Labels for sexual orientation like "homosexual" and "heterosexual" can be useful at times, for instance, in helping you decide what part of town to visit if you are hoping to get laid. Labels are also helpful for people who don't have the same sexual turn-ons as their peers. They let them know where to go for sexual guidance, comfort and fun.
From this Guide's perspective, the biggest utility for these labels is in the discussion that researchers are having about them as new technologies provide new ways to pry under the lid of human consciousness. One of the more interesting things these researchers are finding is that orientation might be
a beast of a different color for women than for men.
Research in sexual orientation is in a state of flux. Actually, it's been a bit topsy-turvy for the past 100 years, and before then, it didn't much exist.
The latest state of flux is being fueled by new ways of looking inside the brain while people are being presented with things that turn them on. This is in addition to the more traditional research, which involves slapping sensors between the legs of college students and seeing what happens when you hand them dirty pictures or show them films of people who are fucking.
It used to be that people thought of "straight male" and "straight female" as being opposite sides of the same coin. No more. Fortunately, some of the top researchers in sexual orientation were kind enough to offer readers of The Guide their current thinking about sexual orientation. Consider what
researcher Richard Lippa has to say:
"People come in different sexual orientations. It's part of human diversity—like variations in skin color, hair texture, mental abilities, and handedness. An analogy is: although right-handedness is clearly more common than left-handedness, it's equally OK to be right-handed, left-handed, or ambidextrous.
"Scientists are interested in figuring the causes of sexual orientation, just as they are interested in figuring out the causes of variations in handedness, personality, and intelligence. When scientists study the causes of human traits, it's not necessarily because the traits are good or bad; rather, it's because it's interesting to understand the causes of human behavior. We're still not sure of the causes of sexual orientation. However, in recent years the pendulum has swung more in favor of biological theories.
"Recent research suggests that the nature of sexual orientation may be quite different for men and women. (I've conducted some of this research.) Women's sexual orientation seems to be more fluid and flexible than men's, whereas men's sexual orientation seems to be more fixed, 'black-and-white,' and perhaps biologically wired in. For example, recent studies of people's physiological arousal to sexy male and sexy female stimuli show that heterosexual men are turned on by sexy women but not by men, and gay men are turned on by sexy men but not by women (as you would probably expect). However, women—both heterosexual and lesbian—get turned on by both sexy men and women (which is perhaps not so expected).
"Western society has become more open about variations in sexual orientation and has become more tolerant of non-heterosexual orientations and relationships. So it will be really interesting to see how the expression of various sexual orientations develops in coming years."
Here's what researcher Michael Bailey has to say:
"Increasingly, people are understanding that men and women do sexual orientation differently. Men are straightforward. A man's sexual orientation results from what causes him the greatest sexual arousal, what kind of person (or animal or thing) gives him the most intense sexual excitement and the most dependable erections.
"Women are different. Increasingly, it appears that women's sexual orientation is not closely linked to their sexual arousal patterns the way it is in men. I even question whether women have something called a sexual orientation, although they clearly have sexual preferences. Women's sexuality seems more fluid than men's, in that it can vacillate between different types of people, and women are known to fall in love with each other and then to revert to a heterosexual identity and life."
When sex researchers ask women to put tampon-like probes in their
vaginas that measure their genital blood flow, they find that just about any kind of sexual stimulus results in arousal between their legs. Heck, a picture of two hippos humping would probably do it for some women. But before you take a girl to the zoo hoping you'll get lucky, what flows between a woman's legs and what she feels in her heart or thinks in her head can be very, very different. As our Ph.D. female friends so eloquently say: there can be a huge disconnect between cunt and cranium. This means it is a very unwise person who assumes that a woman is interested in sex just because her genitals are showing signs of arousal.
There is also the assumption floating around these days that women are turned on by women. But if you ask them what they actually feel, most women say they would rather have sex with guys as opposed to with other women. And if you look at who women actually go to bed with, you will find that only a small minority have had sex with other women.
So just because researchers are saying that female sexuality is fluid doesn't mean that waves of women are going down on each other. Perhaps a better way to put it is to say that when it comes to sex, the theater of a woman's mind tends to have more potential for variety than a boy's brain. How much of this translates into actual behavior is another story, and how much of it has to do with biology versus upbringing and culture is a never-ending source of interesting conversations.
If women's orientations are more fluid than men's, it might explain the results of our own sex survey. Over the past years, we have received approximately 6,000 surveys from visitors to our website who have taken its totally unscientific sex surveys. One of the first questions on the survey has been, "Please state your orientation as totally straight, mostly straight, depends on the day, mostly gay or totally gay." Here are the approximate results:
(This chapter is continued in the book.)
