The Fluidity of Women's Sexual Orientation

I have been saying that sexual orientation is more fluid for women than for men. Now, of all sources, the Oprah magazine is agreeing with me.

Over the past several decades, scientists have struggled in fits and starts to get a handle on sexual orientation. Born or bred? Can it change during one's lifetime? A handful of studies in the 1990s, most of them focused on men, suggested that homosexuality is hardwired. In one study, researchers linked DNA markers in the Xq28 region of the X chromosome to gay males. But a subsequent larger study failed to replicate the results, leaving the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association to speculate that sexual orientation probably has multiple causes, including environmental, cognitive, and biological factors.

Today, however, a new line of research is beginning to approach sexual orientation as much less fixed than previously thought, especially when it comes to women. The idea that human sexuality forms a continuum has been around since 1948, when Alfred Kinsey introduced his famous seven-point scale, with 0 representing complete heterosexuality, 7 signifying complete homosexuality, and bisexuality in the middle, where many of the men and women he interviewed fell. The new buzz phrase coming out of contemporary studies is "sexual fluidity." "People always ask me if this research means everyone is bisexual. No, it doesn't," says Lisa Diamond, PhD, associate professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah and author of the 2008 book Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire. "Fluidity represents a capacity to respond erotically in unexpected ways due to particular situations or relationships. It doesn't appear to be something a woman can control." Furthermore, studies indicate that it's more prevalent in women than in men, according to Bonnie Zylbergold, assistant editor of American Sexuality, an online magazine.

In a 2004 landmark study at Northwestern University, the results were eye-opening. During the experiment, the female subjects became sexually aroused when they viewed heterosexual as well as lesbian erotic films. This was true for both gay and straight women. Among the male subjects, however, the straight men were turned on only by erotic films with women, the gay ones by those with men. "We found that women's sexual desire is less rigidly directed toward a particular sex, as compared with men's, and it's more changeable over time," says the study's senior researcher, J. Michael Bailey, PhD. "These findings likely represent a fundamental difference between men's and women's brains."

Is Same Sex Attraction a Fixed Trait?

This study of 79 women suggests a subtle answer. Money quote:

Women’s definitions of lesbianism appeared to permit more flexibility in behavior than their definitions of heterosexuality. For example, of the women who identified as lesbian in the last round of interviews, 15 percent reported having sexual contact with a man during the prior two years. In contrast, none of the women who settled on a heterosexual label at that point reported having sexual contact with a woman within the previous two years.

“This provides further support for the notion that female sexuality is relatively fluid and that the distinction between lesbian and bisexual women is not a rigid one."

Full text of the article is available from the APA Public Affairs Office or at http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/dev4415.pdf I plan to take a look at the full study before commenting further.