Anthony Harvey
Contributor
This study has overturned the results of a previous study in 2005 done at the same university, which concluded that there was not enough evidence to support that male bisexuality is real.
Both studies involved participants having their genitals monitored as they watched same-sex male and same-sex female pornography; notably, heterosexual pornography was not used in either study as it would have led to ambiguous results since men of any sexual orientation could be stimulated without a clear indication of the cause of their stimulation. The key difference between the recent study and the one conducted in 2005 was the criteria of the participants.
“Last time, they got their guys from an ad in an urban newspaper read by a hipster crowd,” Allen Rosenthal, lead author of the new study and PhD candidate in psychology, explains in an interview with The New York Times. The 2005 study took any participant that was a self-identified bisexual whereas the recent study required the participants to have had a sexual history with at least two members of each sex and at least one long-term romantic relationship of at least three months with a member of each sex. The difference in the criteria led to the differing results between the two studies.
So what does this mean for bisexual men and for the bisexual community in general?
Eighteen-year-old student Kelly Fitzgerald, who identifies as bisexual, and an advocate for the study, finds the study to be a step forward for bisexuals finding acceptance in society.
“People are afraid of what they don’t understand,” she says. “In order to understand [bisexuality], it needs to be studied. If this study will help researchers and the general public understand that bisexuality isn’t a phase and lessen the discrimination, then what can I say about that?”
Marc Stein, a sexuality studies professor at York, believes that the study is also limited in various aspects.
“The study only looks at men, so I don’t think it would be right to draw conclusions about bisexuality in general,” says Stein. “Bisexuality might work differently in women.”
“The study methodology was based on visual stimuli, but I haven’t seen anything in the media reports [on the study] that addresses the possibility that straight men can be turned on by gay porn, that gay men can be turned on by straight porn, or that some people aren’t turned on by porn,” Stein says. “I’m also not sure if the study took age into consideration; it’s quite possible that younger and older men would respond differently to the images.”
He also notes that the media reports appear to imply that the study is based on the misguided idea that “sexual orientation is fixed and innate and that everyone can be classified as homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual.”
Many would agree with Stein’s argument that sexual desires, acts, and identities are much more complicated. They vary across cultures, they change over time, and they don’t fit neatly into mutually exclusive categories.
“We also don’t know whether the study participants who identify as bisexual describe their sexual interests in men and women as perfectly equal or whether they might fall somewhere else on the spectrum between exclusive heterosexuality and exclusive homosexuality,” Stein concludes. “People’s choices about how to describe themselves sexually [are important][…] But we can also reflect on the meanings of the terms people choose to use and the politics of those choices.”
Fitzgerald says that “with being bisexual, it’s difficult to [find] acceptance anywhere.” This includes the queer community, where she claims many people “have a hard time accepting us because they—I use [the term] ‘they’ loosely—see it as a sort of abandonment, like we don’t want to admit to ourselves that we’re full-out gay.”
Ultimately she supports the research “for the sole fact of informing people that it is physically possible [to be bisexual],” she says. “For bisexuals this means, hopefully, a more understanding society.”
