. I'm more or less in your position. I feel like from progressive ethics I'm supposed to take the L and identify as a straight man so everyone can treat me like crap, but I'm not sure it's true and my experiments in this regard have been...underwhelming.
(I've read the stuff on your blog BTW, fascinating stuff...though can you get anything out of the Tao Te Ching without learning Mandarin? Seems like all the paradoxes and so on would be lost in translation.)
Thanks! Yeah I've honestly toyed with the idea of learning some Mandarin (also Sanskrit and German) to be able to look more closely at source texts. I usually end up reading at least 2-3 different translations of the same text for something as dense as the Tao Te Ching (I think I have 4 or 5 of that one in particular).
I'm pretty sure I'm missing half the wordplay and nuance in the Zhuangzi though, no matter how many translations I pick up.
Honestly unsure how much Mandarin (or, frankly, any other Sinitic language) will help. I was taught the classics in Cantonese, so that's my default setting, but Old Chinese is just too far removed from its descendants for any of them to help, I think. Beyond the basic idea of being able to sound out the words, of course.
Once you get to Middle Chinese, it's a different matter, but for Old Chinese, most differences are a rounding error.
Learning Mandarin specifically seems a bit pointless since the Taoist classics weren't written in Mandarin. It's easy to forget, I guess, given how hard the Chinese government tries to suppress awareness of Chinese linguistic variety, but Classical Chinese came into being more than one Latin ago and was used like Latin in the Sinosphere pretty much right up to the Communist revolution.
i think that graph warrants a little bit more explanation in this article. As labeled, it shows a secular *increase* in the number of bisexual women who have had male-only partners in the past five years, suggesting that increased willingness of women to identify as bisexual (and thus a presumably larger same-sex dating pool for women) *negatively* correlates with the number of women who have had at least one female romantic partner between 2008 and 2023.
The linked article provides the presumptive explanation - last sentence is key ("Figure 9 illustrates the statistically significant finding that the share of bisexual women who report having only had male sexual partners over the past five years has risen since 2012. A rising share of women with heterosexual behavior is choosing to identify as bisexual."). But I think the result is somewhat counterintuitive and would benefit from an explicit note that the explanation for this appears to be explained by willingness to identify as bi in a manner decoupled from sexual behavior, rather than the ostensible explanation suggested the graph by itself without this context: that as the same-sex dating pool for women grows, the proportion of bisexual women with female sexual partners *shrinks.*
Americans are not entirely consistent on what does and does not count as dating, "going steady", so forth. To my personal understanding:
Opening moves in the dating process include asking someone else onto a date, which commonly involves a meal and/or a recreational activity. By the third time this happens the two are definitely dating, the first and second events may count as "not yet dating" or "dating for a very short time" depending, especially if further asks are declined.
Someone who is regularly going on dates with multiple different people is themselves "Dating" but is clearly "not steady" with any one person. The other partners may or may not be aware of each other, which can lead to drama when discovered.
A pair of people who are engaged to be married are "no longer dating and instead engaged".
A pair of people who live in the same house, enjoy each others intimate company, but have not legally married are probably still dating but this position is sometimes argued against.
This is a category discussion, which is particularly difficult for certain communities (because they fight the nature of categories, argue about boundaries, basically philosophy major types). That said, seems odd to claim someone wants X, but never tries X, no matter what the numbers say. Also seems odd to conflate "arousal" and what someone actually "desires." Many folk have fantasized about X, only to be disgusted upon having X. Also somewhat odd because this suggests proverbial goat herd is actually "attracted" to goats, rather than opportunistic (back to arousal vs desire). That ability, ability to be aroused by X doesn't mean one is necessarily an Xian. Also doesn't seem to do enough with men playing the more active, "aggressive" role, which might mean it makes sense for women to focus on to what they are potentially receptive (even if those stereotypes now disfavored). But on that note, odd to suggest there's just relatively so little opportunity for women to be bi so they just default to men in most cases (as your use of numbers suggests), given the very intimate friendships, hours spent together alone, and very high chance you're female friend is willing to explore too (that is, with enough opportunities, 10% pays out very frequently over time). Finally, can't note the irony of how comfortable people seem with all these various label, knowing exactly what we mean by X and Y, and also A, B, C, even though in other contexts we're supposed to pretend these terms don't have any sort of fixed, accepted meaning.
There's also a big difference between self-reporting willingness to do X, and actually "wanting" to do X, as demonstrated by doing X. There are many contexts in which people are sure they will love X, based on watching it, reading about it, etc., and then the time comes to (e.g.) rock climb or bungee jump or whatever, the reality is different. That is, arousal can be real, but doesn't necessarily correlate to willingness to follow through. Note that, for those who actually do love to bungee jump, that may seem like an insulting point, but shouldn't be (not about you, who actually do "desire" X). And also doesn't mean anyone's "faking" anything (except maybe the person in bed with not X (sorry, couldn't resist)).
That’s a good point on the claiming fake Xers being insulting to real Xers. In most subcultures posers are actively disliked and outed by the community, or at least just looked down on compared to “Real Xers.” The insult aspect makes me update slightly towards there being more fakers than one would think, as only fakers would be insulted that fakers were called out.
Good point. A related point is that there are many people who *want* to be the kind of person who loves rock climbing, but just...don't love rock climbing. I want to be the kind of person who rides her bike across the Pyrenees, but I'd actually hate it. For many people, bisexuality might fit into this category.
"Suppose someone (let’s say a woman) has exactly equal sexual attraction to both men and women.
Their male dating pool is all heterosexual and bisexual men (95%+ of men), and their female dating pool is all lesbian and bisexual women (about 5-10% of women). So their potential dating pool is about 90% male. So this “perfectly” bisexual woman could be expected to date about 10x as many men as women, just by numbers alone."
Perhaps this would be the case in a rural area. From my (admittedly limited) experience, women who identify as lesbian or bisexual end up with a pool of acquaintances that are not even close to balanced that way - they end up talking to women.
I think this is an excellent point. Assuming one’s friends + acquaintances circle has the same structure as the country at large is almost certainly false, especially as one has less average preferences. It also ignores the fact that gay/lesbian bars and eg Tinder exist, places you can specifically meet people of the same sec who are interested in yours.
Andrew Sulivan (and others) wrote, a year or two ago, about how Lesbian bars are dieing out and hypothesized that this was because so few young women identify as Lesbian, either because they are now some other part of LGBQT+ and/or because it just isn't cool to identify as Lesbian any more.
I shared this with some Lesbian/Bi/etc., family members and after much discussion they decided that this was oversimplified but basically true.
That's interesting. I would imagine the internet and online dating is hurting things too, as there are other options for finding "people with X sexual preferences" making bars less important. I don't go to bars so it is outside my wheelhouse by a wide margin, but I could see a book on the rise and fall of specialty theme bars across subcultures being pretty interesting.
Lesbian and bisexual women in the present tend to stop going to gay bars after they get into a relationship. Lesbian bars as a place of shelter from homophobia aren’t as necessary anymore since you can hold hands or dance with your partner in many places. Basically, since women don’t look for casual sex as much as men, lesbian bars are less economically viable than gay bars. Online dating also contributes.
Yeah treating this as a purely numbers game struck me as odd, and not a mistake Scott would normally make.
The people you date are not a random sample of the people in your area that might plausibly be attracted to. And most people are not purely passive daters - you will in some way seek out the sort of people you are interested.
Your last footnote struck me as odd. As a straight guy I don't feel like I benefit from men not hitting on me. Like your "mostly lesbian" friend, you may decide to make an unexpected exception (although being married rules this out for me). More options are good. And even if there really is a zero chance of taking them up on it, it's always nice to know people are in to you. (I'll caveats all this with women (straight or otherwise) may have reasons not to want men to hit on them).
OTOH, it does seem beneficial to gay and bisexuality men for straight to mean straight. Straight meaning "probably straight, but maybe not" can lead to wasted time, disappointment and even risk of harm (although hopefully that last one is less likely than it once was).
"My friend explained that the acquaintance was mostly lesbian but a little bisexual and it hadn’t come up before. This distinction ended up being very important to me, and I don’t know who it serves to encourage people to hide it."
Your acquaintance was served, she mostly wanted men to not ask her out on dates, and lacking a socially recognized term for "don't ask me out on dates unless it's just perfect", she used the term for "don't ask me out on dates at all" and managed to get mostly what she wanted.
Also note that a lot of homosexual individuals prefer not to date bisexuals owing to an experience gap (and also straight people experimenting resulting in multiple failed relationships, or seeing bisexual people who broke up with them settle down with an opposite-sex partner and assuming that the issue was one of sexuality rather than other incompatibilities which for many people may feel like a better option, might create a distaste for these potential relationships); my personal experience was approximately 50%.
Additionally, homosexual individuals may, because of their limited dating pool, relocate to areas more conducive to their desires (larger cities / areas with higher concentrations of homosexual people); I think bisexual individuals won't feel this pressure as acutely. (Certainly I didn't.)
These, I think, combine to exaggerate the effect far more than might otherwise be expected; even a bisexual person who makes a specific effort to date same-sex partners may find some additional difficulty finding any, relatively.
The more relevant dating pool for bisexual people, I think, is - other bisexual people. I've noticed that most of my partners have been some degree of bisexual, and most of their partners have been some degree of bisexual. And this, I think, might be somehow important.
"seeing bisexual people who broke up with them settle down with an opposite-sex partner and assuming that the issue was one of sexuality rather than other incompatibilities which for many people may feel like a better option"
+1 to this, I personally have known lesbians to feel that bisexual women "always want to go back to dick sooner or later" and are very unreliable/untrustworthy for this reason. I assume this fear is far from ubiquitous, but I also assume it's more commonly held than it is clearly articulated, especially around men.
There is now stigma among the LGBT community to openly express honest sentiments like this, especially among women. So lesbians are very unlikely to articulate this sentiment to others in the community if they want to keep their friends and have people to date.
But 20% of young women are identifying as bi. So if you repeat the analysis with that number, then only about 20% of bi women should report not having a prior female partner.
WRT social conditioning. It's worth remembering that essentially ALL Spartan men were in homosexual relationships. Also classical literature indicates that many Athenian men considered sex with their wives a duty. So social conditioning at least CAN be quite dominant. (OTOH, of course, a lot of Spartan men were killed if they weren't willing to be in a homosexual relationship. The phalanx sort of depended on maximal bonding.)
I think you've confused Spartans and a specific unit of Thebans. AFAIK there's no evidence of Spartan military homosexuality, Xenophon for example says that the older veterans each taking on a younger recruit as a protégé is supposed to be an idealized friendship, not sexual.
It would not surprise me if the fraction of women that can claim to be bisexual on this definition is nearly 100%. This is anecdotal, I know, but I have known a number of women who attended women's colleges and virtually all of them had lesbian relationships. Lesbian until graduate was a real thing well before it become fashionable to be bisexual.
Of course, it could be just that bisexuals are more likely to attend women's colleges or that I happened to know a clique of particularly bisexual women. However, it has always been my impression that sexuality for women is much more fuzzy in its boundaries than it is for men.
It also means I don't think bisexual women are anything special and that I think a lot of them are putting themselves forward as bisexual because it is fashionable rather than because it has any actual special meaning to their identity.
I'm not sure if there's a word for this kind of truthful hypocrisy.
There's this weird hesitancy to acknowledge that, for many physical acts that provide pleasure, if you close your eyes, may be hard to tell who's providing the pleasure, and may be somewhat irrelevant. So it shouldn't be surprising that flexibility on this point may in large part turn on environment, social costs, etc. But that doesn't mean there isn't a real preference that may not be accurately reflected by actions. E.g., if you're sportsball fan of team X, but they don't make playoffs, you may root for team Y. But that doesn't mean team Y is "really" your team. So a large part of this seems definitional, in terms of are you saying X means willing to dabble without consequences, seriously interested in both alternatives, being opportunistic, being open to new experience, being ambivalent, etc. (I don't think almost anyone denies someone of same sex could get them off in the abstract, even if many deny they'd ever permit that to happen, they'd be repulsed, etc., and frequently not just the repression talking).
I was one of the "yeah, bisexual people tend to like to have quirky labels" folks and I basically agree with this article. As a general rule I think just about anyone (with some exceptions) can be attracted to both men or women and most folks tend not to acknowledge that and continue to identify as straight. For instance, I am certain there are circumstances in which I could find men appealing - attractive male and attractive female faces aren't that different for one thing. Nonetheless I've only dated women, only pursued women, and suspect if I suddenly found myself single I would pursue women. In my mind that makes me straight, but I wouldn't be offended if people thought I was bi or whatever.
Nonetheless, just anecdotally there's a significant overlap between people in my life who identify as bisexual and people in my life who respond to another person's story by telling about how the same thing happened to them but it was so so much worse and can we please talk about how victimized I am and also I have eight chronic illnesses. Folks who despite enjoying all the benefits of being a straight cis white man/woman complain constantly about straight cis men and women, y'know?
And I feel like that's probably relevant to the question even if everyone's bisexual and bisexual folks are more correct about their orientation than others. In fact, take out my annoying, unfounded value judgments and you might get something like "bisexual folks are more in-tune with their bodies, their needs, and their inner life than you, you repressed asshole." Nonetheless, I think that probably accounts for at least some of the correlation between bisexuality and long Covid.
Based on a study of n=my dog, animals will put their dicks into any compatible hole unless strong social mediation discourages this behavior. There are better arguments, like the observation that our closest animal relatives tend to be bisexual and that pre-abrahamic religion there were cultures where the default was bisexuality, but this was the funniest one I could think of.
Here's my wild conjecture, based on the spoons model of disability.
In the original model, a disability (especially a chronic and fatigue-inducing one - the original example was Lupus) is like having a limited budget of spoons per day, and each activity you do costs a number of spoons. Extra spoons do not carry over to the next day, and going over your spoon budget has bad effects including reducing your spoon budget in the future (the more you overspend, the worse the effects). Managing such a disability means carefully budgeting with your spoons (which costs extra spoons to do).
What if everyone had a spoon budget, but a normal working day costs around 100 spoons, and a non-disabled person's daily budget is 120 or something - the spoon fairy supplies their budget like everyone else, but they don't notice because they don't have to actively budget with their spoons. A mild disability might put you around the 90s and a more severe impairment is trying to survive on 50 a day or so?
In this model, what if the effect of long covid is something like -5 spoons/day? The person who used to get 120 and spend 100 is now on 115 / 100 and barely notices except on the most stressful days (excess spoons get discarded at the end of the day after all so you don't see something like less compound interest in your spoon account). But the person whose average day used to cost 100 against a budget of 100 - maybe their comorbidities are what's causing the reduced spoon budget in the first place - will absolutely notice the missing 5! And the person who's already actively budgeting their previous 80 spoons/day allowance will absolutely have to adapt to getting 5 more deducted.
In summary: there's a possible model where long covid is not psychosomatic, but still affects people with comorbidities that put them closer to their coping limits in the first place worse than healthier people who have enough slack to deal with the extra effects.
Personally, I agree with Scott's other posts that it's silly to make a distinction between psychosomatic and "real" conditions, I'm just saying there's a possible model to explain why long covid would get noticed more in already otherwise impaired people that doesn't involve a psychosomatic component.
That's super charitable, and thus admirable in some ways, on the psychosomatic/real distinction (and completely agree on the spoons possibility). But there really are malingers, people who claim disability they don't deserve, people who embrace being ill, etc. And where there's money at stake, whether healthcare costs, employment, whatever, there's good reason to distinguish between the two. Similarly, you would expect treatment to change based on whether "psychosomatic" or "real" (we have this problem where we pretend like the psychological isn't based in the physical, and thus similarly physiological at some level), so it seems relevant to assess, rather than unnecessarily harsh. That is, you can agree the goal is to make people happy/better/healthy, regardless of whether "psychosomatic" or "real," yet still find it very valuable to distinguish between the two.
I agree with you that malingerers and profiteers exist. I do think that "psychosomatic" and "malingering" are two separate axes though.
I also agree with you on separate treatment - if someone has leg pains that turn out to be psychosomatic, then it's reasonable that they get something like therapy for the underlying causes rather than physiotherapy for the leg.
Unrelated to the topic at hand: When I click on a link to a reference (the small 1, 2 and 3) to go to it, or to go to where it was in the article, it takes almost two full seconds to go to it. This is a terrible experience.
"getting dates with women is hard, for the usual reasons that every heterosexual man already viscerally appreciates"
Do all of the usual reasons fully apply in this case? Women contemplating dates with men have to worry about accidental pregnancy (absent in this case) and potential violence (much reduced - e.g. the male killer/female killer ratio is around 7:1) so I'd expect less hesitancy from these considerations for women considering dates with women.
I have seen a statistic many times that the highest rates of domestic violence are in lesbian relationships. I don't know about murder. I would assume there's no way lesbians commit as much murder as men. Maybe intimate partner murder, though.
Ok, let me see what I can find about lesbian domestic violence. If I find a url and update this comment to include it, could you take a look and see if it is the sort of thing that you had in mind?
Elliot, P. (1996). Shattering Illusions: Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services, 4(1), 1–8. doi:10.1300/j041v04n01_01
has "The reality is that domestic violence occurs at approximately the same rate in gay and lesbian relationships as it does in heterosexual unions." in their abstract. I was hoping for a nice comparative table in the body of the article (thanks, sci_hub!) but the closest I got was: "Preliminary studies show that 22% to 46% of all lesbians have been in a physically violent same-sex relationship."
By the way, men and women are about equally likely to kill an intimate partner:
Men, women, and murder: gender-specific differences in rates of fatal violence and victimization
A L Kellermann 1, J A Mercy
"Although the overall risk of homicide for women was substantially lower than that of men (rate ratio [RR] = 0.27), their risk of being killed by a spouse or intimate acquaintance was higher (RR = 1.23). In contrast to men, the killing of a woman by a stranger was rare (RR = 0.18). ... In contrast to men, who killed nonintimate acquaintances, strangers, or victims of undetermined relationship in 80% of cases, women killed their spouse, an intimate acquaintance, or a family member in 60% of cases."
Many Thanks! That is interesting information, and was quite a surprise to me, given the coarser information I'd had on male killer/female killer ratios overall.
>Sex researchers have done something kind of like this by showing people porn and monitoring genital arousal
I wonder if this is vicarious though? For instance straight women talk about focusing on the woman when watching straight porn instead of the men because they're imagining being them, it's a kind of vicarious sexual excitement.
As other comments have noted, female physical arousal is not very well linked to subjective reports of arousal. This could be explained by female arousal being more about *getting ready for sex* - this also makes sense when you consider that women usually 'receive' sex rather than initiate it, so just observing sexual activity might be a signal for the body to start preparing (whether she wants it or not). In contrast, men would feel arousal only when they want to activity *initiate* sex, and so arousal would be much more linked to attraction.
Also, anecdotally, as a bi women who has pursued women in the past, there have been several instances where a woman says she thinks I'm attractive, even comes close to going out with me, but realises she actually doesn't want to do anything sexual with a woman. Maybe I'm just a really bad date, but these things make me doubt the 'most women are really bisexual' view. I'm more inclined to believe these arousal studies show something like - women are much more likely than men to prepare for sexual encounter when viewing something sex-related.
Because to me it's baffling in its juvenility and also in its lack of agreement with the actual world.
Being a linear scale it can't possibly model sexual attraction space with its 2+ dimensions. And not only is gynephilia independent from androphilia, but negative attraction is absolutely a thing that manifests in differing degrees, as anyone who has tried to set up a group encounter knows.
Yes. All models are false, some models are useful. You can't reduce everything to a number, but for a large portion of the population (gays, straights, many bis) it's useful to describe who you're looking for relatively rapidly. You can always add on sapiosexual, demisexual, etc.
I mean, it's far from optimal, but you asked if anyone felt like defending it. ;)
But IS it a useful model? It seems to rely on at least two assumptions that we know are not absolutely true and may not even be mostly true:
1. Homo- and heterosexuality are the basis for determining sexuality (I am personally suspicious that "attracted to men" or "attracted to women" makes more sense than attraction to same or complementary gender).
2. Homo- and heterosexuality are inversely proportional. (it seems that behavior would be more determined by the strength of the libido, regardless of the direction)
Honestly, the Kinsey Scale seems more like Galenic medicine than anything else -- bogus, but the basis for an awful lot of science so everyone assumes it is useful and so they keep using it.
I mean, as I've gotten more exposed to rationalism I sort of am more and more able to articulate the problems with this assumptions-based way of understanding human relations--basically, people are much more complicated than any system that can be derived, math-like, from a set of axioms, and it's more useful to use simple heuristics that you can communicate to others. The Kinsey is, well, a scale (effectively a scalar within a given bounded range), like temperature or height or weight (OK the last two can go to infinity but nobody is 10 feet tall), and you can analogize that to any of those. It's the reason everyone laughs at the genderbread person but is happy to come up with new words to describe their sexuality like demisexual and so on. A single word is easier to communicate.
I agree a person can be gynosexual, androsexual, pansexual, or asexual (or something in between), but it's most relevant to talk about the type of person they're looking for, and that might be men, women, or both. If it's both, people often have a preference for one or the other. It's easier to say 'I am mostly into women but might be open to the right guy, I'm a Kinsey 2' rather than try to work out whether your attraction to women is 9 and to men is 5 or your attraction to women is 5 and to men is 1. And a lot of people are monosexual and are then much more concerned about how to be attractive to their chosen sex.
1) Man was made for the categories, you're just plain wrong about this.
2) The same investigative method reveals that women also respond with genital arousal to seeing dogs or chimps have sex, violent rapes etc., basically all kinds of unsavory scenarios. So either all women are massive perverts (this contradicts our conventional wisdom, although not Greco-Roman conventional wisdom) or else women have just evolved to lubricate at the sight of anything sexual because in the ancestral environment they didn't necessarily have much choice about consent and so on and thus it simply minimized vaginal damage to always get ready for sex when there seemed to be some around. In the latter case, presumably "arousal" as subjectively experienced happens somewhere else. Personally I think this seems pretty probable since involuntary boners are also well known to be a thing, including in embarrassing/offputting situations.
As I understand it, the argument is that the attitude of men who falsely claim to be bisexual to gain kudos for being broad-minded and commendably catholic in their tastes, and "the wolf in sheep's clothing" aim of sounding less potentially predatory to women, correlates with the sympathy-seeking goal of a false claim of having long covid. In short, deceit in one makes deceit in the other more likely.
But if the original survey was done by an online poll then what incentive would there have been for heterosexual men to give a false reply to the sexual orientation question?
FWIW, it seems to me that if there is a correlation it is more likely that both are the result of some lack of sensitivity in hormone regulation, a tendency to overshoot one way or another over time, with fluctuating levels causing corresponding changes in predominant sexual orientation, and Covid throwing the whole system out of whack for some time. I think it is well-known that in men, such as M2F guys starting on female hormones, i.e. HRT, a sudden increase in the levels of these can cause mental aberrations such as "brain fog" until the brain adjusts.
Isn't the first table *exactly* what you would expect if people have been increasingly calling themselves bisexual as part of a fad without really practicing it? What else explains the dramatic rise?
Seems like a reasonable disagreement of how we apply identity labels. If I said I was interested in basketball, but I never played basketball, you wouldn't call me a basketball player. If I said I was interested in having kids, but I never had kids, you wouldn't call me a father. Those identity labels require a specific action. But there are some identity labels like rich, poor, tall, short, blond, redhead, straight, gay, bisexual, that we typically apply without that person having to do any particular action.
I think figure 1 gives average for attraction to men and women, whereas figure 2 picks the most arousing gender and gives the other as a fraction of that one. So if half of the 2's and 3's find men more attractive and women half as attractive as that, and the other half of the 2's and 3's find women more attractive and men half as attractive as that, the graphs could be reconciled.
I think the Kinsey scale means 0 is straight and 6 is gay and 1-5 are in between.
So then you could map half the people onto an inverse Kinsey scale to create figure 2, but a 3 would still be a 3 on the inverse scale.
And the 3's in figure 1 liked men and women almost equally.
But you're right, I guess that could mean that half the 3's liked men more and half the 3's liked women more, and those are averaged together in figure 1 but not figure 2.
Would you see a shift, in that data, if bisexuality was weighted more towards gay or straight?
Like, is it why 2 and 3 are about equal in figure 1 or 2 is the peak in figure 2?
Could we conclude from figure 2 that everyone actually has a preference, and no one is truly bisexual with equal weighting? I.e. peak bisexuality is liking one gender half as much as the other, not liking them equally?
I guess you could conclude that from figure 2, as you say. I think they were trying to conclude that bisexuality exists, since the prior thought was that it *didn't exist at all* in men. Everyone knows at least some women are fluid (though I wonder if this 'believe all women' thing is going to raise bisexuality rates among men.)
Is it true? Your guess is as good as mine. As woke pressure on scientists increases, stuff like this is going to be harder and harder to replicate.
The interpretation we discussed is also weird, because you'd think that someone who likes men more than women would not self report as exactly 3 on the Kinsey scale, but report biased towards one side. And you'd expect a bias towards the opposite side for someone who likes women more than men.
So even positing that half the bisexuals at each level of the scale skew one way or the other presumes a strong degree of failure to self report.
I don't know, maybe it's just an impossibly confusing paper.
The original "bisexuality doesn't exist" paper is a little bit confusing in its own way, but it looks like more a question as to whether they have enough subjects that their assertions are statistically valid.
If you look at what Random Reader said above, apparently Kinsey 3s are describing themselves as straight! So there's a real variation in self-report and the like.
I still think it's pretty likely that there's some relationship between trend-susceptibility and activism that's affecting the data here. Right now, unless I'm completely missing the mark, bisexuality is one of those identities that's slated as being seriously underrepresented. Therefore, bisexuality is ripe for representation (i.e. trendy) and you should expect contemporary polls to catch an outsize number of trendsters within that group. (Note that I'm not claiming these people are fakers)
Since we should expect a good number of long COVID cases to by psychosomatic, and for trendsters to be more susceptible to social contagion, we should expect long COVID cases to be overrepresented among trendsters. Since contemporary social polling is likely to catch an outsize number of trendsters when fishing for bisexuals, this would seem to have some explanatory power.
Am I getting something wrong, or do you simply not find this reasoning sufficient to explain the data? It seems like what I've written here is probably falsifiable if somebody is willing to do the work involved...
I'm straight but actually enjoy it when men hit on me (I fool many people's gaydars). I've even on occasion been to gay parties and enjoyed being objectified. It's a rare experience for men since it's usually men who do the objectifying and hitting on someone, and most are straight and won't presume gayness. Personal taste, though...
Is "aroused by genitals of" simply being conflated with "attraction to"?
What if women are simply more imaginative, and so when they see any kind of genitals they're aroused?
Or what if they are biologically predisposed to show arousal signs in the presence of any kind of genitals because it's a possible signal of incoming sex, and they could have their genitals hurt if they aren't in an aroused state. Since this would impact their fitness, females would tend towards more inclusive genital arousal states.
Neither of these alternatives strike me as definitively suggesting same sex attraction.
I don't know why we would just use the background sexuality demographics to makes these estimates.
It's pretty clear that the dating pool of many bisexual women is going to be subject to some pretty powerful selection effects. I would expect the preponderance of these effects (living in urban and queer friendly areas, using queer dating apps, etc) to increase the proportion of women in their dating pool.
In general, surveys of bisexuality are hopelessly skewed by sampling difficulties. Something like 85% of bi men are closeted even from the "most important people in their lives", and it's very hard to track them down to survey them. So your results are almost entirely dominated by _how_ you found your survey respondents. Several widely reported studies on "bi men", including "Sexual Arousal Patterns of Bisexual Men" (Rieger, Chivers, Bailey, 2005) supposedly found their participants by recruiting among the gay male community. And they concluded bi men didn't actually exist. Bailey also later participated in "Robust evidence for bisexual orientation among men" (Jabbour, et el., 2020) which successfully found some bi men to study. It concluded that bi men were, in fact, bi.
This study asks people about their orientation in multiple ways! If I recall correctly, it asks them about how they label their orientation, what genders they're attracted to, where they place themselves on the Kinsey scale, and whether they'd consider a long-term same-gender relationship with the "right person". The results are fascinating: There are people who call themselves "straight" but who claim to be Kinsey 3s (equal attraction), and a bunch of other unexpected combos. Conclusion: Lots of people are open to relationships or sex with the same gender under various conditions, but they don't use any kind of consistent terminology.
And no, bi men are not "doing it for the attention." Outside of rare poly and queer communities, out bi men substantially reduce their dating pool. Something like 60% of women's magazine readers admitted that they would never date bi men. Annecdotally, the real number is likely higher in many places.
As for bi women, physical arousal studies is highly suspect, because of a well-studied phenomenon called "arousal non-concordance." Emily Nagowski summarizes this research as:
> There’s about a 50% overlap between how much blood flows to a male’s genital response and how “turned on” he feels — his “subjective arousal;” and there’s about 10% overlap for women’s genital response and subjective arousal.
Given all this, I would expect that most surveys of bi people are still heavily influenced by how they recruit bi people.
Great article! Heaps of comments on here so I'm sure this is already covered, but in case it's not:
The studies on genital arousal seem super unreliable! Personally, I'm (very) bisexual both in terms of my sex/dating choices and in terms of 'how I identify'. There is ZERO PERCENT CHANCE I will get even the slightest erection if you put me in the Pornoprobotron-9000 and showed me nude pics. That would give me an anti-erection, for even pics I'd subjectively find attractive. Especially for visual-only stimuli, there's no chance I'd show any response to that.
Genital arousal is just so influenced by so many factors/context. Again I want to avoid TMI, but in my experience even in real-world sexual encounters, genital arousal for me is not linked in any straightforward way to how attracted I am to the person. It certainly happens! It's just not according to any pattern or criterion I can discern. If I treated genital arousal as the definitive marker of sexual orientation, I would have been very confused and probably missed out on a lot of later genital-arousal-causing things.
Also re: footnote 3... I think 5% of self-identified straight men would absolutely say yes to sex with a man at some point in their lives. (It was 4% in the table above, no?)
My thoughts on this are not fully formed, but I think you're missing out on the fact that sexual attraction is IN ITSELF subject to suggestion. When someone expresses attraction to you, that emotional state can be contagious-- people are turned on just by being desired. So bisexuals can be genuinely attracted to both sexes, while at the same time being more prone to social contagion that would lead them to delusionally believe they have a disease.
"The average person dates about seven people before marriage" This statistic seems to be an outlier and the source seems kind of dubious, as I can't actually find the study it is referencing. This much more credible source seems to indicate 4 partners for women in a lifetime:https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/n-keystat.htm
Fair enough, but it seems to matter. My country has released statistics claiming bisexual people are the most victimised people of all. This makes a difference in resources allocated etc.
Hahah I've got nothing against flippancy. I was only curious about the response in the first place. And I appreciated your response. Are you bisexual yourself or responding on principle?
I would agree with that. I don't see why what you want to fuck should define you.
I think your assumption that the reason is that it's immutable is false. Whether it's immutable or not is irrelevant, however much it is brought up in rhetoric. The conservatives will say something like it's a sinful choice and because the lgbt have to respond immediately the have to disagree and say it's not a choice (which matches their internal experience) rather than the more fundamentally important but subtler to argue fact that it isn't wrong for any rational reason (which many people will be tough to convince because "ew gross")
This is something I've thought about a lot and I think the problem with this line of reasoning is that it assumes a natural rights based approach from the outset where really it's a matter of consequentialism.
The short version is that the legal protections are deserved because there's a large attacking force to defend against. Without the legal protections, a substantial enough number of people would and were going out of their way to be awful to lgbt people that it meaningfully excluded them from participation in large parts of society and left them at distinct economic and social disadvantages (we called this "oppressed" for short hand)
Foot fetishists don't need legal protections because there's no large attacking movement motivated or capable of oppressing them. If there were, they would be deserving of the protections and I would be 100% behind them. This remains true for any such minority where the matter at hand is victimless. Pedophiles get no such protection because society has good reason to discriminate against them.
Now not every protection that ended up existing is necessarily appropriate or one I agree with, and the battles taking place are often as you say illiberal. I don't think anyone should be forced to make any kind of cake. Even if it really were the case that if people could refuse to make you a cake that you had no other option and got no cake, cake-having is not some important way of participating in society that we need to protect.
Employment however is, and sadly in the way we've built society employment is also largely how people in the USA access healthcare and engage in many or most of their social interactions. These are all ways of societal participation that are important and valuable both to the individuals and society and are deserving of protection, because it leads to improved outcomes in a high stakes way.
If the complaint is "but that violates my natural right to discriminate" I agree but don't care. We live in a society, delenda est. "Rights" aren't real, outcomes are what matters. Rights based thinking is a useful heuristic that we shouldn't do away with, but the outcomes is what it's all for.
I believe you’re fundamentally disagreeing with Scott’s point in this post. The post is that bisexuality is real, but I get the impression you think it’s not because most people choose not to practice it in full effect. The law simply does not, nor should it, choose which sexual preferences should be protected - just that all are. I don’t see a cost difference to a business not being able to discriminate against bisexuals compared to homosexuals. I truly don’t understand what these costs, monetary or otherwise, that you speak of are?
"You can discriminate against bisexual people but not gay or lesbian people because they can pass for straight" is going to immediately turn into "prove that you're actually gay enough to deserve protection," which is immediately going to turn into "this guy had a straight relationship while he was in the closet, clearly he doesn't "really need" protection from discrimination because he's already shown he was capable of staying in the closet." Such a policy would be seen and used as a backdoor way of discriminating against gay and lesbian people by forcing them to pass the appropriate purity tests.
Draw the borders of your discrimination protection wide, because people will inevitably try to chip away at the edges.
Thank you for this well reasoned response. Something I love about these comments is that folks take the time to actually make rational arguments for progessive stances rather than just shaming and downvoting any non-progressive comments into oblivion.
So why are religions in a protected class again?
My point is that religion isn't immutable. People convert all the time. The inclusion of religion in protected categories demonstrates that a trait doesn't have to be immutable to be protected.
You can't fire gays or transes for being gays or trans for the same reason that you can't be fired for your catholicism kink.
"If my religion and being trans are equally voluntary, why does one get priority over the other?"
It does not. A trans employer cannot fire you for being Catholic
This feels like a quite idiosyncratically American perspective, "I can fire someone for doing something I find icky in their personal life" is not, as I understand it, the case for most European countries, and would be considered unfair dismissal, and something you could be sued for.
<i>rather than the more fundamentally important but subtler to argue fact that it isn't wrong for any rational reason (which many people will be tough to convince because "ew gross")</i>
Objection, m'lud: the disgust instinct developed to protect us, and most everything we find disgusting is in fact harmful in some way.* Therefore, "ew gross" is in fact a perfectly rational reason for thinking something's wrong.
* If you think homosexuality's an exception here, I can only advise you to look up rates of STD transmission amongst gay men.
It's a reason to *check* if something's wrong, but not to assume it, especially given how far we are from the ancestral environment.
Images of gross, probably pathogen-ridden things on a screen can trigger the disgust reaction for most people, despite the fact that there is no way for the disease to spread through the intertubes.
And lest you get too hung up on the homosexuality/STD link, by the same logic, checking into the rates of STD transmission among straight people vs asexuals might convince you there is something wrong with having a sex drive at all.
>It's a reason to *check* if something's wrong
This check will terminate with a different result according to the person doing it, depending on the priors, risk tolerance, past experiences, etc... We never bat an eye when a person say they don't like flying, even though the numbers clearly show that flying is very safe, much more so than cars in fact. We still respect the people who decided it's too much risk for them, despite their flawed risk calculus.
But when it comes to homosexuality, suddenly you're not allowed to even think of the naughty conclusion.
>there is something wrong with having a sex drive at all.
I mean, a sexual conservative like me will very much give you a "Your Terms Are Acceptable" meme here. STDs are downhill from promiscuity, not homosexuality per se. It just so happens that (western, mid-late 20th century and 21st) homosexuals were/are promiscuous as hell, so they have some impressive numbers. But I equally well remember reading how STDs were rampant in, say, military camps (Nazis in 1940s France, US troops in 1950s Korea) because they heavily employ prostitutes. It's not really "having a sex drive at all" that is dangerous - although sex drive is indeed a bitch of a desire and the bane of the human condition for all of history - but when it comes to STDs in particular it's more like "having a sex drive and satisfying it by being a slut". You can hump your pillow or satisfy yourself with your hands for weeks and months and you will never catch an STD.
The fundamental trap for an atheist, a very cruel and deceptive one, is to realize that Religion and Tradition may have been wrong about lots and lots of things, all too many to count. But they are extremly good at one thing : Devising rules to hold society together. We don't need to adhere to those rules unconditionally, we just have to realize that they are there for a reason, and that reason is that they have been successful at holding society together. You see those ideologies saying "a merciful god created this [aweful] universe" or "a virgin woman gave birth", and you're awefully tempted to pee on every single thing they say, but no. Those ideologies are indeed a dumpster fire of wrongness and cruelty, but when it comes to sex and sexual dynamics they are 80-90% on the money.
And the most bitter pill of all is that most people aren't fit for freedom, sexual or otherwise.
Uh, you seem to be responding to some straw version of me, or optimizing for conflict, so if that continues to be the case I'm not going to respond again, but here's an attempt at good-faith engagement:
> This check will terminate with a different result according to the person doing it
Yes, different people have disgust reactions to different things at different levels.
> We never bat an eye when a person say they don't like flying....When it comes to homosexuality, suddenly you're not allowed to even think of the naughty conclusion.
You're allowed to be disgusted by homosexuality, at least according to me. You're not allowed to shame other people for it or try to stop them. The same holds for flying - if you don't want to fly, that's up to you, but it would be widely considered crazy if you held a protest campaign against flying on the grounds that it's dangerous. (It would be considered pretty normal if it was on grounds of environmental harm, but that's a whole separate conversation.)
> I mean, a sexual conservative like me will very much give you a "Your Terms Are Acceptable" meme here.
Yeah, that's a valid way to resolve this.
> It's not really "having a sex drive at all" that is dangerous ... it's more like "having a sex drive and satisfying it by being a slut". You can hump your pillow or satisfy yourself with your hands for weeks and months and you will never catch an STD.
Yes, but that's just as true for homosexual drives as heterosexual ones.
> The fundamental trap for an atheist, a very cruel and deceptive one, is to realize that Religion and Tradition may have been wrong about lots and lots of things, all too many to count. But they are extremly good at one thing : Devising rules to hold society together.
Yes, I agree, there's a good reason the major religions were so successful for so long. I'm not sure why you brought this up, though, as I said nothing about my own religious beliefs.
> when it comes to sex and sexual dynamics they are 80-90% on the money
Maybe if you're optimizing for something very different than I am in society. Like, I don't disagree that you can run a cohesive society on conservative sexual norms, I just don't think it's the only or best way to do so. Also, these religions are optimized for a different time, in particular a time without contraception and antibiotics.
> most people aren't fit for freedom, sexual or otherwise
I empathize with this feeling - there was a point when I would have said the same, and it's still a thing I feel occasionally. People sure are imperfect and untrustworthy and irrational and self-destructive a lot of the time. I think most of the problem with this line of thought is that the alternative is putting a small number of people in charge, who are then also people with all the same flaws you're worried about in the general populace.
And when the quirks and flaws of the leadership go unchecked, we can quickly end up in some very bad places. At least when you give people freedom, everyone is pulling in different directions and a lot of the most horrible things average each other out.
(And if you're thinking "well yeah, *most* people aren't fit for freedom or leadership, but *I* am - I empathize with that too, but it's ultimately hubris, and exactly the sort of human flaw that makes dictatorship dangerous)
>you seem to be responding to some straw version of me, or optimizing for conflict
How so ?
>You're allowed to be disgusted by homosexuality, at least according to me.
The "At least according to me" part is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Certainly, when/if I get banned from a social media platform because I said "homosexuality is disgusting", telling them "Oohhh but oxytocin-love says it's okay to be disgusted by homosexuality!" won't yield any results to speak of. What good is that ? I'm sure that many Russians under Stalin were completely okay with dissing him till the cows come home, just not those with the guns or the power.
>You're not allowed to shame other people for it or try to stop them.
Eh, this is equivalent to "You're allowed to have different opinions, just be sure to shut the hell up about them", a familiar hallmark of plenty of authoritarian systems.
What *is* 'shaming other people' ? I'm not going to point and laugh at them, that's for sure. But can I point out the high rates of STD ? The rampant promiscuity ? The constant corporate pandering ? The creepy obsession with children ? The explicitly propagandistic "People will love us more if we make a lot of noise and control their favorite media" attitude ?
Is any of this shaming ? Does it matter ?
Almost every normative ideology involves "shaming" to some extent or the other. An effective altruist can be said to "shame" people who don't think carefully about spending their time and money on those in need, even the very name implies they are "ineffective" aka useless. A vegan can be said to shame meat-eaters by saying that killing animals is a crime (and I agree), calling people killers is not exactly a flattering thing. A muslim can be said to shame non-muslims just by reading the Quran. The part of the Quran that every good muslim is supposed to read 5 times a day, a part literally named "The Intro" in Arabic, contains this gem : "Those who You [God] are not angered by, nor those who had gone astray". How is that for shaming ? And believe me, "angered by" and "gone astray" are lot more harsh in Arabic than they seem in English.
If we're (generally) ok with all of this, why not with being anti-lgbt ?
>Yes, but that's just as true for homosexual drives as heterosexual ones.
Certainly, and I said as much. But in the current place and time we're in, it's a fact that homosexuals happen to be more promiscuous and less monogamous.
>I'm not sure why you brought this up
This was just a self reminder, since I'm an atheist who gradually and reluctantly came to realize that lots of religions are optimal with respect to lots of thing. I'm saying it because it's a subtle trap that's very easy to fall into.
>Maybe if you're optimizing for something very different than I am in society.
Yeah, and the million dollar question is, of course : how should we share a society then ? I don't want to be reminded of the sexual practices of people every day of my waking life for a month of every year, but saying this is apparently contraversial and will get those people doing it very mad ? I don't want kids watching cartoons to be reminded of that either, but alas, that's bigotry nowadays.
If we were living in a pre-nation-state world or in space, I can just pack up and find me another place to live. But that's not feasible in the world we happen to live in.
>the alternative is putting a small number of people in charge,
Well, clearly, some things don't need to have someone "in charge". Like I don't need an HR department and public corporate speakers to remind me of which pronouns I'm supposed to use in my everyday life, I don't need the management of social media plaforms to constantly throw rainbows at me a month of every year. People have been very okay for the vast majority of history with none of those made up bullshit authorities. And yet, as soon as we gave some group the freedoms they want, they made up those authorities and maneuvered for them to have a lot of power, and now lots of people must shut up and bear things they don't want to.
So the paradox of freedom is that more of it is less. When people weren't allowed to be a certain way, people didn't need to be worried about getting fired for using "he" instead of "she". When people were allowed the first, people now have to worry about the second. Asking for and\or giving Freedoms is a zero- or even negative-sum game, the more you play the more you lose.
<i>It's a reason to *check* if something's wrong, but not to assume it, especially given how far we are from the ancestral environment.</i>
In the absence of countervailing evidence, it's generally safer to assume your instinctive reaction is correct. Chesterton's Fence and all that.
<i>And lest you get too hung up on the homosexuality/STD link, by the same logic, checking into the rates of STD transmission among straight people vs asexuals might convince you there is something wrong with having a sex drive at all.</i>
Heterosexual sex is important for carrying on the human species, what comparable benefits does homosexual sex bring?
Sure, there's a reasonable argument (though not one I subscribe to) that heterosexual sex is better/more important/more moral than homosexual sex because it is important for carrying on the species.
My point is just that that's unrelated to whether it causes a disgust reaction or carries disease risk.
<i>Sure, there's a reasonable argument (though not one I subscribe to) that heterosexual sex is better/more important/more moral than homosexual sex because it is important for carrying on the species.</i>
It seems rather nihilistic to dismiss the importance of something which is necessary for the continued survival of humanity, unless I've misunderstood you.
<i>My point is just that that's unrelated to whether it causes a disgust reaction or carries disease risk.</i>
My point is that, in the case of heterosexual sex, there are good reasons for engaging in it even without the disease risk (which, if you live chastely, is practically zero anyway). Homosexual sex is not only more risky, it doesn't even have the defence of being necessary.
Can you support your second point? It doesn't seem in accord with Lawrence v. Texas, Obergefell v. Hodges, or, most relevantly, Bostock v. Clayton.
I understand why people invoke "born this way", but I've always thought it was weak sauce. I was born an American, I'll suck cock if I damn well feel like it.
This sounds like Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s collective vs individual rights argument. Don’t think that was ever resolved in Canada though, much less in the rest of the world. http://schools.yrdsb.ca/markville.ss/politics/lauren_slt.html
What special protections do you think the LGBT community has over and above any other citizen? Protections for sexual orientation includes heterosexuality. You just don't hear about cases of heterosexual discrimination because heterosexuals are almost never attacked for that specifically. The problem is clearly that you think of LGBT protections as "elevated" laws, when in reality they are laws designed to bring LGBT people back to the same level as the average person.
And It's fairly obvious that people like Solana are wrong: it's much easier to attack and take rights away from a group that is smaller than one that is larger.
On the level of laws, I agree. On the level of laws, whites are also just as protected as blacks, males just as much as females. We all know that's not the case in reality. How many male-only awards, support groups, or fellowships, have you seen? How many people in liberal circles use "black female" as a derogatory term, as opposed to "white male"? In reality, women, LGBT people, and racial minorities (except Asians) *are* being put on a pedestal and treated as ubermenschen.
What percentage would we assign long covid as psychosomatic? Is media coverage propagating both bisexuality and long covid to the same people? In that case, does segmenting based on media sources affect incidence?
Speaking on the basis of one case, my sister claimed to be over long Covid long before she was. She still isn't over it (frequent memory lapses...improving gradually). So how much denial of long Covid is psychosomatic?
Perhaps 7 partners before marriage seems low to you because you don't know enough people who marry the first person they date. If anything, 7 seems too high to me.
probably a difference in mean vs median. Another factor is that most people you date probably date more people than you (mathematically).
If you (Scott) have been part of a polyamorous scene where some people have 7 partners at a time, the folks marrying high school sweethearts are part of your dark matter universe.
The range seems very, very wide. There are already many articles, posts, books, etc. out there about what happens to the dating pool when the people who want to and can get married quickly do so, leaving others with high search costs and long search times in the remaining dating pool.
Huh, as a woman who is in two 10+ years relationships with *both* my highschool sweethearts (male and female), I knew I was statistically unlikely, but now it seems on whole another *level* of unlikely.
(If anyone wonders about the variables, we're all cis, in a closed relationship, have demonstrated bisexuality for all definitions, and are tending towards being more interested in women / disliking strong masculinity in partners. And we're not in the Bay Area.)
It *is* a bit unlikely, but on the other hand "a guy with two girlfriends" is the most common quote-unquote polyamorous configuration *and* IIRC by far the most stable. Most people in your situation just don't identify with the ideology or use the terminology of polyamorism.
That's not exactly our situation, we are more like a V with me (female) in the center. My partners are growing closer over time, and we're all a family, but we started out as more of "a guy with his girlfriend, and the girlfriend with her girlfriend."
But I don't want to be nitpicky - you are completely correct that we don't identify much with poly "ideology" and we are not really in a poly scene or community. We have one or two poly friends, but we are relationship-wise more similar to our mono friends. And I do hope that you are correct with the assessment of "the most stable" configuration, that's our intention, anyways!
The thought that there are a lot more people in a similar "configuration" is actually really nice, I hope they're all very happy. :)
That's great! Here's hoping for continued stability.
And yeah, I think (agree?) that who's in the "middle" isn't much of a germane distinction here, especially since to the casual observer you guys probably still look like "a guy and his two girlfriends".
It's the most mediagenic, I guess, as it plays into a common male fantasy, but from what little I can from scraping Reddit for 'what are your demographics?' threads the most common configuration is in fact MFM, i.e. girl with two boyfriends. (Elisabeth Sheff says the same, though I don't entirely trust her.)
There's a simple combinatoric explanation. If you assume equal numbers of men and women, then the possible configurations are MMM, MMF, MFM, MFF, FMF, and FFF. But if male bisexuality is a no-no (as many people here seem to say), the extra men who would be in an MMF configuration will instead be in an MFM, raising the numbers of that configuration. Surveys seem to show more polyamorous men than women, which would further increase this effect.
I have other, less PC explanations, but I'll let those go for the moment. ;)
The most mediagenic? My intuition is that it's the *least*; contemporary media would want to portray the guy as some kind of predator almost compulsively, whereas a woman with two boyfriends would be depicted as an uncomplicated case of personal liberation, complete with jokes about how "just one man isn't enough" etc. that would be absolutely unacceptable to make in reverse.
As for the Reddit statistics I'm afraid I trust those about as far as I can throw Reddit. I think the nicest way to phrase it is to just state that Reddit draws its userbase from a nonrepresentative sample of the population, although like you I can come up with significantly more precise phrasings which are uncouth.
I was thinking more blue-collar tabloids like the Daily Mail, etc., which are ironically more conservative now (which means less misandric...funny how the world works these days). As far as a middle or upper class MSM outlet like the NYT or CNN, you are absolutely correct.
Yeah. I don't really have a sense of the larger poly world TBH. I suspect because of what you describe, vees (situations with two partners in a relationship with a third person but not each other) with a male 'hinge' will not identify as poly and be in groups, whereas vees with a female 'hinge' will, and the second will be the type to wind up in think pieces on polyamory. But since polyamory is poorly looked on and actual polygamy is illegal, I suspect a lot of poly situations lay low and keep their mouths shut.
What seems to be very common in my limited experience are extended 'Z's with numerous people each dating two, usually alternating M-F-M-F-M...
I don't think they are alien in the way creationists or the Amish are, there are lots of slow life path blue tribe, college graduates who get married at 28 to someone they have dated for 10 years
Yeah, if we are just speaking anecdotally, I would have guessed way less than 7 partners. I grew up in a stereotypically liberal setting with liberal non religious friends and family,, and I don't think I could name a person I know in real life with more than 7 partners period, but I could name a bunch with 1.
I personally married(last year!) my first ever partner, as did my sister, parents, parents in law, and both sets of my grandparents. Some aunts and uncles had 2 or 3 partners before, as did my wife and brothers in law. And with wedding season upon us, every one of the 8 wedding I've gone to/will go to this year or last, the couple are either each others first or second. And once again, these are not Amish people or Evangelicals, rather to use an example of a couple who I knew each individually since elementary school, set them up in college and know for a certainty are each others first, they are atheist vegan socialist artists in LA.
Did anyone you knew use dating apps? Did they all just prove perfectly compatible with the first or second person they met on the app for a first date, and end up marrying them? I'm really curious how this worked.
Not OP, but my family is similar. No one used dating apps (in fact, they are frowned upon). I still don't quite understand how it happened and how the divorce rate is so low (1 in 8 for couples close to me, and I can't think of any divorces in the extended family, although I may be forgetting). I can only hypothesize they have a lower threshold for what makes an acceptable partner for marriage / a higher threshold for divorce. There is definitely local cultural pressure for marrying one of your first partners. Seems kind of magical from where I'm standing, but they seem happy in general.
Have you been living in stable social groups where it was possible to know a fair amount about a person before you started dating them?
Is it possible that there's a (genetic?) trait which makes it easy for people to find a good partner?
My first guess would be some sort of matchmaking or vetting process by older members of the extended family, possibly subtle and indirect. Usually people are better at making decisions for themselves, because they know what they want, but a teenager who's never had a serious relationship before might miss clues of a good or bad longer-term match, while the clan elders' collective algorithm has been trained on a much larger dataset, and includes data about early-childhood behavior from before the teenager in question was biologically capable of properly forming memories.
That still leaves some risk of principle-agent problems, though, if the elders' interests and those of the potential new household become misaligned.
Scott do you count going on one date with someone as having "dated" them? Because I don't, personally.
I think this is the critical question: what is the definition of "dated"? Do high school girlfriends count? Is some level of sexual interaction required, or does "went out for coffee a few times" count? I have been in relationships where we debated whether or not we were dating, so I am leery of accepting any number without it being very clear what it means, and seeing that it was VERY clear in the survey so everyone responding is likely to agree on a meaning.
I never understood this either.
Still can't come up with a good definition. Requiring sexual interaction seems too much: imagine two people in love, who are either too young or too religious, spend three years each afternoon together, kissing, holding hands, and planning their future, then they break up... I guess this counts as "dating". On the opposite extreme, two totally drunk people fuck in a bathroom of a bar, five minutes later they do not remember what happened... probably not "dating". Exclusivity? Then polyamorous people are by definition never "dating". Are one-night stands "dating"? I think, people would probably answer differently depending on what exactly happened. Prostitution is not dating, even if the client happens to be in love. Spending an evening with someone you have a crush on, when you perfectly know that nothing more will ever happen, because one or both of you are married, and you are not the kind of person who cheats?
Well, dating was always considered differently from "going steady". But there are still a huge number of edge cases.
I think it's usually some kind of measure of *relatively* exclusive intimacy, which obviously is often physical but doesn't have to be. I say relatively because (a) polyamory exists and (b) i think it's fairly normal for a non poly person to be early dating two people at once
I think "assessing whether they want to continue being in a relationship with each other" reasonably encompasses what people consider dating. Though, of course, "relationship" is also a subjective term.
Yes, "dated" seems synonymous with hooking up amongst the media, younger elites, etc.
Traditionally, it meant more like a long(ish) term relationship....
Well, if you're going that route, just what are the boundaries of "a date" anyway? Exactly where you draw the lines makes a big difference.
E,g., does walking a girl home from school count? What if you stop for a shake on the way? Etc,
> Did they all just prove perfectly compatible with the first or second person they met
This speaks to a view of finding partners as a complex optimization problem, where you're trying to find the perfect fit for you over various factors.
In reality, it's more of a binary "is this person sane enough for me, and weird in the right ways, not the wrong ways? are our ideas about lives basically alignable?" question. Once the answer is "yes", the rest of it is about _making_ the relationship excellent, which is necessary whether or not the person seemed to click perfectly with you initially.
It also helps that most places are not the melting pots that California or NYC are. That immediately increases the chances of the answer to the above questions being "yes" significantly a priori, and then the fact that you asked them out (or vice versa) also increases that chance.
It probably also depends on the age of marriage. Younger people are more flexible. Older people have decades of habits, it is more difficult for them to adapt to someone having decades of different habits.
But also way different standards of what acceptable means, and I'm not talking about "settling "...
And all people who do not have obvious red flags are already taken.
FWIW, my wife and I were never compatible...in all respects. There were places where we agreed, and places where we were extremely divergent. And that was an important part of what made our marriage work. She was extremely effective with people, and I am pretty good with computers. But we could support each other in our weak areas.
It's a lot more than just a binary choice. I suspect there may be a lot of pheromones involved. But you also need to be complementary. (And not have too many places where you really disagree AND feel you should agree.)
I think most fellow Millenials/GenZers I know used a dating app at some point, but were just wildly and extremely unsuccessful. I tried for a while, got a grand total of maybe 15 matches, which translated into exactly zero dates. If you'd generously include a Tinder one-night stand in the category of dating, then we might get closer to that 7 average, I had college roommates who were successful enough on the apps to have that happen a couple times.
Because all of my married or engaged friends knew each other in the real world first, I think there is a higher baseline rapport and ability to judge compatibility. The way I met my wife is actually on topic with the rest of this post: we met in a mutual friends backyard, were friends for a year, saw each other at least twice a week at events, and I developed a crush on her. Her previous partner was a woman, so I assumed she was a lesbian, until she surprised me by asking me out. Plus, it's not like people are exactly rushing into marriage. Me and my wife dated for three years first, living together for two, which was considered a shockingly brief period of dating, the least amount of time anyone in my circles spent before marriage.
A cursory search for data finds that among women who got married in the 2010s, something like two thirds have 5 or fewer sexual partners. If we pretend sexual partners and number of people dated correspond closely (depends whether one night stands versus chaste romances are more common and which count as dating), than to get an average of 7 partners, we'd need the 18% of women in the 10 or more partners group to have had an average of 25 partners, which seems reasonably Pareto distributed. (source: https://ifstudies.org/blog/counterintuitive-trends-in-the-link-between-premarital-sex-and-marital-stability)
No, they marry the first person they dated in high school. I know three friends that did this. I would bet that people that date and marry one person, have not been on apps.
Conversely, most people using apps probably don't consider their high school dates real dating.
I think this question may reflect a remarkably optimistic view of how actively the average person cultivates their own preferences/priorities/life plan, how well they vet their partners, and how willing they are to move on from a relationship that isn't well-suited to them without pressure/forcing conditions.
+1 to anecdotal agreement that <7 partners before marriage is unsurprising when compared to many of the married folks I know (or even those engaged in unmarried, long-term relationships).
I met my husband on a dating app when I was 29, and married him at 35. He's the only person I ever *seriously* dated. He'd had a couple of official girlfriends in college, but I was his first serious post-college relationship. Anyway, I think there's probably a lot of variation in how people define dating and relationships.
Depending on the threshold for dating and if the number is supposed to include your partner I had between 4 and 1 prior relationships.
I'm in the same camp. I'm hardly in a traditionalist religious community (secular, atheist, western), and I don't know many people who dated more than 3 people before marriage. But Scott is in a strange Californian bubble filled with polyamory, vice and licentiousness...
But 7 as a mean does make sense, though. If any Tinder meetup counts as a date, then something like 10% of people would probably be on 20+ a year. For a sample of 12 friends in my age range, a random sample of 'partners before marriage' would look like: 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 5, 6, 15, 50.
The word "date" is used both to mean 'be in a relationship with' and 'go on a date with', so I think the question is just not well defined.
This is also very much tied to geography.
So as someone who is more attracted to women than men, but still attracted to men, I was told to just identify as bi, and this is probably a clearer communication. That said, I honestly wouldn't date a man again; once was enough for me to appreciate why women are concerened about men being predatory. I think that women have to deal with predatory men regardless of their stated attraction, but a man is much likely to if they just go about their life as straight-passing and avoid explicitly stating their preferences. Not that all men are predator obviously, but I think that enough of them are, and men aren't conditioned for the tools to deal with it, that that might be another driver for bi-male-dating trends.
I don’t *quite* share this perspective, but my experience is fairly close. I might say my experience is “men are differently predatory and far more sexually needy / likely to be predatory /sleazy/pushy/manipulative for sexual purposes, as opposed to, say, financial gain…while also far more generous with their affection”.
For this reason, I have been known to recommend that even straight or mostly straight men —especially those without a good model of feminists misgivings about the male sex, or Untitled men who feel gross and helplessly undesirable after too many women’s studies classes in undergrad (I was once arguably both)— spend some time at gay bars to develop a better model of how the other half lives (positively and negatively). There are major pros and cons to being a piece of meat and/or appreciated for just being a person with a body, depending on how one wishes to look at it. It’s a very educational experience, especially if the experiment is conducted before one is 25 or so (“gay death”). But bring a friend.
I've had a guy (maybe two) try to wheedle their way into my pants. It really drove home what I'd already seen women having to deal with.
No, I wasn't teasing you. No, I'm not leading you on. No, I don't feel sorry for your aching loins. No, I won't screw you to shut up your guilt trip. Sorry, buddy!
And that was without a credible threat of physical domination; I was (evidently) in pretty good shape at the time.
Good on 'ya for noticing and appreciating what women in your life were dealing with before you were on the receiving end.
I was embarrassingly oblivious. Of course I knew in the abstract that (e.g.) rape was a crime that exists in the world, but I had zero ability to model the dynamics --or grasp their banality-- until I was subject to them. Oof!
A female friend who trained in an organization I dare not mention here made me aware of a subtler point I hadn't previously considered, having never been a woman, and being relatively green with respect to...uh...appreciating the subtler attentional dynamics of humans: saying no in these situations is even harder for cis women (statistically) because they often suffer from the opposite of the male disembodied nerd problem --she tells me she experiences too much embodiment for some situations, a struggle to decouple. Since affective empathy is mapped onto body sensations, my model is that this makes saying no when faced with those pressures that much harder.
Given the demographics of high-vs-low decouplers, I feel a bit daft for not putting this together until it was spelled out for me by a patient and perceptive woman, but it makes sense: affective empathy is experienced as body sensations. When a person can't decouple their thinking from visceral sensations in the body coming from another person's needs (i.e., the thing nerdy men are anomalously good at and struggle to prevent ourselves from doing), it makes sense that they are going to have a harder time with social 'soft' coercion than the aspy dudes we know and love (/are).
It's a great point. Ironically we may be partially immune to subtler forms of coercion because we just miss the signals. (There was even a rule for it in an edition of GURPS as I recall...)
From GURPS 4e:
> Clueless -10 points
> You totally miss the point of any wit aimed at you, and are oblivious to attempts to seduce you (+4 to resist Sex Appeal). The meanings of colloquial expressions escape you. Sophisticated manners are also beyond you, giving -4 to Savoir-Faire skill. You have many minor habits that annoy others (e.g., leaving the turn signal on while driving from Chicago to Albuquerque), and may take one or two of these as quirks. Most people will react to you at -2.
> Unlike No Sense of Humor (p. 146), you may make jokes – albeit lame ones – and you can appreciate slapstick and written humor. However, you rarely “get” verbal humor, especially if you are the target (roll vs. IQ-4 roll to realize you’re the butt of the joke). And unlike Gullibility (p. 137), you normally realize when someone is trying to take advantage of you, except in social situations. You are no more susceptible to Fast-Talk than normal, save when someone is trying to convince you that an attractive member of the appropriate sex is interested in you . . .
> This disadvantage is most appropriate for ivory-tower geniuses, aliens from Mars, etc.
I also feel obligated to link this incisive analysis of the underlying genre assumptions about psychological advantages and disadvantages: https://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/172042354227/what-use-case-would-you-recommend-gurps-for-btw
It's a good point, and GURPS is clearly of its time, as are most things.
I don't think I ever seriously saw GURPS as a model of reality. From what I know of the indie RPG world its role has been taken over by FATE or Savage Worlds anyway. I just remember reading through the book and laughing at the disadvantage.
I don't really understand what you are trying to say here. Do you mean that women feel empathy for the men that are sexually harrassing them, which makes it harder for them to say "no"?
Thanks. I'd never thought about higher empathy making women more vulnerable.
I remember a moment long ago when it hit me that hiss and claw were part of being female-- it wasn't just about being nice. Now I'm trying to figure out what I believed before that revelation hit me.
Context: I was born in 1953, long before the idea that dangerous women were cool.
I was born long after 1953, but from my reading of old writings it seems to me that dangerous women have always been cool / highly attractive to at least a fairly large contingent of authors - I think of the grand tales of Cleopatra, of Amazon Warriors, etc - stories I always read with more than a bit of "wow she's so cool and amazing and attractive". In more modern times I think of Bonnie of Bonnie and Clyde, or Harley Quinn.
How would you describe the popularity-trend of "dangerous women are cool" over your lifetime (and history if you care to speculate)? I'd have guessed approximately flat, but always interesting to hear from those with longer memories.
I actually tried being bi on OKCupid and had some of the same dynamics, though I'm well after the point of 'gay death' so it's not the same. Haven't tried the gay bar thing except very briefly and I was there for a general event so nobody hit on me. (Or maybe I'm just that ugly.)
I've come to the conclusion women and male nerds are just natural enemies on a social level, and while you can befriend any individual one (and even have semi-stable relationships, though I have to admit I've never actually been in love--could be aromantic though) fundamentally things that help them *as a class* hurt us *as a class*, and vice versa. Their liberation is our oppression, and vice versa.
Of course from utilitarian and evopsych-based virtue ethics you should then throw male nerds (who are after all much less numerous than women) under the bus (unless you're Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, and they can take care of themselves). Nobody cares about the rights of less-successful men--we're evolutionary dead ends.
No. This frame of reference is an evolutionary dead end. Being a male nerd is not.
You are an intelligent homo sapien male: an apex fucking predator.
As an apex predator, what need have you for rights? Let the ladies have them.
As a free thinking individual, what need have you for class? Why would you allow yourself to be oppressed? Leave the categorical reasoning to the pinko identitarian NPCs, while you charm and delight their girlfriends out of their ressentiment addled arms.
Being a male nerd brings some obstacles to overcome: disembodiment, non-verbal communication difficulties, social trauma, social anxiety, inflammation issues, akrasia, and self-loathing are common. These are real and worthy challenges for our hero, but consider what your competition is up against: there is no known cure for being a midwit!
And you don't have to figure it out de novo: you are amidst a tribe of men who have faced the same, and will gladly show you a way. There are better men than me that you could read or talk to (yashkaf comes to mind), but I'm available at +17034724104 (signal) or @georgejrjrjr (twitter) if you don't have a better resource at hand.
Thanks for the vote of confidence. I've screen-shotted the number and twitter handle; you may want to remove them if you don't want random lefties prank-calling you.
Any time, brother.
As for my number: it's public, as all phone numbers were in recent memory. Worst case scenario, I get swatted...in which case I enjoy the adrenaline, share a laugh with some cops, and make some lethal drinking buddies. Or someone hacks my bank account --the joke would be on them. As for calls from lefties: they're often quite cute!
It would be unbecoming for an apex predator such as we are to mind such trivialities.
I wonder whether there's a way to build up one's social and existential confidence without this ugly Nietzschean grandiosity...
Yes! There is a *much* better, gentler, more compassionate, pro-social, and ultimately more powerful option than Nietzsche, whose views I do not hold or endorse. But:
* Nietzsche seemed sufficient as a corrective to that helpless frame,
* The humble love-maxxing option is even more taboo around these parts,
* He takes more time to explain to a secular audience than I had for in that interaction.
* Even His adherents misinterpret His teachings as "be a doormat," which is not what Anonymous Dude needed there. (So did Nietzsche, incidentally).
The characterization of men as apex predators is just a matter of biological fact, so it has the benefit of being obviously verifiably true. I could have left it apolitical and that part could have been better, but I needed some levity.
Additionally, I notice nerdy men VERY OFTEN elide the parts of themselves you appear to be calling ugly, which I believe to be the source of Aella's Werewolf effect: when we suppress and deny the existence of the priors installed by the Goddess of Cancer, they don't go away. And when they do show up, they take over in ways which are in fact ugly (polite rat man -> werewolf), whereas a well-integrated and honestly acknowledged prior for "Kill, Consume, Multiply, Conquer" binds us ever more intimately to the service of the Goddess of Everything Else.
As for ugly, women don't seem to think so. What is unattractive and also dangerous in practice is being false about who and what we are as homo sapiens.
In retrospect, I could have dropped Nietzsche completely, also omitted Wrfhf, and just stuck to GoEE, which is already well-loved and accepted around here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/17/the-goddess-of-everything-else-2/
That was a helpful update, Jeremy, thank-you. I appreciate the query, that's what I'll do next time I feel led to propose a similar shift in frame. Not sure how to drop the apex predator bit, though, and I'm not sure it would be skillful to do so (but I'm open to feedback and updating, of course).
>whereas a well-integrated and honestly acknowledged prior for "Kill, Consume, Multiply, Conquer" binds us ever more intimately to the service of the Goddess of Everything Else.
If I may ask, how so?
At first glance, this seems like an "at least I acknowledge that I'm bad" flavor of sentiment, which I don't see much value in, at least without further elaboration.
>As a free thinking individual, what need have you for class? Why would you allow yourself to be oppressed?
You don't 'allow' yourself to get oppressed, you ARE oppressed. I couldn't exactly will myself out of homelessness, resources did that. I couldn't will myself out of hunger, resources did that.
No, I am not oppressed. Nor would I choose that frame for myself or anyone else* if I could help it.
That does not mean I am not subject to circumstances that others would reasonably term oppression. Far from it. But I play for the people and the communities I love to win, deeply, at positive sum infinite games, and that means ruthlessly routing every trace of self-pity from my heart.
I have limited control over my circumstances, adversities, adversaries, convictions, conscience, and resource constraints, but I can always choose a frame of reference that highlights the affordances available to me within those circumstances, whatever they are. "I'm oppressed" doesn't do that, in my experience (I've tried! And I've been involved in and proximal to strains of activism that tried the same, with consistently disastrous results). It's also not a fun frame of reference to bring to friends and parties --it kills the vibe, which further isolates a person and saps their mindshare.
The counter-argument to this that I see goes something like this: but "oppression" is in an important sense descriptively correct. I could quibble, but I won't, let's take it as given that this is correct, "Oppression" is "Objectively correct", and so a maximally veridical percept classifying the situation in the brain, leading to a maximally veridical term for the situation, "Oppression".
The argument still doesn't hold, as Michael Levin's work shows: non-veridical percepts that maximize the availability of affordances available to a living organism are essential to the survival of intelligent systems. To be effective organisms, we simply must to hold the percepts that maximize our opportunities for skillful action.
https://twitter.com/drmichaellevin/status/1157659546116116480
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26384988/
This is especially critical in adverse circumstances.
*One EXTREMELY IMPORTANT caveat: when someone is accused of oppressing or victimizing someone in any way, especially when they are in charge, they need to be held meaningfully accountable to that accusation, i.e., it should be investigated, taken seriously, and corrected by whatever means are available and appropriate. Not minding that EXTREMELY IMPORTANT caveat is how NIXIVM went to shit (along with a bunch of other high demand groups that said mostly true and important things while giving their leader a pass, often by treating the leaders conduct as ethical by definition): NIXIVM guru Keith Raniere would do terrible things to people and then accuse them of sacrificing their agency by framing themselves as victims when they complained. Obviously that is incredibly awful abusive gaslighting bullshit that must not be tolerated in any community worthy of the name.
If Karl Friston is right, a person literally cannot move their own arm without adopting an action-oriented non-veridical frame. Per Friston, I have to set a counterfactual prior that my arm is above its present location for my arm to lift.
The postrat crowd talks a lot about hyperstition. Similar deal: one chooses to believe a plausible but presently counterfactual thing to make it real.
The metamodernist folks and the metarational / Chapmanite folks had a similar observation about post-modernism: sure, PoMo deconstructionism is descriptively correct in many important ways, but it's utterly useless for getting things done. Ergo, they set out to integrate those insight into an epistemically defensible that also provided affordances for skillful action (building).
Or, to take a negative example, I'll cite a personal failure of mine to select a maximally skillful frame up the thread: in an endeavor to provide a helpfully corrective frame for Anonymous Dude elsewhere in these comments, I unskillfully chose a hyper-Nietzschian frame of reference that Jeremy skillfully and correctly called me out on, when there were more agreeable and understandable tacts available to me. When I look at this in the context of my historical patterns of unskillful behavior, with a mind towards routing out self-pity in particular, here's what I hold as unflatteringly true:
I have a regrettable tendency to frame what I believe to be compassionate points in needlessly ugly-sounding ways. I one had a twitter thread that attempted to explain universal love as non-dual narcissism: I thought it was extremely funny in a perverse way at the time, but I was writing for an audience of like three people at best. Why might I do this dumb thing, repeatedly? What's the emotional payoff that would explain me persisting in my folly? My suspicion is that I'm courting misunderstanding via revulsion, which can feed an insidious pity party story that I'm just like too honest for people who haven't done their shadow work, or too clever for the rif-raff. Those disgusting beliefs that I infer I may have lurking in my subconscious, to the extent I hold them, are total horse shit: when I'm not feeling understood, it's usually because I am courting misunderstanding, writing badly, or just wrong --all common occurrences in my life.
I've read yashkaf. Good stuff--wish I'd read it 20 or 30 years ago. (Though I'm not quite as enamored of polyamory as him.)
Hey, at least I saved some dough.
It was still very kind of you to put yourself out there like that. The old masculine virtues are not entirely dead, though I fear they are their own reward only.
Thanks.
> though I fear they are their own reward only.
This seems like an empirical question to me. Let's assume my experience is irrevocably confounded by my androgyny: I have yet to meet a warfighter who couldn't get a date.
The hardest part of testing it seems to me that setting out to be 'more masculine' often ends up in a theorizing-and-larping trap instead of virtuous honesty about what we are and what we desire, coupled with a means of cultivating virtuous sincere desires --by which I mean those that would be mutually gratifying when fulfilled.
Modeling other people's preferences with 'System 1' is a relevant capability here that is rarely and ill-taught. Doing so implies internalizing others preferences. When other people's preferences are factored into one's own desires, indulging one's desires becomes self-evidently pro-social and extremely gratifying.
Being 'more masculine' usually revolves around lifting weights and doing outdoor and mechanical stuff, not theorizing. Otherwise, you're correct.
And I've read yashkaf's blog and twitter, so I know what you're talking about. Heck, I only studied PUA so I could get enough 'attractiveness points' for a long-term relationship. The stuff about social proof (yes, you DO have to conform, the ex-hippies you grew up with lied to you) and not appearing too needy was useful, evo psych was useful as it removed a lot of the resentment (it's not just some stupid social thing, they're into muscles and popularity/status/money because they have evolutionary programming JUST LIKE YOU DO for a nice body), the stuff about negging I simply ignored as I figured I wasn't smart enough to calibrate it well enough to avoid real offense. It...kinda worked. I just never found anyone I really liked all that much to take the risk of getting wiped out in a divorce.
So, maybe aromantic. ;) Who knows?
I will agree on the warfighters: I've never seen a combat veteran that couldn't get a girlfriend, although I only looked at the ones that were more or less in one piece, physically. If you're a young man who's looking at going to war to be more attractive...even if you survive you will pay an incredible price, and your survival is by no means guaranteed. The guys I knew that chose peacetime military service were usually better off for it, though.
"Become more attractive by going to war" is a pretty dangerous meme to have floating around in an industrialized country, though.
I know happy marriages between women and male nerds. Perhaps it helps for the male nerd to marry a female nerd.
I mean...yeah, but there aren't enough of those to go around. (Thus polyamory.)
Women like nerds; they don't like men who are undersocialized, insecure, or monomaniacal.
Oh my, I still have fond memories of going to a gay bar with a gay friend. I was treated like a princess and as you say it was eye-opening. I also had fun times going to a lesbian bar with a lesbian friend. Sexual banter or joking with no hidden overtones, (none of these women were interested in me as anything more than a friend.) a bit like throwing back beers with the guys, but also totally different.
"There are major pros and cons to being a piece of meat and/or appreciated for just being a person with a body, depending on how one wishes to look at it."
Hmm... When I'm donating blood, I'm happy to play the role of "just being a person with a body" (or, an accessible bloodstream, supplied from bone marrow) for the duration of the donation.
<mild snark>
Does the Red Cross count as predatory when they are seeking donors? They are literally out for blood... :-)
</mild snark>
Good snark.
> Does the Red Cross count as predatory when they are seeking donors? They are literally out for blood... :-)
Just to be super clear, I was being 100% sincere about getting a lot of value out of being able to walk into a context where I was a piece of meat. Definitely helped disarm some of my women’s studies related brain weasels to see that…actually being on the receiving end of male desire is usually awesome and affirming.
My actual hypothesis for the lesbian sheep phenomenon:
Dudes rock.
Many Thanks!
>And - this is something I’ve heard from all the bisexual women I’ve talked to - getting dates with men is easy, because men are horny and desperate and often ask women out; getting dates with women is hard, for the usual reasons that every heterosexual man already viscerally appreciates.
I have heard people on /r/actuallesbians complain about this constantly
Women just do not ask each other out, ever.
The search phrase to use here is "lesbian sheep" or "lesbian sheep syndrome". Possibly stemming from https://boingboing.net/2001/12/04/i-encountered-this-w.html, possibly older.
if 90%+ women are into women then they SHOULD ask each other out
Perhaps women find having a partner much more 'optional' than men do.
If we specify 'partner' to be 'sexual partner' I have no doubt this is so; (though I'm sure people will disagree); but even if it's 'romantic partner,' well, a long-term partner is less urgent, and one can wait.
I don't know about that. Who consumes all the romance novels? Most women's magazines are about relationships and beauty (which attracts a partner); most men's stuff is about gadgets, video games, cars, sports... there could be a substitution effect with porn, I guess, but as for the rest of it...
Women (and for that matter, men) are extremely good at not doing things they should do if they want their problems solved. Especially romantically.
Today's absurd pan-adaptationist evo psych theory is that female passivity in dating is caused by the fact that 90% of women are potentially bisexual, thus those that were active in asking people out ended up with other women 45% of the time and had less children thereby.
Nice one!
What is the evo-psych explanation for the 90% number though? Doesn't seem to be a particularly useful trait at the first glance.
Forget monogamy, imagine an alpha male surrounded by a group of women. Is there an evolutionary advantage in being attracted to the alpha male, and also being able to make stronger coalitions with other attractive women?
Could be something about social bonding to help with mutual aid in terms of childcare and defending against violence from males and so forth. (see bonobos, sparta, etc.)
(and of course the real answer is it's a spandrel, outside of panadaptationist story hour)
Spandrel? As in dragged along as humans self-domesticated themselves? If so, could you say more?
As I've heard the term used in evo psych, a spandrel is any feature that is the result of evolution but was not itself selected for.
For example, bones are white because of features about bones (ie their material composition) that were selected for, but whiteness of bones was not in and of itself selected for.
Saying here that whatever these arousal tests are measuring, it's probably a side effect of other things that were selected for (plus environmental effects), not something strongly selected for on its own.
(possible that this term is used differently in other circles)
The weird thing about this entire discussion is how much it focused on socio-psychological rather than biology. At base, this is the most important biological issues, with a gazillion years of evolution at play. Presumably. there may be some simple physiological explanation, akin to how some people can't smell the "effects" of asparagus, or dislike cilantro, or are lactose intolerant. That is, self-reporting that X might visually arouse is very different from the physical reality of whether X smells/tastes right to you when in close contact, etc. Whether it's pheromones or some other type of receptors, this could just be a simple physiological reaction that's shared across both A and B, making both "attracted" to B.
Yeah, it's stuff like that that makes me take evo psych less than seriously. They've got theories for everything, which are hard to test. It doesn't even make sense--at least some of the men you ask out would wind up marrying you.
That stood out to me, too. I have serious doubts about the correlation between genital arousal and actual "I am attracted to X" numbers for that reason. If nothing else, it bombs the notion that women shouldn't ask each other out more because apparently there is an extremely high chance other women are into that. 90% seems really high for that to me.
I assume part of it is that before birth control, if women wanted sex without risk of pregnancy then other women were probably the best option.
Should? You underestimate the strength of early conditioning.
I have a notion that gender roles are about crippling men and women in complimentary ways to force them into couples.
"getting dates with women is hard, for the usual reasons that every heterosexual man already viscerally appreciates" - someone should build an app for this.
They tried, I think. Not sure what happened.
It worked so well that people didn't end up using it for long. So they made a bunch of bad ones instead.
Hmm so you need to reverse the incentives. You only pay money to the app if you are in a happy relationship... and not using it.
So, regulate the matchmaking app as a public utility, funded by something sort of like a land-value tax on the sanctity of marriage? Interesting concept, but you'd have a hell of a time trying to build the political coalition necessary to actually implement anything that smells so much like eugenics.
Despite my cynicism about evo psych, I have to give Diana Fleischman credit for trying to do something about the stigma around eugenics. Always seemed to the problem with the Nazis was the mass murder, not the eugenics. The Commies did mass murder too, and they're still sending me silly videos on tiktok about the proletariat and liberals being fascists.
Well that is not what I was thinking. But I don't know how you would make it work. My 'vision' was that I promise to send (say) $100 a year to the match-making company. (lets say for a max of ten years.) As long as I'm still with this person they found for me, I keep paying them. There is an obvious incentive for me to lie and say we broke up, even if we are still together, to save the $100. I'm not sure how to deal with that.
> My friend explained that the acquaintance was *mostly* lesbian but a little bisexual and it hadn’t come up before. This distinction ended up being very important to me, and I don’t know who it serves to encourage people to hide it.
Well, if people constantly go around claiming that bisexual women are straight women trying to be trendy, and you want to signal that you actually want to date women, and are willing to reduce your chances with the generally-less-attractive-to-you gender, there's an obvious tradeoff to make here. It gets even more salient when you notice that on some parts of the internet, if you say you're a "bi lesbian" lots of people will yell at you, saying you're "gynephilic" makes it sound like you hang out with Blanchardians, and Kinsey numbers require people to actually remember the Kinsey scale to parse.
I'm lesbian but I think I've been romantically attracted to a man once or twice in my life. I only want to sleep with women, but I don't doubt that there could be a right man for me out there romantically. I do doubt I could get over my repulsion to heterosexual sex. I round this all off to lesbian unless I'm in a deeper conversation about desires, the sort of conversation where straight men admit to being "a little bit bi." I've seen women absolutely pilloried for this kind of rounding in online lesbian spaces. However, in terms of quickly communicating that I am only looking for women, lesbian works so much better as a label than bi.
I wish bi lesbian or just straight up using the Kinsey scale was more common though. Bi lesbians using just lesbian has created an impression that all lesbians are flexible.
I think the "who you actually want to sleep with" is getting discounted too much in these comments (not just willing to sleep with in extremis or otherwise, but really desire), and also "who you actually want to pair bond with" (again, not just on trial basis, but long term, whether that's one decade or many). And your comment captures the biological aspect, where some people/things are just repulsive, even if in theory you might think could work, or some people/things taste/smell/feel better, even if there are decent substitutes.
I definitely had a strong negative reaction to "this ended up being very important to me" because it screams "main character syndrome." Like, she was signalling what she wanted to signal, so what if it means you personally are less likely to get your dick wet, lol.
This seems needlessly uncharitable and rude. Not least because it seems like in this particular situation she _wasn't_ signalling what she wanted to, at least in the sense that the situation here is that _she_ was interested in _Scott_ and was at risk of missing a connection _she_ wanted by calling herself lesbian rather than bi. (If I'm understanding the subtext right, it sounds as if after the mutual friend's intervention they _did_ get together, so she didn't actually miss out -- but then neither did Scott.)
Also, the thing was literally half a sentence, in parentheses. Isn't there a useful distinction between "main character syndrome" and "sometimes mentions own experiences"?
Also also, what's with the insistence on gleefully rounding all male interest in anything related to romance or sex to "get your dick wet, lol"? IIRC Scott has described himself as something-like-asexual-but-not-aromantic, which makes this super-extra-inappropriate in the present case, but even in the general case this seems rude and dishonest.
[EDITED to add:] I should probably clarify that last paragraph. I'm generalizing when I say "rounding _all_ male interest in _anything_ ..." and of course all I've observed _you_ do is this one instance. But it seems to be a very common pattern -- in particular, a very common pattern when making criticisms of the general form "look at this man treating his wants/needs/desires as too important relative to those of women". And I think the world would be better with _less_ of that pattern rather than _more.
Yes, Internet Syndrome strikes again...
Okay, but if 90%+ of women are (latently, subconsciously) bisexual, then isn't the actual dating pool for them pretty much everyone? And as more women recognize/choose a bisexual identity, then the dating pools over time would skew more gender balanced, and therefore the percentage of bisexual women having non-straight relationships would grow over time instead of shrink?
Separately, I think it's possible that people use the term "bisexual" inconsistently. This post uses a definition based on arousal/attraction, but that's not necessarily the driver of partner selection. Suppose we accept 90% of women sometimes experience same-sex attraction, but suppose that of those, 90% exclusively want male partners for reasons unrelated to sexual attraction (child-bearing, non-sexual preferences, etc.). Is this a population with 90% bisexual women, or 9%?
I agree with all of this; it's what I was trying to communicate with the three circles.
If you agree that an increasing percentage of women identifying as bisexual should imply a growing percentage of bisexual women having same-sex relationships, what is your explanation for why we see the opposite trend in the data?
I think calling people who identify as bisexual today but wouldn't 20 years ago "fake" bisexuals is hyperbolic, but the data nonetheless seems consistent with a change in the social costs/benefits of queer identification rather than an increase in introspection or self-awareness.
I expect that long COVID self-diagnosis also correlates with political views. Is bisexual identification just a proxy for left-wing social politics & tribal pressures to emphasize the seriousness of COVID risk?
To address that last point, while I think long COVID is largely psychosomatic, the two people I know who complain of it are both right wing, one... extremely so to a unhealthy degree (and that's coming from a guy who would vote for the criminalization of sodomy to get the Pride flag propaganda out of my face.)
I don't think it's *just* a proxy, I think it's probably *correlated*.
The other thing is that ACX selects for a specific subtribe of blue tribe (people have even tried to give it its own color!), such that bi people answering are, say, less likely to believe heterosexuality is problematic, I think.
Increased social acceptance - 20 years ago a woman wouldn't have much reason to incur the social costs of identifying as 'bi' unless there was a woman they were actively trying to get with.
Bisexual is a broad identity. Thirty years ago you’d have to be pretty bi to identify that way, or at least inarguably into people of the same sex to incur the social cost, so most people who identified that way were higher on the Kinsey scale. As social costs go down, more bisexual people lower on the Kinsey scale will come out, while still, y’know, being lower on the kinsey scale and more interested in dating more people of the opposite sex than OG identified bis.
The study on attraction Scott used was testing arousal in response to porn, and it effectively found men are more susceptible to this form of arousal than women, which is what I took out of it, not that women have an inherent flexibility, but rather different mechanics for arousal.
Yeah I'm pretty skeptical about drawing major conclusions based on "blood flow to genitals". Penises and vaginas are totally different organs, and the fact that blood flow increases in response to some stimulus doesn't necessarily mean you want to have sex with it.
I probably get slightly more bloodflow to my genitals when I see the word "SEX" (or at least I would have when I was a teenager); that doesn't mean I want to have sex with the word "SEX", just that it reminds me of sex.
Agreed, though I think there's more to it than just physiology. I've been married for over a decade and my wife seems to have both a 'positive' arousal signal and a 'negative' arousal signal. If she's negatively aroused, the same things that might have made her feel positive about intimacy at another time will just piss her off.
As a man, maybe there's a similar mechanism going on inside my brain, but I'm certain she is more susceptible to 'emotional' signals in the way I'm more susceptible to 'physical' signals. So, "study found that men and women respond differently to arousal signals" is pretty close to the common complaint that, "they had to do a study to figure out common sense?"
100%. Just reading your comment got the old bloodflow going. Just kidding.
I wonder how fMRI looking at whatever part(s) of the thinking organ light up when sexually aroused corresponds to "blood flow to the genitals". What would be the "gold standard", short of actual bonking (which would introduce too many confounders - too tall, too short, don't bonk on the first study, etc; also likely cost prohibitive), for sexual attraction?
You could bonk two dead salmon together for your control group.
The studies actually used nature documentaries as a control group, so close!
Someone did try to do a study where couples would have sex in an MRI scanner - they mostly found that most people find it too unerotic, except one couple who were really into it
Sounds like somebody needs to find some representative women at both extremes of the Kinsey scale, construct a test suite which can reliably distinguish between them (porn which excites lesbians but bores very-straight women and vice versa, different sensor setups, etc.), apply it to larger sample sizes, and iterate refinements until signals emerge from the noise.
Reading the study Scott linked:
"The sex difference reported here has important implications for future conceptualizations of women’s sexuality. Sexual arousal, especially genital sexual arousal, likely plays a much smaller role in women’s sexual-orientation development than it does in men’s. Female sexuality, in general, may be more motivated by extrinsic factors, such as the desire to initiate or maintain a romantic relationship, than by intrinsic factors, such as genital sexual arousal."
It looks like the authors agree that you should not generalize this study about response to porn into a general assessment of sexuality. (Although in the discussion they state that if you're male and report a response to homosexual stimuli you might question your sexual preferences in a way that doesn't apply to women.)
What would it mean if we have to sample 10,000 women to see signal above noise in this experiment? If we see that signal, how would we interpret it? Certainly not by applying it to the whole population. "100 of 10,000 women display clear sexual arousal after exposure to [same/opposite sex] porn, therefore ..." We should conclude something meaningful about 1% of women, but not of the other 99%. If we're interested in general trends, it seems we have a decent experiment already - the one that Scott shared.
Perhaps we could use a different method if we want to understand female arousal. We could start by asking lesbian and straight women what arouses them, instead of defaulting to whatever arouses the male researchers. then repeat the original experiment using women's preferred methods of arousal and test whether we see the same weak gender preference in women.
Open-ended questions should be part of it, but some of the basic things to try seem obvious - idealized hypermasculine (such as the helicopter pilot from the movie Inside Out) or hyperfeminine types expressing personal competence, romantic availability, and/or emotional vulnerability, rather than the sex act itself. Then do a hill-climbing search with questions like "what single change would make that last thing sexier to you personally / to a typical [x]?" Plenty of artists willing to take commissions for that sort of variations-on-a-theme work, and contribute their own expertise across the broader subject besides.
It would be an interesting study. Although not interesting enough for me to do the minimal simple Google search to see if it has already been done, LOL.
I would note that the helicopter pilot was not the preferred mate for the mom in that feelings movie you mentioned, suggesting a much more complex underlying attraction function. I wonder if the attraction function for women is separate from the arousal function in a way distinct from how it manifests in men. Perhaps you need the former before you get a strong signal from the latter?
90% potentially bisexual as measured by a simple arousal response; probably not 90% biromantic.
If women are nearly equally attracted to both women and men, but men are mostly attracted to women, it will still be far easier for a woman to date a man than another woman. The women have lots of potential partners, but the men will be alone with only half the potential dating pool and will be more available.
If I’m honest here I have to say what I’ve taken away from all this discussion is a desire to have another look at Kissing Jessica Stein.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kissing_Jessica_Stein
Good movie, thanks for recommendation!
It’s a charmer. I had forgotten Jon Hamm is in it. Oh yeah, and the ‘self defecating’ line. That’s what sold it to me initially. Watching now.
FYI you mistyped a word as “defintional” twice.
“Maybe they tune it out because of social conditioning, or because some other arousal system besides the genital one measured here is guiding their emotions.”
I think the latter need to be given serious consideration. For example, I believe I’ve read (could be wrong) that some women experience guilt when raped because they “responded” with, say, vaginal lubrication.
Just want to clarify that this happens to men as well (both the physical response and the guilt).
But yes, genital arousal is not desire or consent, and this is a fundamental problem with all "objective" research on sexual orientation.
Back when I was a teenager and in a vehicle driving over a particularly bumpy road, I sometimes used to get genital arousal without thinking of anything sexual, solely due to the friction of my genitals against my underpants.
Doesn't the first graph support the idea that something pretty janky is going on?
If we've gone from 87% of bi-identifying women actually having female partners to just 45% since 2008, then something has definitely happened. I don't think any of your bullet-point reasons why a bisexual might date only men has changed significantly (apart from the stigma around same-sex relationships, which has decreased) so is it fair to say there's been a significant decoupling between "identifying as bisexual" and "acting bisexual"?
I think in 2008, bisexuality was stigmatized enough that you would only identify as it if you were forced to (ie you were very strongly attracted to same-sex and definitely going to have some same-sex partners), and now it's much more relaxed and people will identify based on only a mild attraction even if they're not expecting it to go anywhere.
In that case this really does seem like a pure boundary drawing question.
Based on this essay, my impression of your definition is that "any person with latent potential sexual interest in both their gender and the opposite gender at all is bisexual". Personally I would definite it as "actively engages in or has engaged in sex and/or relationships with people of both genders, or at least attempts or has attempted to".
From my definition, based on your rough numbers above, a strong complement of "bi identifying" people are in fact straight, and therefore identifying as bi for some reason other than actually being it. So I would be correct to be suspicious that some claims of being bi are not in fact genuine.
We can both be correct given that we're using different meanings for the same word and effectively talking past each other.
Though it's very much a free country and people can label themselves however they want.
I find the idea that people have to have some experience with either sex to call themselves bisexual a little odd -- we don't hold the labels "gay" and "straight" to the same standard
Fair point, though I did edit to include 'attempts or has attempted to', which is about as far as I'd consider it. I didn't mention the label 'asexual' but I would use it as a plug for anybody you think I'm actually leaving out for not having attempting or having attempted to have sex/relationships with either gender.
Yes, thank you for making this point. Especially for those of us who are a little older, through high school and college I knew exactly one guy who was out, and it did not go well for him. Yes, I tried to drop hints to various guys, but when someone else would call me on it I'd always deny it, because it was the 90s. So no, I didn't find an opportunity to date a guy before I wound up marrying a woman.
That doesn't mean that I haven't been attracted to as many men as women, or have any doubts about being bi, it means I never found enough courage to act on same-sex attractions when it was far easier to just pretend to be like everyone else.
I mean we don’t, but on the other hand if somebody says “I’m gay/straight” but never demonstrates any interest in sex with anybody, we might say, “are you sure you aren’t asexual?”
If a person has had a dozen partners and all of them are opposite sex, never having even gone on a serious date with a same sex person - at that point is it reasonable to say that there’s something more going on then just statistical availability of partners?
I think what Jacob and others here are saying is that a reasonable definition of bisexual would mean something a little stronger than “has the occasional same-sex fantasy they would never act on IRL” - it’s reasonable to think the identity would include some intent to actually pursue same sex relations.
This definition implies that it's impossible to be a bisexual virgin, which doesn't make sense.
I include "or at least attempts or has attempted to". which I think would cover anybody relevant?
So there are no cripplingly shy bisexuals?
Or just like, introverted bisexuals, for that matter. The once a decade I can scrounge up the social effort and courage to ask someone out, at least if I pick a girl there's a ten-thousand-year-old script for her to gently reject me without confusion or miscommunication. Asking out a guy, even a confirmed homosexual guy, seems so much murkier i'm not even really sure how to do it. And I don't think that becoming less shy would change that, the existence of the hetero script is a really comforting presence.
I'm not so sure that impossibility is completely unreasonable, in a way...
Let me split a hair:
If heterosexual/homosexual/bisexual is defined by what sexes one is attracted to, it may be reasonable to distinguish between naive attraction and experienced attraction. If a 15 year old virgin who has never had sex with either men or women claims that they are attracted to both, I think it is reasonable to come back to them and say "You don't have enough experience yet to be _sure_ of your own preferences. Tell me again after you've had sex with both and can say that you've tried them and you _indeed_ like them both."
>So I would be correct to be suspicious that some claims of being bi are not in fact genuine.
No.
If someone is using a different definition of a word than you are, that isn't 'not being genuine'.
They are being genuine and just using a word differently.
Very good point, bad wording by me. Rather, they may be being genuine but I would not consider them correct from my perspective
Are celibate priests then by definition asexual, even if they are attracted to men, women, or both?
<i>Personally I would definite it as "actively engages in or has engaged in sex and/or relationships with people of both genders, or at least attempts or has attempted to".</i>
Personally I'd add something about "would attempt to if they thought they'd suffer no adverse consequences" and/or "actively fantasises about", to cover people who stay in the closet due to fear or lack of opportunity or whatever.
Arguing about definitions seems pointless, but the shifting definition might mean some concepts you used to have no longer apply.
I vaguely remember a fictional example where a bi character’s parent told them to just date the opposite sex. The character complained that being bi was part of who she was. While it may not have been the parent’s place to dictate to the character like that, the graph above suggests that for many bi people today, that particular part of the character’s complaint would not apply.
This kind of feels like a distinction without a difference? Both of you seem to agree that “some nontrivial percentage of persons who identify as bi are not actually having any same-sex sex, and this percentage has gone up quite a bit”. The only real difference seems to be whether we say that bisexuality is “trendier now” or just “less stigmatized” which are just functionally equivalent terms with different emotional valence.
It's a difference of false positives versus false negatives.
I think the "trendiness" accusation is (or should be treated as) a claim that the person is not really romantically/sexually attracted to people of the same sex at all (or at least, not at a nontrivial level). They are not disgusted by the idea, otherwise they wouldn't claim it, but they don't actually feel the same type of attraction to same sex people, which is the reason they don't end up in relationships with them.
Both sides agree that the popularity of the bisexual label has increased, and that this has caused the amount of self-reported bisexuals to increase, but the "trendy" side believes that the source of this increase is an increase in false positives, while the "stigma" side believes that the source is a decrease in false negatives.
The fact that you call trendiness an “accusation” is why I assert that the main difference here is emotional valence rather than practical impact.
Both positions agree that the rate of people identifying as bisexual has gone way up without the actual level of underlying attraction (or maybe even the amount of bisexual same-sex sex!) changing much at all. And therefore the change in identification is down to social norms.
Going back to the topic of the original post, it would be interesting to know how long covid rates are different between "active bisexusals" and "homo-celibate bisexuals" (homoincels?)
If homo-celibate bisexuality and long covid are (partially) fake conditions spread through social contagion, and actual bisexuality is not, then we might predict that long covid rates should be high among homo-celibate bisexuals (people especially susceptible to fashionable conditions) while actual active bisexuals have normal rates of long covid.
This would indeed be interesting to know.
We're talking about collections of individuals here, not statistical blobs. If it is becoming "more trendy" then the fraction of individuals who are not attracted to the same sex but say they are goes up; if it is becoming "less stigmatized" than the fraction of individuals who are attracted to the same sex but say they aren't goes down. Both things can be happening at the same time, of course, but they're completely distinct conceptually.
By “attracted to” I mean “potentially aroused by”, not “willing to openly go on a date with”. Unless there has been some sort of rapid biological shift I don’t think that number has actually changed substantially since 2008. So in either case you have people who were not so attracted to the same sex that they would identify as bisexual in the social milieu of 2008 who did identify as bisexual in the social milieu of 2018. We can therefore posit that the threshold level of same-sex attraction required for the marginal individual to identify as bi has gone down (assumption - a higher level of same-sex attraction would result in a higher likelihood of engaging in same-sex relations). Whether the mechanism is reduction in negative incentive (stigma) or an increase in positive incentive (“trendiness”) the net result is the same.
It matters if you want to make a rhetorical point by declaring the marginal heterosexual of 2008 “repressed” or the marginal bisexual “faking it” in 2018, but I’m not particularly interested in either. I’m mostly interested in the fact that whichever was the dominant mechanism, bisexual self-identification appears to have a strong socially modulated component.
I really wish Kinsey could've standardized on tracking "attraction to men" and "attraction to women" as completely independent variables, rather than entangling both of them with each other AND the attracted person's own gender identity.
If I was a lesbian, how likely should I consider it that a given girl who says she's bisexual will consider dating me if I ask her out.
If it's less stigma, I should expect a lot more to consider dating me than if it's trendy. I would expect 'trendy' bisexuals to get really hesitant when actually approached.
As rationalists, aren't we supposed to regard beliefs as helping us make predictions? We should be asking what we should be able to predict based on a person belonging in category X, where here X is "identifies as bisexual".
Sure, but for the purpose of predicting whether or not a given individual is sexually active in same-sex relationships, X is a very poor predictor. EDIT in 2008 it was a very good predictor, now it’s a coin flip
You should be able to predict that they have the capacity to be attracted to people of multiple genders. Your orientation doesn’t imply that you’ve had any particular experiences. Otherwise someone would be baiting the incels by taunting them for not even being straight yet.
What can we predict with that?
> baiting the incels by taunting them for [...]
Absolutely happens out there in the less pleasant parts of the internet (and less commonly in real life situations). Doesn't make it correct, but that's definitely an angle terrible people use to be terrible to others.
Wouldn't that mean the potential same-sex dating pool has experienced a dramatic increase since 2008? If previously if was nigh impossible to get a same-sex date because nobody was bi, yet 85% managed it despite a strong social stigma reducing dating pools, how have we come to a situation where it's now so much harder to find a same-sex date because it's so easy to be bi? This explanation remains opposite how I would expect to interpret that data.
The population of identified bisexuals is not just larger, it includes more low-Kinsey (more hetero attraction) folks who wouldn’t have otherwise come out in a higher stigma environment. They might not view their experiences as “struggling to find a same sex date”, they may be living their best bi lives by dating the people they want to, who want to date them, and the largest population of potential mates are straight/bi people of the opposite sex.
Do you think most of the growth in low-Kinsey women identifying as bi since 2008 is coming from places where stigma against non-heterosexual identities was high among the under-30 cohort in 2008? I think it’s at least equally likely that the growth is occurring in places where adopting a non-straight identity provides positive social cachet.
The low-Kinsey explanation feels less like an explanation of the data than an attempt to explain that we should consider the data meaningless if we start by accepting an unsupported assumption.
Meanwhile, it doesn't invalidate the other interpretation of the data - that people who are not what we would traditionally consider 'bisexual' are increasingly identifying as such. Indeed, it seems to support that interpretation, if anything. In 2008, any low-Kinsey bi-identifiers would be expected to be LESS likely to have a same-sex relationship than in 2018, because the dating pool has (under both assumptions) clearly shifted since then.
The end result of either interpretation is that you have people identifying as bisexual who would not have done so 10 years ago, who remain exclusively heterosexual, and whose only change over the past 10 years is the label they apply to themselves. This seems like a distinction without a difference.
One possible explanation is the shift to modern dating apps. They were less prevalent before 2008 (and many did not yet exist, for instance no tinder). The ones that existed also didn't rely on a swipe mechanic. 2008 itself would have been near-peak Ok Cupid and it would have been mostly website usage, and perhaps largely consist of non-mainstream people (a hetero male friend described it to me as such at that time, but I never went on it). Bisexual women may have relied more on these niche apps, and especially on third spaces specific to their type, which would have fewer men. So they ended up dating more women. The third spaces would have been even more of a factor the further back you go. (Living in San Fran up until 2004, I didn't know anyone who used any kind of dating web site, it was all third space).
Nowadays a bisexual woman can go on an app, and if she doesn't exclude men from the start, she'll likely be buried in attention from them in the first hour.
A lot of thoughts here! In no particular order:
--Your definition of bisexual seems to be based on feelings of arousal. I understand it as more action-oriented. That is, it's not just about an abstract attraction to both sexes, but active participation in some kind of sexual activity or at least active attempts. In that way, it's not so much "accusing people of faking bisexuality" as having different understandings of the word. I think your statistics about how it can be hard to find a same-sex opportunity make sense, but it still seems a little too cute to call yourself bisexual if you possibly have never even had any kind of same-sex sexual experience.
--Relatedly, there seems to be a conflation of "dating" and "sex." If you want to have sex within the constraints of a dating relationship, I can imagine that might be hard to arrange, bisexually. But if you're a woman who just wants to scratch your itch to have sex with another woman--that's pretty easy to arrange.
--I don't understand how the bar chart supports your point. As I'm reading it, fifteen years ago (2008-2010), 87% of bisexual women had had sex with women in the previous 5 years. Now the number is less than 50%. And as you point out, we might expect a more flexible dating pool in the modern era, so the number of bisexual women who have had sex with a woman should be increasing.
--The bisexual men I have known were the ones with an absolutely raging sex drive. I never got the sense that they were particularly attracted to men--it seemed more like they welcomed action wherever it might arise. (I am certain this isn't always the case, but I think it sometimes is.)
Is it also too cute to call yourself straight if you’ve never had an opposite-sex sexual experience?
Being bisexual means you’re attracted to people of the same sex, but it has no bearing on whether the feeling is mutual.
> Is it also too cute to call yourself straight if you’ve never had an opposite-sex sexual experience?
I mean, kind of? Saying "I'm 100% sure I would love this experience I've never had" is an odd thing to stake an identity on.
I'm 100% sure that not every person who *has* had sexual experiences with the same sex identifies as bi or gay, because doing it *and also enjoying it* are kind of prerequisites. So I'm totally fine with the idea that someone who hasn't had sex at all isn't necessarily "straight".
Hell, I've known many people who thought they were bi until they'd tried both and then discovered a strong preference one way or the other. I view all sexual orientations as tentative until people have actually tried the ones they're into.
Absolutely agree. In some ways sexuality is a form of mental quantum state. You don't know what it's going to be until you open the box. Which is an argument for trying EVERYTHING. How do you know what you will like until you try it?
My personal libido has always been pretty damn clear about which sex it is interested in. Maybe *some* people can't tell without actually having sex, but if so, their experiences must be pretty different from mine.
Right? Like, not to be crude, but, like…most people masturbate, don’t they? And there is perhaps a pattern to what they masturbate to?
I'm surprised how many people don't consider "she exclusive watches lesbian porn" as being relevant to whether a girl is straight.
I wonder if at least some of the changes in reported sexuality are down to the much greater availability of porn and the much greater tendency of people to treat porn as being in any way "realistic", i.e. a good basis for what you would be really doing in an actual encounter.
Or maybe the people in California, e.g. our host, *can* treat it as relevant. Certainly I can't.
Does this mean that all virgins have no sexuality and are mistaken if they say they are straight?
Many religious people have strong opinions about expected enjoyment of the afterlife.
From the comments it's clear that people mean a range of things by "bisexual." Some mean "I am a woman and I find myself aroused at the sight of two women making out," which probably covers many, if not most, women. And others mean, "I would actively like to have sex with women as well as men." I take it to mean the latter, but think this is where some of the confusion is arising.
There's also a very real phenomenon of people who are genuinely bisexual but have a strong preference for a heterosexual marriage with a traditional nuclear family. I think this group is where the "lesbians until graduation" come from.
So should virgins just have some sort of neutral sexuality that they identify as?
>Your definition of bisexual seems to be based on feelings of arousal. I understand it as more action-oriented.
But doesn't that mean your identity gets decided for you by external circumstance?
Most people wouldn't consider Tom Hanks in Cast Away to be asexual because he's alone on a desert island.
If another straight man showed up on the island and after several years, the two of them have intercourse, would that make them "gay"? I think we have to remember that human sexuality is slippery and not always reducible to an "identity".
I would say that the behavior is gay, but Tom Hanks is not necessarily gay for doing it.
I don’t think behavior can be “gay”, since it’s an identity.
Tom Hanks is a talented actor who would no more be gay if Chuck Noland were, than he was because Andrew Beckett was :)
Yes they're gay. Choosing gay sex over no sex makes you gay.
Now let's replace a straight man with an animal of some sort, say a cow, and assess how reasonable we find intercourse between the two.
"But doesn't that mean your identity gets decided for you by external circumstance?"
Of course, that always happens. Like, your race is an external circumstance, and for many people, it ends up being a part of their identity. Similarly nationality, class, sex, sexuality... and the random coincidences that lead to the friends you have and the hobbies you enjoy. You have some agency in deciding how those external things affect you, but identity is intrinsically a bit random - and it's outward-facing as well. The only reason we have "identities" is because we need to explain to other people who we are in simplistic, digestible ways, so that social interactions can go smoothly.
The silliness here comes from trying to describe things as "identities" that are something else entirely. A man who is secretly attracted to men, living in a society that represses homosexuality, has no "identity" as a gay man, but he still has a sexual orientation in the normie sense of the term. He's gay, and in the closet.
FWIW (to your last point): I'm bisexual, I've dated both genders, and I have a medium-to-low sex drive. I know plenty of other people like this--in fact probably the majority of bi-men I know (though not all) are this way, or at least that's what they claim. This could be self-selection bias at play.
More generally, and separate from anything you've said, I've always found it interesting how people define their sexual/dating preferences. I find it all more vague than people generally allow, and wonder if it *mostly* comes down to cultural conditioning. When someone says they *are* or *aren't* attracted to men, say, and then find themselves accidentally attracted to a man from behind or in drag, I wonder what that says about attraction. Are we attracted to our cultural associations with a certain gender, or discrete physical features associated with a gender (sharper jaw, larger frame), or their genitalia specifically? I won't make any strong claims other than to say I think attraction is generally more mystifying than we think it is. This could be affected by the sample-pool of people I know, but I imagine this will become all the more clear in coming years, assuming the last dregs of stigma goes away and experimentation isn't discouraged. I think about this as a category similar to any other (job, athletic-inclinations, food preferences)--if you take any of those from, say, the time that Shakespeare wrote King Lear, and compare them to now, I would guess our relationships to these categories have become all the more complicated/mixed/porous. Given that we're still only about a half-a-century out from queerness landing you in jail, I imagine our relationships with these things are still set for radical change.
Last point, and somewhat conversely: I think Scott's use of arousal as a metric for genuine attraction/bisexuality is a complicated subject. I remember reading a study that showed women are sometimes (physically) aroused by the idea of rape while obviously not actually wanting this to happen outside of fantasy/controlled circumstances. Although maybe, in the case of bisexuality, if there is arousal and yet no desire to try out dating/sex, at least some portion of those people may be hesitant due to the remaining stigma.
Also: this is the first time I've posted.And so I'll use it as an excuse to say how much I appreciate this blog. Thanks Scott and all the commenters who make this place so interesting!
And lastly, to echo what other people have said, including @gideon, I *definitely* would have identified as straight fifty years ago, because of the pressure/stigma/legality involved. I, personally, was not 'born that way' such that I don't have control of how I direct my urges. Still: I've been very happy with my relationships with men and am better of for it.
I think your last point is very true. Women often have a rich fantasy life that they would never actually want to see realized.
I have to say your are one of the few here with any kind of common sense. You make several excellent points.
- I would totally agree that being bisexual is about more than just feelings of arousal. I would go further and hold that even some same-sex experiments that you aren't ashamed of doesn't make you bisexual. It makes you human.
To be bisexual requires having engaged in, and being open to, homosexual sex. Otherwise it's all just theoretical bullshit.
- I agree that there is far to much focus on dating and not enough on sex. If you want to have sex with another guy and Tinder/Bumble/Hinge seem cold. There are always gay bars. Before AIDS there were bath-houses with glory holes if you just want to suck cock. Being "bisexual" is easy if you just want to have sex with another guy.
- On being a "bisexual" male. Hmmmm you seem "kinda judgey". But, in my case spot on. I have rarely sought out another man to have sex with and I have only "dated" two men during my life. I have had sex, both oral and anal, with several dozen other men. Mostly because they asked and it was usually at an orgy. A LOT of straight men loosen up about who's sucking their dick at orgies.
Isn't this holding bisexuality to a standard almost no one holds heterosexuality or homosexuality to? I knew I was straight long before the first time I had sex, because I was attracted only to women, not to men. And it would have been super weird for someone to tell me I wasn't, like, truly straight yet.
The difference is that if a young person says they are heterosexual or homosexual but haven't yet had sex, the clear implication is that they intend in the future to have sex along the lines of their claimed orientation. But to say you are bisexual, apparently, doesn't mean that. This makes no sense to me. If you say you are X-sexual, you have to at least, in my mind, be *sexual*, and specifically, sexual along the orientation of X which you claim. E.g., if an 80-year-old woman says: "I'm bisexual. I've never actually had sex with a man, though." then she isn't really telling the truth. At least that's my old-fashioned and probably bigoted view.
I don't think it's bigoted; I just just plain old base-rate neglect. Our intuition tells us bisexuals should date both women and men, ignoring the fact that their opportunities to do so are quite skewed (this starts to break down a bit if 90% of women are actually bisexual, but I don't agree with Scott about that part.)
> The difference is that if a young person says they are heterosexual or homosexual but haven't yet had sex, the clear implication is that they intend in the future to have sex along the lines of their claimed orientation.
Is a young, deeply religious Catholic person who has never had sex and wants to join the clergy (and therefore be celibate for their entire life), just spouting nonsense when they claim to be heterosexual or homosexual?
I agree that it only makes sense to say you're X-sexual if you are in some sense sexual in a manner that matches X. But consider a few examples that I think don't fit with the stronger claim you're making.
1. Alice describes herself as bisexual. She is 80 years old and has never had sex. This is because she is socially awkward and physically unattractive. She has approached dozens of men and dozens of women and said things ranging from "Would you like to go out for dinner some time?", through "I find you really attractive. Would you like to go on a date?", all the way to "I really want to have sex with you. Would you? Please?", but has been rebuffed every time. (She has moral convictions and/or psychological hangups and/or preferences that make the possibility of _buying_ sex unappealing to her.)
2. (This is Crimson Wool's example. It's a good example.) Bert is a Roman Catholic, profoundly religious, who feels himself called to the priesthood. He has had a few girlfriends but never had sex with them, because he and they are good Catholics who believe that sex belongs only in marriage. This hasn't stopped him very strongly desiring to have sex with them. And for that matter quite strongly desiring to have sex with any number of attractive women he has met, or just seen in the street. He has never felt any romantic or sexual attraction to other men. He calls himself heterosexual.
3. Claire is another person who calls herself bisexual. She frequently finds herself attracted to other people of either sex. The experience seems much the same to her whether the others are male or female. In some cases she's seen someone and found them very attractive without actually being sure whether they were male or female. The attraction in all cases seems definitely sexual as well as romantic in nature -- she will find her mind drifting to the thought of what her current crush would look like with no clothes on, etc., etc. Claire is shy and socially awkward, and the first time someone -- who happened to be male -- showed unambiguous enough interest in her, she grabbed the opportunity with both hands. They turned out to make a very good couple, and got married. Claire has had sex with her husband and has no intention to have sex with anyone else. She still calls herselx bisexual.
4. Dave was never very sure about his sexuality when growing up in his conservative southern US town. He wasn't quite sure what it was that his male friends were appreciating when they wolf-whistled the local girls. He always just assumed that they were pretending to be more enthusiastic than they really were in order to show off, just like he was. He found a girl whose company he enjoyed and who seemed like she was into him, and they dated chastely for a while and got married. He and his wife are devout evangelical Christians and believe that marriage is a lifelong commitment, which makes it sad for them that Dave could never really take much physical interest in his wife. They can just about manage to make sex work, but it turns out that to do it Dave has to imagine that he's with another man. (It took him quite a while to persuade himself even to consider that that might help. It turns out that it does.) The only person Dave has ever had sex with, or ever intends to have sex with, is female, but none the less he now (reluctantly and shamefacedly) calls himself homosexual, and his wife would agree.
We aren’t really talking about virgins or celibate people here though - we’re talking about people who are sexually (or at least romantically) active, who identify as bisexual, but exclusively engage in heterosexual sex/romance.
I think the topic is poorly framed. I wouldn't accuse anyone of "faking" or "just claiming to be" bisexual (at least, not without quite particular and strong evidence). The question is more subtle than that. It's something like, "Are there sexual preferences that are, in part, learned and/or chosen through social and cultural interactions, such that it may not make sense to talk about them as a crisp, unchanging part of one's identity, like blood type? And if so, could it be that bisexuality has this quality more often than other preferences?"
I think this is what I try to address in section III.
"Most of them tune out the opposite-sex arousal and go through life honestly identifying as straight."
I think you mean to say "tune out the same-sex arousal" here - but I could be misreading it.
You're right, thanks, fixed.
Am I misreading the last-5-year-only-male-partners chart? Because it seems to say that your estimate of around 50% was only achieved recently, with prior years having lower numbers. Dramatically so for 2008-2010. Your explanation would have made wildly incorrect predictions back then, but good ones now, yet every reason you provide for predicting a high number should either be unchanged (your reasons 2, 3 and 5), or have applied even more back in the past (reasons 1 and 4 and the impact of total # of partners in a given time period). If you find current numbers unsurprising, you should find past numbers completely befuddling.
My guess is that the bar for realizing/labeling oneself as bisexual is lower and awareness of the label is higher. Before, the people who thought of themselves as bisexual probably had a strong attraction to their own sex and weren’t able/willing to bury it to conform to societal norms. As a Gen Z bisexual, I’m fairly confident that if I were born 50 years ago, I would’ve ignored my same-sex urges out of a combination of social pressure and lack of awareness of something between straight and gay (I’d definitely pick straight if I had to choose).
As a Gen X bisexual, can confirm this was a very confusing several years being equally attracted to both and wondering what was wrong with me before finally hearing the term bisexual and learning that was a thing. Still took way too long to start admitting it, but knowing the term and that it was a thing some people were was a big improvement.
My impression was that the chart proves that while the numbers *are* increasing, they're only doing so because their previous values were artificially far below what should be statistically expected, and are regressing to the mean as social stigma against identification lightens.
Ironically, I think this post actually demonstrates one reason why we should consider “identifies as bisexual” as potentially socially contagious (or at least “more socially contagious than other queer identities”), which is the more charitable reading of the comments to the last post that set Scott off (the point was “if bisexuality is a social contagion and so is long COVID, that could be an explanation for why self identified long COVID is way more common among self identified bisexuals”).
It’s a relatively low-cost signal, and some of that cost will be borne by well-meaning allies like Scott flying to your defense with long essays because somebody implied that some people who identify as bisexual might have little if any interest in actually pursuing same-sex relationships. If you adopt a bisexual identity, not only do you not have to actually change your behavior, but your newly adopted community will go into attack mode against anyone that implies that you do!
On top of that I think bisexuality could fit the social contagion model Scott laid out pretty well. You’ve got some percentage of people who are “organically” interested in sex with both sexes. Then you’ve got a larger group who maybe have some occasional or mild or ambiguous feelings of attraction to the same sex that they pattern match to the social contagion.
(Caveat before anyone jumps me: as Scott covered, “socially contagious” does not mean “fake”)
The real question is whether you think "socially contagious" means "bad"? The label isn't entirely low-cost, bisexuals will be discriminated no matter how popular the label becomes. As we saw in the other thread, they will either be attacked for being not normal, or they will be attacked for being too normal. Either way, it is clearly concern trolling. There's no reasonable argument for why you shouldn't identify as bisexual even if you are never going going to be in a homosexual relationship, because if it's how you really feel then that's going to inform your behaviour regardless and thus the utility of the label becomes realised.
And I don't think Scott considers it costly to write in their defense, I think you're exaggerating the social cost of all this.
Socially contagious does not mean “bad” (I mean it could be used that way but considering our host wrote a long post about it I thought it was safe to use it as he does, neutrally).
“ identify as bisexual even if you are never going going to be in a homosexual relationship, because if it's how you really feel then that's going to inform your behaviour regardless”
That sentence doesn’t make sense. The point is that it isn’t informing sexual behavior for some large fraction of self identified bisexuals (at least not enough to result in actual sex), and this fraction has gone up a lot over a short time span recently.
I’m really not concern trolling here, if anything I’m poking Scott for being, in my opinion, too uncharitable to the posters in the previous thread. Clearly a nerve was touched - writing this many words into a post responding to a day old comment is not typical for him.
I mean he can do whatever he wants with his time. My point was that within the LGBTQ and ally community there is clearly something of a taboo against “accusing self identified bisexuals of not really being bi” and this significantly lowers the cost of claiming a bi identity (especially if you aren’t actively pursuing same sex relationships). SOMETHING has clearly changed socially between 2008 and 2018 and I think that’s one of the things (I think this has changed more dramatically than stigma against non-heterosexual identities over this timespan, but that’s just my unsupported observation).
It's beneficial for the gay rights movement to have more people identifying as non-cishet in the same way it's beneficial to keep adding letters to the alphabet soup that describes it. One of the movement's key <s>s̶o̶l̶d̶i̶e̶r̶s̶</s> arguments is that "there are more of us than you think", so any incremental increase in numbers is good. Even if members of the community know someone is bullshitting, they'll turn a blind eye for the sake of promoting The Cause.
> not only do you not actually have to change your behavior
See also: any other form of self-identification or preference.
I mean yes, but Scott has numbers that demonstrably show that the percentage of self identified bisexual women who actually have sex with other women has dropped dramatically over a span of only a decade.
I'm saving this one. It's well-written and packed with good data, perfectly explaining my own orientation and position.
Just to add, I'm also a submissive and generally kinky. I'm not sure what percentage of bi women are subs but from my own experience, it's many. I've had romantic compatibility with women who I'm not sexually compatible with (re: anything longterm or monogamous) for these reasons. My longterm partner is male but I seek female partnership as well. Because polyamory is more taboo than even bisexuality, most people (unless they get to know me on a deeply personal level) will simply assume I'm straight and have no idea what goes on in my house, or in my head.
This strikes me just right.
Pardon the pun, but assuming you're a bi woman, that's what she said.
So the Pragmatist's Guide to Sexuality (this is by the pronatalist Collins couple with the too-cute glasses, so take with a grain of salt) did a survey of about 250, and actually coded attraction to domination and submission independently (so switches exist!). 80% of bi women reported being turned on by submission, versus 62% (!) of straight women. So...you may be on to something. The book is actually fairly amusing, complete with breakdowns of how many people fantasize about sex with giants and aliens, and if you're open-minded enough to post here you might enjoy it, though when they start pontificating based on results of 2% versus 8% in a sample of 250 I really think they should shut up.
Both of the bi women I know personally are subs, but that's only an additional n=2. (There's also an additional selection-bias factor left as an exercise for the reader.)
This is incredibly up my alley. Thank you for the recommendation, and the grain of salt!
Without judging which definition is correct, it is important to notice that the definition has changed. AntimemeticsDivisionDirector asked about Chronic Fatigue among bisexuals. I found two sources, one from 2007 and one from 2020 without opposite effects. Maybe that's because they have different kinds of bisexuals. Moreover, if you want to explain the correlation, you have to have a theory of what bisexuals are, rather than just trusting self-identification. "Psychology Is About Invalidating People's Identities"
"Without judging which definition is correct, it is important to notice that the definition has changed. AntimemeticsDivisionDirector asked about Chronic Fatigue among bisexuals. I found two sources, one from 2007 and one from 2020 without opposite effects"
I don't understand this claim. Which definition has changed? From what to what? There weren't opposite effects on what?
"Moreover, if you want to explain the correlation, you have to have a theory of what bisexuals are, rather than just trusting self-identification."
This was why I was trying to bring in the genital arousal data.
That was a typo. It should have been *with* opposite effects. The effects of bisexuality on CFS.
The people who identify as bisexual have changed. This may be because the definition has changed.
Since women exhibit nearly zero correlation between genital arousal and self-identification, it is a poor theory of self-identification.
Your last paragraph is only correct if we assume that the purpose of labelling someone as "bisexual" or "heterosexual" or whatever is to classify the effects that looking at different varieties of pornography have on the bloodflow to their genitals.
It is not obvious to me that that's a good assumption.
It might be, if there were some demonstration that genital bloodflow in response to pornography were a good predictor of e.g. what sort of relationships someone would get into or find satisfactory. I'm not aware of any such demonstration, but then I'm not aware of anything much in this field so maybe that's been done?
If not, though, then a lack of correlation between (1) self-declared sexual orientation and (2) lab-measured genital bloodflow when viewing pornographic videos is interesting but doesn't tell us much about whether it's #1 or #2 that fails to correlate with _other_ things that might actually matter.
How could you possibly read that into my phrase "theory of self-identification"?
I don't think I understand your question. And, actually, I'm not sure I understood what you meant by "theory of self-identification" before. I suspect there is some misunderstanding going on here, no doubt some of it mine. (Maybe all, I don't know.)
What did you mean by "it is a poor theory of self-identification"?
I _thought_ you meant something like "it's a bad idea to decide who is bisexual simply by who calls themselves bisexual, because that fails to line up with this thing we can measure". But e.g. maybe you actually meant something more like "It's a bad idea to focus on 'genital arousal' because it doesn't match up with self-identification"? Or something else entirely?
Self-identification is a real phenomenon and we study it. In particular, we must study it because it is what we have in medical data. To answer the question of why self-identification correlates with long covid, we must have a theory of self-identification. We might also have a theory of bisexual behavior. When my first comment said "what bisexuals are," it was not clear between the two. Which is why I then moved to the absolutely precise "theory of self-identification."
I think the answer to my question of how you interpreted my statement is that you are first judging people as friend or enemy and then hallucinating their statements to match.
> "self-identified bisexuals don’t really date both sexes, and are just claiming to be bi because it’s trendy"
> Bisexuals themselves hate this
That is also presumptive, I'm also on board with calling the modern trend of 1/2 of teenagers being lbgt bullshit and I have programming socks and prefer flirting with men. I would just want to flatly draw the line capable of getting off from nudes from both.
I would never be offended from someone talking statistics, or definitions. The line should be moral pressure or direct out right denying existence. And I could always talk about porn I enjoy till any religious busy bodies go away and don't feel those links speak for me in the slightest.
I don't get off on male nudes, but I first had sex with a man over thirty years and I still love sex with men today, so I think it would be a stretch to call me straight.
seems like definitions are hard
If they're hard for both men and women, some would say that qualifies definitions as bisexual.
you do know that lots of people don’t get off from looking at nudes, right?
"I would just want to flatly draw the line capable of getting off from nudes from both."
This is a bit of a ridiculous bar. What about people who have no sexual attraction but have romantic attraction? What about people who aren't sexually attracted to nudes but get off in other ways? How do you even test this?
Just let people identify how they feel, most of the time it's accurate and when it's not accurate it doesn't really do much harm at all. If you just want to feel special and unique, you can choose mutable characteristics like hobbies and clothes.
What I personally want is a word to cover sexual experiences instead of sexual attraction. There is a big difference between "I am attracted to both men and women" and "I've had sex with both men and women".
My ex-girlfriend identified as bisexual. She had never had any relationship with a woman despite spending four years at Bryn Mawr (an all-women's college that I'm sure has an above-average proportion of LGBT women). I believe the operative phrase is "target-rich environment."
Color me skeptical.
I get where you're coming from with the math, but when I see headlines about how 1 in 4 high school students are LGBTQ, my BS detector starts screaming.
Here's the CDC data (from 2021, but recently released): https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/supplemental-mmwr/students_by_sexual_identity.htm .
The numbers are even more staggering looking at girls. 3.7% calling themselves gay or lesbian, but 20% bisexual? 13.7% calling themselves "questioning" or using some other (non-straight) term? I think large numbers of teen girls "faking bisexuality" (or succumbing to societal pressure or contagion, or looking for "trendiness points," or signaling their politics, or assuaging their white guilt, or whatever else you want to call it) is far more plausible than only 60% of high school girls being straight. (I say that as someone who's been teaching HS for more than a decade and who's seen something like 4000 girls pass through those schools in that time.)
See Part II and III. I'm making the claim that approximately no women are straight, in the sense of lacking the biological machinery to be interested in women, and whether they choose to acknowledge and explore same-sex attraction is mostly culturally determined.
It would be somewhat strong evidence against my theory if significantly more than 10% of men started identifying as bi.
But does "sexual arousal in laboratory conditions" in a group of people willing to participate in a study that involves watching porn really reflect the entire population? Furthermore, does a woman who is aroused by watching a female masturbate (that's what was referred to in at least one of the studies you linked to) necessarily want to have sex with other women? Maybe she'd just like to go home and masturbate. I think there's probably a real distinction here in terms of how women and men react to sexual arousal, and probably more women are bisexual than men, but I don't really think "no women are straight" makes a lot of sense.
"I'm making the claim that approximately no women are straight, in the sense of lacking the biological machinery to be interested in women..."
This is the kind of thing that should eventually lead us to change the way we define what it means to be straight. If approximately half the straight people in the world are women, and that half has never been straight in the way that (male) writers have traditionally defined sexuality, then we're due for a pretty big shakeup!
If true, this makes a strong argument that we *should* stigmatize at least female bisexuality. If 50% of women ended up with other women, it would leave a huge chunk of men unmarried for life, with the attendant negative outcomes both personally and socially. (E.I. higher crime rates, suicide rates, and general risk taking behavior leading to poor health outcomes.)
Or we could try stigmatizing monogamy, higher rates of polyamory seems like a solution to this problem.
Likely true, though not quite as destructive as widespread monogamy has been.
I mean. Not if we explicitly stigmatize polygamy and promulgate polyandry? I agree a reversion to polygamy would be likely (and bad) if we just abstracted away the stigma without changing anything else, but as long as we're engaging in hypothetical wide-scale social engineering, I don't see that it would be at all *impossible* to nudge a society along those particular lines…
I suspect that the physical power imbalances would lead to worse domestic abuse rates than the current baseline of monogamous households.
I think the "wide-scale social engineering" efforts would be better keyed to teaching people in general how to be better to each other directly.
Two geek men and a girl is a stable situation that won't lead to higher crime.
Two nongeek men and a girl is not.
Please provide some examples of societies organized this way?
Seems a slightly weird reaction. The fact that something is bad doesn't mean that there's a moral imperative to do negative social stuff!
Everything in politics and society is tradeoffs; if artificially restricting half the populations dating pool from 100% of the population to 50% through social pressure gives us lower crime, suicide, and cancer rates, while having virtually no impact on their ability to find a mate because as Scott noted in OP, it's very easy for women to find male partners... it seems like that's probably worth the trade off? Particularly if we can do so without actually threatening anyone with force of law, just using social pressure.
To put it another way; what are the benefits of encouraging potentially bi women to pursue same sex relationships?
I mean... there's a whole bunch of assumptions in there that I don't feel certain about at all, so I'm not nearly convinced that your social engineering would work; plus when you say "just social pressure" I think of gay kids getting beaten by their parents and thrown out of their homes. I don't know what kind of social pressure you were imagining, but that seems like a relevant recent example to me. And I think it constitutes a very large harm, big enough that I'm not comfortable balancing hypothetical benefits against it.
The things that I'm not convinced about: I understand that studies show that single men have lots of bad outcomes. But it's not obvious to me that those outcomes couldn't/wouldn't be mitigated in lots of other ways. If there were more single men, maybe they'd form nice single men's clubs. Maybe governments would legalise prostitution and it would become more acceptable to use sex services. Maybe the increased competition for women would actually have a salutary effect and raise the average quality of men (better health, less crime) so that even the sexual losers ended up better. Any of those outcomes seems as possible to me, in a hand-wavy kind of way, as men just sinking into cancer-ridden criminal delinquency.
The benefits of encouraging women to pursue the relationships they want include the obvious higher chance of finding a really satisfying life partnership; the opportunity to experience lower risk of partner violence; the creation of more stable households for childraising... I don't have any idea how to quantify any of these. But I certainly don't share your instinct that one side of this equation obviously outweighs the other. And as I said above, I think "social pressure" is a thing to be treated with great suspicion, a dangerous weapon, not a harmless nudge.
Marriage as a civilizing factor for men is one of the most robust social studies findings I've ever heard of; from Orwell in 1984, to Johnathan Gottschall in the Professor in the Cage, (really the seminal work on the matter as far as I'm concerned).
To address some of your other points:
"If there were more single men, maybe they'd form nice single men's clubs."
What makes you think that these clubs would not be deeply anti social? E.I. violent gangs? Even the "nice" side of them is probably going to be extreme sports and racing, men without marital prospects will chase risks.
"Maybe governments would legalise prostitution and it would become more acceptable to use sex services."
How would this be good? It would not give them any opportunity for raising children, nor any opportunities for pair bonding.
"Maybe the increased competition for women would actually have a salutary effect and raise the average quality of men (better health, less crime) so that even the sexual losers ended up better."
Perhaps, but after spending a decade working on improving myself to attract a mate and still failing, I know it's only making me far more bitter than I was when I was younger. Sooner or later, somethings gonna give, either finding a wife or a total breakdown into some sort of extreme risk taking behavior, criminal or not.
"The benefits of encouraging women to pursue the relationships they want include the obvious higher chance of finding a really satisfying life partnership"
Why is this obvious? Doubling your potential dating pool does not nessacarily have this effect, there's been plenty written on this with regards to online dating.
"The opportunity to experience lower risk of partner violence."
Actually, the opposite is true, same sex couples have higher rates of domestic violence (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29994648 ) men are taught from a young age not to hit women, and that taboo mostly holds
"The creation of more stable households for childraising."
Again, exactly the opposite is true, marriages between two women have by far the highest divorce rate, 10% point difference. https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2016/13/lesbian-couples-likelier-to-break-up-than-male-couples
Also; it's quite disingenuous to list "The benefits of encouraging women to pursue the relationships they want include the obvious higher chance of finding a really satisfying life partnership" without noting that this possible benefit comes at the cost of the exact reverse for the men, and to a much greater extent.
Scott, please don't assume that no women are straight, this is just plain wrong. Even if I'm the only woman who is quite totally straight and absolutely sure of this fact since kindergarten, I do exist. Yourself, you feel quite sure that you are not bi. The same sentiment exists among women. Not the slightest inkling of romantic or sexual feelings towards any woman at all, either real or imaginary - that is completely straight, isn't it?
I don't mean that it's uncommon for women not to feel same-sex attraction, I mean that it's uncommon for women not to have some kind of instinctive same-sex arousal. In most people that apparently never becomes conscious same-sex attraction. The poll I posted said that 63% of women said they'd never consider sleeping with another woman, and I believe that.
I have to echo other comments that I think the study is likely picking up something more like the autogynephilia-in-cis-women thing you've often talked about. i.e. woman see images of women masturbating and imagine themselves *in their place*, as opposed to imagining themselves having sex with the woman in the video. It's not a different level of capacity-to-be-aroused-by-homosexual-sex, it's a different way of engaging with pornography.
I've said this elsewhere in the thread, but I don't think these studies are actually measuring sexual orientation in women. The studies are based off of an understanding of male sexuality where sexual attraction is the same thing (apparently) as a person looking pretty so porn acts as a pretty good proxy for that.
I personally get turned on by all sorts of porn, but in real life women don't turn me on, men I think are pretty don't turn me on, but some men who may or may not be pretty do turn me on.
Women's sexuality is a lot more situational than men's are, I think.
>The numbers are even more staggering looking at girls. 3.7% calling themselves gay or lesbian, but 20% bisexual? 13.7% calling themselves "questioning" or using some other (non-straight) term?
What do you think the correct percentage should be?
To me, these sorts of arguments implicitly assume that the stats accurately counted LGBT people in the past, and any increase since then is due to "fake" LGBT people inflating the stats.
But couldn't the reverse be true? That in the past, the number of LGBT was artificially undercounted, and now we're seeing the real number?
It's the same as those Occupy Wall Street types ten years ago. "CEO pay has increased 1000% since 1970! It's out of control!" They never bothered to establish what the baseline of CEO pay should be. For all I know, CEOs were underpaid in 1970.
From a point of observation, older generations will not generally adopt new generations' social trends and mindsets (or at least, they'll adopt them much more slowly); we can observe that boomers are, overall, much more homophobic or at least hesitant to accept LGBT ideas as compared to zoomers as well.
Yes, the stigma has faded for zoomers; we can't say the same for boomers.
I could still totally buy a tenfold difference in LGBTQ identification. Boomers are from a more conservative era, likely have more conservative social circles, and are at a stage of life where they are (a) more likely to be married and unlikely to risk that with experimentation and (b) less likely to make major changes in identity. Why blow up your life if you're not writing about it for the Atlantic?
I would think there's a bigger difference in stigma between boomers and Gen X/Millennials than between the latter and zoomers. But there's a much bigger difference in identification between zoomers and their immediate predecessors than boomers and their successors.
https://betonit.substack.com/p/lgbt-explosion
If this is the case, how come the fifty-something guy coming out as transexual is so common? Maybe it's just inflated by the usual distortion lenses, but my admittedly detached impression is that even younger transexuals find this troubling-to-mortifying and something that's hard to deal with in their communities.
It would be interesting to know if these numbers are different if you limit to older men who are single and actively dating. For someone who's been married since before it was socially acceptable, there's much less reason to come out as bi now if you can't really act on it.
They use different definitions. "I experimented in college" is a trope, but for an average boomer it does not change their settled self-identification, while for a zoomer it registers as a part of their identity (and continued "experimentation").
People's identity isn't something that they regularly update based on an impartial assessment of societal trends. Of you're a 60 year old man who has been married to a woman for 40 years you are not going to change your self conception and public identity because your teenage self had some confusing feelings that you suppressed
because there are social scripts and narratives and support networks and resources for coming out at 17 that simply don’t exist for 57-year-olds, who mostly have massive sunk costs in the lives they’ve already built on assumptions they formed decades ago that didn’t include or maybe even have words to describe many possibilities that for young people today do feel like possibilities.
I think it's very true that stigma in the past led to undercounting of LGBT people. But that doesn't explain the explosion of people identifying as bisexuals among younger generations, while the gay/lesbian numbers remain much closer among generations.
Here's another source:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/389792/lgbt-identification-ticks-up.aspx .
From the chart at the bottom of that page, 1% of baby boomers considered themselves gay, compared to 2.5% of Gen Z, a factor of 2.5. 0.7% of baby boomers considered themselves lesbians, compared to 2.0% of Gen Z, a factor of about 3. But while 0.7% of boomers considered themselves bisexual, 15% of Gen Z did., a factor of more than 20. Again, I think it's plausible that many boomers, happily married to a member of the opposite sex, might really be bisexual but have no reason to say that, but the difference here is so drastic I don't see how that can explain everything.
Doesn't seem that hard to explain, when social stigma was higher people who had a choice would have acted to avoid it. By mostly identifying as straight and dating same sex partners. But people who are exclusively or bear exclusively homosexual didn't have that choice, and their only alternative was celibacy.
When I was at school, in the ancient days of the 2000s, you could get beaten up and socially ostracized for any suspicion of being a bit gay. I think people underestimate how recent and significant the social changes have been. So our baseline for what the "normal" level of LGBTQ identities is going to be pretty skewed
> Right now I have a pretty good deal where I can self-describe as straight and guys won’t hit on me. If 5% of straight guys would say yes to being hit on by a man, men would hit on us much more often. So it’s in my self-interest for men who might like men to self-ID as bisexual […]
I don't get it; why is it bad for you if a guy hits on you? (I've heard other straight guys express something similar, so I know you're not alone, but I just don't get it.)
It's not bad, but if he's not interested it's just a waste of everyone's time.
Disgust reflex mostly, I guess. If someone sidles up alongside me and asks if I'd like to eat dog poop with them I'll have a similar reaction.
I support the right of gay men to do whatever they want, but in turn I have the right to be disgusted by it.
1. Some people do find being approached by a member of the sex they're unattracted to disgusting.
2. They may not take no for an answer, and I get the sense Scott isn't the type to lift or do BJJ. (This is, I suspect, the reason lesbians are so eager to have women-only spaces.)
>get the sense Scott isn't the type to lift
Watch out, if you drop too many comments like that we're gonna get rocked one of these days by Wide Scott ripping DSMs in half with his hands, then he and Long Yud will both quit writing and start a tag-team wrestling promotion. Immense short-term utility, but the species might be doomed.
OK, someone needs to turn this into one of these AI pictures.
For my part I find basically all social interactions with strangers to be anxiety-inducing and discordant. If they serve some function or lead to some benefit then ok, but if they're futile and pointless from the start I'd rather avoid them.
something the other replies aren't considering is I rarely hear this from straight women (that it would be really bad if more women hit on them), only from men. I personally think this is because being hit on by men can be a bad experience regardless of gender (less willing to take no for an answer, more physically threatening) and so if you don't even want to date men you will want to avoid this as much as possible (lesbians, straight men). Even as a woman attracted to men I rarely enjoy being hit on by strange men.
edit: another possibility is that this is linked to Scott's numbers on most women not being straight? Then women wouldn't have the same disgust reaction to same-sex experiences as men would.
Surprised not to see this mentioned already: if gay men think it's legit to hit on you, this is a sign that you seem homosexual, and as noted elsewhere in the thread even the appearance of this is enough to sink your chances with a massive swath of women, typically one hugely overlapping the most attractive women. If you react to the approach with anything but forceful, disgusted rejection it's even worse.
Women tend to "like gay men" in a social sense, but that's because they see them as harmless/nonthreatening; in terms of revealed preference women, on the group level, have just as strong a disgust reaction toward male homosexuality as men do.
Great post.
My experience and that of my bi friends experience suggests that —unlike, say, enby— identifying as bi is in no way hip, and is rather a costly signal (or was when I was still searching for my social niche in the DC area):
The main thing is many people assume you’re lying. That sucks. Gays find you untrustworthy, and —at least in DC— were uncomfortable with the implicit notion that some people actually do choose to engage in gay relationships voluntarily, as opposed to because they were ‘born that way’ (though I’m an elder millennial and this may have shifted since I cared). I had two friends in queer activism in DC, both were bi, both in the closet, lest they be fired or sidelined at work. Meanwhile, large swaths of the cis-het set assume you’re secretly gay, and bi is taken as a cowardly means of being half-closeted. My own father once held this viewpoint, and did when he noticed I was probably dating men —awkward! I have been told that having dated any men ever and being transparent about this is THE reason a one very large demographic of people conspicuously ghost me, when that has never happened with women of any other demographic.
I did have one minor quibble with the post:
> “I find myself intrigued by Mike’s explanation: if many people are bisexual but just don’t notice it, bisexuality might correlate with increased awareness of one’s own mental state and unwillingness to round it off to socially acceptable alternatives. If lots of people get Long COVID in the sense of some mild fatigue on the threshold of awareness, maybe people who are good at noticing their mental state and not rounding it off to something else are more likely to notice that.”
My intuition is that Mike’s hypothesis is consistent with Scott’s mental illness and state fixation hypothesis:
Noticing subtle problems others miss and becoming fixated on them might plausibly contribute to both mental illness and long COVID. I’m reminded of the famous Krishnamurti line:
‘It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society’
People who are honest and observant enough to notice issues, personally and societally, in my experience, are much more likely to have to do a lot of work to attain reasonable states of wellbeing.
if you look at polling a surprisingly large percentage of women are unwilling to date bisexual men (i think it's a majority even for millenials)
i am personally quite baffled by this
Why would you be baffled by this? I think most women would suspect that if a man identifies as bisexual then he probably won't be satisfied with only having sex with a woman; eventually he'll cheat on you with a man.
Plus you're likely to wind up with some kind of horrible STD into the bargain.
So, there are, what, like 4 billion women on the planet? What is the difference between four billion people one could cheat with and eight billion?
The only context in which this objection makes sense to me is one in which someone believes that the man in question is identifying as 'bi' because he is gay or gay-leaning --the 'lots of people think you're lying problem' I noted in my original comment.
> likely to wind up with some kind of horrible STD
I mean...sure, if you're an idiot? And you don't calibrate your risk mitigation strategies to the widely known and easily referenced base rates of STDs in various populations? I can't speak for any bi men who are not my friends, but being double plus extra careful with gay guys strikes me as just standard operating procedure among reasonable people.
It is far, far easier for a man to find another man to sleep with than a man to find a woman to sleep with. Plus men are much more likely to be flirted with / propositioned by men than by woman. The kinds of women that wouldn't date a bi-man are probably the kind who hold the view that most men will have sex with someone if the option were available or if the right circumstances arose.
> probably the kind who hold the view that most men will have sex with someone if the option were available or if the right circumstances arose.
A person who can't or won't say no when sex isn't the honorable needs help (and dignity); a person who would wittingly partner with such a person needs even more help (and dignity).
Hard for me to imagine why one would want either in one's dating pool.
Is there a common view of bi people that they want to have sex with men AND women, rather than just being happy to have sex with men OR women? That would explain the "a bi guy is more likely to cheat on me with a man than a straight guy is to cheat on me with another woman" concern.
It wouldn't surprise me if there was a popular conception of "obligate bi", though I don't know that I've come across it.
What Melvin said. I went out with a (poly) gal who was only willing to continue if I was willing to promise never to date other men as MSM was too high-risk in terms of STDs etc. (She was also into gay porn, to underscore the point that real life doesn't always match your fantasies.) I also knew an older lady who said the first case of AIDS she ever saw was in a woman whose boyfriend didn't tell her he was bi. :(
Now if you're a bi man, you have a choice--chase the 47% or so of the population that's straight or bi female, or the 2% or so of the population that's gay or bi male. Unless you lean heavily gay, which one are you going to go for?
I suppose with HIV in more recent history worry about STIs makes more sense?
worry about cheating less so; I doubt there's *that* much of a correlation between bisexuality and sex drive
and while there may be more opportunity for casual sex I doubt the average mono woman is thrilled at the idea of dating a guy who only doesn't cheat because he lacks the opportunity
(as or more salient to me is "someone who has some experience as to what it is to hook up with men probably is a bit better calibrated on how aggressively to approach people?" but I don't know)
Right. This brings us to the silver lining of being a man who's had at least some sexual experience with men (or minimally some time in a gay bar):
We can empathize with having been on the receiving end of bad male sexual behavior. I had no model of this while dating only women in high school. I had a complete failure of imagination, and thought that (e.g.) my girlfriend's mother had a model of men that was just irrationally hateful. Then I learned --through some acutely unpleasant but profoundly edifying experiences in my late teens and early twenties-- that her perspective was tragically understandable. Though this had some unfortunate synergies with the women's studies classes I was taking at the time (think: gendered self-loathing), in the long term it was massively beneficial.
There is also some counter-signaling benefit in bisexuality (or just being a bit faggy): having just enough gay sex to keep my queer card, giggling now and again, and wearing a bag that is beautiful and very nearly a purse signals to the women I care to date that I'm not going to be brittle or weird in sexual contexts. You know what is gayer than men who have sex with men occasionally? And even less fun for women to date and fuck? Men who are preoccupied with their own masculinity. More generally:
Sexual normality is rare and startlingly overpowered in general, and 10x more-so in rationalist circles (at least on the east coast, I haven't spent much time in the bay). I notice I am confused about why more people haven't figured this out.
It's telling that in Aella's experience (as of a couple-few years ago when she made the tweet), every man turns into a werewolf in sexual contexts. This is not at all consistent with my experience with men (or people) in general. My actual experience is that women are far more likely to be sexually unhinged when presented with someone who can actually turn them on, because they have less experience being sufficiently aroused that sexual restraint is even required --a bit like transitioning trans men. But Aella's take is completely consistent with my experience of members of my community. As far as I can tell, all anyone proximal to this community needs to do to receive limitless amounts of sexual attention --even from people who think they aren't attracted to your sex-- is signal that one's libido hasn't been RLHF'd into some waluigi-werewolf mode collapsed monster by being honest and matter of fact about their sexual desires. Fucking a same sex partner now and then and not being weird about that fact is probably not necessary to signal that one doesn't have waluigi-werewolf genitalia, but it does seem to be sufficient.
continues to amuse me to phrase this as
"would you trust a hotdog seller who thinks hotdogs are gross"
it is a bit mean but it is also very funny
If you're looking for a long-term partner a guy who lacks the opportunity to cheat might be right up your alley. I've read the PUA blogs but a lot of women may indeed be willing to settle for a less-sexy guy who will raise a family with them.
It even works the other way sometimes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh9ZZgDqzAg
as a bi-ish man I note that I get hit on approximately never by women and at least a few times a year by men. it would be actively easier to date men, at least if i weren't too discerning.
Half-seriously: do you even lift, bro?
More seriously: you can decide what you want out of life, but if you want to specifically attract women being more of a stereotypical guy can help.
As a ramrod straight person who unquestionably lifts, I will confirm that a roughly 1:20 ratio of women to men hitting on me.
I stand corrected. Hear me now and believe me later.
Interesting!
This is the first time I have seen someone write about scholarly evidence, for what has always seemed like an obvious fact to me: most women are bisexual while men are more likely to be just gay or straight. Even though I was amazed at how stark the difference was.
Serious question, and if you covered this and I missed it, forgive me, but does being Bi correspond to having high levels of “openness?” Like personality wise?
I feel like all the bi people I know are very high on openness in general.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224499.2020.1768204
Yup! n=13,351. On Openness, bi > gay > straight. Conscientiousness is lower too.
Gay men are more agreeable, neurotic, and conscientious; gay women are less extroverted, agreeable, and conscientious. (On average!)
Bisexual women have way more lifetime partners than straight women. I don't have a median or a mean, but for having 10+ partners, the RR is 4. Thus they have more than 7 chances to swing both ways.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6579508/
Good point. More generally, the binomial math Scott does at the top is really sensitive to deviations from "7 relationships for everyone". If its much higher, the "natural" probability of 0 same-sex relationships rapidly goes much lower. If heterogeneity is high - say 75% of women have 0-1 partners, the other 25% average ~30 each, then the reverse is true - well over half will have 0 same-sex relationships.
On the other hand, at the link you cite it still only has a median of "lifetime sexual partners" for bisexual women at (probably) 5.
That's sexual partners rather than relationships though.
People who are thinking 'my friend says she's bi but I only see her date men' may be unaware of any number of female sexual partners she's had.
FWIW, one reason to say you're lesbian when you're actually bi is that lots of actual lesbians have bad history with women who claim to be bi, but are really more like bi-curious or who think they're bi, but actually aren't. This has led to negative stereotypes of bi women in the lesbian community as unreliable and secretly straight, which bi women sometimes try to avoid by presenting as totally lesbian. This stereotyping is included in the umbrella of things labelled "biphobia".
The funny thing is it then comes back around to lesbians being mad at bi women who call themselves lesbians because it increases the impression that lesbian is a flexible identity. Bi women really can't win.
yeah truly.
I can second that. It's a discussed topic in the community, and Cara has described it perfectly.
As an additional note: lesbian romance authors have started to use the word "sapphic" to mean "lesbian and bisexual women (including trans) dating other lesbian and bisexual women (including trans)", which is basically the maximally inclusive description of the concept of two women dating that one could conceive. In this very specific author and reader community, "lesbian" could be taken to mean "only strictly lesbian cis-women". But not every author and reader in that space understands "lesbian" to be so strict to warrant the term "sapphic" as a distinction, so it's all a bit muddy anyways. The "sapphic" label is a bit more fashionable currently, because inclusivity is a celebrated feature.
I cannot say whether a part the readership might have mixed opinions on this, as far as I can tell, most "sapphic" romance novels in this (very small) market are "lesbian" in a strict sense anyways.
It is further complicated by the fact that the word "lesbian" is a very prominent label for erotica, e.g. in the Amazon Kindle Store, often used to mislabel works, while "sapphic" isn't used for erotica, so searching for books with "sapphic" helps filter for actual romance novels, and, ironically, returns more content about "lesbian" themes.
My ex-girlfriend (I'm male) starting getting into relationships with girls after we broke up (she was lesbi-curious while we were together). She identified as (de facto) bi in the UK. When she moved to an Asian lesbian scene, she was put under pressure to identify as lesbian, because of this 'biphobia' that was totally normalised in the community. My impression is that the 'LGBT-solidarity' meme is stronger in young communities in the west, while these four groups don't naturally gel, and often actively dislike each other, in the absence of such a meme.
This is another lovely post, I just chuckled at the last footnote:
"Also, as a straight person, I want to protect the signaling value of the word “straight”. Right now I have a pretty good deal where I can self-describe as straight and guys won’t hit on me. If 5% of straight guys would say yes to being hit on by a man, men would hit on us much more often."
It's not so horrible being hit on by men. At least, not in my experience. I've only been hit on in gentle ways by nice men, so perhaps I've been very lucky. I just wanted to be a straight man who says in public: it's fine when gay men hit on us (when they're polite and friendly about it).
The problem is there's a small fraction of men who won't take no for an answer.
No doubt. My view is that half the world's population (women) already has to deal with that small fraction. If some of that fraction hit on straight men as well, straight men would have a much better idea what that's like. It might help to deter some of the straight small fraction, and it would enable the majority to act more appropriately around women when women experience that kind of harassment. So a small loss of comfort for straight men, and a gain for women (and humanity!). I think straight men getting hit on by other men more would be a net positive.
From the utilitarian point of view, sure (and I've done the experiment of being bi on OKCupid, though I'm past the age of 'gay death' as you stated elsewhere), but it's a loss for *Scott*, who's writing the essay.
I'm only rationalist-adjacent, because I'm much more cynical.
It's not just about men who won't take no for an answer. It's also about the broader picture. The female preference for males is so strongly in favor of straight men that if a whiff of a rumor gets around that a man might be attracted to anything that has ever had a penis, it can be quite damaging to that man's chances with women. It may be said to be so strongly in a man's interest to shut down that perception hard that it results in decreased homosocial behavior (men hugging male friends etc.)
This reasoning may or may not be so applicable to modern-day Scott located in the Bay Area, but it holds generally, even with "liberal" women around.
The first bar graph shows that bisexual women in 2008-10 were much more likely to have had a female partner in the last five years (90+%). The pool of women identifying as Bi is way bigger now yet the graph showed 50% have not had a female partner in the last five years. How does that make sense
Presumably the same number of people had the same preferences then as now; the small group that identified as bi back then is probably importantly different from the much larger group that identifies that way now.
The results from the genital arousal study are likely to be deceptive about women’s attraction. Women can have a reaction to stimuli that doesn’t line up with their experienced sense of attraction, so bisexual women and straight women genitally aroused by lesbian porn have distinct experiences. I can’t easily find the response articles again, but researchers have theorized that the sexualization of women in media has trained straight women to have a Pavlovian-style response to images of naked women. Someone tested this by repeating a version of the study using images of only vulvas vs images including breasts or whole bodies l. Self-reported straight women tended to experience genital arousal to the porn including breasts but not to just vulvas, unlike lesbian and bisexual women. This may be because TV and movies show or accentuate breasts much more than vulvas.
I found the article where the response research is cited: https://psych.utah.edu/_resources/documents/people/diamond/Wanting%20Women%20Sex%20Gender%20and%20the%20Specificity%20of%20Sexual%20Arousal.pdf
I think I would interpret that rather as a pavlovian response to the sight of vulvas in those who enjoy sex with females. Presumably biologically inherited attraction to females is based primarily on visible secondary sexual characteristics.
FWIW - bi woman. Have been asked out by 3 men (accepted 1), been asked out by 0 women, asked out 5 women (none accepted) and asked out 2 men (both accepted).
Among the women, 4 were interested in women (1 of them exclusively women) and we were just not compatible / bad timing. 1 was asexual. 3 out of the 4 interested in women I met off dating apps specifically filtering for women interested in women, the others I knew socially.
All of the men were straight. There were also bi men in my social circle but I would say they were outnumbered 4 : 1 by straight men.
Seven only seems low if you remain unmarried indefinitely or are not monogamous.
He's in the Bay Area.
Two comments on the math:
"So their potential dating pool is about 90% male. So this “perfectly” bisexual woman could be expected to date about 10x as many men as women, just by numbers alone.... if our bisexual woman samples exactly evenly from her male vs. female dating pool, we would expect about a 50-50 chance (0.90^7 = 0.478) that all seven of her relationships would be with men."
Isn't there a (failure to) double-count / weighting issue here? (I think - 75% confident - the following is correct).
Suppose, for a given relationship, "our bisexual woman" has a 10% chance of it being with another woman and 90% chance of it being with a male. So 90% of her relationships contain 1 male and 1 female (and thus qualify as a same-sex relationship for 0 people), but the other 10% contain 2 females and thus qualify as a same-sex relationship for 2 people. So per relationship she has, about 0.2 "woman in a same sex relationship" events occur, not 0.1. If the representative/average member of this group has 7 relationships, then there are 1.4 "woman in a same sex relationship" events per bisexual woman. This is a bit more complex now - I don't think you can use binomial theorem any more - but the probability that the average bisexual woman is ever in a same-sex relationship should be (substantially) higher due to this mechanism.
Some qualifiers / extra mechanisms to note: If most of the females in the dating pool for the bisexual woman are lesbians (who by presumption only have female partners) then this doesn't matter very much / at all. However if most are similarly bisexual, many of the candidate same-sex relationships are with other bisexual women and thus may also get them from 0 to >0 same-sex relationships. Similarly, if there's one woman who dates a tonne of other women, and provides their only same-sex partner, the number of same-sex relationships and "women ever in a same sex relationship" are closer to 1:1 rather than 2:1.
Second, as others have pointed out, the first graph, where the "among bisexual woman, share who have only dated men in past 5 years" has gone from 10% in 2008-10 to 50% today, really works against the claim of the piece. All of the arguments given in the piece for justifying 50% as being a perfectly reasonable number given the dating pool and social phenomena suggest the number should have been higher, not lower, in the past. Rationalising this by saying "the threshold for identifying as bisexual is much lower today" is basically just a different way of framing the original claim Scott is arguing against.
I'm surprised you want to preserve the signaling value of heterosexuality. In my experience most straight men with liberal sentiments are delighted by the idea of being (politely) asked out by a gay guy(1) because:
1. It affirms sexual attractiveness
2. It gives them an opportunity to make a display of magnanimous tolerance
(1)- Of course you could always be non-politely asked out by a gay guy, but that usually happens on Grindr.
See responses to Phil H above.
Couldn't the Long Covid correlation be mostly explained by garden-variety trauma history acting on a specific type of sensitive personality to produce chaotic, intense relationships (often with a masochistic flavor, as somebody noted upthread), unstable patterns of attraction *and* a tendency toward somatization in whatever form, Covid or otherwise?
That life history is certainly something one sees a lot in the wild, and it doesn't necessarily imply anything offensive about the many trauma-free, stable and thriving bisexual individuals out there--just that there are multiple different ways someone might end up self-consciously feeling a strong attraction to both sexes, where at least one of those routes also entails increased vulnerability to Long Covid. As an account, it's not even all that different from the neurodivergence/state-fixation theory described in the post, but has benefit of suggesting other correlations that should be testable.
I had the vague impression that some people enjoy porn by imagining themselves _interacting with_ the depicted subject, while other people enjoy porn by imagining themselves _being_ the depicted subject. If true, this seems like it could hugely distort the genital-arousal studies (e.g. by causing actually-100%-straight women to be aroused by porn of women).
Are they controlling for this in some way? Am I wildly wrong here?
This is a good point! I could imagine women being more likely to imagining themselves as the depicted subject, too (not sure though).
I'm fairly skeptical of genital arousal studies as a measure of *real* sexual orientation, and here's why:
It's pretty common for women to experience physical arousal in these studies while self-reporting no desire or even revulsion. That leads to one of two interpretations—they *are* into it and they're ashamed/lying or the physical reaction reflects *something else.*
Emily Nagoski, the author of the very good Come as You Are (https://amzn.to/3Lybc3H), puts it this way: "sometimes things are sexually relevant, even when they’re not even remotely appealing." [source: https://enagoski.medium.com/unwanted-arousal-it-happens-29679a156b92] Physical arousal can be a way of being *ready* for sex, in case it happens, regardless of whether you *want* sex.
And, in Nagoski's cited sources: "There’s about a 50% overlap between how much blood flows to a male’s genital response and how “turned on” he feels — his “subjective arousal;” and there’s about 10% overlap for women’s genital response and subjective arousal."
This undermines my confidence in genital arousal studies as an orientation measure, and I wish it were covered in middle school health classes generally. It's good for kids to know that getting a little physically aroused does not necessarily mean you have DISCOVERED AN IDENTITY.
Yeah. Genital arousal and subjective arousal are two different things, particularly in women. I would hesitate to use one as a proxy for the other, particularly when comparing genders.
(The main reason why there is a sex difference here is that a man who is being raped only benefits on the margins from being physically aroused, whereas a woman who is being raped significantly benefits most of the time, as most female rape victims are vaginally penetrated by a penis, and lack of physical arousal during PIV carries greater risk of injury. This means the threshold for a "false positive" genital arousal should be expected to be much lower for women, as, indeed, it is.)
A male who gets raped benefits greatly by being aroused in that he may produce offspring as a result of ejaculating, at little cost. I think the real question would be whether males historically have turned down sex often enough that this has been relevant.
You can ejaculate whether or not you have an erection at the time. Further, plenty of rape acts performed on men are not PIV.
Those seems like things that would possibly change the magnitude, but not the direction, of the fitness effect?
If an erect penis is manipulated on the wrong angle, it can be 'fractured'. There are no bones, but the corpora cavernosa (the two cylindrical areas that engorge with blood to stiffen it) can be ruptured. While generally not life-threatening, it has a high chance of causing infertility if not promptly treated.
Penis fractures are usually caused when the penis slips out of the vagina and strikes the partner's pubic bone, and is significantly more common in "cowboy" sex positions where the penetrated partner is on top. This is exactly the sort of position that is most common when the penetrating partner is being raped.
It's very hard to rupture the corpora cavernosa on an flaccid penis. So while the effect is small, there's a fitness bonus for men to NOT become physically aroused during rape. Comparing the small chance of impregnating the raper vs the risk of permanent infertility, I could see the risk being the stronger factor.
Apparently the US has a yearly incidence of 1/175k for penile fractures, which presumably means that it happens on the order of once per million acts of female-on-top intercourse. To me, that seems like a negligible effect.
Thanks. There's a general assumption that, since people can't be trusted to report on their own experience, there must be some more objective method of figuring out what's going on. This might not be true.
Seems to me that there's a crucial error in your math about bisexuals. Yes, a bi woman has far more potential male than female suitors. But she also has far more rivals for the attention of those male suitors than female suitors. Suppose a population is 92% straight, 4% bi & 4% gay. A bi woman will have 94% of the male population interested in her (counting bi men as half) and only 6% of the female population (again counting bi women as half.) But she is competing with 94% of the women for the attention of 94% of the men and only competes with 6% of the women for the attention of 6% of women. For the bi woman, the female dating pool is much smaller but much more likely to hit on her as opposed to another woman.
Simulating this seems hard, but the logic here sounds right, and assuming its true, it probably matters a lot.
One way of thinking about the math (using your numbers): take the perspective of the lesbian women, and suppose that everyone can tell everyone else's type (so the lesbian women can tell which other women are lesbian and which women are bi, etc, so there's no differential efficiency in targeting. Imperfect, but makes things tractable).
Then, 50% of the women a lesbian woman dates will be bi. Suppose the average gay woman dates 7 women (using Scott's number). Then 3.5 will be bi. Since in your example there are an equal number (4%) of bi and lesbian women, this means the average bi woman will date 3.5 lesbians (ignoring any additional bi women they may date); tough to get 50% at 0 from that.
What about if 3% are lesbian but 9% are bi? Then we still get 3.5 lesbian-bi relationships per lesbian but only 1.2 per bisexual woman. Still not easy to get 50% at 0 from that, and this is before accounting for bi-bi relationships at all!
The main reason this argument would break down is if lesbians pretty much exclusively date lesbians, not bisexual women (either due to social networks or other factors).
As stated above by Cara Ouellette and WorriedButch, this last reason is apparently the case to some degree.
In what (given Scott's claim in the OP) strikes me as major irony, they are saying this happens because lesbians suspect bisexuals are "faking" bisexuality.
Suppose this is all true. It doesn't render Crouchback's point moot, but it certainly does make thinking about the math pretty hard.
I think that lesbians might prefer to date other lesbians, but they don't do so nearly exclusively because they are such a small percentage of women.
This depends on what rules you use to generate interactions (opportunities to meet and date). If the bisexual woman is going to local WLW (women loving women) singles events in her area, it's true that the scarcity of WLW in the population is counterbalanced by the scarcity of rivals for their affection: once all the single ladies have been concentrated in one place, she has a good shot with any of them. If she goes to conventional speed dating events instead, the fact that there's more men available and more women after them should wash, especially since only so many of them can physically fit in the building.'
However, if she's just going to singles events for her political party or professional association or just waiting for suitors to turn up in her mixed-sex workplace, school, or hobby groups, then she should meet many more available male matches than female ones.
>Most people who notice their bisexual attraction pattern and identify as bisexual will rarely or never date anyone of the same sex, mostly because of the size of the dating pools, but also for reasons of social convenience.
Small note - the social convenience thing applies most strongly to bisexual women, since the part about women being passive and hard to get doesn't apply to bisexual men.
Which would make us expect that bisexual men are more likely than bisexual women to have any/more same-sex relationships (or at least hookups). Which does match my impression from my friend group, at least.
"Which does match my impression from my friend group, at least."
This may be culturally dependent, -especially in more traditional cultures women are harder to hook-up with because a hook-up in general is frowned on. But as Scott writes "getting dates with men is easy, because men are horny and desperate...; getting dates with women is hard, for the usual reasons that every heterosexual man already viscerally appreciates." So for a horny man who Just Wants Sex Now, it may be more practical to achieve that with another man, especially since the advent of apps like Grindr, than with a woman, even if he would rather the latter. Ironically this is accentuated in more conservative / traditional communities. This is reflected in my social group, at least.
Thank you for writing this much needed follow-up, the comments section of the last post did get a bit frustrating. I wanted to mention that for bisexual men I think the math on size of potential dating pools can actually be much more skewed in practice than the numbers would suggest, for the simple reason that there's much more pressure to be really sure a guy might be interested before asking him out, since if he's actually straight the reaction can be very negative (potentially even more so if he's closeted). So for a bi man, asking a woman is much less risky, as it's much rarer for someone to be offended that you think they might be straight. So whatever proportion of men are either bi or gay, the pool of guys you could safely ask is much smaller. I realize this is becoming less true, but it was definitely the case pre-2000, so any statistics that include people over 40 are going to be affected by this.
I'm not sure how much of this was covered by your phrase "reasons of social convenience", but thought it might be worth spelling out in a bit more detail.
These studies where arousal is measured by attaching sensors to someone’s genitalia and then having them watch porn always make me skeptical. It’s such a weirdly unsexy situation and seems rife with confounding factors. Where are these test subjects? Is it someplace comfy? Where is the researcher? What kind of porn do they use? Are the subjects people who watch a lot of porn, or any at all?
I’m sure they make note of some of this, since e.g. you wouldn’t want to show people porn with both genders since you wouldn’t be able to tell who they’re attracted to. I get that these studies are looking at involuntary physiological responses and the apparent strangeness should theoretically not matter. But the whole setup sounds kind of…I dunno, traumatic? Invasive? Not conducive to natural sexual feelings? Granted, I can’t think of a particularly good way to measure arousal, either. Maybe improved technology could at least make the data collection process more subtle.
True. If I found myself in a scenario where I had an electrode attached to my clitoris and was being made to watch masturbation videos, my thoughts would be less “Is this person attractive?” and more “What circle of hell is this?”
I always wondered about that, it sounded like a nastier version of that notorious scene from A Clockwork Orange. I guess some subs and masochists might enjoy it, which would skew...the...results.
Wait, on the last thread someone (JAZ I think) said the bis they knew were subs (I only knew 2), and there was apparently a small trend (62% vs 80%) as per the Pragmatist's Guide (women only). If only subs or masochists are willing to put up with the study, is that the confounding factor we're looking for elevating the estimated levels of bisexuality?
Personally I would expect that "bisexual" women are just kinkier overall than "straight" women, so more "submissive" but also more "dominant" as a group.
That wasn't what the Pragmatist's Guide numbers said (30% versus 40% for straight), but it could definitely be true. They only had about 250 respondents.
I wonder if there would be a difference between genders too - I'd imagine you'd need much more unusually open-minded women to sign up for these studies than men.
Reminds me of sleep studies where the subjects are wired up to assorted instrumentation. No way I'm getting a normal night of sleep!
And are the fluffy handcuffs really necessary?
This is a mathematically inconsistent argument that leads to the implication that female bisexuality was at 32% in 2008 and has dramatically decreased to 5-10%.
He makes a reasonable argument that a dating pool of 90% male leads to roughly half bisexual females never having female partners because 0.9 ^ 7 = 0.48.
But if that is the rationale then we should do the same for 2008-2010 numbers, which was 0.133 never having a female partner. If we solve for x in x^7 = 0.133 we get x=0.75.
But how do we get 0.75 instead of 0.9? It would indicate that in the time prior to 2008 that 32% of women were identifying as bisexual or lesbian, making their dating pool three quarters male instead of 90% male. This would mean that the number of bisexual females has dropped from 32% in 2008 to 5-10% now.
The other reasons he lists for bisexual females to date more men were all true back then, so I don’t see how these are relevant.
This is a nice way of framing the implausibility of the numbers in that graph under the null hypothesis (thus, of course, casting doubt on Scott's null hypothesis).
Oddly, "Bisexual adults more than twice as likely to have asthma as straight adults" – or so a study I haven't scrutinized says. (It seems to comport with other recent studies claiming a higher incidence of lung disease among bisexuals).
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-09-bisexual-adults-asthma-straight.html
As an asthmatic myself, I couldn't tell anyone where to draw the line between post-infectious asthma/atopy flares and a "trendier" label like "long X" for infection X. Since I'd feel silly claiming the label "long X" for multiple Xs, if I did test positive for COVID (something which hasn't happened yet), and then had what's now become my usual exacerbation afterward, I could probably meet the definition of "Long COVID" for non-psychosomatic reasons – but I wouldn't want to.
I believe people's uneven recovery from what are for most people temporary infections is a problem worth taking more seriously, but because I have underlying conditions that would already explain away months if not years of generally-worsened health after pretty much any infection, I doubt attaching a "long X" label to myself would be helpful.
But I'm also generally reluctant to attach "trendy-seeming" labels to myself, including sexual labels. (I only recently found out that one of my oddities is apparently "trendy" now, and I find this somewhat mortifying,)
I'm "cishet by default", I guess, and happy enough that way. I wanted to avoid premarital sex, and did, I had no pressing reasons to make anything other than a conventional marriage, and I don't feel like I've missed out on anything important to me by doing that.
If I had wanted multiple sexual partners, though, sticking to men seems unlikely to scratch such itches as I do have – and I wonder whether having had somewhat abnormal bodily experiences since childhood might contribute to my perception that normality just isn't for me, even if I also find claiming the "trendy" signifiers of "abnormality" for myself rather embarrassing, and therefore something to avoid, if possible. So there is a commonality underlying why I would avoid both identifying as bisexual and as having "long X" even when my post-infectious condition might qualify for "long X".
Intriguing. My grouchy old guy dermatologist had published on the connection between asthma, GERD, and ezcema. It would have been fun to suggest he look at bisexuality too. My wife and I are both bi, both have asthma, both now have long Covid.
The RCCX theory has an explanation for that; while I'm not hanging my hat on it just yet, people with at least two of "queer, hypermobile, neurodivergent, autoimmune disorder" seems to be a cluster.
https://www.rccxandillness.com/cyp21a2-mutations-may-be-the-diathesis-in-the-stress-diathesis-model-for-chronic-medical-and-mental-illness-and-may-cause-a-psychiatric-spectrum-caps.html
Tracks interestingly with the fact that virtually every female porn star performs as at least bisexual.
I recall Rod Dreher writing a column about a "gold star" lesbian porn actress facing criticism because she refused to film any scenes with a trans performer. I don't know if there's a "gold star" equivalent for straight female porn stars.
Haven't heard of that particular incident, but (mostly unrelatedly) I recall that a Canadian porn star was bullied for her refusal to have sex with black men, after which she committed suicide. Obviously, this is a bad reason to commit suicide (they're all bad reasons to commit suicide), and her position was definitely racist-adjacent.
But. There's a whole thing, that Richard Hanania recently wrote about, that Freddie has written about, and that I swear I read some incredibly schizophrenic piece in Vox or the like about, and (to borrow a phrase from that piece) subjecting desires to discipline.
Freddie was writing about some righty pieces to the effect that the left's commitment to redistribution ended with sex. Freddie essentially threw up his hands at this and said 'it's a special case,' and that sex and access thereto will always be one of the most unequal, unfair areas of human relationships, and that redistribution in the crude 'government man sticks a gun in your face if you don't' is unworkable, tyrannical, and morally repugnant.
I agree, as does Hanania in a recent piece, who points that only the most woke-zombified people are capable of subjecting their actual behavior to its precepts. The most woke tenured professor will still treat a pretty undergrad better than a fat one, etc. Again, I agree.
As a result, I find it interesting, if not exactly unsurprising, that people in the sex trade (the most legitimate form of which is definitely mainstream pornography for paysites, etc.) are subjected to wokeness in this fashion. The inquisitors in this situation almost certainly see the context as being one where they can finally put their money where their mouth is (either implicitly or explicitly) without encountering the ickiness that Freddie can't get past.
These people might in general say that it's transphobic to refuse to engage in romantic or sexual relationships with a trans person or racist to refuse to engage in romantic or sexual relationships with other races. But for the vast majority of people, whose business such things are not, can and do have all these inviolate preferences that they are never put on the spot, social media-wise, to account for. And even if it did happen, the would-be inquisitors would still have to deal with the ick factor of essentially dispensing with the requirement of consent.
But in the end, even going after porn stars this way requires implicitly rejecting the necessity of consent. I feel like this is what people (me) are talking about when they (I) carp about slippery slopes, like with bioethics implying at best eugenics if not extermination camps.
>Freddie was writing about some righty pieces to the effect that the left's commitment to redistribution ended with sex.
While I fully agree to attack "the left" on the arbitrary distinctions made as to what is a legitimate inequality and what ought to be redistributed or not, Hanania's claim (at least as you present it) is plainly false, there's plenty of things that collectivisits don't dream of redistributing.
Straight question... what other things don't they dream of redistributing? Off hand, none come to mind...
Well the obvious one is the direct counterpart to money: free time. If we're taxing Albert who works X hours to redistribute it to Beatrice who work X/2 hours, why aren't we also forcing Beatrice to give X/2 hours of her time in service to Albert?
It's not even a theoritical thought experiment. I have friends working at a similar job as I am, but with a passion to sometimes 70-80h/weeks (at least according to them), while I barely ever break 35. And sure, their career proress faster and they get paid more (in some cases much more) than I do, but also taxed at a higher rate. But the 35-45h of free time (and sleep) that I enjoy? Why am I not being "taxed" on it also?
Then consider Charles. Charles also works X/2 hours, and spends his other X/2 hours lifting weights instead. He's buffed, man, his arms are as large as your legs. I doubt many (if any) leftist would support compelling him into hard labor in order to redistribute his physical strength. It'd be something out of an Ayn Rand villain's monologue.
But money is different. As soon as you convert your time into work, and that work into money, it stops being yours. Why such a distinction?
I believe the Hanania post you're referring to is this one:
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/anti-woke-as-autism
The only people supporting sex workers are left-wingers (the right-wingers hate them and want to kill them in many cases, as I think Aella's said), so they have to play by left-wing rules.
OK, good point about the source. I like her surveys but her view on life is necessarily very unusual.
I still do think the only people who want to let sex workers hoe their own row are on the left, so they wind up having to play by left-wing rules.
???
Even if I mentally correct "Left-Wing" and "Right-Wing" in your comment to "Progressive" and "Conservative", which is a common conflation people do to those 2 very orthogonal axes, this still doesn't track at all. Sexual Conservatives hate **Sex Work**, not sex workers. This is the difference between hating low-wage work and low-wage **workers**. Slavery and Slaves, 2 very different things.
Relevant to the post's topic, there was also a recent suicide of a female porn star who canceled a shoot after learning her male co-star was bisexual
I once told a girlfriend I was bi to try to seem cool (and it worked, sort of; teenagers are weird). I am very confident that at least some other human males have tried this before.
While yes, the concept of "fake bisexuals" must annoy bisexual people to no end, claiming that you're bi to gain social cachet when you know damn well you're not is a real thing that real people do.
36/cis/M here. I currently (as of last few years) identify as bi; before that I exclusively said I was straight. I identify as bi now because:
a) to feel cool - there's a lot of 'in crowd' stuff in my culture where I need to feel like I can say I'm "queer" in some way
b) but, as part of wanting-to-seem-cool and talking about it with my friends, I noticed that I actually *do* have some kind of romantic attraction to guys - the kind of "ooo this is a guy friend I really like" feeling which (for women) I identified early in my life as a crush and now am only mapping similar feelings onto men;
c) but, even with those crushes, and going on actual dates with men, still not feeling excited about actual sex with men of any kind
d) and damn near nobody has ever heard the term 'biromantic' so I can't say that at parties
leads me to just say bisexual, and leave it at that, and feel 80% like an impostor and 20% like someone who has a difficult identity problem that I'm struggling with
There's always 'heteroflexible' if you're bi but lean straight. I think you still get to call yourself queer, though I'm not sure. I've read Dan Savage say people aren't calling themselves straight because it implies a conservative political stance. In the back of my mind something's screaming "that's f***ed up!", but do what you have to to survive where you are.
In my cynicism you could just say you're bi and leave it at that, and turn down any guys you're not into (which is going to be most of them). Frankly with the STD (and rape, especially if you're not a big guy) risks I'm not sure it's a road worth exploring.
"A difficult identity problem that I'm strugging with" sounds great for a progressive environment, TBH. A lot of them seem to take pride in their mental problems these days. (Compare fashionable Victorian neurasthenia...)
Yeah I've seen a few people around here making statements along the lines of "Adopting an LGBT label brings nothing but discrimination and harassment, nobody would do it just to be cool!" I don't know what rock those people have been under for the last 25 years or so but in 2023 America there are huge swathes of the country where that's the opposite of correct.
"Their male dating pool is all heterosexual and bisexual men (95%+ of men), and their female dating pool is all lesbian and bisexual women (about 5-10% of women). So their potential dating pool is about 90% male."
This seems obviously wrong to me, people select their social circle very strongly, you yourself have written about how this happens even unintentionally. Most of my friends are some flavor of LGBT, most of their friends are some flavor of LGBT, and I do in fact see bisexual people having a large, sometimes above 50% pool of same-sex partners.
Claiming you were bi was trendy and edgy in 1995, but does anyone honestly care anymore? Old guy here, so maybe there's a new wave of this I'm missing?
there are a lot of "lgbtq-only" spaces where it really helps to be able to say you're *something* and bi is a defensible thing
Does this mean I can lower my threshold for accusing people of faking heterosexuality?
We know that a lot of people will have sex (or do sex-like things) with members of the same sex if you put them in a situation where the opposite sex isn't available (prison, single-sex schools). But I don't know whether these people necessarily "are" bisexual. To a certain extent sex is enjoyable because buttons are being pushed.
I've never made out with another woman, but I bet it would feel nice. And yes, movie scenes of women making out can be kinda sexy. But I've never looked at a woman and been slammed by attraction--that's only happened with men. To me, that's what "sexual attraction" feels like, and it would be silly/not very meaningful to identify as "bisexual."
For the record, I went to a single sex school and to the best of my knowledge none of my fellow students never did any "sex-like things" with each other. Not even the ones who later turned out to be gay (nobody was openly gay at high school in the 90s). As for the rest of us, we were desperate but we weren't _that_ desperate; girls were missing from our school but they could still be occasionally encountered at parties and things.
I've never been to prison so I can't comment on that.
I think he meant specifically single-sex boarding schools, where women are literally unavailable for most of the year.
Not sure why dating pool size should necessarily matter. Do homosexuals find it harder to find dates than heterosexuals because their dating pool is smaller?
Do people date randomly?
Perhaps the concept of bisexuality has changed a lot recently. I'm reminded of a line from Sex and The City in which one of the women pretends to be a lesbian so she can hang out with a "cool" lesbian crowd. Someone in that crowd sees through her and says: "You either eat cunt or you don't." Certainly the attitude 20 years ago was that your revealed preference meant much more than your stated one.
Perhaps that view is old-fashioned now, but I have an old friend who decided back in the '70s that he wanted to identify as bi because so many trendy rock stars like of the era: Reed, Bowie and Jagger claimed to be. So he tried his best to have sex with a guy but during the experience had an epiphany that he was heterosexual. It's one thing to say you are bi, another to prove you are able to eat cunt, suck dick, whatever. At least that's what Paul Samuelson would have probably said.
'Do homosexuals find it harder to find dates than heterosexuals because their dating pool is smaller?'
Yes, this is often discussed.
Bowie himself famously said his deep, dark secret was that he was heterosexual.
The OkCupid blog put together some interesting data about sexual orientation and same/opposite gender messaging patterns (although their framing is regrettable). See the last section of this post: https://web.archive.org/web/20140122045017/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-biggest-lies-in-online-dating/
I mean, Kinsey scale shows everyone is bisexual to some extent, just strongly leaning towards one sex or another, or 'traits' or one sex, i.e a bisexual man attracted to fem people, whether transmasc, transfems, twinks, or cis women....
The Kinsey scale doesn't show that at all, it's a *scale* where you can select "exclusively attracted to men" and "exclusively attracted to women". Kinsey's findings are also of extremely dubious credibility due to his shoddy methods (for example, use of the scale *in itself* consitutes a severe case of begging the question).
Oh boy, is that bar graph annoying...as many have already said, yeah, greatly increasing the rate of bisexuality without a corresponding huge increase in "same sex success rate" would make Number Go Down. The various whys given all seem plausible; I'd also tack on the whole Young People Not Having Sex Period thing, which would neatly include the same demographics largely responsible for skyrocketing affiliation. (Yeah, I know the magnitude of this effect is likewise contested.)
In similar vein, I think the social convenience calculus has also shifted...on the one hand, stigma more generally has been going down. But on the other hand, it's (perceived to be) a helluva lot more fraught to hit on women now, nevermind actually asking them out. It's hard to tailor norm changes to solely deter predatory men. Like, being a bi trans woman...I might prefer the company of women in most regards, but the risk of flirting with female coworkers just isn't worth that greater potential reward. (Current workplace has had, uh, numerous...incidents...of such going very poorly. The North remembers.) Which is unfortunate, since that means seeking out mostly men, and the local quality just isn't very good. So I too end up dragging down bar graphs of that sort, without meaning to. Many Such Cases, I'd imagine.
That sucks. OKCupid? Feeld? Munches (if you have...other interests)?
I really like reading you in the comments section, and I'm sorrowed you're having a hard time. I find partners online in interest-communities, but that does lead to long-distance relationships unless I have freak luck about it, which has all the obvious problems. I can definitely sympathise with it feeling more dangerous to express interest in women explicitly in the real world. Good luck!
Oh, more of a default time really. Long-haul singledom leads to a lowering of expectations, which helps temper the disappointment. In many regards, "fake" or otherwise, I'm kinda happy that younger generations can at least pretend to be more open wrt sexuality and gender earlier...time is not infinite, and I sure spent a lot of my better years flailing about in the morass of Self-Identity Crises. Those tribulating trials were worth something, for sure, but...it's probably better overall if the LGBT life journey isn't intrinsically marked with conflict, doubt, remorse. Can't get those prime years of young adulthood back. There's less room to mess up when you're a Real Adult...
Yeah, I think finding parallel interests is easier in a lot of ways than playing the Standard Game of looks...I don't have a horrible Charisma score or anything, but it's tough to compete with youth (live and work near college = majority younger, sometimes way more) + really have no interest in cosmetics, etc. Plus some interests like gaming tend to attract neurodivergent people to begin with, which ups the odds somewhat on finding quirkyweird ones who're above-average to be some flavour of LGBT too.
"It's hard to tailor norm changes to solely deter predatory men."
It's literally impossible. Any norm change intended to do this will deter predatory men the *least* and other men more. The most functional norm is "it is 100% okay to hit on any woman above the age of consent at any time, in any place, no matter how sleazily or awkwardly you do it, *as long as you take no for an answer the first time*. You are not allowed to give someone the slightest amount of flak for attempt #1 as long as it stops there."
The curse of conscientiousness, yeah. Rules only apply to rule-followers, Nice Guys finish last. I'm not sure I'd word it that bluntly, or if that actually was the status quo in some mythical age, but in many ways that seems a preferable norm for maximum utility/dating market liquidity. (Though of course, people more on the receiving than giving end of said interactions probably feel differently.)
Genital-arousal studies might be The Best Thing We Have for "objective" sexuality measurements (are they?), but...yeah, quite a lot of possible disconnect there. Lots of ways to get aroused without the actual genitals doing much, lots of ways to rouse the gametes while feeling otherwise pretty indifferent or even opposed to incipient sex. I have no idea how common this is, but like - personally, most of my erogenous zones or other things that get me in the mood have minimal connection with genital response. The nerve streams just don't seem to cross. The inverse is also true, where purely-genital machinations might strictly technically lead to "an orgasm", but it's sure not satisfying. The same way one *can* get drunk off pissbeer, but...why would you, where's the fun in that?
Wrt footnote #3: well, that cuts both ways. "Bisexual" loses a lot of meaning if it includes nearly all women, and similar for if it includes an excess of people who really mean "I'd theoretically be into a same-sex relationship With The Right Person, but it never actually happens". The useful signal of, hey, hit on me regardless of your sex and/or gender, I'm probably fine with it - I find that valuable. This is part of the downside of spectrum-framing; it really is a (I hate using this word) privilege to just not have to worry about being hit on/potentially feeling feelings for ~50% of people in daily life. Sometimes a much higher percentage, depending on one's specific circumstances.
So guilty of not following this myself in all kinds of ways but I think this might get down to the question of “What is a thing?”
And because people can talk about internal states we have in recent times been heavily weighting how we categorize people based on those self-reports.
However, if you think about other things you are basically 1) describing constellations of characteristics 2) noticing they behave in predictable ways 3) describing them in a way you can communicate that prediction to someone else.
What is a chair? You’d say it has a seat and some legs and you can probably sit on it and if you say it somebody else knows what you mean.
If you’re a bisexual woman but not in anyway other than internally you’ve theoretically been open to having same sex relationships but in practice would never actually do it…
I can see both sides of this because it’s not like that attraction isn’t something measurable or interesting or a thing that’s very important to you but in day to day life it doesn’t really tell someone something about your actual predictable behavior. Like when someone has been married for years, has children, and then says they are now non-binary but the only actual functional change is that they get a haircut. From the outside, asking the question what is functionally different now in this system, the answer is: someone got a haircut, being non-binary means you get a hair-cut.
I would assume the overwhelming majority of people identifying as/claiming to be bisexual are, in fact, bisexual, and "they're just faking!" is wrong. However, it seems like it only takes a few percent of people being extra susceptible to socially spread conditions to explain the results of your survey. In particular, why homosexuality was not associated with long covid: if you have the slightest inclination that maybe a same-sex sexual encounter is something you would try, you can put "heteroflexible" on your dating app profile (which urbandictionary defines as "inbetween bisexual and straight" which makes very little sense to me), answer "bisexual" on surveys and act almost completely indistinguishably from straight.
As a Schrodingers' fake bisexual woman (who also has long COVID, despite it not being convenient for my COVID-related politics at all):
I spent years saying to myself that that one crush on my (female) best friend 'didn't count,' because, after all, I've never dated a woman. I've never kissed a woman. It was just that one crush.
(In the two point five years between meeting any out non-straight people at all, and getting together with my now husband. This was over twenty years ago, I should say).
Being bisexual's never impacted my life. I've never been oppressed because of it, and I'm not dating anyone because of it. I might, if I were single, but I'd been married for years before I was fully fine with doing so. So, I'm not.
But I decided to start saying I was bisexual rather than leaving that detail out - as 'personal, complicated, irrelevant' - because I was talking with all these other women. Liberal, social justice-y even, most leaning younger than me. About sexuality, and queerness, and I knew their lives, and lots of them hadn't kissed girls either! But if I described myself (perhaps more biographically accurately) as 'basically straight,' 'rounds to straight,' etc., then I'd be on the outside of that group. But if I'm 'bisexual', well, that's what they want. Because by their definitions, it's clear that any nonzero amount of attraction is not only good enough but actively should count, .... and then my opinions are valid, and, anyway, I'm as bisexual as lots of others!
Does that imply that the concept of a "Straight ally" doesn't get to exist anymore?
I keep seeing things about how allies are never doing enough, so I'd guess not.
Ime, it really depends on what specific social circles you're running in.
Yeah, I've seen a few people in this thread denying that anyone could derive net benefit from adopting the label Bi, but that definitely can be the case in certain place and communities.
I don't like Scott's framing of people "faking" bisexuality. At least from what I could see, nobody in the comments of the previous post was accusing people of faking being something they aren't for cynical purposes. They were talking about exactly what you describe: People who are kind of on the margins sexuality-wise and could easily pass as straight if they wanted but adopt a label they don't strictly need to adopt for social reasons.
This might seem slightly off topic but I have been following the comments here with interest due to something that has been frequently trotted out in the media of my own country which has perplexed me.
https://www.justice.govt.nz/about/news-and-media/media-releases/lgb-community-experiences-higher-levels-of-victimisation-than-average-new-zealand-adult/
Does anybody have any thoughts on why this could be true? It seems as though people identifying as bisexual claim to have proportionately higher experiences of just about everything.
There is some amount of stigma coming from both directions, from the straights and the gays. They both get to feel secure in their belief that their orientation exists and that other people believe their orientation exists. Gay and lesbian people often base their social lives in their respective communities so they can feel safe, make friends who understand them/aren’t disgusted by them, and get a date, so there is a high concentration of LG people in separate communities. As in, even in a major liberal city, it’s pretty common to have inadvertently dated one of your new friend’s exes or something like that.
Bi people kind of straddle the straight world and the gay worlds. By which I mean, they don’t fit neatly into either one, and there isn’t much of a bisexual world where they know they can mention any ex’s pronouns without fear of social rejection or confusion. Friends and community keep you safe. They warn you if the person making eyes at you from across the room is a known sketchball. They can provide validation that your new boo’s bad behavior isn’t okay, and encourage you to dump them and tell you you deserve better, which is the kind of social support people need to end relationships that aren’t quite abusive yet but aren’t heading down a safe and happy path.
Yeah, I can see that could be true socially but it doesn't seem to explain such huge differences. How would bisexuals suffer more domestic violence? General crime? Why would they have more mental illness? Or 'long-covid'? Asthma?
Where do you see robust lesbian communities that are large enough to socialize entirely in them? The lesbian identity has been almost entirely supplanted by the queer umbrella in most major Western cities, and dating men isn't a barrier to being in a queer space. I think this argument is a bit out of date at least on the women's side of things, I've been hearing it for 10 years+ but in that time the lesbian label has become less and less popular, and as a lesbian i've always been in the minority in any LGBT space I've been in, far outnumbered by bisexuals.
I think the simplest explanation is that some developmental abnormalities lead to both bisexual identification and those correlated dysfunctions. Pleiotropy is common and comorbidities are abundant, so I don't think this should be particularly surprising.
Yep. It might be the same thing that causes autism, hypermobility, ADHD...
This is a very humorous angle to me because as a gay man, the trope is that actually the bisexual dudes are just in denial and are never actually dating the opposite sex. Maybe I’m just old enough to remember when bisexuality was gay denial rather than being a trendy victim of statistics.
Nah, it's cool to be bi now in the city. Or at least to be non-straight. I think it's weird too. They've reclaimed 'queer', even, which had *very* negative responses when I brought it up with an older gay man a while back--I had to remember to keep switching back and forth.
The rule is that if a man claims to be bisexual, he's really just into men. If a woman claims to be bisexual, she's also just into men. It's a rule very flattering to men.
> It's a rule very flattering to men.
As an alternative framing: if you express interest in men, men might hit on you, whereas if you express interest in women, nothing much seems to happen, per the post. So, the former is a more costly signal and so people use it more rarely, i.e., the threshold for publicly expressing interest in men is higher. Expressing interest in women has a low threshold because it has few consequences. So, the phenomenon is not due to men being more desirable but due to men being more aggressive in their pursuit.
I don’t think advancing beyond the necessity of reproduction the old fashion way is exciting (comment triggered by the “(for now!)” hyperlink to some 2 year old article about turning blood into eggs or something). Could you imagine the fallout of that? People no longer having to be sexually competitive? Literally anyone being able to reproduce via parthenogenesis and create copies of themselves? I think humans have introduced enough dysgenic influences into the environment via tech, I don’t think removing the primary and sole remaining check on the continuing health of the species is good, much less something that warrants an exclamation point.
I might be wrong (paging Metacelsus) but I don't think gametogenesis is useful in creating a copy of yourself - you can do that already with cloning, which is simpler and already understood. Gametogenesis could be used for (among other things) letting two people of the same sex have a child.
I think regular cloning has that issue where the clone's telomeres start out already with a lifetime's worth of wear and tear, and cloning-via-gametogenesis would avoid it.
I think this seems sociologically unlikely. Being a single parent is hard. I expect people will mostly still want to raise children in pairs (or more!), and to incentivize the other person you'll still want the baby to be a mix of the two of you. Indeed we could even imagine groups of three people raising babies that are all theirs!
Can we get a LOT more info on 'Long COVID also correlates with pretty much every mental illness, and it correlates more with psychiatrist-diagnosed illnesses than self-diagnosed ones'? To me, that's more fascinating than the article topic.
Isn't it more like bisexuality 'also correlates with pretty much every mental illness, and it correlates more with psychiatrist-diagnosed illnesses than self-diagnosed ones'?
Yeah that's the point. If it's the case (which I haven't looked into) that long COVID correlates with mental illness, then bisexuality just becomes one of a whole laundry list of things that also correlates with mental illness, and thus the connection between bisexuality and long COVID becomes a lot less interesting.
That's why I'm annoyed by "social contagion" type of theories. They sneak in the assumption that the observed changes in the number of cases are all/mostly false positive without providing evidence for it. And then just keep pointing to the observed changes: "See! There used to be x cases when it wasn't trendy and now it's trendy and there are 2x cases! What other proof do you need?".
In reality "trendiness" is not two discreet state. Ideas can be more or less widespread in the society and we do not know which level of the spread for a specific idea is optimal, leading to the best f-score. We can't just assume that whatever base line was 10 years ago was the best.
Social contagion is a real thing though. Two recent, positive, examples that have been pushed by social conformity / pressure / sanctions are decreased smoking and picking up your dog's excrement. These are good things but were pushed by society and by social groups. Backnin the 70s it would have been seen as rude to ask a visitibg smoker to stop but insane to follow your dog with a bag.
I'm not saying that social pressure doesn't exist or doesn't affect people.
But there is an obvious difference between organised campaign of imposing new norms onto peoplewith social pressure and just making information about something more available.
There is a continuum between "just making information about something more available" and "organised campaign of imposing new norms onto people". Threats and promises are a thing after all, and they are simply information. "Organised" is also not essential to the argument.
People notice when a group is elevated above all others and every criticisms or dislike of them becomes a news worthy controversy. Deliberate or not, organzied or not, they notice.
There is a key difference between imposing new requirement of "being X" onto others and making information about the "existence of people who are X" more available. Sometimes making information about "existence of people who are X" more available is coincides with imposing some norm Y, for instance "don't be a dick towards people who are X" onto others. But this is a separate thing and not relevant to what I'm taking about.
The distinction between enforcing people and not enforcing people is not always absoutely clear but in most cases it's clear enough. The irony, is that most of the time when people panic about social contagion, what's actually happening is the removal of previously enforced norm of not talking about something.
The thing is, not all information is born equal. If somebody invites you to a wedding or a birthday, and you started blasting hardcore porn on the video stream, I imagine very few people will be pleased with that or invite you to their parties ever again. Theoretically, all that you have done is "making information available", right ? You didn't persuade people to watch porn, you didn't engage in porn, you simply played porn, information, on the public audio-video stream that plenty of other people are free to play other things on.
And yet, people will hate it. And yet, people will say that you violated their right of not watching porn in a normal party. So clearly, making information available is not always a right.
Two of the most reviled and hated practices, Marketing and Spam, are literally nothing less and nothing more than "Putting information out there". I can almost imagine the marketer's or the spammer's plea for tolerance : Come on, we're just making info available, we're not forcing you to do anything, it's just 5 seconds on every youtube video you watch or 10 emails every week, it's not a huge deal, don't be a dick.
And yet, the "info" they're making available is not exactly the most welcomed, eh ?
The graph you included that shows how many bisexual women "have exclusively dated men in the last five years" very clearly shows that this number has increased dramatically in the last decade. The linked study mentions "wide error bars," but claims the trend is statistically significant.
That seems to support the idea that when people self-identify as bisexual, it's helpful to keep in mind that that word doesn't mean what it used to.
My thesis is, to be clear, not that people are lying or that the broadening application of that self-label is bad or incorrect. It's just that bisexual-identification is inherently subjective, and so the act of self-identifying as bisexual signals someone's personality and cultural context in addition to their underlying arousal patterns. (The same is true of e.g. straight people, though we could argue about percentages.)
It's important to find a way to discuss this concept without making bisexual people feel "erased," and I'm open to suggestions on how to better accomplish that end. I say it's important to discuss because it feels Beyond Obvious to me that the long-covid correlation provides evidence for long covid being correlated with personality and cultural context in addition to underlying biology, which we miss if we can't admit and discuss those properties of bisexual identification. (I also think we should be more aware of how often self-identified straight people feel same-sex attraction, though that's a separate topic.)
I think the fact that bisexuality also signals culture is consistent with the model in Scott’s post, where the underlying arousal patterns are filtered through self-realisation and convenience before reaching self-identification.
I’m a bit surprised Scott seems to dismiss how this means the culture-personality connection COVID and bisexuality is still viable, having to look for other explanations.
Agree pretty much with sections 1 and 3, but section 2 seems to presume that genital arousal correlates pretty well with actual arousal (as perceived internally by the person whose genitals are being monitored). Genital non-concordance is a pretty well-established phenomenon, particularly in women. Why this happens is unclear (one suggestion is that physical arousal can prevent further physical damage during a rape, so more cis women's bodies automatically respond with physical arousal to any sexual stimulus, regardless of whether they're into it or not), but monitoring genitals seems like a bad proxy for judging whether women are self-reporting their sexuality correctly, as it is pretty irrelevant to the question of "is this particular woman open to dating me or not".
Anybody (including me) who has ever been a middle-school-aged boy can tell you with great certainty that genital arousal and sexual attraction are far from synonymous.
>Bisexuals themselves hate this
> why you shouldn’t say it
This is a weird appeal to niceness at the start of a post that seeks to convince by statistics. I have no particular horse in this race - I'm actually kinda annoyed by how trite and predictable the """Bisexuals are simply faking it""" opinions were getting in the last thread - but my first reaction to "You shouldn't do X" where X is a fairly harmless action or gesture is always being suspicious and defensive. The paternalistic "No Questions Asked" attitude is a hallmark of 2 kinds of institutions I despise the most, the Military and Traditional Religion, and this immediately motivates me to start looking for reasons that I *should* do X.
And, quite frankly Scott, the lgbtq+++!@#$ folks do not seem too keen on not upsetting the straight men either, who also have plenty of problems with some of what the lgbt say and do, and the latter's universal response is almost always some variation of "Lol sucks to suck". So why the asymmetrical calls for niceness here ? You ever see an article with a title like "Raise Your Threshold For <something that annoys straight men or offends them>" ? I have never.
But anyway, let me get a bit meta.
What this post and the comment sections of the last one has taught me is that what I call "Population Thought Experiments" ways of reasoning should be banned and\or significantly curtailed, at least as hard as aristotelian teleology or freud's psychoanalysis. By "Population Thought Experiments", I mean the genre of reasoning where you start with "Imagine a population of $GENERIC_ENTITY where x% are grubs and y% are shrubs, further assume that alpha, beta and omega, here is [What I think is] a plausible scenario that can happen in this world".
The insidious thing about this way of thought is that you might be perfectly right and still be wrong. The scenario your brain comes up with *might* be in fact a plausible one conditional on the world you imagined, in the sense that if I wrote a computer simulation (after teasing out all the implicit assumptions and biases in your wording and teaching them to the silicon) I *would* indeed get that scenario..... under a specific setting of parameters, in 34% or so of the simulation runs. But what happens under other parametric settings ? What happens in the other 66% of the runs ? What happens under different interpetations of your assumptions and biases ? If you have working code, you can explore all of this. But if all you have is your faulty and slow meat brain and the vague and rhetoric-optimized Natural Language that we originally just evolved to shout "Lions!!", you will be led astray. And then there is the whole, seperate, issue of whether the world you imagine approximates the real one enough for whatever insight you derive from the thought experiment to transfer.
This is the article that informs my opinion[1] : Probability, Why Intuition Fails Us & How Design And Simulation Can Help. Recommended reading, I spent 10 minutes hunting it down just to refer to it. Take all the difficulty that Probability Theory as a mathematical field is notoriously known for, and multiply it by 10x or 12x to get the difficulty of Statistics, which is Probablity meets Real World (^TM). Multiply *that* by another 5x or 7x combo factor when the Real World phenomenon under study happens to be the high-dimensional, anti-inductive, and value-laden Social World, where semi-coordinated groups of people navigate a semi-comprehensible world to achieve ill-defined goals. Population Thought Experiments never stood a chance.
Computer simulations are fantastic because all the countless assumptions and hidden steps are - MUST BE - spelled out right there in the code. Because everything can be made a parameter and sweeped for all possible values in its range. Because the results are huge arrays of numbers that can equally well be rendered as pretty pictures or sent as input to yet other computations to milk other insights from them.
I know it's unrealistic to expect writers, readers and people who like to think about questions in general to know programming *and* craft/follow an involved code+words mixed argument just for an essay. I'm not truly saying we should treat Population Thought Experiments with the exact same suspicion teleological reasoning or sex-metaphors-heavy psychoanalysis (and those ways of thought can - against all odds - be useful sometimes) are treated with, I'm just saying that... we should Raise Our Thresholds For Trusting The Results Of Such Ways Of Reasoning, so to speak.
And what's so bad about women faking bisexuality ? It has all the advantages of lesbianism, being very hot and beautiful in ways I can't articulate, but without the drawback of those women actually being out of reach. We Should Raise The Percentage Of Women Who Fake Their Bisexuality.
[1] https://nicolaerusan.medium.com/probability-why-intuition-fails-us-how-design-and-simulation-can-help-2e25483d714e
I can't speak for the rest of the world but no, where I am, in a rather liberal country, I don't think anyone is especially concerned about upsetting the 'straight men'. And even if 100% of people identifying this way were lying it would still annoy them if it was mentioned wouldn't it?
I don't quite understand what you're getting at in the last sentence, but I will reiterate my point anyway.
My point is that non-straight-men do not give a flying duck about upsetting straight men, so it's rather asymmetrical and unfair to demand that straight men shouldn't use a specific phrase to avoid upsetting bisexuals.
I have never seen any of the lgbt people say "Guys, let's stop doing/saying this thing because it upsets the straights". If anything, I have seen the exact opposite. So again, to put it very bluntly, why should I care whether a phrase or an opinion upsets the bisexuals or not ? They (and the rest of the larger group they belong to) have never done the same for me.
I absolutely agree. I'm not sure what you disagree with.
Ah, I don't disagree. I was just confused about the last sentence in the first comment, thought I would repeat my view to make sure we're on the same page.
Respectfully I reject this particular premise. I am gay, my best friend is straight, I mind his feelings all the time, and I find mocking and provoking straight people on the basis of their sexuality to be distasteful. Many of my lgbt friends are of the same opinion as me.
People are different, and just because you see some people act a certain way online, or in particular instances in your own life, does not mean that everyone who belongs to that group is the same! Its understandable that you feel hurt by the things you’ve seen other people say, but I find it less understandable to then make generalizations about entire groups of people, and ascribe those particular behaviors to those entire groups of people (for the purpose of withholding kindness from them). It isn’t a very rational thing to do, and the reality is that people are just more complicated than that. Being kind or mindful of upsetting someone is free and needs not be transactional, its something you can even do when you feel you aren’t getting it back...
You could apply the same logic of your comment as an explanation for why some lgbt people have negative opinions about straight ppl in the first place and might be compelled to offer distasteful opinions about them.
Again, this all relies upon the choice to make assumptions about an entire group of people that you don’t know. You lumping everyone in with these “bad guys” is your choice, your behavior, not the fault of someone else. Deciding an entire group of people are “bad guys” based on some angry tweets you saw online is irrational.
Similarly, it would be wrong of me to develop prejudices toward ALL straight people, based on the fact that I have received a very large amount of direct hatred from straight people in my lifetime (i would guess more than most straight ppl have ever received from an lgbt person). It is my OWN choice if I decide to blame an entire group of people for the actions of a few — that would be bigoted and prejudiced of me.
<i>You could apply the same logic of your comment as an explanation for why some lgbt people have negative opinions about straight ppl in the first place and might be compelled to offer distasteful opinions about them.</i>
Insulting gay people is against the law in most of the western world, and given the sexual demographics of human societies, it's a crime which is enforced largely by straight people.
I don't think it's irrational to treat groups homogeneously. I agree it's not an optimal solution, the optimal solution is that if all humans live in small groups (100-10000 members) so that each member can be individually known intimately by every other member and rewarded/punished according to their own behaviour as much as possible. Human societies have left this behind long time ago with the rise of city states, the moment you get >10000 people living together you *have to* either box multiple people into groups or.... just lose your ability to reason about people at all.
So in a society of millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions, I must homogenize, and I must homogenize into boxes that are really big. There are multiple strategies for that, multiple ways and criteria to consider different people as belonging in the same group. But make no mistake, I have to pick one and use it.
Even the very people that you say want to be treated as individuals, they themselves treat their group as a homogenous block and speak for it with one voice when it suits their purpose (e.g. when they want to assert that not liking a fictional character in a TV show or a video game is equivalent to bigotry), so that's really having it both ways. If I can't get away with "lgbt people don't give a shit about me", then an lgbt fellow shouldn't be able to get away with "You're bigoted because X", because 'bigoted' is an assertion about my judgement towards the entire lgbt, but X is a personal judgement that this particular fellow is computing. So how come they decided I'm bigoted against their entire group from reasoning that only happened in their brain ? If they were serious about "We're not a monolith", they should have asked a representative random sample before labelling me.
That last phenomenon happens a lot in my #1 hated faction among progressive ideologies, Feminism. It's really common there that if a woman defends men or pushback on the crazy talk even a little bit, she's called a pick-me girl seeking male approval. This what every female Men's Rights advocate ala Karen Straughan can attest to, but I have seen it happen on the scale of a single Facebook comment section. It pushes my fucking buttons, but ignore me for a moment, doesn't it reveal a fundamental belief held by feminists that "Feminism" is in fact a single monolithic block that can be reasonably compressed to "Say bad things about men" ? If they didn't believe so, why would they call their fellow feminists or other women "pick-me"s or other such unflattering labels that all mean "You're not a true feminist, you're a fake imposter seeking male approval" ?
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Your second point is whether being kind is free, and whether transactionalism is ok. I disagree with you on both. Being kind is not free, as a minimum it takes a lot of thought and consideration, careful rewording, repeated deference and relinquishment of initiative, etc..., all hard things to do. As for transactionalism, "Do Unto Others" is literally and explicitly a transactional attitude, and it's called the Golden Rule of Ethics. I agree that the amount of transactionalism should be tuned to the particular person and\or group you're dealing with : your blood family and sibling-level friends should be given a lot more slack than your close friends, which should be given more slack than mere acquaintances, which should be given more slack than complete strangers. But surely you don't disagree that there is *always* some point - we can disagree on where exactly it lies but never on whether it exists - at which you can say to the other party "I'm sick and tired of doing things that you never give back, I'm out" ? Surely, without that, bad people will exploit good people and milk their goodwill without ever returning it ?
So here we have a classical prisoner's dilemma. An endless recursion of "(S)he Started It !", of the sort that everyone who tried to moderate fighting children or angry spouses understand. I think it's okay to be an asshole to the lgbt people and feminists because they have been assholes with me plenty of times before, but - as they will probably say - they only do this because some other straight guy was an asshole to them, but I bet this guy was resentful because yet another was an asshole to them, etc..... This is a Molochy dynamic, it can easily end with collaboration, we can make a pact right now that whoever is asshole next gets punished and banished from their group. But who will enforce this ? What can you, a reasonable lgbt guy, gurantee me about the next psycho that insults me on reddit or youtube ? nothing. So it goes.
This is why I'm becoming increasingly resentful and hateful of the modern world and really the entire idea of civilization in general. It was never a good idea to take a monkey brain that evolved to deal with 100-1000 people, maybe 10000 max, and then shove it in cities with 100s of thousands, millions, or tens of millions of people. The only thing that came out of it is that people became amorphous blobs of identities and groups that make each other's life hell. "Democracy" is a bad joke given all of this, you can never solve the communication problems involved to make it actually fair or democratic, the resulting status quo is always the loudest/richest/most-well-connected mouths imposing their interests.
That's just how things are.
Neurodiversity also correlates to a bunch of other physical disorders like EDS and digestive system problems, likely because of underlying pervasive development disorders - I'm not sure why that makes it 'more likely to be psychosomatic' rather than 'body that went slightly wrong in development is more susceptible to cumulative damage'.
It's fairly clear by now from autopsy evidence that covid does a load of subtle damage most people just don't notice because it doesn't stop them functioning, but if you're already on the edge of not functioning (or just more adept at noticing small changes) it is more likely to tip you over.
Autopsy evidence is pretty specific. Everyone's had covid by now haven't they?
This is a really good point. It can be quite hard to tease out. ND people are more likely to express feeling pain, i.e. are "hypersensitive", but it's likely this hypersensitivity has a biological basis in the brain (more excitatory networks perhaps!). So to what extent is this "psychological?"
Or it might just be misattributing genuine symptoms. My ASD son has just been referred to a pediatrician for low energy and poor weight gain. If it weren't for the fact that I know for a fact he didn't get covid and my normal energy NT kid did, I might say it's long covid.
This is a point I made in comments on the last piece, which is to say that the CDCs list of symptoms of long COVID is so long, broad, and vague that anybody experiencing just about any disease, disorder, illness, or abnormality could probably find *something* that fits, if they wanted to. (consciously or unconsciously)
If you were less informed and/or more motivated to be alarmist, you could be posting here that your son had long COVID with those symptoms and nobody could really gainsay you.
I think I found a typo
"before identities were scrip that could be exchanged for trendiness points, "
"scrip" should be "scripts"
Scrip is a word for non-standard currency
Interestingly, "script" is also usable almost anywhere "scrip" would be more appropriate, being short for "prescription", which is also a piece of paper that can be exchanged for goods and/or services in a non-standard way.
True, but I would argue "scrip" has the connotation of being a direct replacement for currency in a way that "script" doesn't.
Re: signaling value—I am considering reclassifying myself as straight on all-gender dating sites because right now 90% of my intros there are from gay men who clearly didn't read my profile and are probably just swiping right on everyone because for gay men on an all-genders site, "everyone" in your area is like 100 people. Even though I do want to remain open to male matches, my non-gender-related preferences are discriminating enough to rule out at least 99/100 people, and my intros from women are much more likely to be people with whom I share common interests just by virtue of them having so many other alternatives. I don't *want* to cut off potential matches with men, and I don't *want* to signal as straight (signaling as bi has the pleasant side-effect of filtering out homophobes), but being categorized as bi significantly lowers the signal-noise ratio.
https://i.imgur.com/DACxRKN.png (The size of the overlaps is inaccurate, the point is that they all exist)
I don't really care if people are "faking" it or not. I'm saying that people are confusing the black circle for one of the other circles.
The questions we should be asking are: "What makes some women identify as bi and others not?", "What are the different things people signal when they identify as bi and why do they want to signal those things?", "What makes people more susceptible to psychosomatic or sociogenic illnesses?"
The retreat into talking about bisexuality in the more concrete, "real-world" sense is interesting but it avoids the occam's razor explanation of the long-covid correlation.
Mike’s explanation is clever but it fails to explain higher rates of young women identifying as Trans as well. Since there are actually a lot less FtMs that MtFs in reality.
Just personal anecdata, but I have noticed some (I think?) systematic differences / strong trends semantically between women and men, as relates to sexual orientation- what people mean by 'gay', 'bisexual', etc.
In short, men have a strong tendency to use arousal-based definitions, and to use patterns of arousal as diagnostic. Whereas women have an equally strong tendency to use behavior-based definitions, where lesbianism and bisexuality to mean openness to actually dating someone of the same sex, whether or not you find them attractive. For example, I've seen lesbian friends ask their partners to stop identifying as 'bisexual' and start identifying as 'lesbian' for the duration of the relationship, because it felt to them like the girlfriend was saying the relationship was temporary.
Man was not made for the categories etc.; both of these definitions have their merits. But it's interesting to me that the arousal-based definition is something that's most useful in a community where homosexual arousal is quite rare, and there's a high correlation between same-sex arousal and same-sex activity. Contrast with the behavioral-based definition, which is more useful in a community where same-sex arousal is a poor predictor of same-sex sexual activity, that is, one in which bisexual arousal is common and same-sex intercourse is not.
(It could also speak to patterns where sexual arousal is more intrusive or acute in men than women, on average; that also seems like a pretty likely contender.)
makes sense given the sexual differences between men and women..
Just want to suggest long-covid may not be psychosomatic because it's associated with being bisexual which is
associated with stress/mental illness. Consider this...
"There were positive associations between mental health disorders, all cancers and lung cancer risk, however with the exception of anxiety and lung cancer in women (Hazard Ratio [HR] = 1.67, 95% CI: 1.01–2.76), associations were attenuated with adjustment for sociodemographics, health status and lifestyle factors."
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0281588
Stress and mental illness leads to higher cortisol, etc., which leads to an increased risk of a real and long-term physical disorder! Just classic mind-body connection stuff. So being bisexual could be associated with more stress, mental illness, etc., which leads to a cascade of physical and immunological changes.
So link is bisexual (or some other sexuality...) <-> stress/mental illness -> physical/life style changes (cortisol, drug use, sleep, std rate, etc.,) -> greater risk of the body having long-covid.
I also find it interesting the link wasn't seen among homosexual patients which in theory should have a greater rate of mental illness when compared to bisexual patients. For me, that's a strong signal ethier the link is a false positive or is not strongly related to mental illness (why the inconsistency?).
I think the association between mental disorders and lung cancer is mostly because mentally ill people smoke. I was able to find https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5855217/ , which doesn't seem to show much cancer difference by sexual orientation except in very obvious ones (HIV-related, smoking related).
I agree there's some chance Long COVID could be caused by smoking, although I can't figure out exactly what the pathway would be - if it was frank lung damage, I think it would mostly happen in very severe cases; it seems more immunological to me.
Thanks for the reply! Huge fan by the way (:
Oh I actually did some brief googling and found this. Not sure what this means but I'll just leave this hear for your sake. There indeed does seem to be a strange link between smoking and the dreaded long-covid.
"Desgranges et al. in a study whose objective was characterize the post-COVID-19 syndrome after mild COVID-19 and identify predictors found that active smoking was a predictor of memory impairment. Hossain et al.8 have identified smoking, among others, as a key predictor for the presence of long COVID-19, in terms of associated risk factor and also as a risk factor that was associated with a longer duration of long COVID illness."
https://www.elsevier.es/en-revista-open-respiratory-archives-11-avance-resumen-are-smoking-vaping-risk-factors-S2659663622000418
Cool. It would be nice to motivate more people to stop smoking with the ominous warning they will develop "long-covid" if they don't stop. Maybe it might hit home better than warning them to stop for cancer, etc.
Immune derangement triggered by smoking apparently isn't limited to the lungs, though it's concentrated there.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5352117/
Similar might be said of immune derangement associated with reactive airway disease. Having a reactive airway disease is a sign not just of lung weirdness, but immune weirdness generally, even if the best course of treatment is to treat the lungs directly (with, say, inhaled steroid) rather than to treat the whole body.
I’m not finding where in that last linked study it says most women experience both-sex arousal, seems to mostly be about same-sex attraction being linked to masculine non-sexual traits? I’d be curious about that.
I'm sceptical those studies measure what they're actually trying to measure. Women are aroused by sexual *situations*, not aroused by looking at naked bodies, the way that men are. If you show a woman lesbian porn and she gets aroused, that doesn't mean she's a lesbian, it just means she finds lesbian porn arousing, anymore than a lesbian watching straight porn (which, btw, they do! A lot) means she's heterosexual. To me it very much feels like inappropriately applying a model from male sexuality to female sexuality.
I'm a fake bisexual! Who has actually dated women in the past. About 20% of my total lifetime partners were woman (I ended up with a man, as one does.) I would say I'm actually kind of bad at introspection? I ended up being bisexual because women are pretty and men are ugly, and when I was younger I hadn't figured out that that being physically attractive isn't the same as sexual attraction at that point. But, I primarily get turned on from having sex with men, even though they're as a whole gross looking. So, in the end, I've decided I'm straight, actually. Female sexuality is WEIRD.
I have a friend with the same opinions/history.
"when I was younger I hadn't figured out that that being physically attractive isn't the same as sexual attraction"
What? I'm probably older than you (going purely by the statistical age distribution of this blog's readership) and I haven't figured that out *now*. Is this just another male-female difference? To me, this is basically a definitional identity. "Physically attractive" *means* "sexually attractive", it's just a slight euphemism for polite company, the way "gender" was for "sex" universally until a few years ago and still is for most people.
Yeah, as a man I'm with you here. Physically attractive and sexually attractive are total synonyms to me. Both are separate from romantic compatibility, of course. I could be physically/sexually attracted to a woman who I hate as a person. And vice versa, I can be dear friends with a woman I have no sexual attraction to. But being turned on by sex with people I find "as a whole gross looking" is a fundamental contradiction in terms from my perspective.
I don't pretend to speak for my whole sex, but yes, I do think this is a male-female difference.
I talk downthread about how I don't think the studies showing women are aroused equally by lesbian, heterosexual, and gay porn actually indicates universal bisexuality. Women's sexual arousal is more situational, it's not about how visually attractive a person is.
I think in common parlance we might talk more about "sexual chemistry." But, for instance, in grad school I knew this guy who was short, pudgy, and ugly. But we stayed up late one night having drinks on a roof and I liked him personally, and then when we got down to it the sex was GREAT.
Another dude I hooked up with later who I thought was *pretty* but when it came down to it I wasn't sexually attracted to him at all; we had sex and I was totally unmoved. Him being visually attractive wasn't enough to turn me on (and in fact, generally never is). Sexual attraction is a bit ineffable for me, but as far as I can tell it's not really correlated with someone being pretty/handsome.
That's interesting, and weird insofar as it contradicts my personal anecdata: it's always been my experience that the men around me who had the most success with women were the most handsome, and proportionally to their looks. (And it's not just some "oh, their looks just gave them more confidence to approach" thing either, this includes women hitting on *them*.)
In particular, the most handsome guy I know is completely the boss of his wife to this day, not because she's naturally weak or because he's brutal and controlling but because she's acutely aware that he could replace her in an instant if he felt like it. He doesn't feel like it, he loves her sincerely as far as I know, but the mere awareness still visibly affects the balance of their relationship.
"Long COVID also correlates with pretty much every mental illness, and it correlates more with psychiatrist-diagnosed illnesses than self-diagnosed ones, so I think that provides extra evidence that it is a neurodivergence effect, which is also sufficient to explain the bisexuality effect."
A possible way to adjudicate between this hypothesis and the 'signaling/cool points' hypothesis might be to find phenomena which are more uncontroversially just 'cool point' garnering and see how strongly correlated they are with bisexuality and long covid.
To answer as to why people don't use the term (including people who "know" they are, to some degree, bisexual and accept the definition internally for themselves), there are a few reasons I have come across, as a bisexual (my own "split" is more 90/10 straight/same).
One is that the term lacks descriptiveness. That is, even if people take the label at face value, many (especially straight people) will assume that it means 50/50, which is a different person than the one I am, or even than the more typical 75/25. It doesn't seem to describe a lot of actually bisexual people very well, because it means something to straight people in particular that is not really reflective of what many bisexual people are, in fact, in terms of their attractions.
Another is that the term is disfavored and doubted by many. Many gay men simply think bisexual men don't exist, and are gay men in denial, regardless of what we actually say (this is ironic, of course, but it is common nonetheless). Many straight people make the kind of argument that has been discussed in these last few posts to the effect that if one mostly dates people of the opposite sex, then how bisexual are you, anyway, really, because they have neither crunched the numbers and done the analysis you've laid out in this post (and, to be honest, can't be reasonably expected to do so -- I mean why would the average straight person care?), nor have they had the personal experience that results in the numbers you discuss. But it seems like in many cases the term causes more dissonance than anything else, and it is easier to assume the label associated with one's primary dating pool, which for most bisexual people is the straight dating pool -- there are exceptions, as well, as you experienced with the lesbian who was actually a very lesbian leaning bisexual woman who chose, in the same way, to identify with her primary dating pool rather than use a label which was technically correct but otherwise mis-stated her general practice and history in dating and relationships.
Finally, bisexuality is a different kind of label than heterosexual or homosexual, because there is no such thing as a bisexual relationship. It is merely an umbrella term that captures sexual orientations which are not more or less "strictly" same sex or opposite sex in nature. But the actual relationships that a bisexual engages in are either heterosexual relationships (which is the most common for the reasons you cite here) or homosexual ones, and in both cases the person slips into the norms and assumptions and mores and behaviors of that specific relationship culture -- they don't exist in a "bisexual relationship culture", because there is no such thing. I think because of this there is also a much weaker personal link to the label than there is for heterosexual and homosexual oriented people, because there isn't an entire relationship (and sex) culture associated with it -- in the end, it is an umbrella term that lumps together in one "holding" category a lot of individually different permutations of not being perfectly straight or gay, and this goes a long way to explaining why the label is often so tenuously held by people who are, in fact, bisexual to some degree, if it is indeed held at all.
Some someone explain why many conditions seem to correlate with sexual identities but are not seen in reverse?
I am beginning to feel that if somebody was to identify as bisexual I would consider them to be inherently unreliable, perhaps a liar in a general sense. I don't like feeling that way, can anyone tell me why I'd be wrong?
It's probably pretty subjective, just like everything else. For me, I think I say I dated someone if we snogged more than twice.
This thread/topic desperately needs a little clip from Ron White https://youtu.be/yVxZKOhLPco
I'm more of the opinion that everyone is bi. No one is 100% straight nor 100% gay. What's more, if we subscribe to this idea, one's "sexuality" no longer makes any of us special. Which would be nice as the west can't stop drooling over the idea that you can be special depending on what you do with your genitals.
What makes you think that you know better than me and all the other people who believe ourselves to be attracted solely to one sex? I feel like you'd need pretty strong evidence to conclude that billions of people are mistaken about something so basic about themselves and how they experience the world.
I think there is some truth to the idea that many more people are bi than we realize. But I wouldn’t say everyone, I don’t think its quite so all-encompassing. My best friend of 10 years is 100% a straight man & I wouldn’t doubt that for a second, and speaking for myself, I am 100% gay. I have never experienced attraction to a woman. It would have made my life much easier if I was actually bisexual!
I also don’t understand the ideas that seem to be common in this comment section about “being special” — I have never been given a reason to feel special for being gay lol. There are no secret advantages, I don’t get discounts at restaurants, or a bigger tax return, or any real world special social treatment. I am well at peace with my sexuality but it’s sort of been a source of pain for me more than anything else. My teenage years were hell, and I’m glad that society has at least changed since then and I can achieve a sense of normalcy instead of being reviled or a topic of tribe vs. tribe culture war political debate, but I don’t feel like anyone is drooling over the idea that I’m special just because Chase bank runs some corny rainbow-colored television ads in June or whatever lol, or because of some militant twitter activists.
I think you should raise your threshold on accusing people of faking heterosexuality.
Anecdotal evidence, of course, but I'm a man who is well into adulthood now and I can say with 100% certainty that I have never once in my life been sexually attracted to or romantically interested in another man. As Roman said it is possible (perhaps likely) that bisexuality is more common than most people think but the idea that nobody is 100% straight or 100% gay is fairly absurd.
To flip the script a bit, going to a lesbian woman and saying "come on, you've got to be at least a little bit into fucking men" would correctly be viewed as insanely offensive.
Also the name of the dude in your link is Ron, not Jon.
"No one is 100% straight nor 100% gay."
I am reminded of the point that 0.0 and 1.0 aren't really legitimate probabilities, that they require an infinite number of bits of evidence to justify. On the other hand, "rounds to 0.0" and "rounds to 1.0" are quite common and quite useful...
Thank you for writing this.
As a somewhat bi man who has exclusively dated women, I've always struggled with this--am I allowed to identify as bi? I'm not taking any of the risks that come with a queer identity, just occasionally ogling guys on the subway. I found this essay validating.
A lot of your first section focuses on why bi women end up in hetero relationships--bi men have a lot of complementary problems. E.g. every time I make myself available to men, I get completely overwhelmed for the usual reasons that every heterosexual woman already viscerally appreciates.
There's also (IMO) increased social stigma against bi men than bi women. And as a bi-male-Canadian friend of mine put it: "in Canada, when I say I'm bi, it means I date men and women. In the US, it just means I'm gay."
The genital arousal stats are interesting, but I'm not sure how much we should trust them. Young teenage Catholic me felt physical discomfort when I saw two men kissing (I have one very specific memory here), enough that it would probably kill any arousal. So I wonder how much social stigma influences the results--it will be interesting to see if the numbers change over time as LGBTQ identities gain more acceptance.
How can you struggle this? What do you mean by struggle?
I have mostly avoided identifying as bisexual, because I feel like "I'm not gay enough" to do so, even though I'm clearly attracted to men. It feels like whether I say "I'm straight" or "I'm bi", I'm being somewhat dishonest, because the situation is more nuanced than either label.
One approach I've seen used elsewhere in this thread is to attach percentages to it. If someone were to respond that they were "80% Straight" to the range of questions you might answer with some mix of bi or straight, would you feel that to answer the question well?
Yeah I do this. Usually if there's enough space for me to provide context it's nbd. But do I check the "LGBTQ" box on my employer's diversity survey? That's where I get tripped up.
Depends how ethical you feel like being. ;)
Given how I feel about diversity surveys, I'd go on a few OKCupid dates and call it. I can even tell you you have a nice butt, and if you respond in kind you've now engaged in online flirting with a man. ;)
I hear ya man. I'm more or less in your position. I feel like from progressive ethics I'm supposed to take the L and identify as a straight man so everyone can treat me like crap, but I'm not sure it's true and my experiments in this regard have been...underwhelming.
(I've read the stuff on your blog BTW, fascinating stuff...though can you get anything out of the Tao Te Ching without learning Mandarin? Seems like all the paradoxes and so on would be lost in translation.)
Thanks! Yeah I've honestly toyed with the idea of learning some Mandarin (also Sanskrit and German) to be able to look more closely at source texts. I usually end up reading at least 2-3 different translations of the same text for something as dense as the Tao Te Ching (I think I have 4 or 5 of that one in particular).
I'm pretty sure I'm missing half the wordplay and nuance in the Zhuangzi though, no matter how many translations I pick up.
Honestly unsure how much Mandarin (or, frankly, any other Sinitic language) will help. I was taught the classics in Cantonese, so that's my default setting, but Old Chinese is just too far removed from its descendants for any of them to help, I think. Beyond the basic idea of being able to sound out the words, of course.
Once you get to Middle Chinese, it's a different matter, but for Old Chinese, most differences are a rounding error.
Learning Mandarin specifically seems a bit pointless since the Taoist classics weren't written in Mandarin. It's easy to forget, I guess, given how hard the Chinese government tries to suppress awareness of Chinese linguistic variety, but Classical Chinese came into being more than one Latin ago and was used like Latin in the Sinosphere pretty much right up to the Communist revolution.
OK, you know, you're right. I should have thought of that. Standard Mandarin was made in the 20th century.
Just leaving a comment to say I appreciate you bringing awareness to the situation!
i think that graph warrants a little bit more explanation in this article. As labeled, it shows a secular *increase* in the number of bisexual women who have had male-only partners in the past five years, suggesting that increased willingness of women to identify as bisexual (and thus a presumably larger same-sex dating pool for women) *negatively* correlates with the number of women who have had at least one female romantic partner between 2008 and 2023.
The linked article provides the presumptive explanation - last sentence is key ("Figure 9 illustrates the statistically significant finding that the share of bisexual women who report having only had male sexual partners over the past five years has risen since 2012. A rising share of women with heterosexual behavior is choosing to identify as bisexual."). But I think the result is somewhat counterintuitive and would benefit from an explicit note that the explanation for this appears to be explained by willingness to identify as bi in a manner decoupled from sexual behavior, rather than the ostensible explanation suggested the graph by itself without this context: that as the same-sex dating pool for women grows, the proportion of bisexual women with female sexual partners *shrinks.*
This supports the trendiness hypothesis
What do Americans count as 'dating'?
Americans are not entirely consistent on what does and does not count as dating, "going steady", so forth. To my personal understanding:
Opening moves in the dating process include asking someone else onto a date, which commonly involves a meal and/or a recreational activity. By the third time this happens the two are definitely dating, the first and second events may count as "not yet dating" or "dating for a very short time" depending, especially if further asks are declined.
Someone who is regularly going on dates with multiple different people is themselves "Dating" but is clearly "not steady" with any one person. The other partners may or may not be aware of each other, which can lead to drama when discovered.
A pair of people who are engaged to be married are "no longer dating and instead engaged".
A pair of people who live in the same house, enjoy each others intimate company, but have not legally married are probably still dating but this position is sometimes argued against.
This is a category discussion, which is particularly difficult for certain communities (because they fight the nature of categories, argue about boundaries, basically philosophy major types). That said, seems odd to claim someone wants X, but never tries X, no matter what the numbers say. Also seems odd to conflate "arousal" and what someone actually "desires." Many folk have fantasized about X, only to be disgusted upon having X. Also somewhat odd because this suggests proverbial goat herd is actually "attracted" to goats, rather than opportunistic (back to arousal vs desire). That ability, ability to be aroused by X doesn't mean one is necessarily an Xian. Also doesn't seem to do enough with men playing the more active, "aggressive" role, which might mean it makes sense for women to focus on to what they are potentially receptive (even if those stereotypes now disfavored). But on that note, odd to suggest there's just relatively so little opportunity for women to be bi so they just default to men in most cases (as your use of numbers suggests), given the very intimate friendships, hours spent together alone, and very high chance you're female friend is willing to explore too (that is, with enough opportunities, 10% pays out very frequently over time). Finally, can't note the irony of how comfortable people seem with all these various label, knowing exactly what we mean by X and Y, and also A, B, C, even though in other contexts we're supposed to pretend these terms don't have any sort of fixed, accepted meaning.
There's also a big difference between self-reporting willingness to do X, and actually "wanting" to do X, as demonstrated by doing X. There are many contexts in which people are sure they will love X, based on watching it, reading about it, etc., and then the time comes to (e.g.) rock climb or bungee jump or whatever, the reality is different. That is, arousal can be real, but doesn't necessarily correlate to willingness to follow through. Note that, for those who actually do love to bungee jump, that may seem like an insulting point, but shouldn't be (not about you, who actually do "desire" X). And also doesn't mean anyone's "faking" anything (except maybe the person in bed with not X (sorry, couldn't resist)).
That’s a good point on the claiming fake Xers being insulting to real Xers. In most subcultures posers are actively disliked and outed by the community, or at least just looked down on compared to “Real Xers.” The insult aspect makes me update slightly towards there being more fakers than one would think, as only fakers would be insulted that fakers were called out.
This reminds me of the voluminous and intense and unending discussion of what real X vs poser X are.
Where X = Star Wars fan, socialist, etc., etc., etc.
Good point. A related point is that there are many people who *want* to be the kind of person who loves rock climbing, but just...don't love rock climbing. I want to be the kind of person who rides her bike across the Pyrenees, but I'd actually hate it. For many people, bisexuality might fit into this category.
"Suppose someone (let’s say a woman) has exactly equal sexual attraction to both men and women.
Their male dating pool is all heterosexual and bisexual men (95%+ of men), and their female dating pool is all lesbian and bisexual women (about 5-10% of women). So their potential dating pool is about 90% male. So this “perfectly” bisexual woman could be expected to date about 10x as many men as women, just by numbers alone."
Perhaps this would be the case in a rural area. From my (admittedly limited) experience, women who identify as lesbian or bisexual end up with a pool of acquaintances that are not even close to balanced that way - they end up talking to women.
I think this is an excellent point. Assuming one’s friends + acquaintances circle has the same structure as the country at large is almost certainly false, especially as one has less average preferences. It also ignores the fact that gay/lesbian bars and eg Tinder exist, places you can specifically meet people of the same sec who are interested in yours.
Andrew Sulivan (and others) wrote, a year or two ago, about how Lesbian bars are dieing out and hypothesized that this was because so few young women identify as Lesbian, either because they are now some other part of LGBQT+ and/or because it just isn't cool to identify as Lesbian any more.
I shared this with some Lesbian/Bi/etc., family members and after much discussion they decided that this was oversimplified but basically true.
That's interesting. I would imagine the internet and online dating is hurting things too, as there are other options for finding "people with X sexual preferences" making bars less important. I don't go to bars so it is outside my wheelhouse by a wide margin, but I could see a book on the rise and fall of specialty theme bars across subcultures being pretty interesting.
Lesbian and bisexual women in the present tend to stop going to gay bars after they get into a relationship. Lesbian bars as a place of shelter from homophobia aren’t as necessary anymore since you can hold hands or dance with your partner in many places. Basically, since women don’t look for casual sex as much as men, lesbian bars are less economically viable than gay bars. Online dating also contributes.
I suspect it may also be that the stereotypical lesbian is less likely to be interested in the bar scene than the stereotypical gay.
Of course stereotypes are not universal, but they do have some basis.
Yeah treating this as a purely numbers game struck me as odd, and not a mistake Scott would normally make.
The people you date are not a random sample of the people in your area that might plausibly be attracted to. And most people are not purely passive daters - you will in some way seek out the sort of people you are interested.
Your last footnote struck me as odd. As a straight guy I don't feel like I benefit from men not hitting on me. Like your "mostly lesbian" friend, you may decide to make an unexpected exception (although being married rules this out for me). More options are good. And even if there really is a zero chance of taking them up on it, it's always nice to know people are in to you. (I'll caveats all this with women (straight or otherwise) may have reasons not to want men to hit on them).
OTOH, it does seem beneficial to gay and bisexuality men for straight to mean straight. Straight meaning "probably straight, but maybe not" can lead to wasted time, disappointment and even risk of harm (although hopefully that last one is less likely than it once was).
"My friend explained that the acquaintance was mostly lesbian but a little bisexual and it hadn’t come up before. This distinction ended up being very important to me, and I don’t know who it serves to encourage people to hide it."
Your acquaintance was served, she mostly wanted men to not ask her out on dates, and lacking a socially recognized term for "don't ask me out on dates unless it's just perfect", she used the term for "don't ask me out on dates at all" and managed to get mostly what she wanted.
Also note that a lot of homosexual individuals prefer not to date bisexuals owing to an experience gap (and also straight people experimenting resulting in multiple failed relationships, or seeing bisexual people who broke up with them settle down with an opposite-sex partner and assuming that the issue was one of sexuality rather than other incompatibilities which for many people may feel like a better option, might create a distaste for these potential relationships); my personal experience was approximately 50%.
Additionally, homosexual individuals may, because of their limited dating pool, relocate to areas more conducive to their desires (larger cities / areas with higher concentrations of homosexual people); I think bisexual individuals won't feel this pressure as acutely. (Certainly I didn't.)
These, I think, combine to exaggerate the effect far more than might otherwise be expected; even a bisexual person who makes a specific effort to date same-sex partners may find some additional difficulty finding any, relatively.
The more relevant dating pool for bisexual people, I think, is - other bisexual people. I've noticed that most of my partners have been some degree of bisexual, and most of their partners have been some degree of bisexual. And this, I think, might be somehow important.
"seeing bisexual people who broke up with them settle down with an opposite-sex partner and assuming that the issue was one of sexuality rather than other incompatibilities which for many people may feel like a better option"
+1 to this, I personally have known lesbians to feel that bisexual women "always want to go back to dick sooner or later" and are very unreliable/untrustworthy for this reason. I assume this fear is far from ubiquitous, but I also assume it's more commonly held than it is clearly articulated, especially around men.
There is now stigma among the LGBT community to openly express honest sentiments like this, especially among women. So lesbians are very unlikely to articulate this sentiment to others in the community if they want to keep their friends and have people to date.
But 20% of young women are identifying as bi. So if you repeat the analysis with that number, then only about 20% of bi women should report not having a prior female partner.
Assuming that here: "Most of them tune out the opposite-sex arousal and go through life honestly identifying as straight."
You meant: "Most of them tune out the *same-sex* arousal and go through life honestly identifying as straight."
WRT social conditioning. It's worth remembering that essentially ALL Spartan men were in homosexual relationships. Also classical literature indicates that many Athenian men considered sex with their wives a duty. So social conditioning at least CAN be quite dominant. (OTOH, of course, a lot of Spartan men were killed if they weren't willing to be in a homosexual relationship. The phalanx sort of depended on maximal bonding.)
I think you've confused Spartans and a specific unit of Thebans. AFAIK there's no evidence of Spartan military homosexuality, Xenophon for example says that the older veterans each taking on a younger recruit as a protégé is supposed to be an idealized friendship, not sexual.
It would not surprise me if the fraction of women that can claim to be bisexual on this definition is nearly 100%. This is anecdotal, I know, but I have known a number of women who attended women's colleges and virtually all of them had lesbian relationships. Lesbian until graduate was a real thing well before it become fashionable to be bisexual.
Of course, it could be just that bisexuals are more likely to attend women's colleges or that I happened to know a clique of particularly bisexual women. However, it has always been my impression that sexuality for women is much more fuzzy in its boundaries than it is for men.
It also means I don't think bisexual women are anything special and that I think a lot of them are putting themselves forward as bisexual because it is fashionable rather than because it has any actual special meaning to their identity.
I'm not sure if there's a word for this kind of truthful hypocrisy.
There's this weird hesitancy to acknowledge that, for many physical acts that provide pleasure, if you close your eyes, may be hard to tell who's providing the pleasure, and may be somewhat irrelevant. So it shouldn't be surprising that flexibility on this point may in large part turn on environment, social costs, etc. But that doesn't mean there isn't a real preference that may not be accurately reflected by actions. E.g., if you're sportsball fan of team X, but they don't make playoffs, you may root for team Y. But that doesn't mean team Y is "really" your team. So a large part of this seems definitional, in terms of are you saying X means willing to dabble without consequences, seriously interested in both alternatives, being opportunistic, being open to new experience, being ambivalent, etc. (I don't think almost anyone denies someone of same sex could get them off in the abstract, even if many deny they'd ever permit that to happen, they'd be repulsed, etc., and frequently not just the repression talking).
I was one of the "yeah, bisexual people tend to like to have quirky labels" folks and I basically agree with this article. As a general rule I think just about anyone (with some exceptions) can be attracted to both men or women and most folks tend not to acknowledge that and continue to identify as straight. For instance, I am certain there are circumstances in which I could find men appealing - attractive male and attractive female faces aren't that different for one thing. Nonetheless I've only dated women, only pursued women, and suspect if I suddenly found myself single I would pursue women. In my mind that makes me straight, but I wouldn't be offended if people thought I was bi or whatever.
Nonetheless, just anecdotally there's a significant overlap between people in my life who identify as bisexual and people in my life who respond to another person's story by telling about how the same thing happened to them but it was so so much worse and can we please talk about how victimized I am and also I have eight chronic illnesses. Folks who despite enjoying all the benefits of being a straight cis white man/woman complain constantly about straight cis men and women, y'know?
And I feel like that's probably relevant to the question even if everyone's bisexual and bisexual folks are more correct about their orientation than others. In fact, take out my annoying, unfounded value judgments and you might get something like "bisexual folks are more in-tune with their bodies, their needs, and their inner life than you, you repressed asshole." Nonetheless, I think that probably accounts for at least some of the correlation between bisexuality and long Covid.
"As a general rule I think just about anyone (with some exceptions) can be attracted to both men or women"
As a general rule? No. That is ridiculous unless you have some special definition of "attracted to".
Why you think that?
Based on a study of n=my dog, animals will put their dicks into any compatible hole unless strong social mediation discourages this behavior. There are better arguments, like the observation that our closest animal relatives tend to be bisexual and that pre-abrahamic religion there were cultures where the default was bisexuality, but this was the funniest one I could think of.
The "default" was bisexuality? No.
Your dog's behavior sounds like hyper auto-eroticism which I don't think has much to do with sexual preference, does it?
At least half of the dudes having sex in prison want it. The idea that most people are a little bit bi makes sense.
1. At least half having - no. Not necessarily a 1 to 1 consensual relationship.
2. % having versus total of all inmates?
The amount of confused reasoning is ridiculous.
1) Hmm. It could be possible that a single powerful gay or bi prisoner is coercing multiple straight prisoners into sex.
2) Fair enough...
Here's my wild conjecture, based on the spoons model of disability.
In the original model, a disability (especially a chronic and fatigue-inducing one - the original example was Lupus) is like having a limited budget of spoons per day, and each activity you do costs a number of spoons. Extra spoons do not carry over to the next day, and going over your spoon budget has bad effects including reducing your spoon budget in the future (the more you overspend, the worse the effects). Managing such a disability means carefully budgeting with your spoons (which costs extra spoons to do).
What if everyone had a spoon budget, but a normal working day costs around 100 spoons, and a non-disabled person's daily budget is 120 or something - the spoon fairy supplies their budget like everyone else, but they don't notice because they don't have to actively budget with their spoons. A mild disability might put you around the 90s and a more severe impairment is trying to survive on 50 a day or so?
In this model, what if the effect of long covid is something like -5 spoons/day? The person who used to get 120 and spend 100 is now on 115 / 100 and barely notices except on the most stressful days (excess spoons get discarded at the end of the day after all so you don't see something like less compound interest in your spoon account). But the person whose average day used to cost 100 against a budget of 100 - maybe their comorbidities are what's causing the reduced spoon budget in the first place - will absolutely notice the missing 5! And the person who's already actively budgeting their previous 80 spoons/day allowance will absolutely have to adapt to getting 5 more deducted.
In summary: there's a possible model where long covid is not psychosomatic, but still affects people with comorbidities that put them closer to their coping limits in the first place worse than healthier people who have enough slack to deal with the extra effects.
Personally, I agree with Scott's other posts that it's silly to make a distinction between psychosomatic and "real" conditions, I'm just saying there's a possible model to explain why long covid would get noticed more in already otherwise impaired people that doesn't involve a psychosomatic component.
That's super charitable, and thus admirable in some ways, on the psychosomatic/real distinction (and completely agree on the spoons possibility). But there really are malingers, people who claim disability they don't deserve, people who embrace being ill, etc. And where there's money at stake, whether healthcare costs, employment, whatever, there's good reason to distinguish between the two. Similarly, you would expect treatment to change based on whether "psychosomatic" or "real" (we have this problem where we pretend like the psychological isn't based in the physical, and thus similarly physiological at some level), so it seems relevant to assess, rather than unnecessarily harsh. That is, you can agree the goal is to make people happy/better/healthy, regardless of whether "psychosomatic" or "real," yet still find it very valuable to distinguish between the two.
I agree with you that malingerers and profiteers exist. I do think that "psychosomatic" and "malingering" are two separate axes though.
I also agree with you on separate treatment - if someone has leg pains that turn out to be psychosomatic, then it's reasonable that they get something like therapy for the underlying causes rather than physiotherapy for the leg.
Malingerers (who do exist) aside, I would buy that. Life's full of all these little marginal effects.
Unrelated to the topic at hand: When I click on a link to a reference (the small 1, 2 and 3) to go to it, or to go to where it was in the article, it takes almost two full seconds to go to it. This is a terrible experience.
re bisexual women seeking dates with women:
"getting dates with women is hard, for the usual reasons that every heterosexual man already viscerally appreciates"
Do all of the usual reasons fully apply in this case? Women contemplating dates with men have to worry about accidental pregnancy (absent in this case) and potential violence (much reduced - e.g. the male killer/female killer ratio is around 7:1) so I'd expect less hesitancy from these considerations for women considering dates with women.
Aren't lesbian women more physically abusive than men?
Oops, I'm not sure. I was going by differences in female/male murder statistics https://www.statista.com/statistics/251886/murder-offenders-in-the-us-by-gender/ Do you have a url that splits out the numbers by sexual orientation? Many Thanks!
I have seen a statistic many times that the highest rates of domestic violence are in lesbian relationships. I don't know about murder. I would assume there's no way lesbians commit as much murder as men. Maybe intimate partner murder, though.
Ok, let me see what I can find about lesbian domestic violence. If I find a url and update this comment to include it, could you take a look and see if it is the sort of thing that you had in mind?
Elliot, P. (1996). Shattering Illusions: Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services, 4(1), 1–8. doi:10.1300/j041v04n01_01
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J041v04n01_01
has "The reality is that domestic violence occurs at approximately the same rate in gay and lesbian relationships as it does in heterosexual unions." in their abstract. I was hoping for a nice comparative table in the body of the article (thanks, sci_hub!) but the closest I got was: "Preliminary studies show that 22% to 46% of all lesbians have been in a physically violent same-sex relationship."
https://www.advocate.com/crime/2014/09/04/2-studies-prove-domestic-violence-lgbt-issue
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/11/a-same-sex-domestic-violence-epidemic-is-silent/281131/
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29994648
By the way, men and women are about equally likely to kill an intimate partner:
Men, women, and murder: gender-specific differences in rates of fatal violence and victimization
A L Kellermann 1, J A Mercy
"Although the overall risk of homicide for women was substantially lower than that of men (rate ratio [RR] = 0.27), their risk of being killed by a spouse or intimate acquaintance was higher (RR = 1.23). In contrast to men, the killing of a woman by a stranger was rare (RR = 0.18). ... In contrast to men, who killed nonintimate acquaintances, strangers, or victims of undetermined relationship in 80% of cases, women killed their spouse, an intimate acquaintance, or a family member in 60% of cases."
Many Thanks! That is interesting information, and was quite a surprise to me, given the coarser information I'd had on male killer/female killer ratios overall.
>Sex researchers have done something kind of like this by showing people porn and monitoring genital arousal
I wonder if this is vicarious though? For instance straight women talk about focusing on the woman when watching straight porn instead of the men because they're imagining being them, it's a kind of vicarious sexual excitement.
As other comments have noted, female physical arousal is not very well linked to subjective reports of arousal. This could be explained by female arousal being more about *getting ready for sex* - this also makes sense when you consider that women usually 'receive' sex rather than initiate it, so just observing sexual activity might be a signal for the body to start preparing (whether she wants it or not). In contrast, men would feel arousal only when they want to activity *initiate* sex, and so arousal would be much more linked to attraction.
Also, anecdotally, as a bi women who has pursued women in the past, there have been several instances where a woman says she thinks I'm attractive, even comes close to going out with me, but realises she actually doesn't want to do anything sexual with a woman. Maybe I'm just a really bad date, but these things make me doubt the 'most women are really bisexual' view. I'm more inclined to believe these arousal studies show something like - women are much more likely than men to prepare for sexual encounter when viewing something sex-related.
For personal reasons, I am curious whether the study showing that most women are physically aroused by images women would replicate. So I made a market on it: https://manifold.markets/Sinclair/are-almost-all-women-into-women-wil?r=U2luY2xhaXI
Anyone feel like defending the Kinsey Scale?
Because to me it's baffling in its juvenility and also in its lack of agreement with the actual world.
Being a linear scale it can't possibly model sexual attraction space with its 2+ dimensions. And not only is gynephilia independent from androphilia, but negative attraction is absolutely a thing that manifests in differing degrees, as anyone who has tried to set up a group encounter knows.
Yes. All models are false, some models are useful. You can't reduce everything to a number, but for a large portion of the population (gays, straights, many bis) it's useful to describe who you're looking for relatively rapidly. You can always add on sapiosexual, demisexual, etc.
I mean, it's far from optimal, but you asked if anyone felt like defending it. ;)
But IS it a useful model? It seems to rely on at least two assumptions that we know are not absolutely true and may not even be mostly true:
1. Homo- and heterosexuality are the basis for determining sexuality (I am personally suspicious that "attracted to men" or "attracted to women" makes more sense than attraction to same or complementary gender).
2. Homo- and heterosexuality are inversely proportional. (it seems that behavior would be more determined by the strength of the libido, regardless of the direction)
Honestly, the Kinsey Scale seems more like Galenic medicine than anything else -- bogus, but the basis for an awful lot of science so everyone assumes it is useful and so they keep using it.
I mean, as I've gotten more exposed to rationalism I sort of am more and more able to articulate the problems with this assumptions-based way of understanding human relations--basically, people are much more complicated than any system that can be derived, math-like, from a set of axioms, and it's more useful to use simple heuristics that you can communicate to others. The Kinsey is, well, a scale (effectively a scalar within a given bounded range), like temperature or height or weight (OK the last two can go to infinity but nobody is 10 feet tall), and you can analogize that to any of those. It's the reason everyone laughs at the genderbread person but is happy to come up with new words to describe their sexuality like demisexual and so on. A single word is easier to communicate.
I agree a person can be gynosexual, androsexual, pansexual, or asexual (or something in between), but it's most relevant to talk about the type of person they're looking for, and that might be men, women, or both. If it's both, people often have a preference for one or the other. It's easier to say 'I am mostly into women but might be open to the right guy, I'm a Kinsey 2' rather than try to work out whether your attraction to women is 9 and to men is 5 or your attraction to women is 5 and to men is 1. And a lot of people are monosexual and are then much more concerned about how to be attractive to their chosen sex.
But Scott,
1) Man was made for the categories, you're just plain wrong about this.
2) The same investigative method reveals that women also respond with genital arousal to seeing dogs or chimps have sex, violent rapes etc., basically all kinds of unsavory scenarios. So either all women are massive perverts (this contradicts our conventional wisdom, although not Greco-Roman conventional wisdom) or else women have just evolved to lubricate at the sight of anything sexual because in the ancestral environment they didn't necessarily have much choice about consent and so on and thus it simply minimized vaginal damage to always get ready for sex when there seemed to be some around. In the latter case, presumably "arousal" as subjectively experienced happens somewhere else. Personally I think this seems pretty probable since involuntary boners are also well known to be a thing, including in embarrassing/offputting situations.
As I understand it, the argument is that the attitude of men who falsely claim to be bisexual to gain kudos for being broad-minded and commendably catholic in their tastes, and "the wolf in sheep's clothing" aim of sounding less potentially predatory to women, correlates with the sympathy-seeking goal of a false claim of having long covid. In short, deceit in one makes deceit in the other more likely.
But if the original survey was done by an online poll then what incentive would there have been for heterosexual men to give a false reply to the sexual orientation question?
FWIW, it seems to me that if there is a correlation it is more likely that both are the result of some lack of sensitivity in hormone regulation, a tendency to overshoot one way or another over time, with fluctuating levels causing corresponding changes in predominant sexual orientation, and Covid throwing the whole system out of whack for some time. I think it is well-known that in men, such as M2F guys starting on female hormones, i.e. HRT, a sudden increase in the levels of these can cause mental aberrations such as "brain fog" until the brain adjusts.
Isn't the first table *exactly* what you would expect if people have been increasingly calling themselves bisexual as part of a fad without really practicing it? What else explains the dramatic rise?
Do you need to be practicing a sexuality before claiming it? I was pretty comfortable calling myself straight before I’d had sex for the first time
Presumably many of these people actually had sex at all in this period.
Also, how do you explain the dramatic rise in any other way?
The problem is one of operationalizing definitions.
Dating 7 people. What do you mean by "dating"
"Long Covid" what is operational definition. Shouldn't it actually require contracting Covid. See Norwegian study.
"Preference status", "Jhanas", etc.
People who
a. claim to be the king of France and believe they are king of France
b. claim to be the king of France and know they are not king of France
c. are the king of France by some definition n1.
d. are the king of France by some definition n2.
e. 🤷♂️
Seems like a reasonable disagreement of how we apply identity labels. If I said I was interested in basketball, but I never played basketball, you wouldn't call me a basketball player. If I said I was interested in having kids, but I never had kids, you wouldn't call me a father. Those identity labels require a specific action. But there are some identity labels like rich, poor, tall, short, blond, redhead, straight, gay, bisexual, that we typically apply without that person having to do any particular action.
I'm struggling to reconcile figure 1 and figure 2 in the paper Scott linked on bisexual men:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2003631117
figure 1 appears to indicate that Kinsey 2's and Kinsey 3's are equally aroused by men and women.
figure 2 appears to indicate that Kinsey 2's and Kinsey 3's are only half as aroused by one gender as they are by the gender that they prefer.
Does this make sense to anyone else?
I think figure 1 gives average for attraction to men and women, whereas figure 2 picks the most arousing gender and gives the other as a fraction of that one. So if half of the 2's and 3's find men more attractive and women half as attractive as that, and the other half of the 2's and 3's find women more attractive and men half as attractive as that, the graphs could be reconciled.
Not that it isn't confusing as heck.
Maybe?
I think the Kinsey scale means 0 is straight and 6 is gay and 1-5 are in between.
So then you could map half the people onto an inverse Kinsey scale to create figure 2, but a 3 would still be a 3 on the inverse scale.
And the 3's in figure 1 liked men and women almost equally.
But you're right, I guess that could mean that half the 3's liked men more and half the 3's liked women more, and those are averaged together in figure 1 but not figure 2.
Would you see a shift, in that data, if bisexuality was weighted more towards gay or straight?
Like, is it why 2 and 3 are about equal in figure 1 or 2 is the peak in figure 2?
Could we conclude from figure 2 that everyone actually has a preference, and no one is truly bisexual with equal weighting? I.e. peak bisexuality is liking one gender half as much as the other, not liking them equally?
I guess you could conclude that from figure 2, as you say. I think they were trying to conclude that bisexuality exists, since the prior thought was that it *didn't exist at all* in men. Everyone knows at least some women are fluid (though I wonder if this 'believe all women' thing is going to raise bisexuality rates among men.)
Is it true? Your guess is as good as mine. As woke pressure on scientists increases, stuff like this is going to be harder and harder to replicate.
The interpretation we discussed is also weird, because you'd think that someone who likes men more than women would not self report as exactly 3 on the Kinsey scale, but report biased towards one side. And you'd expect a bias towards the opposite side for someone who likes women more than men.
So even positing that half the bisexuals at each level of the scale skew one way or the other presumes a strong degree of failure to self report.
I don't know, maybe it's just an impossibly confusing paper.
The original "bisexuality doesn't exist" paper is a little bit confusing in its own way, but it looks like more a question as to whether they have enough subjects that their assertions are statistically valid.
If you look at what Random Reader said above, apparently Kinsey 3s are describing themselves as straight! So there's a real variation in self-report and the like.
I still think it's pretty likely that there's some relationship between trend-susceptibility and activism that's affecting the data here. Right now, unless I'm completely missing the mark, bisexuality is one of those identities that's slated as being seriously underrepresented. Therefore, bisexuality is ripe for representation (i.e. trendy) and you should expect contemporary polls to catch an outsize number of trendsters within that group. (Note that I'm not claiming these people are fakers)
Since we should expect a good number of long COVID cases to by psychosomatic, and for trendsters to be more susceptible to social contagion, we should expect long COVID cases to be overrepresented among trendsters. Since contemporary social polling is likely to catch an outsize number of trendsters when fishing for bisexuals, this would seem to have some explanatory power.
Am I getting something wrong, or do you simply not find this reasoning sufficient to explain the data? It seems like what I've written here is probably falsifiable if somebody is willing to do the work involved...
I'm a little curious why the percentage of bisexual women reporting only make dates in the past 5 years is increasing in that plot
I'm straight but actually enjoy it when men hit on me (I fool many people's gaydars). I've even on occasion been to gay parties and enjoyed being objectified. It's a rare experience for men since it's usually men who do the objectifying and hitting on someone, and most are straight and won't presume gayness. Personal taste, though...
Is "aroused by genitals of" simply being conflated with "attraction to"?
What if women are simply more imaginative, and so when they see any kind of genitals they're aroused?
Or what if they are biologically predisposed to show arousal signs in the presence of any kind of genitals because it's a possible signal of incoming sex, and they could have their genitals hurt if they aren't in an aroused state. Since this would impact their fitness, females would tend towards more inclusive genital arousal states.
Neither of these alternatives strike me as definitively suggesting same sex attraction.
Your data all seem to be from Americans. The world population is much bigger, and various.
I don't know why we would just use the background sexuality demographics to makes these estimates.
It's pretty clear that the dating pool of many bisexual women is going to be subject to some pretty powerful selection effects. I would expect the preponderance of these effects (living in urban and queer friendly areas, using queer dating apps, etc) to increase the proportion of women in their dating pool.
In general, surveys of bisexuality are hopelessly skewed by sampling difficulties. Something like 85% of bi men are closeted even from the "most important people in their lives", and it's very hard to track them down to survey them. So your results are almost entirely dominated by _how_ you found your survey respondents. Several widely reported studies on "bi men", including "Sexual Arousal Patterns of Bisexual Men" (Rieger, Chivers, Bailey, 2005) supposedly found their participants by recruiting among the gay male community. And they concluded bi men didn't actually exist. Bailey also later participated in "Robust evidence for bisexual orientation among men" (Jabbour, et el., 2020) which successfully found some bi men to study. It concluded that bi men were, in fact, bi.
A more interesting dataset is YouGov's 2019 survey for MRS Pride: https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/0mefw998rr/YG-Archive-SexualityScaleInternal-240519.pdf
This study asks people about their orientation in multiple ways! If I recall correctly, it asks them about how they label their orientation, what genders they're attracted to, where they place themselves on the Kinsey scale, and whether they'd consider a long-term same-gender relationship with the "right person". The results are fascinating: There are people who call themselves "straight" but who claim to be Kinsey 3s (equal attraction), and a bunch of other unexpected combos. Conclusion: Lots of people are open to relationships or sex with the same gender under various conditions, but they don't use any kind of consistent terminology.
And no, bi men are not "doing it for the attention." Outside of rare poly and queer communities, out bi men substantially reduce their dating pool. Something like 60% of women's magazine readers admitted that they would never date bi men. Annecdotally, the real number is likely higher in many places.
As for bi women, physical arousal studies is highly suspect, because of a well-studied phenomenon called "arousal non-concordance." Emily Nagowski summarizes this research as:
> There’s about a 50% overlap between how much blood flows to a male’s genital response and how “turned on” he feels — his “subjective arousal;” and there’s about 10% overlap for women’s genital response and subjective arousal.
Given all this, I would expect that most surveys of bi people are still heavily influenced by how they recruit bi people.
Great article! Heaps of comments on here so I'm sure this is already covered, but in case it's not:
The studies on genital arousal seem super unreliable! Personally, I'm (very) bisexual both in terms of my sex/dating choices and in terms of 'how I identify'. There is ZERO PERCENT CHANCE I will get even the slightest erection if you put me in the Pornoprobotron-9000 and showed me nude pics. That would give me an anti-erection, for even pics I'd subjectively find attractive. Especially for visual-only stimuli, there's no chance I'd show any response to that.
Genital arousal is just so influenced by so many factors/context. Again I want to avoid TMI, but in my experience even in real-world sexual encounters, genital arousal for me is not linked in any straightforward way to how attracted I am to the person. It certainly happens! It's just not according to any pattern or criterion I can discern. If I treated genital arousal as the definitive marker of sexual orientation, I would have been very confused and probably missed out on a lot of later genital-arousal-causing things.
Also re: footnote 3... I think 5% of self-identified straight men would absolutely say yes to sex with a man at some point in their lives. (It was 4% in the table above, no?)
My thoughts on this are not fully formed, but I think you're missing out on the fact that sexual attraction is IN ITSELF subject to suggestion. When someone expresses attraction to you, that emotional state can be contagious-- people are turned on just by being desired. So bisexuals can be genuinely attracted to both sexes, while at the same time being more prone to social contagion that would lead them to delusionally believe they have a disease.
is anyone else here bi-curious?
"The average person dates about seven people before marriage" This statistic seems to be an outlier and the source seems kind of dubious, as I can't actually find the study it is referencing. This much more credible source seems to indicate 4 partners for women in a lifetime:https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/n-keystat.htm