Electrodes Don’t Lie
So, a man, who calls himself straight, watches two men having sex and gets turned on. That means he’s actually gay (“Even gay men who deny their own homosexuality will become more sexually aroused by male sexual stimuli than by female stimuli.”). A woman, who calls herself straight, watches lesbians having sex and gets turned on. That means she’s expressing an “increased flexibility” (relative to men’s inflexibility, I suppose).
Why does this study on sex differences interpret the same reaction differently?
“‘Since most women seem capable of sexual arousal to both sexes, why do they choose one or the other?…Probably for reasons other than sexual arousal.’ That is, heterosexual women were just as sexually aroused by watching female stimuli as by watching male stimuli, even though they prefer having sex with men rather than women.” (Study Suggests Difference Between Female And Male Sexuality).
The most objectionable part of this research is that these differences are being declared to be differences in the brain without regard to cultural factors. Sex research is obsessed with genetic and evolutionary explanations, when culture can explain so much of the obvious. This supports a notion I’ve had. Actually, two notions.
Female Bodies are a Universal Code for “Pleasure”
One notion is that women are so sexually objectified in our culture that they become an arousal object for everyone. A feminist way back in the 1970’s — I can’t recall who — made the point that pornography was becoming so ubiquitous that one day even truly straight women would be turned on by images of other women. I think this study supports her point. Like Pavlov’s dog, we’re trained through repetition and reinforcement to associate certain images with pleasure. Many images arouse us not because nature designed it so, but because culture did.
Take, for example, another study of men who responded that beer on a woman’s breath was an arousing smell on a date. Beer breath? Do I need to point out how men came to make that connection, or is it already pretty clear that Michelob wasn’t around when natural selection was building the human genome?
Bisexual Men are Dangerous
The second notion is that the most dangerous sort of person out there is a bisexual man. Bisexual women have their uses, as anyone who has been to college or used the web knows. They’re fun and nonthreatening, because any woman who “acts” like a man is just, you know, cute. She’s only reinforcing the point that we all secretly want to be men, who alone in a patriarchal arrangement have the power to turn women into objects — shazam!
But bisexual men don’t really exist, because if they did, then that means there are men who want to be like women, which then makes men’s natural qualities and rights anything but natural. You might think the same applies to gay men, but bisexual men can’t be written off as genetic defectives or boys damaged by bad parents — any of the many reasons hate speech uses. Not that the gay community loves these half-breeds, either. I mean, bisexuals are normal only some of the time and lying the rest of the time — “normal” being either straight or gay but nothing “in-between”.
Bisexuals shatter the illusion of our rigid binary system, so the rules that organize everything from what color we put on a baby, to who gets better jobs and money, to who has a right to sex and speaks for God are shown to be arbitrary and, therefore, capable (even worthy) of being changed.
Science is Political
If you’re not convinced that the world wants to make bisexuals invisible in a way homosexuals are not, take a look at another, more recent study.
Bisexuality Not A Transitional Phase Among Women, According To New Research, wherein we learn that “bisexuality in women appears to be a distinctive sexual orientation and not an experimental or transitional stage that some women adopt ‘on their way’ to lesbianism”. I suppose next will be studies to confirm that walking is a distinctive activity and not an experimental or transitional stage that some people adopt ‘on their way’ to running. This study also uses the word “fluid” to describe women’s sexuality: “This provides further support for the notion that female sexuality is relatively fluid and that the distinction between lesbian and bisexual women is not a rigid one.”
I guess this is where the old joke comes from: What’s the difference between a straight woman and a lesbian? A six pack.
The intimation from all these studies is that women are not really bisexual, they’re “fluid” and men are never bisexual, they’re straight, or gay and lying. That means there is no real category of “bisexual” comparable to “straight” or “gay”, nothing about our sex or gender binaries that needs to be examined.
I’m not sure what’s going on besides the fact, as the studies mention, so little research has been done on women’s sexuality compared to men’s. Women’s research is then fit into the structures built around a theory of masculine sexuality. That leaves us with the common dualisms feminism has been fighting for decades, only now they’re clothed in scientific language, so they’re given just that much more authority.
Science is political when it comes to how research is funded, how questions are asked, how the questions are answered, and how they are interpreted. Especially the booming area of sexual behavior — hardly a subject for a petri dish. When medical research has repeatedly emphasized the plasticity of the brain, the unpredictability, the variance, how can behavior researchers so blithely connect complex behaviors to binary sexual encoding without examining other factors, like the incredibly coercive social structure called “gender”?
I discovered this post on a rss feed, and I’m glad I did! Your analysis of women’s bodies coded as pleasure is an important insight. I’d take it a little further (or maybe in a slightly different direction) and suggest that at least some of the women aroused by the women-only films were identifying with the women as receivers of pleasure, because that how we have been conditioned to respond and that’s how most erotic films are presented, while men are expected to be aroused by seeing the object of their desire.
I recently started questioning any and all studies, and discover how biased the so called researchers. Factors such as personal bias as well as who is funding the research, not to mention how they conduct the study all reveals data that isn’t so much fact.
Good blog entry here. Thanks for posting.
Wow. it is interesting that I came across this today. I have been in this emailing with a frien of mine for days. We are talking about this exact thing. It appears that we have both opened up to each other (me-male, she is… well female LOL! duh!). We have both found out that we like bisexual videos. We both like lesbian and she is strangely turned on by bisexual men videos like me. She has told me that when she watches these she thinks of being the receiver person. I love watching women, but I like to think of myself as the giver in the bisexual videos.
We have discussed cravings and that being a true core sign of preference. I do not, at all, look or see a guy and think about sex in any way. I see women and instantly think of them naked and how wonderful it would be. But I only enjoy same sex videos and love bisexual male videos. So, does that make me gay? I don’t think so. does it make me want to have a female role? I don’t think so.
My friend (she) told me that she does not think of herself as a lesbian. She wants men but she loves the idea of having sex with women, and loves watching it.
So what is a bisexual male? Just a person who can transcend sexual boundaries and sexual enjoy either sex or both at the same time. Just as other humans can do…..females.
Whoa…gender identity and sexual orientation are two totally different things, any transgender folk will tell you that.
Jersey, of course sex and gender are different, hence my dismay at the lack of rigor in these studies, which muddle male-female with man-woman, not seeing how they overlap, engage, coerce, and therefore color everything about us, including desire, which is not simply a gene-generated phenomenon. Maybe bisexuality is that place where male-female and man-woman don’t overlap correctly in our culture, hence the desire to wipe it from existence.
Teresa,
You didn’t address the supposed “control” group in your post, but I found it troubling:
“In a sense, those transsexuals have the brains of men but the genitals of women. Their psychological and genital arousal patterns matched those of men — those who like men were more aroused by male stimuli and those who like women were more aroused by the female stimuli — even though their genital arousal was measured in the same way women’s was. ”
I have a feeling many transsexuals would object to this characterization. I wonder what your thoughts are. Seems like more assumptions projected onto the subjects on the study rather than observation and analysis.
astraeasscales, you opened a can of worms.
I’ll take a leap here and say I think our understanding of the transexual (TS) is confounded between what is sex and what is gender and how each contribute to identity, so as a control group and the way it’s done here, it’s just silly.
I’m not discounting the experience of body dysphoria (the sense that his/her body is the wrong one) and what that means for an individual life. In fact, sex reassignment surgery is incredibly successful by patient satisfaction measures.
I just wonder how much of the pressure to alter a body is an implicit acceptance of what being a man or woman is. In other words, does a pre-op TS male want to be a female or to be a woman? Does that man want to alter his male body into a female body with the belief that this will make him a woman, when it seems to me that a woman is not just vagina and boobs, anymore than a man is just a penis.
And from the stories of many TS individuals, the focus seems to be on dislike of the role their current genitals require in their culture — the physical body is mistaken as the cause when the cause is a cultural role expectation. It’s as if someone considering reassigmment surgery has bought into the gender roles so thoroughly, they can’t act outside them without the “justification” of a body that matches that role. Our culture reaffirms this in many ways; for example, two M can’t get married, but if you get reassignment surgery and are able to change your birth certificate to F, you can marry that M (this from UK).
Many life histories of TS men comment on their desire to wear dresses, heels, panties; wanting to give up having to be “macho”. Is that what being a woman is all about? How we dress? Look at the questionairres used for psychological evaluation of those who wish to have the surgery. Many of us women would fail to prove we are women. The requirement that the pre-op patient present in his/her gender for 80% of the time for a 1-2 year period means what, exactly? I’m not sure I “present” as a “woman” that much of the time. Would I be allowed to be a woman by their measures?
So, unfortunately, the phenomenon of TS does more to maintain our rigid binary sex/gender system than to overcome it, in my opinion. More to chew on International Journal of Transgenderism: http://www.symposion.com/ijt/index.htm
If man is not woman
and woman is not man
what is the purpose of
humanity ?
Man to meet the woman,
woman to meet the man
in their own heart.
Then mankind will ‘be’ !
From Ron White, comedian:
I told him, “We’re all gay, man. It’s just to what extent are you gay.” He says, “That’s bullshit man, I ain’t gay at all!” I said, “Yes you are and I’ll prove it.” He says, “Fine, prove it.” I said to him, “All right. Do you like porn?” He says, “Yeah, I love porn, you know that.” I said, “Do you only watch two women doing it?” He said, “Naw, I’ll watch a man and a woman make love.” I said, “Oh, do you want the guy to have a tiny, half-flaccid penis?” He said, “Naw, man, I like big, hard, throbbing co– I did not know that about myself.” “Do you like chocolate?”
So why does a redneck comedian get it and scientists do not? Simply, comedians observe and comment on people and scientists observe and comment on data.