50 shades of gay
05/02/2013
A fascinating Ted talk arguing that most people are somewhere between completely gay and completely straight. Good to hear the Kinsey idea given some new energy.
Disturbing findings on bisexuality and domestic abuse
28/01/2013
Bisexual Women Almost Twice As Likely To Be Abused As Straight Women
They are also three times as likely to be raped, according to the first-ever nationwide study on domestic violence and sexual orientation.
The first nationwide study to break down domestic violence rates by self-identified sexual orientation has found that lesbian and bisexual women are at higher risk than straight women, with bisexual women facing especially high rates.
The study [PDF], conducted by the CDC in 2010 and released Friday, found that 35% of straight women had experienced rape, physical violence, or stalking by a partner at some point in their lives. But 43.8% of lesbian women had experienced one of the three, as had a full 61.1% of bisexual women. Researchers interviewed a total of 9,709 women — 96.5% of them identified as straight, 2.2% as bisexual, and
1.3% as lesbian.
Bisexual women were also the most likely to have been raped by anyone, partner or not — 46.1% of them had experienced rape at some point, compared with 13.1% of lesbian women and 14.7% of straight women. And they were more likely to report that domestic violence had negatively impacted their lives — 57.4% of bisexual women who’d experienced violence said they also suffered aftereffects like missing work or having symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Only 33.5% of lesbian women and 28.2% of straight women said the same. Read more…
Happy new year!
31/12/2012
The Bisexuality Report made the Kinsey Chronicles top 5 news stories of 2012.
See here for details.
Bifuriosity in the Huffington Post
29/11/2012
There’s a great article today by Matt Stanley and Lauren Connors in the Huffington Post responding to a recent belittling piece they published about bisexuality. Nice mention for The Bisexuality Report too. Thanks Matt and Lauren!
Bisexuals – its seemingly okay for belittling blogs questioning our identity (or even if we exist) to not only be granted a voice, but to remain largely unchallenged. This fact has been uncomfortably highlighted by Daniel Warner’s recent exercise in hackery, creatively entitled ‘Bisexuality: Is It Fun, Non Committal or Just Plain Greedy?’.
We hope Daniel realises how short this falls from the mark for groundbreaking, or even ‘edgy’ writing. Being bisexuals ourselves, we can assure you that being called ‘greedy’ happens to us with a tedious frequency – imagine, if you will, the number of times a day you might have to read an irritating phrase like ‘float my boat’ or ‘cut the mustard’. Lazy writing aside, we thought we could take this opportunity to explain (for those of you who are ‘confused’ or can’t make up your minds) what bisexuality is and is not. Read more…
Bisexual and Parenting?
08/11/2012
Request for participants from Birkbeck researchers for a new study on bisexual parenting:
Bisexuality research guidelines – out now!
06/09/2012
The research guidelines which BiUK wrote for people writing about and studying bisexuality have now been published in an article in the Journal of Bisexuality.
The authors are a group of researchers and writers who work on bisexuality, organize bisexual research conferences, and take part in discussions on many bisexual and lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) academic forums. The authors have noticed, over the years, many problematic tendencies in research that focuses on, or includes, bisexuals. The authors therefore felt that it would be useful to come up with a list of ‘good practice’ guidelines for people researching and writing in this area. These should be particularly useful to those new to the area when they send out their calls for participants, to avoid alienating those participants or finding themselves ‘reinventing the wheel’ with their studies. Hopefully, the guidelines will also be helpful for experienced researchers to reflect on their research practices.
The paper is followed by a great piece by Sari van Anders who took the idea of the guidelines and applied it to researchers who work in bioscience laboratory settings.
Bisexuality is studied within the biological sciences, in fields like neuroscience, biopsychology, evolution and biomedicine, yet these fields typically do not train researchers to consider the social locations of their participants. However, bisexuality is a marginalized sexuality, and minorities and researchers have increasingly called for scientific research to attend to issues around power and social identity. This article provides a set of guidelines written by a bioscientist for bioscientists, to help delineate and address potential issues when studying bisexuality.
The original guidelines are mainly aimed at a social science/psychology audience. A couple of BiUK people have just finished adapting the guidelines for humanities scholars and we will publish their set of guidelines soon. We hope that people find the guidelines helpful.
Bisexuality and depression
05/09/2012
There’s a great new post up on Bisexuality and Beyond by Sue George on bisexuality and depression.
For long as I’ve been writing this blog, one of the main ways new people find it is by searching for “bisexuality and depression”. I find that really sad, but nothing like as sad as the statistics about bisexuality and mental health.
- A major Canadian study found bisexual men 6.3 times more likely, and bi women 5.9 times more likely, to report having been suicidal than heterosexual people
- A large Australian study found rates of mental health problems among bi people to be higher than those among lesbians, gay men, or heterosexuals.
- The UK Mind report on the mental health and wellbeing of LGB people found that bi men and women were less at ease about their sexuality than lesbians or gay men, and less likely to be out.
Bisexuality and mental health is currently a big issue in the bi community. This summer’s BiReCon (the British conference that looks at current research on bisexuality) had bisexuality and mental health as its theme. Read more…
BiReCon 2012: Meg’s talk
10/08/2012
Thursday 9th August 2012 saw the third biennial BiReCon event (#birecon2012 on twitter). Following the main findings of The Bisexuality Report, published earlier this year, the conference focused on bisexuality and mental health. Huge thanks to Rebecca Jones, Caroline Walters and Helen Bowes-Catton for organising such a wonderful event.
The full programme of the event is available here and we will be encouraging speakers to write up their presentations for BiUK and/or BCN over the coming weeks and months.
Keynote talks considered the individual and community implications of bisexual mental health, explored intersectionality and debates around ethnicity and sexuality, and outlined changes in the UK mental health system, drawing out possibilities for future bisexual mental health. In parallel sessions we heard fascinating explorations of the overlaps between stereotypes of bisexuality and the diagnostic category of borderline personality disorder, as well as an important consideration of eating disorders in bisexual men. One workshop covered bisexual people’s experiences of mental health services, which will be fed back to key National Health Service providers. Talks also dealt with understandings of sexuality more broadly, non-monogamous relationships, Shakespeare, and the importance of the bisexual community in relation to mental health.
For Meg Barker’s presentation on Depression and/or oppression? Bisexuality and Mental Health you can view the prezi presentation here, and listen to it (and Rebecca’s introduction to BiReCon) on these youtube clips.
Bisexual people exist (again): News release for Cornell sexual orientation study
06/08/2012
Cornell University issued the following news release:
Pupil dilation reveals sexual orientation in new Cornell study
There is a popular belief that sexual orientation can be revealed by pupil dilation to attractive people, yet until now there was no scientific evidence.
For the first time, researchers at Cornell University used a specialized infrared lens to measure pupillary changes to participants watching erotic videos.
Pupils were highly telling: they widened most to videos of people who participants found attractive, thereby revealing where they were on the sexual spectrum from heterosexual to homosexual.
The findings were published August 3 in the scientific journal PLoS ONE.
Previous research explored these mechanisms either by simply asking people about their sexuality, or by using physiological measures such as assessing their genital arousal.
These methods, however, come with substantial problems.
“We wanted to find an alternative measure that would be an automatic indication of sexual orientation, but without being as invasive as previous measures. Pupillary responses are exactly that,” says Gerulf Rieger, lead author and research fellow at Cornell.
“With this new technology we are able to explore sexual orientation of people who would never participate in a study on genital arousal, such as people from traditional cultures. This will give us a much better understanding how sexuality is expressed across the planet.”
The new Cornell study adds considerably more to the field of sexuality research than merely a novel measure.
As expected, heterosexual men showed strong pupillary responses to sexual videos of women, and little to men; heterosexual women, however, showed pupillary responses to both sexes.
This result confirms previous research suggesting that women have a very different type of sexuality than men.
Moreover, the new study feeds into a long-lasting debate on male bisexuality.
Previous notions were that most bisexual men do not base their sexual identity on their physiological sexual arousal but on romantic and identity issues.
Contrary to this claim, bisexual men in the new study showed substantial pupil dilations to sexual videos of both men and women.
“We can now finally argue that a flexible sexual desire is not simply restricted to women – some men have it, too, and it is reflected in their pupils,” says Ritch C. Savin-Williams, co-author and professor in Human Development at Cornell.
“In fact, not even a division into ‘straight,’ ‘bi,’ and ‘gay’ tells the full story. Men who identity as ‘mostly straight’ really exist both in their identity and their pupil response; they are more aroused to males than straight men, but much less so than both bisexual and gay men,” Savin-Williams notes.
The researchers are confident that their new measure will aid in understanding these groups better and point to a range of sexualities that has been ignored in previous research.
Paperblog
