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Bisexuality
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| Swerving on the dancefloor Stephanie Theobald was a lesbian who slated bisexuals, Jake Arnott was bisexual and gay. Then, four years ago, the two novelists fell in love. The Guardian 16 April 2009 Stephanie on Jake I remember standing on a beach in Thailand telling my dyke friend, Alison, that I felt like a soldier who'd had all his medals ripped off - a court-martial for lesbian desertion. Naturally I was being a little overdramatic. I'd never had that many medals in the first place, and my only real piece of lesbian activism was in 1993 with the recently founded London chapter of The Lesbian Avengers. Clad in our Lesbian Avenger T-shirts (slogan: We Recruit), 30 of us ran out to the statue of Queen Victoria in front of Buckingham Palace and unfurled a banner that bore the message, "THE LESBIAN AVENGERS ARE NOT AMUSED." The "zap" had limited impact because it was 10 o'clock on a Sunday morning and hardly anybody was up. Yet it was a massive deal for us. For many of us, a lot of our lives had been about girding ourselves to say the "L" word in public without feeling embarrassed. (The "Why don't we just define ourselves as people?" angle has never washed with me because if we don't define ourselves, we'll all be accused of being heterosexual.) So there I was on the beach, feeling like I had an awful lot of egg on my face. It was 2004 and I'd just had an affair, not merely with a man but with the estranged husband of the late Isabella Blow. If I'd been straight, the press wouldn't have bothered with the story, but being known as a lesbian functioned as a leg-up into the limelight. "But what will I call myself now?" I said to Alison in a panic. "I've always been totally against bloody bisexuals!" "Don't worry," Alison comforted. "Just tell people you're not ashamed of having been a hypocrite." And I had been a hypocrite, a right old bigot. In 1999, in an essay called Lesbians On Horseback, I'd slated both bisexuals and an even less committed group of woman I termed the "bi-try" - a kind of fly-by-night lesbian. The affair with Detmar didn't last but then, on April Fool's Day 2005, having bumped into Jake now and again for more than a year, we went to Club Pig in Soho where it suddenly struck me that he had an incredibly sexy neck. When people saw that this was more than a fling, the flak really started. Not from lesbians, although they'd do this irritating thing of being really friendly with Jake, almost flirty - something I put down to lesbians being competitive. Most of the hassle was from straight girls. The first outburst came at a party at Ronnie Scott's when a well-known fashion writer came up and growled drunkenly, "Why don't you go out with girls any more? How can you call yourself a lesbian if you don't go out with girls?" It was the first bit of straight-bashing I'd experienced but she had a point. My life was full of conundrums: if you go out with women until you're 38 and then you start seeing a man, does that make you less bisexual than, say, a chick who's gone out with men for years and then has a relationship with a woman? If your new boyfriend is usually gay is that more right-on? If you are bisexual but homosocial (ie most of your close friends are gay) does that make things better? It wasn't easy making the transition to Man Land. I define myself these days as a "bisexual lesbian" because the emphasis is on the second word and I still feel more attracted to women. Luckily, one of the good things about going out with Jake is that, just as I am obsessed with women, he is obsessed with the way men tick and as a result I've reviewed my opinions on men. Women are supposed to be the needy, over-emotional ones but actually, it's men who are. I wish I'd been more confident as a dyke because I see now that men are secretly impressed by lesbians - they seem strong and in charge and that must be a relief for men. • Stephanie Theobald's new novel, A Partial Indulgence, is published in April by Sceptre at £12.99. apartialindulgence.com Jake on Stephanie The sense that I was attracted to both genders came early in life, along with the suspicion that this wasn't something I would grow out of. The deep desire I felt for men and other boys seemed an obvious danger, and I learned to be careful growing up in a strange, straight world. But as I got older, I realised that the other side of my nature - the side that was attracted to women - wasn't exactly welcome either. It was such a disappointment coming out as bisexual in the 1980s, only to find that my orientation was politically incorrect in orthodox radical sexual politics. At a time of intense campaigning for lesbian and gay rights, we were seen as ambivalent, confusing, even as traitors to the cause. I was aware that a lot of people saw my stance as wilful, capricious, greedy and selfish. And they were absolutely right. I was determined to have and eat as much cake as I could. As James Dean said when asked about his sexuality: "Well, I'm certainly not going through life with one hand tied behind my back." I got involved in sporadic attempts at organisation but the joke bisexual demo chant: "What do we want? We don't know! When do we want it? Errr ... " wasn't far off the mark. As it happened, my inclination and behaviour increasingly tended towards homosexuality, and that became my default state. But it wasn't simply that I ended up dancing more at the homo end of the ballroom that made me start identifying as gay. It was an emotional decision, something that so often gets overlooked in any discussion about sex. For a long time all of my significant and long-term relationships were with other men. This, I reasoned, was how I would love. But then love always brings surprises. I honestly didn't think it was at all likely that I would ever have a proper relationship with a woman again, until I fell in love with Stephanie. It came out of the blue but the passion I felt simply overwhelmed all other considerations. Sharing a similar past has allowed for an awful lot of understanding. I've never felt that I've had to explain myself to her. I've not been "cured" of being gay. In fact I'd go as far as to say that I still veer towards the homo end of the continuum. My sexuality is not, and will never be completely "straight", but now all of it belongs to one person. And being in a "straight" relationship certainly doesn't make me butch. I'm actually a little bit more camp and dizzy for seeing a woman. Boys can act tough when they're in the majority but it doesn't prove anything. And it isn't homosexuality that emasculates men, it's heterosexuality (or it should do if you're doing it properly). The notion that opposite-sex attraction is a secure sign of masculinity is a relatively recent one. Romeo complains to his buddies, "O sweet Juliet, thy beauty hath made me effeminate." Perhaps this is a good thing, because the most obvious observation from my experience is that inequality of gender remains more profound than that of sexuality. The disparity of the freedom of men compared with that of women is starkly demonstrated when it comes to bisexuality; it is the disparity of theory and practice. In theory, many more women appear bisexual than men. It is permissible even for an element of display, Madonna kisses Britney, girl-on-girl fantasies spice up the straight world, but women are scarcely allowed to do it for themselves. In practice, plenty of heterosexually defined men have sex with men on the side. You know the saying: "He's not gay, he just helps out when things get busy." Rarely will these guys identify themselves as bisexual. Why should they? After all, a lot of the time they are fulfilling the fantasies of gay men who want to have sex with straight men. There are also gay men who occasionally sleep with women, it's more common than people imagine. Men simply have more sexual freedom, they just don't talk about it (which often gives them even more freedom). It's a more inclusive world than I once knew, with the coming of the term LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender). It's just that there aren't that many Bs coming out of the acronym, which is why I want to state my case. Not that I have any conclusions to offer, just more questions. Four years on and Stephanie and I are still going strong, trying to be honest about the continuum of our desires, still swerving about all over the dancefloor. • Jake Arnott's new novel, The Devil's Paintbrush, is published in May by Sceptre, priced £15. |
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| What Women Want (Maybe)
LADIES! Behold the splendor of the nude male form: sleek and powerful, a miracle of sculpted sinew, striding confidently across the sand or stretching out before you in ever-uncoiling glory. econd thought, perhaps you’d prefer not to. The New York Times June 12, 2008 So say scientists at the frontiers of research on the eternal question of what women find erotic, the latest answer to which seems to be: not naked guys, or at least not simply naked guys. “For heterosexual women,” a researcher, Meredith Chivers, says in a new documentary about bisexuality called “Bi the Way,” which was shown at the NewFest film festival in New York last Friday, “looking at a naked man walking on the beach is about as exciting as looking at landscapes.” Dr. Chivers, a research fellow at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health at the University of Toronto, says she has data to support this assertion. She recently published results of a study in which she showed people video clips of naked men and women in various sexual and nonsexual situations and measured their genital arousal. Heterosexual women, Dr. Chivers and her colleagues found, were no more excited by athletic naked men doing yoga or tossing stones into the ocean than they were by the control footage: long pans of the snowcapped Himalayas. When straight women viewed a video of a naked woman doing calisthenics, on the other hand, their blood flow increased significantly. What really matters to women, Dr. Chivers said, at least in the somewhat artificial setting of watching movies while intimately hooked up to a device called a photoplethysmograph, is not the gender of the actor, but the degree of sensuality. Even more than the naked exercisers, they were aroused by videos of masturbation, and more still by graphic videos of couples making love. Women with women, men with men, men with women: it did not seem to matter much to her female subjects, Dr. Chivers said. “Women physically don’t seem to differentiate between genders in their sex responses, at least heterosexual women don’t,” she said. “For heterosexual women, gender didn’t matter. They responded to the level of activity.” Dr. Chivers’s work adds to a growing body of scientific evidence that places female sexuality along a continuum between heterosexuality and homosexuality, rather than as an either-or phenomenon. “She’s pinpointing what’s kind of obvious, and yet unexplored: that women are so fluid in their sexuality,” one of the directors of “Bi the Way,” Josephine Decker, said at an after-party for the screening at a Russian-themed gay bar in Midtown. Even in a culture that often cycles through moments of bisexual chic — Britney and Madonna, make way for Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson (photographed smooching in Cannes, France) — and despite survey data showing that young people, in particular, are open to sexual experimentation, bisexuality still tends to be treated as a novelty, a titillating fluke, a phase or even a cover for homosexuality. Dr. Chivers herself was an author of a 2005 study using similar methods that found that men who called themselves bisexual were significantly more aroused by one gender, usually by men. But women, some researchers say, are fundamentally different. A University of Utah researcher, Lisa M. Diamond, published a study in January in the journal Developmental Psychology that followed the love lives of 79 nonheterosexual women who variously labeled themselves lesbian, bisexual or none-of-the-above. Over 10 years, Dr. Diamond found, the women continued to be attracted to both sexes. Women’s response to images of coupling extends even to other species, Dr. Chivers found. In a 2004 experiment, and again in the recent study, published in the December 2007 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Dr. Chivers and her colleagues found women slightly but significantly aroused by footage of bonobo chimps mating. Men showed no such response. And when Dr. Chivers asked her subjects to rate their own arousal to the videos they watched, the women, whether gay or straight, tended to give higher ratings to films showing women. “Heterosexual women are responding to women, which is counterintuitive,” Dr. Chivers said. “Why are women so turned on by watching other women?” Straight and gay men, as well as lesbians, were more predictably aroused by images of their preferred sex, Dr. Chivers found. It is tough to know what to make of this information. Dr. Chivers makes no bold claims for it. “To conclude that women are bisexual on the basis of their sexual responding overlooks the complexity and multidimensionality of female sexuality,” she wrote in her paper. She did allow that the apparent flexibility of women “may be related to greater potential for bisexuality in women than in men.” The makers of “Bi the Way” draw their own conclusions. “What started as a fad may have become a revolution,” a director, Brittany Blockman, says in a voiceover in the film, which traces the romantic peregrinations of five members of what a commentator calls the Whatever Generation. “But either way, it’s clear that young people are redrawing the map of sexuality.” That’s a conclusion Dr. Chivers, for one, is not ready to draw. Ms. Blockman, 27, who holds an M.A. in medical anthropology from Harvard, said she got the idea for the film when she channel-surfed across “The O.C.” and saw Mischa Barton’s character kiss another young woman. “When did two girls making out on mainstream teen shows become acceptable and cool?” she said in an interview. “I felt like I’d missed some kind of cultural shift.” At the after-party for the screening, at Vlada on West 51st Street, the culture seemed to be shifting in several directions simultaneously. A woman in Ziggy Stardust makeup, wearing a prosthesis cast from a man’s penis, participated in a simulated sex act. A while later, the woman, Amy Ouzoonian, a dancer and performance artist, made out on a couch with a mannish woman in a black suit. “You go along in life looking for that one person,” said Ms. Ouzoonian, 29. “The genitals shouldn’t really matter that much.” A party guest, Gillian Baine, a private-school teacher (and avowed heterosexual), said that seemed about right to her. “Young people are not wanting to pigeonhole themselves, and are doing that in a lot of ways,” said Ms. Baine, 28. “They’re feeling less constrained by norms. Or the norms are changing.” But norms are tricky things. Ms. Decker, 27, one of the movie’s directors, seemed a little embarrassed by her own limited experience. “The sad thing is, I desperately need to get with a girl,” she said, adding that a few stolen kisses was all she could count on the female side of her sexual ledger. “I just didn’t want it to be some random woman.” |
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| The Gay Animal Kingdom The effeminate sheep & other problems with Darwinian sexual selection. Jonah Lehrer June 7, 2006 From the JUN/JUL 2006 issue of Seed Joan Roughgarden thinks Charles Darwin made a terrible mistake. Not about natural selectionshe's no bible-toting creationistbut about his other great theory of evolution: sexual selection. According to Roughgarden, sexual selection can't explain the homosexuality that's been documented in over 450 different vertebrate species. This means that same-sex sexualitylong disparaged as a quirk of human cultureis a normal, and probably necessary, fact of life. By neglecting all those gay animals, she says, Darwin misunderstood the basic nature of heterosexuality. Male big horn sheep live in what are often called "homosexual societies." They bond through genital licking and anal intercourse, which often ends in ejaculation. If a male sheep chooses to not have gay sex, it becomes a social outcast. Ironically, scientists call such straight-laced males "effeminate." Giraffes have all-male orgies. So do bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, gray whales, and West Indian manatees. Japanese macaques, on the other hand, are ardent lesbians; the females enthusiastically mount each other. Bonobos, one of our closest primate relatives, are similar, except that their lesbian sexual encounters occur every two hours. Male bonobos engage in "penis fencing," which leads, surprisingly enough, to ejaculation. They also give each other genital massages. As this list of activities suggests, having homosexual sex is the biological equivalent of apple pie: Everybody likes it. At last count, over 450 different vertebrate species could be beheaded in Saudi Arabia. You name it, there's a vertebrate out there that does it. Nevertheless, most biologists continue to regard homosexuality as a sexual outlier. According to evolutionary theory, being gay is little more than a maladaptive behavior. Joan Roughgarden, a professor of biology at Stanford University, wants to change that perception. After cataloging the wealth of homosexual behavior in the animal kingdom two years ago in her controversial book Evolution's Rainbowand weathering critiques that, she says, stemmed largely from her being transgenderedRoughgarden has set about replacing Darwinian sexual selection with a new explanation of sex. For too long, she says, biology has neglected evidence that mating isn't only about multiplying. Sometimes, as in the case of all those gay sheep, dolphins and primates, animals have sex just for fun or to cement their social bonds. Homosexuality, Roughgarden says, is an essential part of biology, and can no longer be dismissed. By using the queer to untangle the straight, Roughgarden's theories have the potential to usher in a scientific sexual revolution. Darwin's theory of sex began with an observation about peacocks. For a man who liked to see the world in terms of functional adaptations, the tails of male peacocks seemed like a useless absurdity. Why would nature invest in such a baroque display of feathers? Did male peacocks want to be eaten by predators? 450+ Species Can't Be Wrong For a list of over 450 species exhibiting homosexual behavior, pick up a copy of the June/July issue of Seed, or subscribe here. Darwin's hypothesis was typically brilliant: The peacocks did it for the sake of reproduction. The male's fancy tail entranced the staid peahen. Darwin used this idea to explain the biological quirks that natural selection couldn't explain. If a trait wasn't in the service of survival, then it was probably in the service of seduction. Furthermore, the mechanics of sex helped explain why the genders were so different. Because eggs are expensive and sperm are cheap, "Males of almost all animals have stronger passions than females," Darwin wrote. "The female...with the rarest of exceptions is less eager than the male...she is coy." Darwin is telling the familiar Mars and Venus story: Men want sex while women want to cuddle. Females, by choosing who to bed, impose sexual selection onto the species. Darwin's theory of sex has been biological dogma ever since he postulated why peacocks flirt. His gendered view of life has become a centerpiece of evolution, one of his great scientific legacies. The culture wars over evolution and common descent notwithstanding, Darwin's theory of sexual selection has been thoroughly assimilated into mass culture. From sitcoms to beer ads, our coital "instincts" are constantly reaffirmed. Females are wary, and males are horny. Sex is this simple. Or is it? Indeed, biology now knows better. Nobody is hornier than a female macaque or bonobo (which mount the males because the males are too exhausted to continue the fornication). Peacocks are actually the exception, not the rule. Roughgarden first began thinking Darwin may have been in error after she attended the 1997 gay pride parade in San Francisco, where she had gone to walk alongside a float in support of transgendered people. Although she had lived her first 52 years as a man, Roughgarden was about to become a woman. The decision hadn't been easy. For one thing, she was worried about losing her job as a tenured professor of biology at Stanford. (The fear turned out to be unfounded.) After living for a year in Santa Barbara while undergoing the "physical aspects of the transition," Roughgarden returned to Stanford in the spring of 1999 and decided to write a book about the biology of sexual diversity. In particular, she wanted to answer the question that had first surfaced in her mind back in 1997. "When I was at that gay pride parade," Roughgarden remembers, "I was just stunned by the sheer magnitude of the LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender] population. Because I'm a biologist, I started asking myself some difficult questions. My discipline teaches that homosexuality is some sort of anomaly. But if the purpose of sexual contact is just reproduction, as Darwin believed, then why do all these gay people exist? A lot of biologists assume that they are somehow defective, that some developmental error or environmental influence has misdirected their sexual orientation. If so, gay and lesbian people are a mistake that should have been corrected a long time ago. But this hasn't happened. That's when I had my epiphany. When scientific theory says something's wrong with so many people, perhaps the theory is wrong, not the people." The resulting book, Evolution's Rainbow, was an audacious attack on Darwin's theory of sexual selection. To make her case, Roughgarden filled the text with a staggering collection of animal perversities, from the penises of female spotted hyenas to the mnage trois tactics of bluegill sunfish. As Roughgarden put it, "What's coming out [in the past 10-15 years] is to the rest of the species what the Kinsey Report was to humans." According to Roughgarden, classic sexual selection can't account for these strange carnal habits. After all, Darwin imagined sex as a relatively straightforward transaction. Males compete for females. Evolutionary success is defined by the quantity of offspring. Thus, any distractions from the business of making babiesdistractions like homosexuality, masturbation, etc.are precious wastes of fluids. You'd think by now, several hundred million years after sex began, nature would have done away with such inefficiencies, and males and females would only act to maximize rates of sexual reproduction. But the opposite has happened. Instead of copulation becoming more functional and straightforward, it has only gotten weirder as species have evolvedmore sodomy and other frivolous pleasures that are useless for propagating the species. The more socially complex the animal, the more sexual "deviance" it exhibits. Look at primates: Compared to our closest relatives, contemporary, Westernized Homo sapiens are the staid ones. Despite this new evidence, sexual selection theory is still stuck in the 19th century. The Victorian peacock remains the standard bearer. But as far as Roughgarden is concerned, that's bad science: "The time has come to declare that sexual theory is indeed false and to stop shoe-horning one exception after another into a sexual selection framework...To do otherwise suggests that sexual selection theory is unfalsifiable, not subject to refutation." Roughgarden is an ambitious scientist. She believes it is impossible to comprehend the diversity of sexuality without disowning Darwin. Although she isn't the first biologist to condemn sexual selectionDarwin's theory has never been very popular with feministsshe is unusually vocal about cataloguing his empirical errors. "When I began, I didn't set out to criticize Darwin," she says. "But I quickly realized that most scientists are pretty dismissive about same-sex sexuality in vertebrates. They think these animals are just having fun or practicing. As long as scientists clung to this old dogma, homosexuality would always be this funny anomaly you didn't have to account for." Roughgarden's first order of business was proving that homosexuality isn't a maladaptive trait. At first glance, this seems like a futile endeavor. Being gay clearly makes individuals less likely to pass on their genes, a major biological faux pas. From the perspective of evolution, homosexual behavior has always been a genetic dead end, something that has to be explained away. But Roughgarden believes that biologists have it backwards. Given the pervasive presence of homosexuality throughout the animal kingdom, same-sex partnering must be an adaptive trait that's been carefully preserved by natural selection. As Roughgarden points out, "a 'common genetic disease' is a contradiction in terms, and homosexuality is three to four orders of magnitude more common than true genetic diseases such as Huntington's disease." So how might homosexuality be good for us? Any concept of sexual selection that emphasizes the selfish propagation of genes and sperm won't be able to account for the abundance of non-heterosexual sex. All those gay penguins and persons will remain inexplicable. However, if one looks at homosexuality from the perspective of a community, one can begin to see why nature might foster a variety of sexual interactions. According to Roughgarden, gayness is a necessary side effect of getting along. Homosexuality evolved in tandem with vertebrate societies, in which a motley group of individuals has to either live together or die alone. In fact, Roughgarden even argues that homosexuality is a defining feature of advanced animal communities, which require communal bonds in order to function. "The more complex and sophisticated a social system is," she writes, "the more likely it is to have homosexuality intermixed with heterosexuality." Japanese macaques, an old world primate, illustrate this principle perfectly. Macaque society revolves around females, who form intricate dominance hierarchies within a given group. Males are transient. To help maintain the necessary social networks, female macaques engage in rampant lesbianism. These friendly copulations, which can last up to four days, form the bedrock of macaque society, preventing unnecessary violence and aggression. Females that sleep together will even defend each other from the unwanted advances of male macaques. In fact, behavioral scientist Paul Vasey has found that females will choose to mate with another female, as opposed to a horny male, 92.5% of the time. While this lesbianism probably decreases reproductive success for macaques in the short term, in the long run it is clearly beneficial for the species, since it fosters social stability. "Same-sex sexuality is just another way of maintaining physical intimacy," Roughgarden says. "It's like grooming, except we have lots of pleasure neurons in our genitals. When animals exhibit homosexual behavior, they are just using their genitals for a socially significant purpose." Roughgarden is now using this model of homosexuality to reimagine heterosexuality. Her conclusions, published last February in Science, are predictably controversial. While Darwin saw males and females as locked in conflict, acting out the ancient battle of their gametes, Roughgarden describes sexual partners as a model of solidarity. "This whole view of the sexes as being at war is just so flawed from the start. First of all, there are all these empirical exceptions, like homosexuality. And then there's the logical inconsistency of it all. Why would a male ever jettison control of his evolutionary destiny? Why would he entrust females to serendipitously raise their shared young? The fact is, males and females are committed to cooperate." Consider the Eurasian oystercatcher, a shore bird that enjoys feasting on shellfish. A consistent minority of oystercatcher families are polygynous, in which a lucky male mates with two different females simultaneously. These threesomes come in two different flavors: aggressive and cooperative. In an aggressive threesome, the females are at war; they attack each other frequently, and try to disrupt the egg-laying process of their fellow spouse. So far, so Darwinian: Life is nasty, brutish and short. However, the cooperative threesome is everything Darwin didn't expect. These females share a nest, mate with each other several times a day, and preen their feathers together. It's domestic bliss. In Roughgarden's Science paper, she uses "cooperative game theory" to elucidate the diverse mating habits of the oystercatcher. Whereas Darwin held that conflict was the natural state of life (we are all Hobbesian bullies at heart), Roughgarden sees cooperation as our default position. This makes mathematical sense: The family that sleeps together has more offspring. Why, then, do oystercatcher females occasionally engage in all out war? According to Roughgarden, violence occurs when "social negotiations" break down. Although the birds really want to get along (who doesn't like being preened?), something goes awry. The end result is risky violence, in which one female or both will end the breeding season without an egg. The advantage of Roughgarden's new theory is that it can explain a wider spectrum of sexual behaviors than Darwinian sexual selection. Lesbian oystercatchers and gay mountain sheep? Their homosexuality is just a prelude to social cooperation, a pleasurable way of avoiding wanton conflict. But what about the peacock and all those other examples of sexual dimorphism? According to Roughgarden, "expensive, functionally useless badges like the peacock's tail...are admission tickets": they just get you in the door. If you don't have a ticket, you are ruthlessly denied breeding rights, like an uncool kid at the prom. Of course, most humans don't see sex as a way of maintaining the social contract. Our lust doesn't seem logical, especially when that logic involves the abstruse calculations of game theory. Furthermore, it's strange for most people to think of themselves as naturally bisexual. Being gay or straight seems to be an intrinsic and implacable part of our identity. Roughgarden disagrees. "In our culture, we assume that there is a straight-gay binary, and that you are either one or the other. But if you look at vertebrates, that just isn't the case. You will almost never find animals or primates that are exclusively gay. Other human cultures show the same thing." Since Roughgarden believes that the hetero/homo distinction is a purely cultural creation, and not a fact of biology, she thinks it is only a matter of time before we return to the standard primate model. "I'm convinced that in 50 years, the gay-straight dichotomy will dissolve. I think it just takes too much social energy to preserve. All this campy, flamboyant behavior: It's just such hard work." Despite Roughgarden's long list of peer-reviewed articles in prestigious journals, most evolutionary biologists remain skeptical of her conclusions. For one thing, it's tough to measure the benefits of diversityor lesbian pair bonding. It's even harder to imagine how traits that are good for the group get passed on by individuals. (As a result, group selection has largely been replaced by kin selection.) In the absence of anything conclusive, most scientists stick with Darwin and Dawkins. Other biologists think Roughgarden is exaggerating the importance of homosexuality. Invertebrate zoologist Stephen Shuster told Nature that Roughgarden "throws out a very healthy baby with some slightly soiled bathwater." And biologist Alison Jolly, in an otherwise positive review of Evolution's Rainbow for Science, conceded that Roughgarden ultimately fails in her ambition to "revolutionize current biological theories of sexual selection." As far as these mainstream biologists are concerned, Roughgarden's gay primates and transgendered fish are simply interesting sexual deviants, statistical outliers in a world that contains plenty of peacocks. As Paul Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, put it, "I think much of what Roughgarden says is very interesting. But I think she discounts many of the modifications that have been made to sexual selection since Darwin originally proposed it. So in that sense, her Darwin is a straw man. You don't have to dismiss the modern version of sexual selection in order to explain social bonding or homosexuality." Roughgarden remains defiant. "I think many scientists discount me because of who I am. They assume that I can't be objective, that I've got some bias or hidden LGBT agenda. But I'm just trying to understand the data. At this point, we have thousands of species that deviate from the standard account of Darwinian sexual selection. So we get all these special case exemptions, and we end up downplaying whatever facts don't fit. The theory is becoming Ptolemaic. It clearly has the trajectory of a hypothesis in trouble." Roughgarden's cataloging of sexual diversity has challenged a fundamental biological theory. If Darwinian sexual selectionwhatever its current variantis to survive, it must adapt to this new data and come up with convincing explanations for why a host of animals just aren't like peacocks. |
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| The more they like sex, the more women
like women Bisexuality is on the rise - but only on one side of the gender gap The Independent Online Jonathan Owen 12 February 2006 Being highly sexed changes men's and women's sexual orientation in startlingly different ways, a major academic study has concluded. The research, conducted by Dr Richard Lippa, an internationally renowned sex expert at California State University, shows highly sexed women to be no less than 27 times more likely than men to become attracted to their own sex. The survey, of more than 3,500 people, is published in this month's Psychological Science. It showed that 0.3 per cent of men were attracted to their own sex, as opposed to 8 per cent of women. For most women, a high sex drive increases their sexual attraction to both men and women. The opposite occurs in men, where a high sex drive simply exaggerates existing sexual orientation. Dr Lippa told The Independent on Sunday: "Sexuality is more complex than we want to believe. It is more common for women to change their sexuality. My personal sense is that there are very few bisexual men, but there are significantly more bisexual women out there." Researchers are finding evidence that there is a key biological difference at play between the sexes, rather than sociological factors alone. This conclusion comes as no surprise to the television personality Rebecca Loos, a lifelong bisexual. "I do find that a lot of my female friends find women and men attractive, whether or not they happen to be in relationships with men," she says. "Most women I know have been with other women. Men and women are completely different when it comes to sex: for men it's a lot more physical." As more women develop an open-minded attitude, celebrities are once again leading the way in bringing sexual orientation out of the closet. Madonna, Angelina Jolie and Saffron Burrows are among those famous for their relationships with both sexes. In the 1990s the columnist Julie Burchill had a much-publicised affair with the writer Charlotte Raven, whose brother she later married. Data from last year's Sex Survey conducted by the BBC is expected to show twice as many bisexual women (6 per cent) as lesbians (3 per cent) in the UK. Numbers of women who had tried lesbian sex more than doubled between 1990 and 2000. The TV sex therapist Tracey Cox says: "Bisexuality is going to be very interesting - something to watch, particularly with women. They've done experiments where they wire up people and get them to watch porn, woman on woman, man on man and hetero, and women were aroused by all three. "Nearly all the sex therapists I know, if I ask what's the top fantasy for women, [will say] sleeping with another woman." |
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Bonobo Bonking |
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