Myten om att så många kvinnor är lesbiska eller bisexuella

More Bisexual Women? Think Again.
A large national, representative sample of US adults (NSFG Study) recently headlined more women (but not men) are identifying as bisexual and engaging in sex with both males and females.


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Let’s tackle first the authors' failure to find an increase in same-sex sexuality among men.
When I compare the NSFG findings with another nationally representative study (Add Health) with the youngest adult cohort, I discovered something rather odd:

Add Health reports twice as many men are not straight as does the NSFG (8% versus 4%).
What happened to all the sexual-minority men in NSFG? Easy to explain: Because the authors only had 3 categories of sexuality, most mostly straight men were “forced” to claim straight status because they are in reality closer to the straight than the bisexual category. It is exactly these mostly straight men—who are comfortable with their slight degree of gender nonconformity and same-sex behavior—who most likely benefited from the gender/gay revolutions.

Turning to women, while we’re on the gender/gay revolutions, I have a difficult time understanding why they seemingly caused women to identify as and engage in sex with both sexes without having significant impact creating lesbians and female-only sexual behavior. Why haven’t these revolutions provoked more women to identify as lesbian or engage in only sexual behavior with other women? No explanation is given. Doesn’t make sense to me.

However, my major problem with the NSFG findings is that they fail to identify what likely has actually happened: the increase in sexual-minority women is not about bisexual women but about mostly straight women. The two are not the same. When given a forced choice between identifying as straight or bisexual, the vast majority of mostly straight women (similar to mostly straight men) will chose their “closer cousins,” their straight sisters.

Furthermore, whereas an earlier NSFG report that did not force mostly straights into the bisexual box, 15% of women reported mostly heterosexual attraction and 3% bisexual attraction (similar to Add Health). And, whereas Add Health found 16% of women identified as mostly straight and 2% as bisexual, the current NSFG study found 7% identified as bisexual. Why so many bisexuals and what happened to the other women? My guess is that most of these other women identified (falsely) as straight because, as noted above, that was a closer fit than bisexual. The current NSFG study merely lumped (some of) these women with the bisexual category, thus erasing their visibility.

As further evidence, it is noteworthy that Add Health reported over twice as many women are not straight-identified compared with the NSFG study: 20% vs. 9%. That’s losing a lot of self-identified sexual-minority women—and most are mostly straight!

Why these huge discrepancies among two reputable national studies? Their assumptions about the nature of sexuality:

1. Add Health assumes a less categorical approach to sexuality and more of a continuum approach.

2. The NSFG authors assume the traditional sexual categories: straight, bisexual, gay/lesbian.

Unfortunately, this appears to be another instance in which theory and previous research were ignored for “practical” reasons—to achieve the numbers needed for statistical analyses at the cost of truth. By doing so the authors found something that likely does not exist: an increase in bisexual women.

Does their decision matter? Absolutely in terms of the millions of individuals who do not fit into one of these three boxes—they’re neither straight, bisexual, or lesbian. We as researchers need to listen to them. Indeed, we know there are more mostly straight women and men than bisexual and lesbian/gay individuals combined (see my earlier posts). The net effect is to erase entire, legitimate, personally meaningful points on the sexual continuum.

Bottom Line: Mostly heterosexuals exist. They’re not bisexuals.