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A few quick words on that study that found that male bisexuality is real, and the way folks are responding to it: 1/13
It's frustrating for bisexual men to hear that science has proven they exist, because of course they already know this. Most articles I've seen have taken a tone sympathetic to bi men: "OBVIOUSLY bi guys exist, why did we waste money on this study?" 2/13
But this study isn't quite just another example of science "proving" what was already common knowledge. Studies of male bisexuality have been haunted since the 2005 publication of "Sexual Arousal Patterns of Bisexual Men", coauthored by J. Michael Bailey ("JMB"). 3/13
"Sexual Arousal Patterns" tested 33 self-identified bi men (along with similar numbers of straight and gay men) and found that "most bisexual men appeared homosexual with respect to genital arousal, although some appeared heterosexual." https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.502.8782 4/13
It continued: "Male bisexuality appears primarily to represent a style of interpreting or reporting sexual arousal rather than a distinct pattern of genital sexual arousal." These results were then reported in the New York Times... 5/13
The NYT article's title? "Gay, Straight or Lying?". It reported that "a new study casts doubt on whether true bisexuality exists, at least in men." https://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/05/health/straight-gay-or-lying-bisexuality-revisited.html 6/13
There was strong backlash to both JMB's article and the NYT piece from bi people and other queer folks, that this study with a sample size of 33 bi men would be so widely reported. 7/13
JMB would go on to revisit the research and conduct another study around 2011 which DID find evidence of male bisexual arousal patters but the cultural damage of "bi men don't really exist and here's a study that says so" had already been done. 8/13
(Consider that JMB's 2005 study has 266 citations on Google Scholar and the 2011 refutation has only 87.) 9/13
So while today's study is another piece of research which "proves" what members of the researched group already know, it's also a direct response to the damage of the cultural impact of JMB's study 15 years ago (seeing as JMB was one of the coauthors on today's study). 10/13
+Bonus: also worth considering that attempting to pathologize sexual orientation has had uhhhh pretty bad outcomes in the past and trying to fix bisexuality into a medical framework not only makes it something that can be "fixed"... 11/13
...but also limits its liberatory potential for challenging a system of attraction based solely on gender! 12/13
All of which is to say: today's study is a useful meta-analysis that aggregates a larger dataset than ever before and challenges research from 15 years ago which came to the opposite conclusion and negatively affected how bi ppl (esp. bi men) were viewed in western culture. 13/13
But also yeah, this. The present study is "useful" only in terms of the conditions set by JMB et al. in 2005, conditions which should never have been set in the first place. https://twitter.com/maenads_dance/status/1285711226228670468
