Currents

The latest study in what has become an impressive body of evidence shows that a growing cohort of people are coming out as bisexual. It’s not that people’s sexuality is changing as much as they’re breaking free from binary thinking. Researchers using data from the General Social Survey, which has tracked changes in the behavior and attitudes of Americans since 1972, found that the percentage of adults who report having had both male and female sexual partners more than tripled from 1989 to 2021, going from 3.1% to 9.6%. This accords with data from Pew Research, Gallup, the UK’s Office of National Statistics, and elsewhere showing that bisexual behavior and self-identification are on the rise. This development has left some people wondering why more people are suddenly “becoming” bisexual. To understand the problems with that thinking, we first have to understand a bit about measurements.

One of the first things undergrads learn about in courses on statistics or research methodology are levels of measurement — specifically nominal and interval. If I give you a survey and ask if you’re a cat person or a dog person, I’m going to put those into a fancy statistics program (think Microsoft Excel on steroids), and the responses will be replaced with numbers:

1 = dog person
2 = cat person
3 = neither

This is the nominal level of measurement. I can’t divide “neither” by “dog person” and figure that three dog people equals one person who prefers houseplants. They’re all subjective, qualitative categories with no mathematical relationship between them. I could pick any number, and it wouldn’t make any difference because “3” is just a symbol for a category and not something I can add, subtract, multiply, or divide. If I instead record how fast you run a mile, we’ve gotten into interval measurements. If your time is five minutes, and someone else’s is 10, I can divide and determine that you ran twice as fast. Interval measurements are more than simple labels — they have actual arithmetical values and can be calculated.

People tend to think about sexuality at the nominal level. You are X, or you aren’t. You’re in or you’re, well, out. But that’s not the way it works, and we’ve known this for quite some time.

For those unfamiliar, Alfred Kinsey is the godfather of sex research. He published two landmark studies, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), which revolutionized sexology. Prior to Kinsey, we were studying more about bug sex than “us” sex. One of these subjects was treated as a rigorous scientific endeavor worthy of agnostic and atheoretical examination, and the other was, and in many ways still is, widely treated with derision.

We’ve all played this game by now: if some famous guy was born in the 1890s, you can assume there’s some weird shit in his story. And yeah… Kinsey is no different. He encouraged his staff to go fuck like rabbits since they were interviewing thousands of people about sex, a move which today would land you in a meeting with HR. He even filmed sex among his staff in his attic, which again, HR would like to have a word. But Kinsey asked some important and fundamental sexual questions today that occupy every 12-year-old boy’s Google search history but back then were mysterious to much of the public. Do women masturbate? Do women orgasm? What is that clitoris thing anyway? How does gay sex actually work, anatomically? Keep in mind that “sodomy” was only definitely decriminalized in the United States with the 2003 Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas. Kinsey was studying things that were largely illegal at the time.

One of the most important things Kinsey did was move the study of sexuality out of the nominal level and into the interval. Sexuality does not consist of boxes you need to fit neatly inside like a bored cat. Kinsey proposed a sexuality scale: 0 to 6. You can be exclusively heterosexual (0) or exclusively homosexual (6), but many people fall somewhere in between. Bisexuality (not being a 0 or a 6) is as much a spectrum as it is a category. It consists of the potential to be attracted to people of both sexes, regardless of degree or whether those attractions are acted upon.

Transferring the measurement of sexuality to the interval level helps not only to normalize bisexuality by representing a more natural and accurate sliding scale of attractions, it also shows how our categorical thinking can limit our self-expression and, in many ways, our behavior. If your choices are X or not-X, you might pick not-X and then refrain from doing X-like things even if you inwardly want to because “that’s what Xs do, and I ain’t no damned X!” But sexuality cannot be reduced to a binary category any more than sex itself can be reduced to simple reproduction. Sex is as much about connection as it is about conception. It’s the euphoria of being exposed but accepted, a kiss that has endured a thousand poems; the paradoxical beauty of vulnerability and security — and it isn’t confined to two boxes.

We can see this shift as our societies have relaxed our concern with rigidly binary sexual boxes. The number of people who are more fluid in their sexuality is growing, as Peter Tatchell, Jamie Paul, and others have covered in these pages. If we follow Kinsey’s logic, we should expect this because most of the points on his scale are some form of bisexuality. As per The Journal of Sex Research study discussed earlier:

“Findings demonstrate that sexual norms and behaviors have changed and that far more persons today than in earlier years identify as bisexual and/or have both male and female partners.”

The “and/or” part is the operative bit of the sentence. There are always more people who engage in bisexual behavior — and thus fit at least one definition of bisexual — than who think of themselves as bi. Of course, some straight people experiment and decide they don’t fancy it, and that’s a legitimate experience. For others, they choose, for one reason or another, not to act on their attractions let alone identify with them. As noted, bisexuality is as much a spectrum as it is a category. I have a female family member who almost exclusively dated women but wound up marrying a man because she had a connection. It doesn’t mean she “became straight” but that she simply continued to be herself. Understanding that opposite-sex relationships don’t negate one’s bisexuality is important because the “B” in LGBT makes up the largest group in the community.

The American Psychological Association calls the imposition of the straight/gay binary on how we think and talk about sexuality “bi erasure”, and it can contribute to people being less likely to self-identify to a healthcare provider. Let’s put that in perspective. I’ve been in terribly embarrassing situations where a whole group of doctors stared at my ass. My wife once had a whole group of doctors stare at her vagina. Patients let doctors congregate in groups to shine flashlights into their bodily orifices and take notes — but they’re hesitant to discuss sexual orientation with them. Putting it in visceral and uncomfortable terms is sometimes the only way to drive it home. “Listen, you can pull a tiny person out of my vagina, but I don’t want to tell you I made it to second base with another girl one time at band camp and I don’t regret it.”

These labels we use to describe ourselves are modern conventions. The terms homosexuality, heterosexuality, and bisexuality are newer than air conditioning. They only started to enter into the popular lexicon a little more than a hundred years ago, right before Kinsey began wondering if they were overly simplistic. But human nature is far, far older. Love, to invoke the cliché, has always been love. If we learn anything from the way we measure and categorize, the takeaway from the rise in bisexuality isn’t people being different; it’s just people learning that it’s okay to love outside the box.

Published Aug 15, 2023