Erotic Plasticity

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Erotic Plasticity
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EROTIC PLASTICITY : "Erotic plasticity looks at behaviour shaped by society ."
Cite this page: N., Sam M.S., "EROTIC PLASTICITY," in PsychologyDictionary.org , April 7, 2013, https://psychologydictionary.org/erotic-plasticity/ (accessed July 9, 2022).
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The degree that sexual desire is shaped by social , cultural ans situational factors. See behavioural plasticity .
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This article requires an expert's contribution. I have merely completed some fairly basic copyediting. --Soulparadox 08:54, 21 April 2012 (UTC)

This article contains at least one devastatingly sweeping assertion, As women have been found to possess a weaker sex drive than men . This is supported by a reference to a paper by Baumeister, the originator of the erotic plasticity concept. Apart from the use of the vague term "sex drive", such an assertion seems to me to be pure POV. A rephrasing to state that the argument/theory is based on such a POV might be more fitting. Everybody got to be somewhere! ( talk ) 16:34, 15 May 2012 (UTC) [ reply ]

More sweeping assertions:
In section "Sexual fluidity" is stated as a matter of fact that women's sexuality is more fluid than men's, and the link goes to the work of Diamond. Well, that's just Diamond's opinion, and notice that her research was done ONLY in lesbian and bisexual women. The results of that research conclude that lesbians are rarely exclusively attracted to women, but in no case entitle her to extrapolate that to all women.
The same goes for the line "women are more likely than men to engage in homosexual behaviour". WHAAAAAAAAAAT!!!?
Almost ALL research done worldwide shows that the amount of men who engage in homosexual behaviours is bigger (sometimes much bigger) than the amount of women. A single anecdotical study is not enough to invalidate years of previous and well grounded studies and statistics (no need to talk about the absolute prevalence of men's homo-bisexuality through history). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.216.119.208 ( talk ) 16:35, 18 July 2012 (UTC) [ reply ]

I knew ideologues would flip and whine over this article. Surprised there's not more hate. "bias bias bias". You people are so predictable. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.110.146.196 ( talk ) 20:53, 5 February 2018 (UTC) [ reply ]

Why is this article so heavily biased towards female sexual fluidity? It cites a lot of research done by individuals who try to prove that only women are sexually fluid (all of them very recent research, by the way), but conveniently ignores the bulk of evidence as far as male sexual fluidity is concerned, evidence with deeper roots in culture and history, also.
Just a quick examination of history (Ancient Greece or Rome, for example), non-Western cultures (both ancient and modern), and behaviour in all-male environments (prison, Army, gender-segregated schools), shows that male sexuality is as fluid, if not more, as female's. You don't need to cite particular research to prove this; it's self-evident and common knowledge.
Why is it being ignored, then?
Or is it that this article is just about a recent theory about female sexuality, and not about real behaviour and history? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.125.33.252 ( talk ) 01:15, 27 August 2012 (UTC) [ reply ]

What? Researchers haven't found proof of male sexual fluidity!? Then I suppose that extensive historical documents and anthropological studies showing that male same-sex experimentation is as old as humanity, and present in every single culture and time, don't count as much as a couple of dubious studies made by a couple of researchers a couple of years ago. Yeah, sure...
Not to mention that upon examination of historical data, the prevalence of male same-sex behaviours over female's is overwhelming, and the same happens among animals.
The article also ignores conveniently about Kinsey's studies, which showed that homosexual behaviours were quite more frequent in men than in women (well, it ignores MOST statistics worldwide, which show the same results).
This article IS biased, period.
And if these researchers haven't found proof of male sexual fluidity in their studies, it's because they don't want to conduct those studies in the first place because, you know, "that would make straight men feel so insecure about their sexuality, and God forbids that!" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.125.33.252 ( talk ) 15:09, 5 September 2012 (UTC) [ reply ]

The only research that pretends to prove that female bisexuality is more common than male bisexuality is that conducted by L. Diamond and Lippa, both of them controversial. Diamond studied above all lesbian, bisexual and unlabeled women, not straight ones, and found that many of them changed labels over time. That tells us NOTHING about real inherent bisexuality or fluidity. It only tells us that those women changed their labels.
And Lippa used an entirely subjective questionnaire to draw his conclusions. Only because straight women with high libido confessed increased attraction to both genders, while straight men with high libido didn't, means nothing about real attraction or behaviour. Men are known to lie about their homosexual tendencies much more than women, because the stigma associated is much worse. Also, there's plenty of evidence that shows that high libido (caused by hormones during teenage years, by long periods without female companionship, or by drugs like alcohol or crystal meth) is associated with more likeliness for homosexual behaviours in straight men. Sexologist Joe Kort has the same opinion: http://straightguise.blogspot.com.es/2008/07/high-sex-drive-is-associated-with.html
The effects of increased libido (caused by alcohol) on homosexual tendencies has been observed as well in fruit flies: http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080103/full/news.2007.402.html

So apart from that couple of research, most evidence (historical, cultural, statistics, animal behaviour and so on) points towards the direction that bisexuality in men is no less common than in women, and most probably, MORE common in fact.
The idea that female homosexuality is less known through history just because nobody paid attention to it it's a fallacy.
Women's sexuality was closely watched over. "Deviations" like adultery were as known in women as in men; there's no reason to think that homosexual "sins" were invisible in women, when adultery was certainly not invisible. And if it's true that homosexuality in women wasn't as taboo as in men, then for the same reason, it would have been more visible as well.
So, if there are less accounts of homosexuality in women, is because it has always been less prevalent. Period.
And the idea that homosexual behaviours are more common in male animals than in females, is not a theory. It's a proven fact.
You can go read the article about it in Wikipedia, if you want. For most species, homosexual behaviours are exclusively male-male.

So no matter how you look at it. As long as this article only cites the little evidence we have for bisexuality being more common in women than in men, while it ignores all statistics or studies that show otherwise, the article is going to be biased and distorted. It cherry-picks only those pieces of evidence that support the ideas of the author, and silences everything that prove them wrong. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.11.22.223 ( talk ) 17:57, 14 October 2012 (UTC) [ reply ]

You are also forgetting Roy Baumeister , who coined the term "erotic plasticity" and argues that women have high plasticity, meaning that their sex drive can more easily change in response to external pressures, and men have low plasticity, and therefore have sex drives that are relatively inflexible.

Roy Baumeister was referring to plasticity in sex drive, NOT in sexual orientation. And following that logic, if men's sex drive is more inflexible, then they're more likely to engage in same-sex relationships when women are not available, while women could adjust better their sex drives and live in chastity. You're forgetting that point.

You have also either forgotten about or don't know of the research that was done by Gerulf Rieger, Meredith L. Chivers, and J. Michael Bailey on male bisexuality, which was/is also controversial because they concluded that bisexuality is rare or doesn't exist in men.

You may haven't heard of the study that the same researchers conducted later, debunking their first study, in which they found that male bisexuality certainly exists and isn't rare. You should update that.

Chivers (Reiger, G., Latty, E., & Bailey, J.M.) also found that women have a non-category-specific genital response pattern of sexual arousal, meaning their genital responses are only modestly related to their preferred category. However, female subjective responses are category-specific because they typically report their highest level of arousal to their preferred stimulus, although the reported difference in levels of arousal is typically much smaller than those in men.

Those same researchers found as well that female genitalia responded to pictures of bonobos mating, and this study ( http://pss.sagepub.com/content/22/2/159.short ) showed that they responded to consensual and non-consensual sex in the same degree, while male genitalia didn't. This, and the fact that the genital arousal was found to be automatic, faster than subjective awareness, has led to the hypothesis that vaginal arousal in these cases has nothing to do with sexual orientation, but it's just an automatic response to prevent damage during sex (the preparatory hypothesis). Chivers herself has stated this theory as a quite plausible explanation; it's in her research paper.
So I don't know why everybody is ignoring that theory and using Chiver's study to support the idea that "all women are bisexual". I suppose that headline sells more magazines, huh?
Not to mention the Adams' study in Georgia, that showed that a significant amount of heterosexual men became aroused with all kinds of porn (straight, gay and lesbian).

You state that " Men are known to lie about their homosexual tendencies much more than women, because the stigma associated is much worse. " and yet you also assert that female homosexuality was scrutinized just as much as male homosexuality? That sounds pretty contradictory.

I said that women "SEXUAL LIVES" were scrutinized as much as men's, not "WOMEN HOMOSEXUALITY". Women homosexuality has been completely ignored (and unknown) through history, which is quite eloquent in itself. What I wonder is, if female bisexuality is as rampant as they want us to believe, how on Earth has it been so ignored!?

And I'd still need to see a reliable source stating that "homosexual behaviours are more common in male animals than in female [animals]" and that this "is not a theory. It's a proven fact."

For starters, you could simply go to the Wikipedia article about animal homosexuality and count the examples of male-male sex against female-female sex.

But going to the point, I'm not against the "erotic plasticity" theory of Baumeister in itself. It's a theory like any other, and if it deserves its own article, no matter if the theory is right or wrong, so be it. What I'm against, is against the use of the theory (and of Diamond's, Chiver's, etc.) in this article to support the wild assumption that "women are more likely bisexual than men", as if that was a scientific and proven reality. Even if Baumeister's theory was about that (it isn't), that wouldn't suffice to make such a claim. It's as if somebody wrote an article about Freud, in which they spoke of the Ego, Superego and Id, as proven, real facts, instead as a theory.
If you want to make an universal and all-encompassing claim, like that about female bisexuality being more common than male, sorry but no, you can't simply grab a couple of theories and studies and use them to ground it (specially when the studies may not speak about that, like the Chiver's one).
Human sexuality is far more complex than chemistry. A couple of laboratory or statistical researches aren't enough to throw away history and social studies. As long as sexuality is influenced by culture and society, these subject-matters will have an important saying in the controversy.
And, I reiterate, there's more than enough proof in history and culture about male fluid sexuality. Not only in Ancient Greece and Rome, but also in non-Western cultures (like those in which exist a "Third Gender"). The literature about it is ample. Ignoring all of this, just because some American researchers say otherwise, is more ethnocentric and near-sighted than anything else.

I'm not sure who slapped all the "unreliable medical source" tags on here, but I'm going to remove them because they make the article look extremely messy, and makes it difficult read. While I'm new to this whole editing thing and not 100% sure how to handle this situation, I know for a fact that passively aggressively sabotaging other people's work and the article as a whole isn't the best course of action.

If someone has legitimate, factual evidence that they can point to that supports the claim that the sources stated are unreliable, then to me that would mean they should mention in the article that there is some disagreement as to the results of the study and state their sources that show such. If it's an individual themselves that believes that a study is unreliable, in that case I'd think that it might be best to, again, state in the article that the findings of a given study are not necessarily agreed upon, link to the talk page, then state one's case there. That way rather than a reader being forced to read through a bunch of confusing, obnoxious tags all over the place, they can come to the talk page, look over what people have said in detail, and decide for themselves whether or not they agree or disagree. That to me personally sounds like a far better course of action.

Guys, I understand that issues like this are fairly controversial these days and many have strong beliefs related to them, but as I've said on other articles that end up looking like this one did, articles themselves are not places to be airing grievances with social issues. Talk pages aren't even technically supposed to be for that, but they're a far better option than trying to prove a point by borderline vandalizing a page.

Heck, I'm not ambivalent to the issue; even as a 21 y/o males I recognize we definitely need females, most times emotionally even more than physically, and I've always found the idea of that need being reciprocal between genders to be appealing, so I find the notion that females don't truly need us by nature to be both questionable and somewhat upsetting. I also don't believe females have lower sex drives, I simply believe their sex drives tend to manifest themselves somewhat differently than males' sex drives. The thing is that those are all personal beliefs, and therefore I would not place such in the article. The point of wiki isn't supposed to be to sway people's views or share personal opinions. The point is supposed to be to lay the facts out there in the most clear and unbiased fashion possible and let people decide for themselves what they want to believe.
Penguinato23 ( talk ) 18:03, 22 September 2012 (UTC) [ reply ]

It would do a great deal of good to that sub-section if there was a study checking for correlation between sex drive and erotic plasticity.

Also, even though I'm not hopping for an affirmative answer to this one, I may as well ask, are you aware of any other hypotheses of erotic plasticity that we can add and source in that section? EIN ( talk ) 09:17, 9 February 2013 (UTC) [ reply ]

The theory of Baumeister about erotic plasticity (which is what the article speaks about) has nothing to do with bisexuality, but rather with the better adaptation of women to social norms like celibacy or no sex before marriage. As such, is related with the lower sex drive of females.
The section that talks about bisexuality is actually a reference to Lisa Diamond's "sexual fluidity" hypothesis, which has nothing to do with sex drive. I even doubt that it should be included in this article, since is a theory by other researcher and speaks of all-together different issues. Indeed, bisexual men and women have been found to have higher sex drives on average (see the Wikipedia article on "Bisexuality"). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.22.94.140 ( talk ) 08:04, 4 April 2013 (UTC) [ reply ]

Frankly, I think Baumeister might have confused cause and effect in his hypothesis. There tends to be higher variablity of sexual norms applied to women than men so "high sexual plasticity" in women is therefore more likely to be the result of that rather than cause of variation in sex drive. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.153.78.241 ( talk ) 13:48, 8 January 2015 (UTC) [ reply ]

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