All Women Are Bisexual

All Women Are Bisexual
Why Women Become More Bisexual As They Age, According To Science
By Jessica Cruel — Written on Aug 13, 2020
Like most women, I have no shame in admitting that I find other females attractive. I have even admitted to being open to bisexual experimentation .
For women, it's perfectly acceptable to be a little bi-curious. And, according to research, it's the norm.
A 2019 study in the Journal of Sex Research revealed that women's sexual preferences tend to be a gray area where women become more sexually fluid as they get older.
Our sexuality is a major part of our identity. Christine Kaestle is a professor of developmental health at Virginia Tech and the leader of the study. "Sexual orientation involves many aspects of life, such as who we feel attracted to, who we have sex with, and how we self-identify," she said.
In fact, researchers at Boise State University found that in a group of heterosexual women, 60 percent were physically interested in other women, where 45 percent made out with a woman in the past, and 50 percent had fantasies about the same sex.
Sometimes when I catch myself staring at a beautiful woman in the grocery store I wonder about my own sexuality. I'm not supposed to like girls! (At least according to some people in society.)
Would I date a woman? I'm not sure, but I am attracted to the beauty of other women — and they're so much easier to understand psychologically than men.
And, personally, I believe that emotional connections and physical attraction are linked. For instance, guys tend to get cuter in our eyes if they're genuinely nice.
"Women are encouraged to be emotionally close to each other," psychology professor Elizabeth Morgan said. "That provides an opportunity for intimacy and romantic feelings to develop."
From talking about personal issues for hours to calling each other "lovers," women's friendships are often barely distinguishable from romantic relationships.
When heterosexual women hook up with other women , their relationships are based on an emotional connection. Lisa Diamond from the University of Utah believes that it only takes the right person to convince a woman to enter into a relationship with someone of the same sex.
Not exactly. "You can still be heterosexual and have interests, experiences or fantasies with the same sex," says Morgan.
And Kaestle adds, "At the same time, as more people pair up in longer-term committed relationships as young adulthood progresses, this could lead to fewer identities and attractions being expressed that do not match the sex of the long-term partner, leading to a kind of [bisexual] invisibility."
In addition, sexuality gets more, not less, fluid with time — yet more proof that experimentation isn't just for when you are in college.
In a study conducted by Diamond, the older a woman was, the more likely she was to describe her sexual preference as "unlabeled."
"We have this idea that sexuality gets clearer and more defined as time goes on," says Diamond. "We consider that a sign of maturity to figure out who you are. I've seen it's really the opposite."
Of course, the media plays a role in girl-on-girl attraction, only fueling the fire of our confusion. Not only have pop stars like Lady Gaga made bisexuality mainstream, but women can't help but ogle beautiful women — they are everywhere we turn.
According to Neuroscientist Ogi Ogas, Ph.D. analyzed billions of web information including web searches, erotic websites, and e-books, and found that women are just as likely to search for "pictures of Ryan Gosling" as "pictures of Jessica Alba." How about that?
"Women in the media are often sexualized and women constantly get the message that appearance should be important to them, so they're used to viewing women in a sexualized way," says Morgan.
I wonder how much of the attraction to other women is based on appearance and messages from the media, and how much of it is authentic and genuine. Should we even try to distinguish between the two?
Jessica Cruel is the Senior Editor of Beauty & Style at SELF Magazine.
Editor's Note: This article was originally posted in March 2015 and was updated with the latest information.
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By now, we all know that sexuality isn’t a binary: there’s a whole spectrum of sexual identification. And even within the ways people self-identify, there are nuances that aren’t necessarily apparent.
A new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology from the University of Essex in the U.K. found that most women who identify as straight are actually sexually stimulated by both sexes. To test this, 345 participants were shown videos of naked men and women and their responses (including pupil dilation and other physiological indicators of sexual arousal) were recorded.
Seventy-four percent of the women who identified as straight “were strongly sexually aroused to videos of both attractive men and attractive women,” according to a University of Essex press release about the study. In contrast, participants who identified as lesbian “showed much stronger sexual responses to their preferred sex (women) over their less preferred sex (men).” Apparently, this means that lesbians are more like men in their sexual response — they also show a stronger reaction to their preferred sex. There's no indication that the study involved any women who identify as bisexual.
These findings are also in line with a study released earlier this summer from researchers at the University of Notre Dame that found "women’s sexuality may be more flexible and adaptive than men’s," according to study author Elizabeth Aura McClintock.
So, what does this all mean? “This shows us that how women appear in public does not mean that we know anything about their sexual role preferences,” said lead researcher on the Essex study, Dr. Gerulf Rieger. “Men are simple, but women’s sexual responses remain a mystery.” And though sexual response is certainly an important factor in forming one's sexual identity, it's clear that there are other important elements also at play.
More than anything else, this study shows us how varied and complex human sexuality is — and how little the labels we have do to reflect the depth and diversity of attraction among people.
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Guess what, girls? As of this month, everything you think you know about your own sexuality is wrong. If you think you’re straight, think again. And if men — and men alone — turn you on, well . . . you’re wrong.
You see, ladies — we’re all secretly lesbians! At least, that’s what “science” would have you believe.
Earlier this month, researchers from Essex University “discovered” through a “scientific study” that “all” women are bisexual or homosexual. Supposedly, the straight woman is a matter of myth.
In the study, some 300 women were shown sexually provocative videos of attractive men and women. Researchers claim that most female participants, including those who identified as heterosexual, became sexually aroused in response to images of both sexes. The primary evidence? Pupil dilation.
The sensationalist conclusion? All women are gay.
In the words of lead researcher Gerulf Rieger, the man behind the madness, “Even though the majority of women identify as straight, our research clearly demonstrates that when it comes to what turns them on, they are either bisexual or gay, but never straight.”
That a random male researcher would conclude that he understands every single woman’s sexuality better than women do themselves is bad enough. That these researchers would point to painfully fragile evidence to paint a broad, black-and-white picture of female sexuality and then pass it off as infallible fact or universal truth is reckless and irresponsible.
Nonetheless, we’re left with the science fiction that if your eyes get too wide when you see an attractive woman — boom! — you’re a lesbian.
Let’s forget for a moment that pupils dilate for many reasons. Let’s agree, for the sake of argument, that pupil dilation is in fact a definitive link to sexual arousal. How can anyone say with certainty that the dilation was not a result of something subsidiary to the image itself, like an individual thought, image, emotion or response that the image triggered?
But even if the image of a beautiful woman prompted arousal, that still doesn’t necessarily equate to actual sexual desire. It’s undoubtedly true that most women, unlike men, will contemplate the physical beauty of their own sex.
We’ll admire that singer’s curves, that actress’s face, that model’s legs, that lady’s abs and so on. Most of us can point to at least one famous female whose looks we’d like to have. But admiring another woman’s appearance usually means we want to copy her, not copulate with her.
Most women believe Angelina Jolie is beautiful, but would still probably prefer to be with her husband (Brad Pitt) than with her.
Yet there’s a larger point here as well: We talk about sex too much. We are an undeniably sex-obsessed society with a seemingly insatiable appetite for finding something sexual in everything. And lately, we’ve been talking far too much about sexual preference.
We’ve spent much of the last few years giving standing ovations to those who’ve come out as gay, and we’ve been busy heaping praise and awards on those who announce they’re switching genders.
We’ve been hearing an increasingly loud message that there’s no real difference between men and women, and that the two are largely interchangeable. And there’s an increasingly strong cultural pressure to accept as normal any and all sexual preferences, even those people create for themselves.
We’re already an inch away from placing sexual variation up on a pedestal, and now we’re going to claim that heterosexuality doesn’t even exist? Please.
A study like this doesn’t help anyone understand anything. Rather, it has probably caused greater confusion and angst among girls and women who might now be wondering, consciously or subconsciously, if there’s something wrong with them if they’re still attracted to boys and men.
But even more importantly, our constant cultural chatter about sex and sexual preference is blinding us to the bigger picture that human beings are more complex than their genitals (or dilated pupils).
So maybe the folks over at Essex could put their time, energy and money to better use by studying the consequences of a culture that tries to condition people into believing their sex organs are the most interesting and valuable part about them.
Now that would produce some eye-opening research.

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