Bisexual Men Exist: A Handbook for Bisexual, Pansexual and M-Spec Men

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Okay, I will take you at face value when you say that you are sincere. What I take that to mean is that you genuinely do not understand the amount of distress that I feel at participating in the discussion on your blog, nor do you know why I feel this way. On that basis, I’ll explain it to you this one time, and leave it to you to decide what to do with this information. Coming out as a bisexual man is incredibly difficult, which is probably why so few do it. According to Stonewall, only 14% of bisexual men are out to their whole family. 46% are out to no one in their family. When compared to gay men, where the statistics are 59% and 10% respectively, the issue presents itself very clearly. Second, they examined the difference in each man’s arousal to women and men, to see if bisexual men would show less difference in arousal, compared to gay and straight men, to women and men. Bisexual men indeed showed less difference in arousal to both sexes.

The end where the writing stops is often the conclusion, as in the takeaway or the gist or the main point. Here, it was “There’s obviously a different question of why, in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty, are researchers using the language of discovery in this context. And why they’d go straight for the old penis measuring method rather than just asking.” Simpson most certainly implied self-report was reliable, and that it was stupid to use other measures. The former head of the Australian Army (ironically) said it best: The standard you walk past is the one you endorse. Last year, Bailey, Rieger, and others published a study in which they measured female sexual arousal. They concluded that women — whether they identify themselves as homosexual or heterosexual — have bisexual arousal patterns. That's because the genitals of women participating in the study became aroused when they watched porn, regardless of whether it featured men or women. It's also worth defining the ‘four monos’. Monosexuality relates to an attraction to a single-sex or gender, while non-monosexuality is an attraction to more than one sex or gender. Monosexism describes the negativity shown to individuals who do not identify with monosexuality (Hayfield, 2020). Finally, mononormativity refers to cultural or social norms which assume that everyone is or should be monosexual (Hayfield, 2020), and it’s also used around the assumption of monogamy.He is obviously pissed that researchers have taken it upon themselves to explore bisexuality using methods apart from just asking people how they identify themselves. The representation of queer men often followed a similar storyline. A man who had shown himself to be straight goes through some form of inner turmoil as his attraction towards a man grows. Eventually, the character comes out as gay and gets into a relationship with another man. People who are purely straight or purely gay can tend to generalize their own experience and think all other people must be just one or the other," added John Sylla, one of the 13 authors of the latest study and president of the American Institute of Bisexuality. "But the Kinsey Scale is valid, and there are bisexually aroused men and women, even if for different reasons they choose to pass as just straight or gay."

Dyar, C., Feinstein, B.A. and London, B. (2014) ‘Dimensions of sexual identity and minority stress among bisexual women: The role of partner gender’, Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity, 1(4), p. 441. Honestly there’s some stats in the papers but who really cares. The data is combined across 6 studies that cover two different types of stimulus (but it’s not clear how this was taken into account). The data also has about 270 straight(-ish) people, 200 gay(-ish) people, and 100 bi people, so, you know, balance.While bisexual erasure has existed for a long time, the actual term was coined by law scholar Yoshino (1999). The Royal College of Psychiatrists has recently defined the term as: ‘ignoring, removing, falsifying evidence of bisexuality from a source and in its extremist form can perpetuate that bisexuality does not exist’ (Watson & Smith, 2020). When bisexual people internalise society's negative social beliefs and apply them to themselves and other bisexual people, that’s internalised biphobia (Hayfield, 2020). Bisexual Men Exist is available from Five Leaves Bookshop or any other good bookstore. Vaneet will also be talking about his new book at Five Leaves on Sunday 19 February I’m happy that comments like Daniel Lakeland have spent time cleaning this up, but I firmly believe it’s the responsibility of the people who invite comment to frame the comments in a way that doesn’t hurt extremely marginalized communities. We (abstractly, in this case I) have the ability to remove or modify comments and we (I) are responsible to our readers. The LGBTQ+ community often isn’t a safe space for bisexual people. Historically speaking, bisexual people were often shunned from these spaces. For example, the London Lesbian and Gay Centre banned bisexual groups from using the space. But this isn’t just a historical issue. According to Stonewall’s statistics, 27 per cent of bi women and 18 per cent of bi men noted the discrimination they faced within their local LGBTQ+ community because of their sexual orientation. This is compared to just 9 per cent of lesbians and 4 per cent of gay men. I think it’s worth noting the extraordinary bias everyone here has (being educated, compassionate, generally left-leaning people) to virtue signal support for LGBTQ causes. That’s certainly a good thing, but I don’t think we are making enough distinction between biological features of sexuality and social nature of sexual identity. In this conflation, I don’t think we are doing those causes any special service.

The fact that you’re unable to distinguish between these two statements is a statement about your obtuseness, not anyone else’s. Dr Rieger’s scepticism stemmed from a previous small study he had done with Professor J. Michael Bailey of Northwestern University in 2005, and which found no evidence of bisexual arousal in men. This had led to a New York Times article “Straight, Gay or Lying?,” which dismayed many in the bisexual community.A further small study, by the same team, in 2011 confirmed the existence of bisexual arousal in men. We can identify all these problems with what might be called the fallacy of decontextualized measurement, the idea that science proceeds by crisp distinctions modeled after asocial phenomena, such as unambiguous medical diagnoses (the presence or absence of streptococcus or the color change of a litmus paper). Seeking an on–off decision, normalizing a base rate to 50 percent, and, most problematically, stripping a phenomenon of its social context all give the feel of scientific objectivity while creating serious problems for generalizing findings to the world outside the lab or algorithm. The authors say “the aim of this study was to examine the extent to which men who self-report bisexual orientation exhibit bisexual genital and self-reported arousal patterns” and “The primary question motivating this research is whether men who identify as bisexual have sexual arousal patterns that are also relatively bisexual,” which seems fine. It’s possible that people self-report bisexual orientation for reasons other than sexual arousal, so the *extent* to which these empirically relate is a fair question. It’s particularly puzzling since we would expect these to relate VERY strongly even in the presence of other reasons to ID as bisexual (even to the point that most of us wouldn’t bother studying this question)- around the “Notably” quote, apparently previous research does not provide consistent evidence of this relationship, at least depending on whether sexual arousal is measured subjectively or via physiological response, or possibly related to sampling concerns. Perhaps previous research suffered from underpowered studies (low N), which they argue they rectify.

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I should add that my comment is from a fairly abstract point of view; I think Andrew’s moderation is more sensible as a general principle. Obviously there are contextual factors to be taken into account etc etc. I don’t fault Dan for 86’ing transphobic comments. Maybe indeed this is not the place for that kind of discussion – that line has now been drawn. I think Dan’s comment is a quite concise and humorous summary of the societal framework within which this study was developed. A number of disciplines trail rather than lead society’s beliefs. The shifts seem to occur as a result of a recognition that beliefs were being treated as reality and when there is a shift in these normative beliefs toward reality the question is resolved. Ultimately, this comes down to the “paradox of tolerance”. If you tolerate the presence of bigotry, the marginalised people they target will leave. You cannot allow comments like Paul’s and also hope that someone like me will participate. You cannot engage with people like Michael Bailey and hope that people like me will participate. We will not. The *only* reason I am here talking to you still is that I am friends with Dan and Lauren. But my charity only goes so far. This is your blog, and you are free to do what you like with it. I will not return here while this kind of content is considered permissible: that’s my call to make. Perfect for anyone who wants to learn the language of bi+ community and scholarship, and concepts that can help them navigate their own sexual identities. Universities can play their part too. While I am yet to reach my final year of study, I do not feel represented in the curriculum so far. We’re talking about one of the most prominent areas of psychology, human relationships, yet much of the classic research ignores or erases my experiences. It’s time for bisexuality to stand as a unique identity.

Brewster, M.E. and Moradi, B. (2010) ‘Perceived experiences of anti-bisexual prejudice: Instrument development and evaluation’, Journal of Counseling Psychology, 57(4), p. 451. The question of whether bisexual arousal patterns exist has been less controversial about women than men Mereish, E.H., Katz-Wise, S.L. and Woulfe, J. (2017) ‘Bisexual-specific minority stressors, psychological distress, and suicidality in bisexual individuals: The mediating role of loneliness’, Prevention science, 18(6), pp. 716-725. Also there seems to be a kind of contradiction… or maybe a couple. I see many people saying (not in this comment section but generally) that words are important – and I agree! – but at the same time they have this strange “it doesn’t matter” attitude towards moderation. “Well it’s just a blog comment”, they might say: “Why do you care lol?”. But it isn’t just a “blog comment”– especially on a blog like this. It is strange how at the same time one should be concerned about the impact of words and have that kind of laissez faire attitude towards moderation.Kritzer, too, questions the study design. She points to the large number of men who were not genitally aroused during the study. I have very little to say here, except to let you all know that the venerable PNAS has today published a paper (edited by Steven Pinker) letting use know that male bisexuality exists.