Bisexuality explained by psychologist | Julia Shaw and Lex Fridman

Bisexual research and terminology

00:02- Or thinking they're lying. So with men... I wrote a book called Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality, and I did that after I created a bisexual research group. So, I wasn't a sexuality researcher, but as a bi person and a scientist, I was interested in the science of bisexuality, and I couldn't really find it. It was really hard to figure out what people were actually learning about bisexual people in comparison to other kinds of queer people. And one of the things I found is that the terms that are used are not necessarily bi. And so it could be things like plurisexual. So, if you type into Google Scholar the word bisexual, you're going to get a lot of confusing things also because

00:40bisexual is used for, like, two sexes where you have multiple sex or you can change, and so they're bisexual. - Right. - Yeah, which is different entirely. And so I think partly out of that, researchers started using words like plurisexual, and omnisexual is another one. And so if you're looking for research on this, plurisexual is probably the word. But - What does omnisexual mean? - It's just the same. It's just another- - Okay. Got it. - another word where it's all. Sometimes pansexual is also used. And again, the idea being that it's all genders. - So how should we think about bisexuality? Is it fluid, like day to day, month to month, year to year fluid who you're attracted to? Or is it at the same time have the capacity to be attracted to

What bisexuality means

01:26anyone or attracted to everyone? What's the right way to think about it? - I think the right way to think about it is that I'm not attracted to most people, but I can be attracted to people regardless of gender, much like you're probably not probably not attracted to most people, but you are attracted to people of a certain gender, maybe. And so that's... It's the same as being heterosexual in terms of potentially my pool of people whom I might be interested in. It's just that the gender is irrelevant. - What's the biggest thing that people misunderstand about bisexuality? - The biggest thing that researchers find people misunderstand about bisexuality is that it's a phase and that it's this idea that it's transient, that it's always changing, and that it's a

The 'phase' misconception

02:06stepping stone. So, I think a lot of people still see bisexuality as on the way to Gay Town, sort of like you're, you're on your way, but you haven't quite committed and you're still stuck in expectations of society. You haven't quite let go yet, but really you're gay. And that's especially true for men. So when you look at research on bisexual men, which is actually how the research started. So, I think now when we think of bisexuality, we think of women. And it's true that today twice as many women identify as bisexual as men. But if you look at the history of this and the research on bisexuality over time, it was the other way around. So someone called Alfred Kinsey was one of the first sexuality researchers in recent

Alfred Kinsey and his research

02:48history certainly, and he, after World War II, did this really big study of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, it was called. He was a biologist himself, so he thought of taxonomies, and he was doing research on gall wasps, so insects. And this idea of human sexuality was sort of thrown at him after the war because there's also this whole move to get people to, well, reproduce and to rebuild America. So sexuality was partly, and sex, specifically, was becoming more of an area of interest, both in terms of research and in terms of policy and funding. So Alfred Kinsey was asked, "Do you want to do a class on human sexual behavior?" And he was like, "I know nothing about this." So he spent about

03:33a year just listening to students' questions about what they want to know about sex, and he realized that he was looking for research to try and build up this course that he was probably going to teach, and he realized that he couldn't answer most of their questions because the research hadn't been done. So a lot of the questions were around, "What is normal?" You know, "If I feel this during sex, is that normal? How often do people have sex? Should I want these? What about these fantasies? What does it mean? What if I have homosexual fantasies? What if I engage in this kind of..." And so he was looking at all of these questions and collating them, and then he went out and did these huge studies, and he interviewed thousands of people himself, but

04:14also had all these research assistants who were out there interviewing people in America about their sexual behavior, which, I mean, just picture the time. This is the 1940s. This is quite a conservative time. I mean, certainly more than we might expect now. And here's this researcher asking incredibly personal questions about thousands and thousands and thousands of people, and he ended up finding, and this is one of the big findings in this book that he published called "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male," which was a best-seller for an entire year. He sold out auditoriums. They had to sometimes add the room next to the room he was in because there was so much desire to go to his lectures about sex that they had to connect radios to

The Kinsey Scale

05:05other halls to give people enough space to sit down. He was basically a rock star. And again, I think this challenges the misconception we have about sexuality, that we think of it as this sort of woke thing now. that the rainbow flag and all this stuff is sort of this modern invention almost. But this is the '40s. This was happening. People were going to these talks. People were having these conversations, and he created something called the Kinsey Scale. And so the Kinsey Scale is from zero to six, and he found that it was not useful to apply a binary to people's sexual desires and sexual orientation. It was more useful to put them on a continuum because most people were not exclusively homosexual or exclusively

05:50heterosexual. Most people were somewhere in between. And so zero was exclusively heterosexual tendencies, and six was exclusively homosexual, and he would place people based on all of the things they told him somewhere on the scale, and about half of men were somewhere in the middle, not exclusively either, and about a quarter of women. Now, think about the time. - It was a very conservative time. - Well, and it's post-war though, so I think that mattered as well. So there's something called a homosocial environment, which has nothing to do with being gay. That has to do with being in a situation where you are with people of the same gender as you. So a homosocial environment are things like prisons, where you only have men or only have women,

Homosocial environments and the shift

06:33war, which, at that point, they just had. And so you have a lot of men who are exclusively in the company of men, and maybe looking around going, "Well, now that my options are different, maybe I'm going to choose from this pool." Anyway, so he found that it was that way around, that a lot of people have these fantasies or actions that they've engaged in. And then there are other researchers, other male researchers, who found similar things, and then at some point in the '70s, it swapped, and it felt like maybe more people, more men were identifying as gay, and there were maybe fewer people who would have called themselves bi, and suddenly this became a thing more for women. So I think that there's some social things

Queerphobia within queer communities

07:12going on. There's some research things going on that actually bi men are have been studied for a long time as well. - Okay, so you said a lot of interesting things. So there is a difference between the truth and the socially acknowledged thing. So there's social elements. I don't know, this might be anecdotal, but I know a few women, friends of mine, who identify as bisexual. I don't know a single guy friend who identifies as bisexual. They're either gay or straight. So there's still a social thing going on. - Definitely. - Right? - Definitely, and I think that research consistently shows that bisexual men are more likely to identify as, well, as gay or straight. And gay, well, it depends. So if they

08:01have what we might refer to as a homosexual lifestyle, so they engage in sort of going to queer parties, maybe go on Grindr or other gay apps, that would be much more a lifestyle thing, where you've embraced and you see this as part of your identity, that you are part of this queer community. It's much easier to say you're gay than bi, most often, also because there's queerphobia within the queer community. And so you might get gay men saying to a bi man, "Oh, come on, you're... "I was bi once." That's a classic. "I was bi once," or "Come on, you're actually gay." It's the same that you get the other way around with bi women, is that because it's seen as performative, the idea being that bisexual women are doing it for attention,

08:44but the attention of men, specifically, that, well, they're all going to go back to men anyway and they're just doing it. It's a phase. It's this thing that they're doing actually to be sexy to men, not because they're actually interested in women. And so there's this lesbian-bi thing going on, which is often quite hostile. Not always, but often. And there's this gay male bi thing going on, which is different in nature but is also potentially hostile. So in both, saying you're bi can be problematic, but for men more so.