2020/7/29 1©PsyPost
A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has uncovered genital responses in men that are consistent with a bisexual orientation. The research is the most “extensive assessment of bisexual men’s arousal patterns to date,” according to its authors.
“There has long been a controversy whether men who identify as bisexual are actually bisexual. The bisexual men and many others believe that they are. However, some others — including some scientists and lay persons — have doubted this,” said study author J. Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University.
“The latter believe that men who identify as bisexual are actually either heterosexual or homosexual, and that their claim to be bisexual is based on self-misunderstanding, perhaps due to social pressure not to admit exclusive homosexuality.”
“For reasons I won’t address here (I’d have to speculate), female bisexuality has not elicited nearly as much skepticism as male bisexuality,” Bailey added.
For their study, the researchers combined data from eight previous studies that included objective measures of genital response in men who also reported their Kinsey scores — a measure of self-reported sexual orientation. The data allowed Bailey and his colleagues to examine the sexual orientation of 606 men, who were around 29 years of age on average.
In the studies, the men reported their sexual orientation on the Kinsey scale and viewed erotic video clips while a device measured changes in the circumference of the penis.
The researchers found that 178 participants self-identified as exclusively heterosexual, 102 identified as mostly heterosexual, 46 as bisexual leaning heterosexual, 34 as bisexual, 37 as bisexual leaning homosexual, 70 as mostly homosexual, and 139 as exclusively homosexual.
Importantly, men who identified as bisexual displayed genital responses to female and male stimuli that were consistent with their self-reported orientation. Men in the middle of the Kinsey spectrum showed smaller differences in genital arousal to male versus female erotic stimuli, compared with exclusively heterosexual and homosexual men.
“Men who identify as bisexual tend actually to be more sexually aroused by both sexes compared with heterosexual and homosexual men. The idea that ‘all bisexual men are lying’ is false,” Bailey told PsyPost.
“However, even bisexual men tend not to be equally aroused by both male and female erotic stimuli. They still tend to show preferences, just smaller ones than heterosexual and homosexual men show.”
There are still some men who identify as bisexual who do not have a bisexual orientation, such as so-called “transitional bisexuals,” Bailey said.
“Skepticism does not only reflect prejudice. Many men who identify as homosexual (‘gay’) as adults go through a stage during their youth in which they identify as bisexual. Asked later, they usually say they were not actually bisexual during this time,” he explained.
“There are other reasons for identifying as bisexual that do not require bisexual orientation (by which I mean sexual arousal and attraction to both sexes to the degree that arousal/attraction to women exceed that of homosexual men and arousal/attraction to men exceed that of heterosexual men). This can include sexual experience with both sexes (which is not uncommon but does not require bisexual orientation) and atypical sexual interests (example: men attracted to she-males — natal males who have acquired breasts surgically while retaining their penises).”
The study, “Robust evidence for bisexual orientation among men“, was authored by Jeremy Jabbour, Luke Holmes, David Sylva, Kevin J. Hsu, Theodore L. Semon, A. M. Rosenthal, Adam Safron, Erlend Slettevold, Tuesday M. Watts-Overall, Ritch C. Savin-Williams, John Syllah, Gerulf Rieger, and J. Michael Bailey.
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