I've long suspected that bisexuality, in many men, is the stage between shame and acceptance. That is, men who call themselves "bisexual" are often gay men who aren't quite ashamed anymore of their homosexual inclination but who, for any number of reasons, also aren't fully accepting of it. By calling themselves bisexual, they cling to some thin reed of their heterosexual identity.
A new study, following other studies reaching similar conclusions, lends support to these suspicions by concluding there are few, if any, bisexual males, defined here as those who are about equally aroused by both sexes. The study is being criticized by gay-left groups that have an ideological and political investment in the "B" in "GLBT." While the study is not definitive - what study could be? - and more work needs to be done to shore up its conclusions, the criticisms of it have not been very persuasive.
"Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual," wrote Alfred Kinsey. "The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats." Kinsey considered sexual orientation a spectrum along which many people were somewhere between the extremes of total homosexuality and total heterosexuality.
Ever since, "queer" theorists have argued that sexual orientation is itself a social construct. The categories "gay" and "straight" are creations of language and culture. Sexuality is plastic; it can change and be molded. In this view, everyone is in some sense bisexual.
Now a team of psychologists in Chicago and Toronto is publishing a study that questions this fashionable academic view. The researchers studied 101 men, about equally divided among men who called themselves gay, straight, and bisexual. They then showed the men pornographic images involving only women or only men, and measured their genital arousal.
Unsurprisingly, the straight men were aroused by the images of women. Also unsurprisingly, the gay men were aroused by the images of men.
And what aroused the men who called themselves bisexual? Three-fourths of them were aroused only by the images of men; one-fourth of them were aroused only by the images of women; and none of them were aroused by the images of both men and women. That is, their arousal patterns were indistinguishable from either the gay or straight men. In the memorable headline of the New York Times, the "bisexual" men in the study were either "Straight, Gay, or Lying."
The National Gay & Lesbian Task Force was predictably "stunned." The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, never missing a chance to promote a dull conformity of language, called the Times headline itself "derogatory."
The criticisms of the study have been underwhelming. One criticism has been that the sample size - 101 men, of whom 33 identified as bisexual - was too small. One could make that criticism of just about any sample size, and more is almost always better in these matters. But gay advocates have relied on studies with even smaller sample sizes to argue that homosexuals make good parents. There's also not much reason to believe a larger sample size would have yielded significantly different results, especially given that the findings are consistent with past studies of bisexual arousal and sexual behavior.
A second criticism has been that the sample - drawn from personal ads in gay and alternative newspapers - was not representative of all bisexual men. Some bisexual men, for example, may not self-identify as bisexual and thus wouldn't be in the study. Yet there's no reason to believe that these men would have exhibited different arousal patterns. Indeed, one would expect a greater degree of bisexual arousal in bisexual men who actually identify themselves as bisexual.
A third criticism has been to attack one of its leaders, Michael Bailey, some of whose past work on transgenders has been ethically questionable. Whatever the merits of Bailey's past work, this wasn't Bailey's study; he was part of a team of researchers who designed and conducted it. Plus, the study is either flawed or not based on its own methodology, not based on past criticisms of one of its authors.
Other criticisms have focused on supposed methodological "flaws" that don't affect the study's central conclusion. For example, some critics have noted that about 30% of the men had no physiological reaction to any of the porn they were shown. But so what? That may prove the porn was bad, or that some men just don't respond to sexually explicit images, but there's no reason to believe their lack of response biased the study away from finding bisexuals.
A final criticism has involved playing with the definition of "bisexual" in order to come up with more such people. If "bisexual" means anybody who has any degree of arousal, however small, to both sexes, then surely there are a large number of bisexuals.
Others have insisted that sexual orientation is more complicated than mere sexual attraction, and includes emotional attraction as well. Fair enough, but surely bisexual must involve some sexual element. If "bisexual" means anybody who calls himself "bisexual," regardless of whether he's actually sexually attracted to both sexes, then words lose all meaning.
If, however, "bisexual" means a person who has roughly equal erotic attraction to both sexes, then there are very few male bisexuals. Most people mean the latter when they use the word "bisexual," and it is this definition under which the study found there are no male bisexuals.
Clearly there are straight men who occasionally have gay sex when circumstances limit their preferred sexual outlet, as in prison. Clearly there are gay men, some of whom are married to women, who have straight sex because they're ashamed of their homosexual orientation or afraid of the consequences of being found out. These are not bisexuals.
Clearly, for queer theorists and their allied political groups, there is an ideological motivation behind the idea of bisexuality. They will defend it, damn the truth. And for some men, having sex with men who claim to be attracted to women is a fetish.
Clearly there are men who call themselves bisexual, whether for political reasons or fetishistic reasons or because they simply aren't yet able to accept that they're gay.
Our goal should be to free this last group from the identity prison of bisexuality, not to build higher walls around them in the service of political correctness. We may not like that the world is divided into sheep and goats, but that's preferable to pretending we live in a world of mythical unicorns.