A Study Affirms That Almost All Women Are Bisexual
A research article by Rieger and collaborators (2016) suggests that women are almost never exclusively heterosexual, but most are both aroused by seeing images of attractive men and women. Below we will analyze this study so that the reader can assess the degree of credibility of this bold statement.
Recently a research team from the University of Essex led by psychologist and anthropologist Gerulf Rieger has published the results of their studies on the differences between men and women in the response to sexual stimuli. These authors also analyzed the peculiarities of these patterns in homosexual people.
The article by Rieger and collaborators is based on two studies carried out by this team. The first of them focused on genital responses associated with sexual arousal and in self-reports on the degree of masculinity or femininity perceived by the subjects in themselves.
The second investigation, however, focused on a particular sign of sexual response: pupillary dilation or mydriasis in the presence of sexual stimuli Likewise, this element was compared again with the degree of masculinity/femininity, although in this case it was measured by external observers in addition to self-report.
According to the authors of this study, their hypotheses were based on different information obtained in previous research. A particularly notable aspect in this sense is the scientific evidence regarding the differences in the sexual responses of men and women, as well as those that occur between heterosexual and homosexual women.
Different studies, including that of Rieger’s team, have found significant differences in reactivity to sexual stimuli depending on biological sex. Specific, the sexual response of heterosexual men is specific to female stimuli but that of heterosexual women is not so much for male images.
Apparently, the physiological response (in this case pupil dilation) of heterosexual men appears almost exclusively when the eliciting stimuli include feminine elements. This would be the typical pattern in men who consider themselves heterosexual, although the answer may vary depending on the specific case.
On the contrary, women respond to both male and female sexual stimuli although they claim that they are exclusively heterosexual. Thus, the degree of pupil dilation of hetero women turned out to be similar when the sexual images presented included men as when they involved other women.
It is for this reason that Rieger’s team ventures to affirm that women are not usually completely heterosexual, but that most of them would be bisexual. Specifically, 74% of heterosexual women who participated in the study showed intense sexual arousal responses when viewing images of attractive women.
Patterns based on sexual orientation
According to researchers at the University of Essex, Homosexual women are the exception to the general feminine pattern Curiously, their sexual response seems to be more similar to that of men than to that of women – always taking into account, of course, that studies of this type focus on average values.
In this way, women who claim to be exclusively attracted to women tend to react selectively to female sexual stimuli, and not when these are related to men. As we see, this response is closer to that of the male gender than to that of women who consider themselves heterosexual.
Furthermore, Rieger’s team suggests that the behavior of homosexual women tends to be more typically masculine than that of heterosexual women. The degree of selectivity in the response to female sexual stimuli seems to be correlated with the masculinity intensity of external behavior (“non-sexual masculinity”).
However, the authors state that there is no evidence that sexual and non-sexual patterns are connected to each other. Thus, these two types of masculinity would develop independently as a consequence of different factors, in the words of this research team.
All bisexual? The cause of these differences
The University of Essex team’s studies used visual sexual material. In this sense, it should be taken into account that, according to research such as that of Hamann et al. (2004), Men respond more intensely than women to visual stimuli when these are related to sexuality.
This seems to be related to the fact that certain regions of the brain of men are activated more than those of women in the presence of this type of images. In particular, some of the relevant structures are the amygdala (especially the left one), the hypothalamus and the ventral striatum, which is located in the basal ganglia.
On the other hand, women seem to become more aroused depending on the context ; That is, they tend to show responses such as pupil dilation if sexual cues are present in the situation, regardless of whether they are masculine or feminine.
It has been proposed that these differences could be due in part to differential socialization between men and women. Thus, while men would learn to repress homosexual thoughts in moments of sexual arousal, women could feel less social pressure in this regard.
