These results may be compared to a series of three results posted earlier from the time period from 7 Feb 2012 to 15 Mar 2012. See here and here.
10 September 2016
My Evolving and Changeable Sexuality
Today I have taken the Flexuality Test again to see how my sexuality may have changed over the last few years. Truthfully, I believe it fluctuates significantly over a few day period, but there is also a longer range drift which it would be interesting to track. In fact, changes over both timescales are interesting.
These results may be compared to a series of three results posted earlier from the time period from 7 Feb 2012 to 15 Mar 2012. See here and here.
These results may be compared to a series of three results posted earlier from the time period from 7 Feb 2012 to 15 Mar 2012. See here and here.
08 December 2012
My Wife, My Marriage, My Bisexuality
For those of you who have read my previous post, On My Sexual Development, I was married for years before I came to see myself as bisexual. It is not clear that I ever would have become bisexual without the very special sexual relationship my wife and I have. Some will say that I did not correctly phrase that statement. What do you mean become bisexual? Are not people genetically and by nurture determined to be heterosexual, bisexual, or homosexual? I think the answer depends upon how much personal choice is covered under the term nurture. Some will be angered that by implying that personal choice can play a role, I have become allied with persecutors of the religious right. I am not. What I am is a rational observer of my own life and my own mind. I know why I am bisexual and it is not because I was hardwired such that I could only be bisexual. I had and even now, have a choice in the matter.
As I noted in the last post, I was a pretty asexual teenager. Lust was not any part of my life then. Whatever switch turns lust on, it took me years perhaps to will that it should be turned on and it took a wonderful woman to actually throw that switch. She is the love of my life and she remains that to this day. I cannot imagine living without her. Indeed, after three days without her loving, I start to decompose, or some other such drastic and undesirable effects take over. I can live quite happily with only the love of my wife. Yet, I have come to realize that I would be even happier with a long term intimate relationship and bond with a best male friend. In some quarters, they are saying he just wants to have it all. That is right. I do. And what on Earth is wrong with that? I am sure many of you have answers, but are they rational answers?
In general, I expect that one's sexuality is a very complex development of one's biochemistry, life experiences, and self-evaluations and choices based on one's experience and biochemistry.
Genetically we are extremely varied. The human genome sequencing results are showing us to be more and more varied genetically all the time. We are so varied that it is actually becoming much more difficult than had been thought until just now to even try to compare genetic effects and traits based on our DNA. There are surely many DNA sequences that allow one to be only heterosexual, others that allow one to be bisexual, and still others that allow one to be homosexual. I expect there are many combinations of DNA sequences in which there is overlap on the DNA domains of the heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual sexual responses. When there is overlap of these domains, one's experiences and evaluations of those experiences make the operative choice. Some people perhaps had no or little choice, while others are likely to have considerable choice.
I only really know my own mind, so I am not of the opinion that my sexual development is anything like the story of most others. But, it is probably only entirely unique unless you observe it with a microscope. I made a long series of choices to explore, develop, and choose the nature of my sexuality. My wife was intimately involved in much of that development. She and I both enjoyed the exploration and the developments. It was in substantial part because I so much came to treasure the sexual relationship and the intimate closeness we had together, that I was enabled to even imagine a kind of parallel relationship with a good man. As a teenager, I did not have sexual fantasies. Upon being strongly attracted to the woman who became my wife, I had fantasies about sex with women, mostly her, and I had dreams about sex with women thereafter.
Only after venturing into an all male theater in San Francisco years later and our both realizing we were turned on by what we were watching, did I really begin to fantasize about sex with a man. There was a slow build-up in the frequency of those fantasies. As my wife played to the fantasies she knew I was having and which did seem to turn her on fairly often, we both came to think of me as bisexual. But, it was a few years down the road yet before my fantasies were central enough in my mind that I ever became aware of having a dream about having sex with a man. Meanwhile, my dreams about having sex with women had continued. I am very convinced that if I had felt really uncomfortable with having fantasies about sex with men and if my wife and I had not played with those fantasies in our own sexual relationship, then it is unlikely that I would have come to actually develop a desire for male sex strong enough to have dreams about it.
I believe that in this way, I made a choice and it was to feel comfortable with being a highly sexual being and to flout the social and sexual conventions of the society in which I lived. I did not hold them in high regard whenever they were based on irrational ideas. I saw no harm in being close to and giving pleasure to another man or in his giving me pleasure. Some claim that this weakens the family, but that also is a choice people make. I still loved my wife deeply and very much enjoyed being with her. I still loved my children. And, my wife had been with me every step of the way to this point in my development as a bisexual man. There was no drama when I told her that I now thought of myself as a bisexual man. I never had to make a hard decision about whether to tell her or worry about her reaction.
But to this time, I had never actually had sex with a man. I did not want to stop at only having fantasies about sex, so I took advantage of the Internet to talk to some men who were bisexual. After exchanging e-mails and meeting a few men to talk, I decided to actually have sex for the first time with one man I liked after spending some time with him. We only had oral sex and it was a bit awkward, being my first time, at least at first. But, the experience was positive enough that I soon was looking for a man I hoped I might have a longer relationship with. I found such a man and we had great sex as noted in my last post. But, he lived far enough away and we were both very busy men, so we did not get together very often. Nonetheless, those occasional visits did confirm that my optimal mode of life was as a bisexual married man with an intimate long-term relationship with a good man.
For some time, I did not tell my wife about my actual experience with a man. She also did not ask. In fact, I thought that she had enough good reason to ask whether I was looking for a man or meeting with a man, that I was pretty sure that she did not yet want to know. I thought that when she did want to know, I would surely tell her about it. In time, she did ask and I did tell her. She did suffer some uncertainty and fear. I assured her that I loved her as much as ever. I am sure that it was very apparent to her that I was very much enjoying our own sex life. I told her that I very much enjoyed having sex with a man, but it was a great addition to loving her and could not be a substitute. She made me proud in how quickly she got over her worries. She is a very, very good woman.
It may have helped that in the first 9 years of our marriage, my beautiful wife had not always been able to say no to all of the men who wanted sex with her. My love for her never waivered in that time, though I had told her that a couple of the men were not worthy of her. A couple were good men and I had been fine with that as long as she was enjoying the occasional sex with them and as long as I had reasonable assurance that she still loved me. I wanted her to be as happy as possible.
So, my wife and I have the unusual characteristic of not expecting monogamy, but fully expecting to be much loved by one another. We have now been in love with one another for 40 years. That love is deep and dependable, yet it is not entirely exclusive. Perhaps some people really need exclusivity. People are very complex and very unique. Certainly, society generally holds that exclusivity is the very central tenet of a marriage. Our marriage is more an intimate partnership, companionship, the knowledge we can depend on one another, a deep need to hold one another close, four decades of memories, children we love together, and a great sex life. With all that, we have had the strength to forge our rules of marriage and for our own particular loving relationship. I would most enjoy a polyamorous relationship and believe that with the right man, that would be most ideal.
Marriages, loves, sexualities, partnerships, and companionships are highly complex and much differentiated among individuals. We all have to wrestle with them. But, never underestimate the importance of thinking about them and of giving them the time they require. This is especially true of your marriage, but also true of the relationships we try to forge with another man.
As I noted in the last post, I was a pretty asexual teenager. Lust was not any part of my life then. Whatever switch turns lust on, it took me years perhaps to will that it should be turned on and it took a wonderful woman to actually throw that switch. She is the love of my life and she remains that to this day. I cannot imagine living without her. Indeed, after three days without her loving, I start to decompose, or some other such drastic and undesirable effects take over. I can live quite happily with only the love of my wife. Yet, I have come to realize that I would be even happier with a long term intimate relationship and bond with a best male friend. In some quarters, they are saying he just wants to have it all. That is right. I do. And what on Earth is wrong with that? I am sure many of you have answers, but are they rational answers?
In general, I expect that one's sexuality is a very complex development of one's biochemistry, life experiences, and self-evaluations and choices based on one's experience and biochemistry.
Genetically we are extremely varied. The human genome sequencing results are showing us to be more and more varied genetically all the time. We are so varied that it is actually becoming much more difficult than had been thought until just now to even try to compare genetic effects and traits based on our DNA. There are surely many DNA sequences that allow one to be only heterosexual, others that allow one to be bisexual, and still others that allow one to be homosexual. I expect there are many combinations of DNA sequences in which there is overlap on the DNA domains of the heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual sexual responses. When there is overlap of these domains, one's experiences and evaluations of those experiences make the operative choice. Some people perhaps had no or little choice, while others are likely to have considerable choice.
I only really know my own mind, so I am not of the opinion that my sexual development is anything like the story of most others. But, it is probably only entirely unique unless you observe it with a microscope. I made a long series of choices to explore, develop, and choose the nature of my sexuality. My wife was intimately involved in much of that development. She and I both enjoyed the exploration and the developments. It was in substantial part because I so much came to treasure the sexual relationship and the intimate closeness we had together, that I was enabled to even imagine a kind of parallel relationship with a good man. As a teenager, I did not have sexual fantasies. Upon being strongly attracted to the woman who became my wife, I had fantasies about sex with women, mostly her, and I had dreams about sex with women thereafter.
Only after venturing into an all male theater in San Francisco years later and our both realizing we were turned on by what we were watching, did I really begin to fantasize about sex with a man. There was a slow build-up in the frequency of those fantasies. As my wife played to the fantasies she knew I was having and which did seem to turn her on fairly often, we both came to think of me as bisexual. But, it was a few years down the road yet before my fantasies were central enough in my mind that I ever became aware of having a dream about having sex with a man. Meanwhile, my dreams about having sex with women had continued. I am very convinced that if I had felt really uncomfortable with having fantasies about sex with men and if my wife and I had not played with those fantasies in our own sexual relationship, then it is unlikely that I would have come to actually develop a desire for male sex strong enough to have dreams about it.
I believe that in this way, I made a choice and it was to feel comfortable with being a highly sexual being and to flout the social and sexual conventions of the society in which I lived. I did not hold them in high regard whenever they were based on irrational ideas. I saw no harm in being close to and giving pleasure to another man or in his giving me pleasure. Some claim that this weakens the family, but that also is a choice people make. I still loved my wife deeply and very much enjoyed being with her. I still loved my children. And, my wife had been with me every step of the way to this point in my development as a bisexual man. There was no drama when I told her that I now thought of myself as a bisexual man. I never had to make a hard decision about whether to tell her or worry about her reaction.
But to this time, I had never actually had sex with a man. I did not want to stop at only having fantasies about sex, so I took advantage of the Internet to talk to some men who were bisexual. After exchanging e-mails and meeting a few men to talk, I decided to actually have sex for the first time with one man I liked after spending some time with him. We only had oral sex and it was a bit awkward, being my first time, at least at first. But, the experience was positive enough that I soon was looking for a man I hoped I might have a longer relationship with. I found such a man and we had great sex as noted in my last post. But, he lived far enough away and we were both very busy men, so we did not get together very often. Nonetheless, those occasional visits did confirm that my optimal mode of life was as a bisexual married man with an intimate long-term relationship with a good man.
For some time, I did not tell my wife about my actual experience with a man. She also did not ask. In fact, I thought that she had enough good reason to ask whether I was looking for a man or meeting with a man, that I was pretty sure that she did not yet want to know. I thought that when she did want to know, I would surely tell her about it. In time, she did ask and I did tell her. She did suffer some uncertainty and fear. I assured her that I loved her as much as ever. I am sure that it was very apparent to her that I was very much enjoying our own sex life. I told her that I very much enjoyed having sex with a man, but it was a great addition to loving her and could not be a substitute. She made me proud in how quickly she got over her worries. She is a very, very good woman.
It may have helped that in the first 9 years of our marriage, my beautiful wife had not always been able to say no to all of the men who wanted sex with her. My love for her never waivered in that time, though I had told her that a couple of the men were not worthy of her. A couple were good men and I had been fine with that as long as she was enjoying the occasional sex with them and as long as I had reasonable assurance that she still loved me. I wanted her to be as happy as possible.
So, my wife and I have the unusual characteristic of not expecting monogamy, but fully expecting to be much loved by one another. We have now been in love with one another for 40 years. That love is deep and dependable, yet it is not entirely exclusive. Perhaps some people really need exclusivity. People are very complex and very unique. Certainly, society generally holds that exclusivity is the very central tenet of a marriage. Our marriage is more an intimate partnership, companionship, the knowledge we can depend on one another, a deep need to hold one another close, four decades of memories, children we love together, and a great sex life. With all that, we have had the strength to forge our rules of marriage and for our own particular loving relationship. I would most enjoy a polyamorous relationship and believe that with the right man, that would be most ideal.
Marriages, loves, sexualities, partnerships, and companionships are highly complex and much differentiated among individuals. We all have to wrestle with them. But, never underestimate the importance of thinking about them and of giving them the time they require. This is especially true of your marriage, but also true of the relationships we try to forge with another man.
05 December 2012
On My Sexual Development
Because thinking people are very complex, the exploration and
development of each such person's sexuality is a very unique journey.
We are on our own in many ways as we make this journey. This can be
very disturbing to many people, so it is not uncommon for them to simply
fall back on the broad generalizations of sexual knowledge and the
rules of their society. Few are eager to develop their own
understanding of sexuality and its role in human happiness by using
their independent minds. Many are not eager to formulate their own
moral principles, especially those pertaining to sex and sexuality. Rather, they accept
the moral rules of the dominant local religion or the more practical, but rough, rules of
the game as practiced by others of their locale and age. In this game, many women try to play by one set of rules, while many men are trying
to play by another set of rules altogether. By and large, men often try
to exercise their raging hormones and women try to take advantage of
the men's raging hormones to gain control over the men for the security of monogamy. Of course,
some men and some women play by rules more of their own making, as I and my wife have.
My own sexual development has been a long time in evolving. As a boy and teenager, I was pretty much asexual. I came very late to sexual activity at age 25, when a considerably more experienced woman, later wonderfully to become my wife, introduced me to the incredible pleasures of sex and love-making. I had had no clue what I had been missing and have spent most of my life since trying to make up for lost time. It was startling that I had missed so much by virtue of a failure of imagination and more importantly by a failure to explore and develop my sexuality. Being an independent thinker, I have made many exciting discoveries along the way. As a scientist, I learned the critical importance of experimentation. It is almost impossible to get things right on an entirely theoretical basis. Reality is just too complicated. Reality's complications certainly do not stop short of the human mind and body.
I had given some thought while serving in the late part of the war in Vietnam to the things in life that I had excluded from my attention in pursuing my studies. I determined that I would learn more about the arts on my return to the States. I would also spend more time with women. As matters turned out, my wife got me started on my great adventure into exploring, developing, and realizing my own very unique sexuality.
My journey of development is not quite like anyone else' and is undoubtedly very different than that of most people. But, everyone is short-changing their sexual potential if they do not think hard about their sexuality and if they are unwilling to do some real exploration of the many possibilities. This is not to advocate anything like arbitrary and careless exploration. No, our sexuality, our health, and our personal relationships are far too important not to proceed in a very thoughtful and rational manner.
David Roberts is a pen name. This allows me to tell my story without hurting those I love and without causing professional problems. Those who believe everyone should be out to suit their political purposes or to make life more convenient for them hold no sway over me. I have responsibilities to fulfill and they are not best filled by subjecting myself and everyone around me to the prejudices of others. Fortunately, those prejudices are becoming less prevalent, though they are still fairly prevalent among people my age. The few friends I have talked to about my sexuality have proven just how much most of us differ in our sexuality and how prevalent the common attitudes toward sex and sexuality are, even though these friends are in many ways extraordinary people. I have long argued openly on internet forums that gay and bisexual sex is no more immoral than is heterosexual sex, that marriage should be available to same-sex as well as heterosexual couples, and that gay and bisexual people should be free to serve in all government offices and in the military.
I am bisexual. I was not meaningfully bisexual as a child or teenager. I was only attracted to very nice and intelligent people with interesting ideas as a teenager. I was happy and generally self-confident. I was actually quite comfortable as a teenager, though I was shy with the girls where sexual issues came into play, but because I had little interest in sex then, that was not very important to me. There were a few girls I left frustrated because I did not have a sexual interest in them. I was delighted to talk about ideas for hours with my male and female friends. I also was delighted to play sports with my male friends and the rougher the better. Whenever a girl was mistreated by a guy, I stood up to protect her, just as I always did for my younger sisters. I am going to tell the story in more detail now of how I progressed from such a state to being a happily married bisexual man today.
As a young boy, I was interested in the physical and thinking differences between boys and girls, but once I understood something about the physical differences, I lost further interest in most of that. Girls and women were still interesting as thinkers, but when I was young, not many of the girls I knew were as interesting as thinkers as were my male friends. In either case, the kids I liked were the most intelligent, the most independent thinkers, creative and interesting, and nice individuals. Most were boys and a few were girls. But, my interest in them never seemed to have a sexual component.
As a teenager, I was pretty much asexual. I did not think much about sex and I never even masturbated. Life was all about thinking and sports. I loved to read. I enjoyed math and science. I thought history, which I read extensively on my own, was at least as interesting as reading a mystery or science fiction novel, and more useful to me. I liked learning about economics and business, which were so much about the practical living of life and opened endless possibilities for countless people to prosper and to enjoy a huge richness of choices and values tailored to their individual nature and dreams.
I was the oldest child in a large family and had many responsibilities as such. I did not mind this, but took pride in helping out and taking care of my younger siblings. Despite this, I had time for long bike rides, running, baseball, basketball, and football. I especially enjoyed football and loved playing defense. I usually had about twice the tackles of anyone else in our pick-up games. On offense, I was usually a receiver. Not because I was fast. I just had great concentration on the ball and if I touched it, it was caught. I never had any thought about being hit while laying out for a ball. I was indestructible. I really was. I just bounced back from any hit and loved it. But nothing was as good as a tackle. Perhaps, though I had no sense at all that this was the case, I just loved the excuse of wrapping up a male friend. Perhaps there was a deep seated desire there with some sexual component I was not self-sensitive enough to recognize. Maybe, or maybe not.
This is not to say that I was insensitive. I always thought it was beneath me to be unkind to people who were not in my usual group of the better students and guys interested in sports. I tried to be nice and other students generally saw me that way. I was often surprised to be elected to offices and honors I had not asked for. It was never hard to treat others decently and I often helped people with concepts they had trouble understanding and was happy to suggest a few things they ought to know five minutes before a test began. But from my perspective, I was often appalled that so many teenagers were very cliquish and too inclined to say unkind things about other kids. I had no significant knowledge of gay or bisexual people. There were a couple of boys who seemed very effeminate and I never had much in common with them so I spent little time with them. I was nice to them and did not participate in making fun of them, though the ones I knew about were gossipers and too often not very nice to others.
I thought that exercise was very sensual. Eating was also. I loved the sensations of taking a shower and of sliding between the sheets at the end of a long day. I enjoyed sitting in a tree and feeling the sun and breezes and listening to wildlife while reading for hours on a summer day. I definitely had a sensual enjoyment of life, just one which was not sexual.
I grew up in various small towns around the country. I graduated from a high school deep in what most Progressives, which most gay and bisexual people seem to think one ought to be, think of as flyover country. I never liked it when guys made crude sexual jokes about girls. I could not understand why many of my friends were eager to date girls who put out, but were not particularly bright or very interesting or very good looking. When I needed a date for some event as a Senior in high school, I asked one of a few nice girls who were relatively intelligent and good looking, but they were always a bit to predictable and not very exciting. Our conversations lacked zest. The sex appeal simply was not there. I was aware of the fact that sex appeal had to have a very significant mental stimulation to get me going. At least, I hoped that was all that was lacking at that time. I had at least some sexual attraction to a girl in the 10th grade while living in the East before moving to the Great Plains and there was a Senior girl who was intelligent, nice, and beautiful who was very attractive to me, but I was then a Junior, new to town, and too shy to ask an older girl out.
To this point in my life, I had been rather disappointed that my several male friends were not inclined to talk about meaningful dreams and closely held values and thoughts. I wondered whether this was all there was or if they were simply constant posers or con men trying to play a role. It seemed they were all uncomfortable with a more intimate sharing of their personal desires. There were definitely limits on how deep their friendships were capable of being. I was disappointed that so many intelligent guys were rather superficial emotionally. There was too much desire to be conventional and accepted. This is still a nearly universal failure of most people. A deep and intimate friendship with a man is still very hard to establish and it has always been a great disappointment for me.
I went to an Ivy League college and majored in a hard science. All of my main friends were guys. Most of the girls at this college were sadly wrongheaded in their efforts to foster big government and deplete the freedom of association that only resides in the private sector. There was a strong anti-male bias among many of them, though the childish and boorish behavior of many of the men at that highly esteemed college provided them some re-enforcement for such an evaluation. Despite the fact that they were generally very intelligent, their failure to properly value individual rights showed them to be shallow thinkers and conformists given the trend of that time and place. Many of the women actually tried to look unattractive. This was anything but a sexual turn-on for me. There were very few exceptions and those who were exceptions were not very good looking. I frankly thought that was more important then than I now think it to be. I likely missed at least one opportunity with a very nice and intelligent, thinking young lady that I came to regret later. The experience would have been good for both of us.
I had several good male friends in college and we were all especially interested in learning and lacking in any interest in partying. Two of my closest friends dated girls periodically, with whom they had sex. They were also very close to one another and one of their girl friends once accused them of having sex with one another in front of me. She was a bit crazy and very angry at the time, so I did not take her claims as substantial. I told her that I had no reason to think they were and that it surely was not right for her to express such an angry opinion in front of me if they were. It would have been private information she should not have been spouting. Thinking about it later, neither of my friends ever denied her claim or discussed the matter later. I realized that I really would not mind if they were. After all, they were my friends. I even thought briefly that with such intelligent and good friends, it was kind of nice if they could enjoy sexual pleasures with one another. I wondered what that might be like, but never dwelled on it. I did think it might be interesting to discuss male-male sex with them, but never followed up on the thought. I wonder if I might have become bisexual much earlier if one of them had tried to persuade me to have sex with them.
While pursuing my Ph.D. at a mid-western university, I met a highly spirited, intelligent, and beautiful Junior in the school at the end of my first year of graduate school. I asked her out, but I was a week from having to report for induction during the tail end of the Vietnam "conflict." This young lady was a great conversationalist and how I wanted to know her better. After my return to the university at the end of my time in the Army and Vietnam, I looked her up and dated her for several very exciting months. While we developed a friendship, she could not get over my lack of belief in God. I loved her, but I knew she was not the love of my life. We were not right for one another as long time partners in life. As bright as she was, she was too much of an emotional roller coaster ride for me. I was too rational and calm for her. I was also too honest. We never had sex, yet she did stir a sexual interest, which had long been dormant.
A few months later, I met an intelligent woman whose values and ideas were more like mine. I soon came to very much enjoy her company and to feel quite comfortable with her. She was a beauty with the most outstanding and firm breasts, a very slender waist, and delightful legs. Her ass was well-rounded and her thighs were strong. She was well-practiced in a martial art. She was also a very sexual woman with a good bit of experience. She was just what I needed to awaken my own sexuality. But, she had decided before we met that she had had sex with too many young men and needed to be more selective. So we became friends and talked a lot for about 6 weeks. Then I just had to make love to her and, fortunately, she was ready. Making love to her was a revelation. I was 25 and that first experience with sex awoke an incredible hunger and appetite. She soon described my love of sex as an insatiable passion. It was. Having sex with her was amazing and heavenly. A year later, I asked her to marry me and she said yes. I love her to this day and cannot imagine life without her. I still love making love to her and having sex with her. This passion lives on.
In fact, if we do not make love for four days, I start to feel bad. It is fair to say that I am pretty much addicted to her love. Her touch on almost any part of my body causes me to become intensely excited and aroused. Who would have thought that a touch on the arm, the shoulder, a nibble on a nipple, a scratch on my back, a bite on my ass, her leg pressing against mine, her breasts pressed into my chest or back, her ass pressed back against me with my cock between her legs, a kiss on my neck, all create the most heavenly pleasure. When we make love, it is a shame to come and bring these incredibly sensual pleasures to an end.
We used to go to an x-rated movie theater occasionally and some of the light-hearted sexual romps were definitely arousing and added some new wrinkles to our sex when we finally got home. I enjoyed seeing the variety of women and found that some of the guys had nice cocks, but that was only of secondary interest. We were having fun.
I enjoyed seeing beautiful women. I very rarely remember thinking that a guy was good looking and thinking of that as anything like the equivalent of my interest in a good-looking woman. That was especially true then and is largely true now.
Among our best friends were a married couple with whom we went hiking once and then we each slept as couples in the same van and made love. It was exciting hearing the sounds of each of us as we made love. He and my wife became very attracted to one another. They began having an affair. My wife told me about this after they had met a few times for sex. Since I liked him and my wife was clearly enjoying herself, I was fine with this. I am not a jealous person. I have always thought that a low emotion. We even met once later and he and I made love to my wife together. That was a lot of fun. To that time, I had only had sex with my wife, so when we and that couple got together later, I decided to see if his wife was interested in a night of sex with me, while her husband and my wife had sex. Fortunately, it turned out she was a most enthusiastic lover and I had a great time. It was really very hard to leave when we had to the next morning. She gave me a kiss that caused my lips to tingle for a few hours after leaving. Such passion was wonderful and I greatly regretted having to leave for a family commitment.
The sum of this experience helped to make it clear to me that enjoying sexual pleasures with good friends can be a very wonderful experience and need not interfere with the primary love of one's life. Indeed, it should be possible and might well be heavenly to enjoy loving multiple people at one time. The love of one need not preclude the love of another. Every love is different and more than one may very well be better than just one when intelligent and understanding people are involved. My wife and I shared these thoughts and even speculated that it would have been great if we had had a similar experience with another couple we knew.
About 5 years after we married, I gave a scientific talk at a meeting in San Francisco. My wife came with me. After my talk, we walked through the streets exploring and came across a few movie theaters that were showing all-male movies. We looked at the posters and then decided it would be an adventure to watch a movie. After about 20 minutes, we looked at one another and whispered that we were quite turned-on. I really had not expected to be. But I really got hard and clearly my wife was excited. We talked afterward and we were both surprisingly comfortable with this. My wife seemed to have a bit of a voyeuristic interest and seemed to like the idea that I was aroused by the idea of sex with a man for the first time. There had been some few occasions on which I had thought briefly about it before, but there had never been any significant arousal.
Now, the idea of sex with a man became the subject of an occasional fantasy in which I wished I had a good friend with whom I could share sexual benefits. It became clear to me that perhaps this was a key to overcoming some of the shallowness of almost all of my male friendships and besides a good cock was a powerful visual lure. To couple sex with the pleasures of a friend with a more analytical and rational mind and a harder, male body was a most interesting thought.
Our sharing of fantasies led my wife to occasionally play with my ass. The pleasure this brought me was quickly apparent with my moans and shudders. Over and over my wife found new ways to excite me. In time, she put a finger up my ass and then later a dildoe. It was all good. No, it was wonderful. This prompted an increase of my fantasies about trying sex with a good man and we shared the fantasy. We joked about my hungry ass and how insatiable it had become under my wife's ministrations.
After many years, when I was about 54, I came to exchange many e-mail notes with a bisexual engineer and we finally met. He was nice and I went to his apartment and we talked about male sex and sex generally. Finally, we sucked each others' cock and it was good. But, this proved to be a one-time event. Later I met a gay doctor after exchanging a number of notes with him. He was well-experienced in male-male sex. We met at an outside park and quickly felt comfortable with one another, but it began pouring rain and we were quickly drenched. We went to his apartment where we undressed and he gave me a robe to put on. We sat and talked for 20 or 30 minutes and then I got up and knelt down in front of his chair between his legs and moved his robe aside. His cock was standing up and I had seen it peeking out of his robe from time to time before when we were talking. It had become a categorical imperative that I touch his cock and put it in my mouth. It was beautiful and I really wanted to give him pleasure. He proved very appreciative.
He reciprocated my effort by sucking my cock and it was clear we each enjoyed both the sucking and the being sucked. That was a turn-on and really made everything right. We went to his bed and he kissed me and caressed me. He played with my balls and then licked them. Then he began rimming my ass and I was in heaven. At that point, my ass was his to do with as he pleased and he pleased to fuck it. He proved really good at it and I really loved it. Then I fucked his ass and that was great also. We continued to get together over the course the next several years, but only about once every few months since we did not live very close to one another and we were both very busy. The company, our conversations, and our sex were always great. Then we had an interruption of getting together for a few years when he moved and I lost contact. About three years later he contacted me again and we got together a few times again and each time was great again, but then he moved away again.
I told my wife about him when she finally asked if I had ever acted on my bisexuality to have sex with a man. This happened after my friend had moved away the first time. In a way, I was surprised that my wife waited so long to ask me this, but I think she had waited until she thought she could handle my having had sex with a man. I would have told her the truth at any time had she asked, but I also thought that she would ask when she wanted to know the truth. She was a bit worried at first, but she soon got over that, as I made it clear that I very much loved her and had no desire to ever be without her. Our love and our sex life became even better. For my part, I was very appreciative that I had a love with my wife that was so strong that she wanted me to have the happiness that a sexual relationship with a good man could give me. How can one not love a woman all the more who so much wants your happiness and is willing to share your love? When the doctor reappeared, I told my wife about our getting together a few times again and how much I enjoyed it. Her jokes about my insatiable ass and my joy in sucking a cock were now more real and she really began more regularly to play with my fantasies. She has been incredibly wonderful in understanding my bisexuality and in just continuing to love me. I have always loved her, but I can only love her more now.
I could have lived a happy life only having made love to her, but there is no question that I am living a still happier and more fulfilled life when I have a good male friend with sexual benefits. Of course many will condemn me for not being monogamous, but I believe that is a small-minded idea. Mind you, I do not claim that monogamy is the wrong choice for everyone, but it is surely not the right choice for everyone. One would think the tendency of many to become serial monogamists would make that pretty apparent, but the assumption that such people simply suffer a character defect is apparently enough to protect the ideal of monogamy for most people. The fact that many societies have not practiced monogamy also gives its advocates little pause for thought. Finally, while most critics are Christians, they are ignorant that the early Christians very commonly did not marry and often were not monogamous. Going back still earlier, the Bible itself had no problem with polygamy. The claim that monogamy is moral and all else is wrong is without a rational foundation. In the end, my concern is to pursue my personal happiness in accordance with my own knowledge and character and to allow my critics to pursue theirs.
I am hoping to find another good man for friendship and mutual benefits. It would be good if we shared an interest in some of such things as hiking, biking, sailing, racquetball, handball, tennis, reading, libertarianism or a not-too-religious conservatism, history, business, economics, science, engineering, classical music, folk music, and romantic comedies or some adventure movies. I am interested in many things and learning new things all the time that interest me. It would be great to have an intimate friend to share all of this with, as well as his unique interests, which might join my many interests as new interests. It would be good if this man is married or has been married so that we might share the interests and concerns that come with such a commitment. I would hope there is such a man somewhere in the Baltimore-Washington area, about 55 to 70 years matured. Please feel free to e-mail me to talk further. See the side-bar for my e-mail address.
My own sexual development has been a long time in evolving. As a boy and teenager, I was pretty much asexual. I came very late to sexual activity at age 25, when a considerably more experienced woman, later wonderfully to become my wife, introduced me to the incredible pleasures of sex and love-making. I had had no clue what I had been missing and have spent most of my life since trying to make up for lost time. It was startling that I had missed so much by virtue of a failure of imagination and more importantly by a failure to explore and develop my sexuality. Being an independent thinker, I have made many exciting discoveries along the way. As a scientist, I learned the critical importance of experimentation. It is almost impossible to get things right on an entirely theoretical basis. Reality is just too complicated. Reality's complications certainly do not stop short of the human mind and body.
I had given some thought while serving in the late part of the war in Vietnam to the things in life that I had excluded from my attention in pursuing my studies. I determined that I would learn more about the arts on my return to the States. I would also spend more time with women. As matters turned out, my wife got me started on my great adventure into exploring, developing, and realizing my own very unique sexuality.
My journey of development is not quite like anyone else' and is undoubtedly very different than that of most people. But, everyone is short-changing their sexual potential if they do not think hard about their sexuality and if they are unwilling to do some real exploration of the many possibilities. This is not to advocate anything like arbitrary and careless exploration. No, our sexuality, our health, and our personal relationships are far too important not to proceed in a very thoughtful and rational manner.
David Roberts is a pen name. This allows me to tell my story without hurting those I love and without causing professional problems. Those who believe everyone should be out to suit their political purposes or to make life more convenient for them hold no sway over me. I have responsibilities to fulfill and they are not best filled by subjecting myself and everyone around me to the prejudices of others. Fortunately, those prejudices are becoming less prevalent, though they are still fairly prevalent among people my age. The few friends I have talked to about my sexuality have proven just how much most of us differ in our sexuality and how prevalent the common attitudes toward sex and sexuality are, even though these friends are in many ways extraordinary people. I have long argued openly on internet forums that gay and bisexual sex is no more immoral than is heterosexual sex, that marriage should be available to same-sex as well as heterosexual couples, and that gay and bisexual people should be free to serve in all government offices and in the military.
I am bisexual. I was not meaningfully bisexual as a child or teenager. I was only attracted to very nice and intelligent people with interesting ideas as a teenager. I was happy and generally self-confident. I was actually quite comfortable as a teenager, though I was shy with the girls where sexual issues came into play, but because I had little interest in sex then, that was not very important to me. There were a few girls I left frustrated because I did not have a sexual interest in them. I was delighted to talk about ideas for hours with my male and female friends. I also was delighted to play sports with my male friends and the rougher the better. Whenever a girl was mistreated by a guy, I stood up to protect her, just as I always did for my younger sisters. I am going to tell the story in more detail now of how I progressed from such a state to being a happily married bisexual man today.
As a young boy, I was interested in the physical and thinking differences between boys and girls, but once I understood something about the physical differences, I lost further interest in most of that. Girls and women were still interesting as thinkers, but when I was young, not many of the girls I knew were as interesting as thinkers as were my male friends. In either case, the kids I liked were the most intelligent, the most independent thinkers, creative and interesting, and nice individuals. Most were boys and a few were girls. But, my interest in them never seemed to have a sexual component.
As a teenager, I was pretty much asexual. I did not think much about sex and I never even masturbated. Life was all about thinking and sports. I loved to read. I enjoyed math and science. I thought history, which I read extensively on my own, was at least as interesting as reading a mystery or science fiction novel, and more useful to me. I liked learning about economics and business, which were so much about the practical living of life and opened endless possibilities for countless people to prosper and to enjoy a huge richness of choices and values tailored to their individual nature and dreams.
I was the oldest child in a large family and had many responsibilities as such. I did not mind this, but took pride in helping out and taking care of my younger siblings. Despite this, I had time for long bike rides, running, baseball, basketball, and football. I especially enjoyed football and loved playing defense. I usually had about twice the tackles of anyone else in our pick-up games. On offense, I was usually a receiver. Not because I was fast. I just had great concentration on the ball and if I touched it, it was caught. I never had any thought about being hit while laying out for a ball. I was indestructible. I really was. I just bounced back from any hit and loved it. But nothing was as good as a tackle. Perhaps, though I had no sense at all that this was the case, I just loved the excuse of wrapping up a male friend. Perhaps there was a deep seated desire there with some sexual component I was not self-sensitive enough to recognize. Maybe, or maybe not.
This is not to say that I was insensitive. I always thought it was beneath me to be unkind to people who were not in my usual group of the better students and guys interested in sports. I tried to be nice and other students generally saw me that way. I was often surprised to be elected to offices and honors I had not asked for. It was never hard to treat others decently and I often helped people with concepts they had trouble understanding and was happy to suggest a few things they ought to know five minutes before a test began. But from my perspective, I was often appalled that so many teenagers were very cliquish and too inclined to say unkind things about other kids. I had no significant knowledge of gay or bisexual people. There were a couple of boys who seemed very effeminate and I never had much in common with them so I spent little time with them. I was nice to them and did not participate in making fun of them, though the ones I knew about were gossipers and too often not very nice to others.
I thought that exercise was very sensual. Eating was also. I loved the sensations of taking a shower and of sliding between the sheets at the end of a long day. I enjoyed sitting in a tree and feeling the sun and breezes and listening to wildlife while reading for hours on a summer day. I definitely had a sensual enjoyment of life, just one which was not sexual.
I grew up in various small towns around the country. I graduated from a high school deep in what most Progressives, which most gay and bisexual people seem to think one ought to be, think of as flyover country. I never liked it when guys made crude sexual jokes about girls. I could not understand why many of my friends were eager to date girls who put out, but were not particularly bright or very interesting or very good looking. When I needed a date for some event as a Senior in high school, I asked one of a few nice girls who were relatively intelligent and good looking, but they were always a bit to predictable and not very exciting. Our conversations lacked zest. The sex appeal simply was not there. I was aware of the fact that sex appeal had to have a very significant mental stimulation to get me going. At least, I hoped that was all that was lacking at that time. I had at least some sexual attraction to a girl in the 10th grade while living in the East before moving to the Great Plains and there was a Senior girl who was intelligent, nice, and beautiful who was very attractive to me, but I was then a Junior, new to town, and too shy to ask an older girl out.
To this point in my life, I had been rather disappointed that my several male friends were not inclined to talk about meaningful dreams and closely held values and thoughts. I wondered whether this was all there was or if they were simply constant posers or con men trying to play a role. It seemed they were all uncomfortable with a more intimate sharing of their personal desires. There were definitely limits on how deep their friendships were capable of being. I was disappointed that so many intelligent guys were rather superficial emotionally. There was too much desire to be conventional and accepted. This is still a nearly universal failure of most people. A deep and intimate friendship with a man is still very hard to establish and it has always been a great disappointment for me.
I went to an Ivy League college and majored in a hard science. All of my main friends were guys. Most of the girls at this college were sadly wrongheaded in their efforts to foster big government and deplete the freedom of association that only resides in the private sector. There was a strong anti-male bias among many of them, though the childish and boorish behavior of many of the men at that highly esteemed college provided them some re-enforcement for such an evaluation. Despite the fact that they were generally very intelligent, their failure to properly value individual rights showed them to be shallow thinkers and conformists given the trend of that time and place. Many of the women actually tried to look unattractive. This was anything but a sexual turn-on for me. There were very few exceptions and those who were exceptions were not very good looking. I frankly thought that was more important then than I now think it to be. I likely missed at least one opportunity with a very nice and intelligent, thinking young lady that I came to regret later. The experience would have been good for both of us.
I had several good male friends in college and we were all especially interested in learning and lacking in any interest in partying. Two of my closest friends dated girls periodically, with whom they had sex. They were also very close to one another and one of their girl friends once accused them of having sex with one another in front of me. She was a bit crazy and very angry at the time, so I did not take her claims as substantial. I told her that I had no reason to think they were and that it surely was not right for her to express such an angry opinion in front of me if they were. It would have been private information she should not have been spouting. Thinking about it later, neither of my friends ever denied her claim or discussed the matter later. I realized that I really would not mind if they were. After all, they were my friends. I even thought briefly that with such intelligent and good friends, it was kind of nice if they could enjoy sexual pleasures with one another. I wondered what that might be like, but never dwelled on it. I did think it might be interesting to discuss male-male sex with them, but never followed up on the thought. I wonder if I might have become bisexual much earlier if one of them had tried to persuade me to have sex with them.
While pursuing my Ph.D. at a mid-western university, I met a highly spirited, intelligent, and beautiful Junior in the school at the end of my first year of graduate school. I asked her out, but I was a week from having to report for induction during the tail end of the Vietnam "conflict." This young lady was a great conversationalist and how I wanted to know her better. After my return to the university at the end of my time in the Army and Vietnam, I looked her up and dated her for several very exciting months. While we developed a friendship, she could not get over my lack of belief in God. I loved her, but I knew she was not the love of my life. We were not right for one another as long time partners in life. As bright as she was, she was too much of an emotional roller coaster ride for me. I was too rational and calm for her. I was also too honest. We never had sex, yet she did stir a sexual interest, which had long been dormant.
A few months later, I met an intelligent woman whose values and ideas were more like mine. I soon came to very much enjoy her company and to feel quite comfortable with her. She was a beauty with the most outstanding and firm breasts, a very slender waist, and delightful legs. Her ass was well-rounded and her thighs were strong. She was well-practiced in a martial art. She was also a very sexual woman with a good bit of experience. She was just what I needed to awaken my own sexuality. But, she had decided before we met that she had had sex with too many young men and needed to be more selective. So we became friends and talked a lot for about 6 weeks. Then I just had to make love to her and, fortunately, she was ready. Making love to her was a revelation. I was 25 and that first experience with sex awoke an incredible hunger and appetite. She soon described my love of sex as an insatiable passion. It was. Having sex with her was amazing and heavenly. A year later, I asked her to marry me and she said yes. I love her to this day and cannot imagine life without her. I still love making love to her and having sex with her. This passion lives on.
In fact, if we do not make love for four days, I start to feel bad. It is fair to say that I am pretty much addicted to her love. Her touch on almost any part of my body causes me to become intensely excited and aroused. Who would have thought that a touch on the arm, the shoulder, a nibble on a nipple, a scratch on my back, a bite on my ass, her leg pressing against mine, her breasts pressed into my chest or back, her ass pressed back against me with my cock between her legs, a kiss on my neck, all create the most heavenly pleasure. When we make love, it is a shame to come and bring these incredibly sensual pleasures to an end.
We used to go to an x-rated movie theater occasionally and some of the light-hearted sexual romps were definitely arousing and added some new wrinkles to our sex when we finally got home. I enjoyed seeing the variety of women and found that some of the guys had nice cocks, but that was only of secondary interest. We were having fun.
I enjoyed seeing beautiful women. I very rarely remember thinking that a guy was good looking and thinking of that as anything like the equivalent of my interest in a good-looking woman. That was especially true then and is largely true now.
Among our best friends were a married couple with whom we went hiking once and then we each slept as couples in the same van and made love. It was exciting hearing the sounds of each of us as we made love. He and my wife became very attracted to one another. They began having an affair. My wife told me about this after they had met a few times for sex. Since I liked him and my wife was clearly enjoying herself, I was fine with this. I am not a jealous person. I have always thought that a low emotion. We even met once later and he and I made love to my wife together. That was a lot of fun. To that time, I had only had sex with my wife, so when we and that couple got together later, I decided to see if his wife was interested in a night of sex with me, while her husband and my wife had sex. Fortunately, it turned out she was a most enthusiastic lover and I had a great time. It was really very hard to leave when we had to the next morning. She gave me a kiss that caused my lips to tingle for a few hours after leaving. Such passion was wonderful and I greatly regretted having to leave for a family commitment.
The sum of this experience helped to make it clear to me that enjoying sexual pleasures with good friends can be a very wonderful experience and need not interfere with the primary love of one's life. Indeed, it should be possible and might well be heavenly to enjoy loving multiple people at one time. The love of one need not preclude the love of another. Every love is different and more than one may very well be better than just one when intelligent and understanding people are involved. My wife and I shared these thoughts and even speculated that it would have been great if we had had a similar experience with another couple we knew.
About 5 years after we married, I gave a scientific talk at a meeting in San Francisco. My wife came with me. After my talk, we walked through the streets exploring and came across a few movie theaters that were showing all-male movies. We looked at the posters and then decided it would be an adventure to watch a movie. After about 20 minutes, we looked at one another and whispered that we were quite turned-on. I really had not expected to be. But I really got hard and clearly my wife was excited. We talked afterward and we were both surprisingly comfortable with this. My wife seemed to have a bit of a voyeuristic interest and seemed to like the idea that I was aroused by the idea of sex with a man for the first time. There had been some few occasions on which I had thought briefly about it before, but there had never been any significant arousal.
Now, the idea of sex with a man became the subject of an occasional fantasy in which I wished I had a good friend with whom I could share sexual benefits. It became clear to me that perhaps this was a key to overcoming some of the shallowness of almost all of my male friendships and besides a good cock was a powerful visual lure. To couple sex with the pleasures of a friend with a more analytical and rational mind and a harder, male body was a most interesting thought.
Our sharing of fantasies led my wife to occasionally play with my ass. The pleasure this brought me was quickly apparent with my moans and shudders. Over and over my wife found new ways to excite me. In time, she put a finger up my ass and then later a dildoe. It was all good. No, it was wonderful. This prompted an increase of my fantasies about trying sex with a good man and we shared the fantasy. We joked about my hungry ass and how insatiable it had become under my wife's ministrations.
After many years, when I was about 54, I came to exchange many e-mail notes with a bisexual engineer and we finally met. He was nice and I went to his apartment and we talked about male sex and sex generally. Finally, we sucked each others' cock and it was good. But, this proved to be a one-time event. Later I met a gay doctor after exchanging a number of notes with him. He was well-experienced in male-male sex. We met at an outside park and quickly felt comfortable with one another, but it began pouring rain and we were quickly drenched. We went to his apartment where we undressed and he gave me a robe to put on. We sat and talked for 20 or 30 minutes and then I got up and knelt down in front of his chair between his legs and moved his robe aside. His cock was standing up and I had seen it peeking out of his robe from time to time before when we were talking. It had become a categorical imperative that I touch his cock and put it in my mouth. It was beautiful and I really wanted to give him pleasure. He proved very appreciative.
He reciprocated my effort by sucking my cock and it was clear we each enjoyed both the sucking and the being sucked. That was a turn-on and really made everything right. We went to his bed and he kissed me and caressed me. He played with my balls and then licked them. Then he began rimming my ass and I was in heaven. At that point, my ass was his to do with as he pleased and he pleased to fuck it. He proved really good at it and I really loved it. Then I fucked his ass and that was great also. We continued to get together over the course the next several years, but only about once every few months since we did not live very close to one another and we were both very busy. The company, our conversations, and our sex were always great. Then we had an interruption of getting together for a few years when he moved and I lost contact. About three years later he contacted me again and we got together a few times again and each time was great again, but then he moved away again.
I told my wife about him when she finally asked if I had ever acted on my bisexuality to have sex with a man. This happened after my friend had moved away the first time. In a way, I was surprised that my wife waited so long to ask me this, but I think she had waited until she thought she could handle my having had sex with a man. I would have told her the truth at any time had she asked, but I also thought that she would ask when she wanted to know the truth. She was a bit worried at first, but she soon got over that, as I made it clear that I very much loved her and had no desire to ever be without her. Our love and our sex life became even better. For my part, I was very appreciative that I had a love with my wife that was so strong that she wanted me to have the happiness that a sexual relationship with a good man could give me. How can one not love a woman all the more who so much wants your happiness and is willing to share your love? When the doctor reappeared, I told my wife about our getting together a few times again and how much I enjoyed it. Her jokes about my insatiable ass and my joy in sucking a cock were now more real and she really began more regularly to play with my fantasies. She has been incredibly wonderful in understanding my bisexuality and in just continuing to love me. I have always loved her, but I can only love her more now.
I could have lived a happy life only having made love to her, but there is no question that I am living a still happier and more fulfilled life when I have a good male friend with sexual benefits. Of course many will condemn me for not being monogamous, but I believe that is a small-minded idea. Mind you, I do not claim that monogamy is the wrong choice for everyone, but it is surely not the right choice for everyone. One would think the tendency of many to become serial monogamists would make that pretty apparent, but the assumption that such people simply suffer a character defect is apparently enough to protect the ideal of monogamy for most people. The fact that many societies have not practiced monogamy also gives its advocates little pause for thought. Finally, while most critics are Christians, they are ignorant that the early Christians very commonly did not marry and often were not monogamous. Going back still earlier, the Bible itself had no problem with polygamy. The claim that monogamy is moral and all else is wrong is without a rational foundation. In the end, my concern is to pursue my personal happiness in accordance with my own knowledge and character and to allow my critics to pursue theirs.
I am hoping to find another good man for friendship and mutual benefits. It would be good if we shared an interest in some of such things as hiking, biking, sailing, racquetball, handball, tennis, reading, libertarianism or a not-too-religious conservatism, history, business, economics, science, engineering, classical music, folk music, and romantic comedies or some adventure movies. I am interested in many things and learning new things all the time that interest me. It would be great to have an intimate friend to share all of this with, as well as his unique interests, which might join my many interests as new interests. It would be good if this man is married or has been married so that we might share the interests and concerns that come with such a commitment. I would hope there is such a man somewhere in the Baltimore-Washington area, about 55 to 70 years matured. Please feel free to e-mail me to talk further. See the side-bar for my e-mail address.
15 March 2012
Flexuality Test Result When More Horny
Back on 26 February 2012, I decided to retake the Flexuality Test on a day when I was feeling decidedly more horny than when I had first taken it. It had been about 5 days since I had last made love with my wife. My mental state really begins to suffer whenever I go about 4 days without loving and sex. The results were interesting. There was some shift toward a greater interest in male sex. The results are:
Heteroflexible 6
Ambisexual 10
Flexamorous 8
Queer 1, note the rather strange definition of queer as used by Dr. James W. Hicks
Supersexual 4
Versatile 2
Transitioning 1
Then tonight I took it once again while both rather more horny than usual and with a mind-frame that I was able to live my life with no concern about what some family members might think and no worry about effects upon my business dealings. That is, how would things be if the world were what it should be, rather than what it is. The results were:
Heteroflexible 4
Ambisexual 10
Flexamorous 10
Queer 2
Supersexual 5
Versatile 3
Transitioning 5
What is more, I would be Polyamorous, not as Dr. James W. Hicks was using the term before switching it to Flexamorous, but in the sense of loving and having sexual relationships with more than one person at a time. I very much favor long term relationships over casual ones and prove to be very loyal to those I love. I just do not attach a high value to exclusive relationships. Jealousy seems to me to be a very low emotion. I enjoy sharing a lover with another good person. The key is that I do need to believe the other person is a good person. Such sharing is best if the other person is someone I also love.
Heteroflexible 6
Ambisexual 10
Flexamorous 8
Queer 1, note the rather strange definition of queer as used by Dr. James W. Hicks
Supersexual 4
Versatile 2
Transitioning 1
Then tonight I took it once again while both rather more horny than usual and with a mind-frame that I was able to live my life with no concern about what some family members might think and no worry about effects upon my business dealings. That is, how would things be if the world were what it should be, rather than what it is. The results were:
Heteroflexible 4
Ambisexual 10
Flexamorous 10
Queer 2
Supersexual 5
Versatile 3
Transitioning 5
What is more, I would be Polyamorous, not as Dr. James W. Hicks was using the term before switching it to Flexamorous, but in the sense of loving and having sexual relationships with more than one person at a time. I very much favor long term relationships over casual ones and prove to be very loyal to those I love. I just do not attach a high value to exclusive relationships. Jealousy seems to me to be a very low emotion. I enjoy sharing a lover with another good person. The key is that I do need to believe the other person is a good person. Such sharing is best if the other person is someone I also love.
07 February 2012
A Most Interesting and Subtle Sexuality Test
James W. Hicks, M.D. has a blog called Flexuality. As I do, he believes that many more people are bisexual than will identify themselves as such, as he explains in this discussion of bisexuality. He has a much more subtle categorization of Major Sexual Orientations than I have seen in other tests and he also rates for a number of Sexual Traits. You can take the test here, where he also offers up definitions of his terms.
On Sexual Orientation I came out:
Ambisexual = 8
Heteroflexible = 6
Flexamorous = 6
Of his Sexual Traits:
Supersexual = 3
I believe these results did give a very good characterization of my own sexuality. I will be interested in hearing from others if they believe their sexuality was well categorized or not.
On Sexual Orientation I came out:
Ambisexual = 8
Heteroflexible = 6
Flexamorous = 6
Of his Sexual Traits:
Supersexual = 3
I believe these results did give a very good characterization of my own sexuality. I will be interested in hearing from others if they believe their sexuality was well categorized or not.
15 July 2011
Obama Continues to Defy First and Fifth Amendments of Constitution with DADT
Judge Virginia Phillips ruled on 9 September 2010 in the case of Log Cabin Republicans v. the United States that the military policy Don't Ask, Don't Tell violated the First and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution. The Obama Department of Justice asked for a stay of that judgment until a decision was made by the Appeals Court and it was granted. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard the case and ruled that it also thought DADT to be unconstitutional. Once again, the Obama Department of Justice is asking for a stay of the decision.
Though the Obama administration has largely enjoyed and sought the support of gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans, it has consistently acted to maintain the DADT policy, until its hand was forced by the ruling by Judge Phillips. It then backed a legislative repeal, but on a very slow timetable. Meanwhile, highly competent, dedicated, and effective military personnel have fallen victim to this unconstitutional act which never accomplished, and actually counteracted, its stated purposes. Judge Phillips' ruling was very convincing in arguing that it was both unconstitutional and harmful to our military effectiveness.
So why is the Obama Administration fighting the rapid end of DADT? I believe there are several reasons:
Though the Obama administration has largely enjoyed and sought the support of gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans, it has consistently acted to maintain the DADT policy, until its hand was forced by the ruling by Judge Phillips. It then backed a legislative repeal, but on a very slow timetable. Meanwhile, highly competent, dedicated, and effective military personnel have fallen victim to this unconstitutional act which never accomplished, and actually counteracted, its stated purposes. Judge Phillips' ruling was very convincing in arguing that it was both unconstitutional and harmful to our military effectiveness.
So why is the Obama Administration fighting the rapid end of DADT? I believe there are several reasons:
- It is galling to the Democrats that they did not have the guts to end it, but the Log Cabin Republicans effectively opposed it with a lawsuit well-directed at its constitutional weaknesses.
- There are still enough Democrats and Independent voters with biases against gay people that there are significant votes to be lost among them on this issue. Popular votes on anti-gay measures in Democrat states often result in overwhelming support for the anti-gay and individual rights violating issues.
- Obama and the Democrats do not believe that sovereignty resides in the People. They believe it resides in the government. The court rulings say that the People have sovereign rights protected by the 1st and 5th Amendments of the Constitution, which was established and ordained by the sovereign People. This does not sit well with socialists who believe that government grants the people such privileges as it cares to. This is why Biden and others have denied natural rights and so many Democrats laugh at the very idea that the Constitution limits the power of government.
- Obama and cohorts realize that they will not get credit for ending DADT if the courts stop it before the legislation awaiting the unified approval of the top military leaders does. Their standing with gay people is likely to take a beating of some sort because of their long inaction followed by very slow motion action.
- There is the usual vying for power between the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judicial branch going on here. Too often, these branches seem to find enough power to share that they all too readily reach accommodations on sharing the power in order to increase the total power of government by ignoring the limitations of the Constitution. Sometimes, the friction in vying for power actually works something like it was supposed to with one or more branches acting as a check on the power of the other branches. While the delays here in correcting a long time injustice are aggravating, our governmental system is not really supposed to work quickly or efficiently. It has a very limited scope of constitutional power and is supposed to figure out how to protect individual rights after due deliberation.
11 July 2011
Examining the Bailey Study of Bisexual Male Arousal
The Research Report entitled Sexual Arousal Patterns of Bisexual Men by Rieger, Chivers, and Bailey published in Psychological Science noted that self-identified bisexual men in their study did not generally experience strong genital arousal to both male and female sexual stimuli. The paper says "most bisexual men appeared homosexual with respect to genital arousal, although some appeared heterosexual. In contrast, their subjective sexual arousal did conform to a bisexual pattern." These results are interesting and I will take a closer look at them.
They advertised in gay-oriented magazines and an alternative newspaper in Chicago for heterosexual, bisexual, and gay men for a paid study of sexual arousal. It is a tough job to find representative heterosexual men who read gay-oriented magazines or alternative newspapers, I would think. But, in fairness, setting up a good study of sexual arousal is a tough job.
They showed participants in the study an 11-minute sexually neutral and relaxing film, followed by four 2-minute sexual films and then another neutral film. Now personally, a string of 2-minute films would not be very sexually stimulating to me. I tend to need some time to get into my thoughts and a series of two-minute jolts would do little for me. Now two of these sexual clips depicted two men having sex with one another and two showed two women having sex with one another. Finding a way to balance the level of sexual stimulation of these films would be difficult. We cannot make a judgment of how balanced they were because we are told nothing more about them.
But, most American males have ready access to to film clips showing two women having sex with one another, but less ready access or a need for more courage anyway to see films of two men having sex together. This is surely true of heterosexual and bisexual men. So, on the one hand one can see two brief films of a type one has seen many times, while on the other hand, one sees film of two men having sex which one has probably seen less often. The new experience or the less frequent experience is often the more arousing as compared to the routine experience. One would expect that men with relatively little experience watching men have sex with one another will experience at least some degree of heightened arousal due to its relative newness.
The degree of sexual arousal was measured by applying a strain gauge to each participant's penis. If the growth of circumference was less than 2 mm, the data was not used in the genital arousal part of the study. Presumably, this just means that at some point in time while watching the film clips, arousal exceeded 2 mm. The difference was apparently then expressed in terms of the number of standard deviations, since no units of length (i.e. mm) are given and that was the procedure used by Chivers, Rieger, Latty, and Bailey in an earlier article entitled A Sex Difference in the Specificity of Sexual Arousal.
The final sample consisted of 21 heterosexual men, 22 bisexual men, and 25 homosexual men according to their self-identifications, in which Kinsey scores as multiples of 0.5, from 0 through 1 were considered heterosexual, from 5 through 6 were considered homosexual, and those from 1.5 through 4.5 were considered bisexual. The men were asked to rate themselves on the Kinsey scale for the relative degree of attraction for women and men with a score of 0 meaning attraction only to women and a score of 6 meaning attraction only to men. A score of 3 would presumably mean an equal degree of attraction to each. The study also had the men push a lever forward to indicate arousal and back to indicate less arousal. This measured their subjective arousal.
As the results were presented below, they did not seem to confirm a tendency for bisexual men who identified themselves with Kinsey scores near 3 as having a genital response which was similar for both men and women. Their subjective arousal indicated with the lever was more consistent with a similar stimulative effect by both men and women for bisexual identifiers. The actual arousal is measured versus the Kinsey score in each graph below:
Unfortunately, this is not the data itself, but some sort of apparently hand-drawn fit to the data which is not shown. All across the spectrum of the Kinsey scale, the less arousing sex was still somewhat arousing. One of the more salient results in the genital arousal data is that those men who identified themselves as near or in the homosexual zone of the Kinsey scale were even more polarized in their sexual preference than were the men at the heterosexual end of the scale. Strangely, those in the bisexual range were simply intermediate in this degree of polarization.
There are aspects of these plots which I find hard to understand in light of the individual data points provided in the case of the genital arousal difference, which is the strain gauge genital response to male stimuli minus that of the response to female stimuli. If a man is more aroused by watching two women have sex, the number is negative. If he is more aroused by watching two men have sex together, it is positive. The units are apparently in terms of the standard deviation still. That data is shown here:
Let us use a very simple method to look a little harder at what this data is telling us about genital arousal for men. Let us find a simple average for each Kinsey scale number. There is a caveat I must make here. There are supposed to be 21 heterosexual data points, but I could only distinguish 20, with perhaps some debate on two of those, due to overlapping data points. Of the 22 bisexual men, I could only distinguish 21 data points. While I have 25 data points for the 25 homosexual men, some may be somewhat in error due to overlaps also. But, the effects of these problems are small on the results I will discuss.
Now by looking at the data for local regions of the Kinsey scale self-identification, one sees that the results in the range from 0 through 1 are similar and they average -1.31, showing a considerable genital preference for women in the heterosexual men. But at the other end of the scale, the men with Kinsey scores from 4 through 6 are very similar and average 1.47, indicating a stronger preference for genital arousal by male stimuli than heterosexual men had for arousal by women. Those males who self-rated as 2.5, 3, or 3.5 had similar degrees of preference and they did prefer male stimuli. This preference was substantially weaker than that of the men scoring themselves 4s or more. Finally, the men choosing scores of 1.5 and 2 had a slight preference for women with an average of -0.23.
While the men in the 2.5 to 3.5 range might have been expected to have an average genital arousal differential closer to zero, they certainly are a distinguishable group from those scoring themselves 4 or more, who are quite homosexual judging the genital response alone. It would appear that the men scoring themselves 1.5 and 2 are the men actually more in the mid-range zone one would normally consider bisexual. But, I would note again that this is a study of small numbers of men, chosen by a method that might selectively pick out men more sexually adventurous and even inclined to be interested in same sex stimuli, and that the film clips used for the male-male sex may have been more novel and exciting than those used for the female-female sex stimuli. A reverse novelty effect may explain why two men who rated themselves 6s and one who rated himself a 5.5, were actually more stimulated by the female stimuli than by the male stimuli. For some men who are immersed in homosexual activities regularly, woman on woman sex may sometimes be more novel and exciting.
On the other hand, a great many men only somewhat or occasionally attracted to men are very insistent in seeing themselves as heterosexual. Generally those men more attracted to women than men have every incentive in our society to crowd the low Kinsey numbers and to fear to venture out into higher numbers. A certain bias for men choosing higher Kinsey numbers being more attracted to men than a linear scale would suggest is not surprising. But, it is also not surprising that the men in the 1.5 to 3.5 range distinguish themselves both from heterosexuals and homosexuals based on their genital arousal responses. They do rightly see themselves as different by genital arousal and by subjective arousal as well.
It is highly instructive to look at the distribution of men in each self-rating group with respect to their genital arousal differential measurement. One man with Kinsey score 0 had a genital measurement of about -0.5 indicating a very substantial sexual response to males. One man in the 0.5 Kinsey group had a measured response very near the average of those who rated themselves 1.5 or 2 on the Kinsey scale. One man who self-rated a 1, was slightly more attracted to men genitally. It might be best to ignore the self ratings for a moment and simply look at how many men seem to fall enough in a middle ground by genital response to be considered bisexual. Looking at the data, there are plenty of men measuring near -2 who are quite heterosexual. There are also many measuring near 2 who are quite homosexual. It would seem to be reasonable to consider those who measure between -1 and 1 as bisexual then. They are certainly not as strongly polarized as those men with differential scores near 2 or -2. There are at least 18 such men in the middle ground, which includes 5 who rated themselves 5.5 or 6 on the Kinsey scale and 5 who rated themselves 0, 0.5, or 1 on the Kinsey scale! The remaining 8 genitally bisexual men had rated themselves from 1.5 to 3.5. Substantial genital arousal by the same sex is very commonplace across the entire self-rated Kinsey scale!
Those men who chose Kinsey numbers of 4 and 4.5 might simply be indicating that they are willing to consider having sex with a woman who might arouse them, or that they have at some time been aroused by a woman and they are simply acknowledging that fact. This is a more mental activity choice than a merely genital reaction to some general and anonymous film sexual stimulation. These men may be predominantly homosexual, which their number choice indicates them to be in their self-assessment, but they may also be more aware of the fact that women can offer them some genital and mental sexual stimulation.
We do not well-understand the degree to which we are biochemically predisposed to be attracted by one sex or another and how our minds through our thinking processes and fantasizing come to influence our attractions. It would not be surprising if heterosexual and homosexual men tend to be more biochemically hardwired, while those who are bisexual are less hardwired and more mentally attuned to the attractions of both sexes. They do often say that they respond more to the person's character than to the person's sex. That suggests a higher degree of mental input, which is fully consistent with the subjective arousal response observed in the Bailey study. It may also make sense that the mental response occurs first in some bisexual men and then, with some delay, the genital arousal occurs. The short and choppy film stimuli would not be conducive to a genital response delayed by a mental response. I think we can be sure the 2-minute clips neglected character development and got right down to mechanical sex, so this stimuli should have under-stimulated those bisexual men whose attraction to one sex or other was not adequately addressed by the film clips. This will systematically make some bisexual men appear to be either heterosexual or homosexual. This is most definitely not a random type error.
The investigators of this study seem to alternate between good distinctions and interpretations and clearly wrong interpretations. The abstract seems to state their findings well, but the fourth sentence of the Discussion Section says
Bailey and company conclude by saying:
Better studies with larger numbers of participants are needed. The brain arousal scan approach they mention should be used in combination with the genital strain gauge measurements and subjective measurements. The stimuli used need to be examined for their effects on results as well. Do longer film clips with some effort to develop desirable character make a difference? It is important to know whether it makes a difference if one shows bisexual men two women making love, a man and a woman making love, or two men making love. Does it make a difference if the films show people making love or just having mechanical sex?
It also needs to be remembered that general stimuli by people unknown to the respondent does not work well for many people. A man really may experience little arousal for most women or most men, but a great deal of arousal for some particular man or woman. A man may only look at women when walking down the street, yet be very attracted to one of his golf and hunting male friends. Is he not bisexual, even if he only responds then to the film clips of the two women having sex? Or what if he has only had sex with women but he has a specific fantasy based on no particular man but based on a circumstance in which he finds himself with a man and this sexual fantasy is very arousing? Is he not bisexual again even if this circumstance was not presented by the study film clip? One can substitute man and woman in each of these questions as well.
When all is said and done, I do not think the existence of bisexual men will be doubted. But clearly, science knows little about them and this is a great shortcoming in our understanding human sexuality. Meanwhile, it is really bad manners to tell someone who self-identifies as bisexual that he does not exist or that he is simply lying to himself. Before doing such a thing, one ought to know what one is talking about.
This post was revised on 17 September 2011.
They advertised in gay-oriented magazines and an alternative newspaper in Chicago for heterosexual, bisexual, and gay men for a paid study of sexual arousal. It is a tough job to find representative heterosexual men who read gay-oriented magazines or alternative newspapers, I would think. But, in fairness, setting up a good study of sexual arousal is a tough job.
They showed participants in the study an 11-minute sexually neutral and relaxing film, followed by four 2-minute sexual films and then another neutral film. Now personally, a string of 2-minute films would not be very sexually stimulating to me. I tend to need some time to get into my thoughts and a series of two-minute jolts would do little for me. Now two of these sexual clips depicted two men having sex with one another and two showed two women having sex with one another. Finding a way to balance the level of sexual stimulation of these films would be difficult. We cannot make a judgment of how balanced they were because we are told nothing more about them.
But, most American males have ready access to to film clips showing two women having sex with one another, but less ready access or a need for more courage anyway to see films of two men having sex together. This is surely true of heterosexual and bisexual men. So, on the one hand one can see two brief films of a type one has seen many times, while on the other hand, one sees film of two men having sex which one has probably seen less often. The new experience or the less frequent experience is often the more arousing as compared to the routine experience. One would expect that men with relatively little experience watching men have sex with one another will experience at least some degree of heightened arousal due to its relative newness.
The degree of sexual arousal was measured by applying a strain gauge to each participant's penis. If the growth of circumference was less than 2 mm, the data was not used in the genital arousal part of the study. Presumably, this just means that at some point in time while watching the film clips, arousal exceeded 2 mm. The difference was apparently then expressed in terms of the number of standard deviations, since no units of length (i.e. mm) are given and that was the procedure used by Chivers, Rieger, Latty, and Bailey in an earlier article entitled A Sex Difference in the Specificity of Sexual Arousal.
The final sample consisted of 21 heterosexual men, 22 bisexual men, and 25 homosexual men according to their self-identifications, in which Kinsey scores as multiples of 0.5, from 0 through 1 were considered heterosexual, from 5 through 6 were considered homosexual, and those from 1.5 through 4.5 were considered bisexual. The men were asked to rate themselves on the Kinsey scale for the relative degree of attraction for women and men with a score of 0 meaning attraction only to women and a score of 6 meaning attraction only to men. A score of 3 would presumably mean an equal degree of attraction to each. The study also had the men push a lever forward to indicate arousal and back to indicate less arousal. This measured their subjective arousal.
As the results were presented below, they did not seem to confirm a tendency for bisexual men who identified themselves with Kinsey scores near 3 as having a genital response which was similar for both men and women. Their subjective arousal indicated with the lever was more consistent with a similar stimulative effect by both men and women for bisexual identifiers. The actual arousal is measured versus the Kinsey score in each graph below:
Unfortunately, this is not the data itself, but some sort of apparently hand-drawn fit to the data which is not shown. All across the spectrum of the Kinsey scale, the less arousing sex was still somewhat arousing. One of the more salient results in the genital arousal data is that those men who identified themselves as near or in the homosexual zone of the Kinsey scale were even more polarized in their sexual preference than were the men at the heterosexual end of the scale. Strangely, those in the bisexual range were simply intermediate in this degree of polarization.
There are aspects of these plots which I find hard to understand in light of the individual data points provided in the case of the genital arousal difference, which is the strain gauge genital response to male stimuli minus that of the response to female stimuli. If a man is more aroused by watching two women have sex, the number is negative. If he is more aroused by watching two men have sex together, it is positive. The units are apparently in terms of the standard deviation still. That data is shown here:
Let us use a very simple method to look a little harder at what this data is telling us about genital arousal for men. Let us find a simple average for each Kinsey scale number. There is a caveat I must make here. There are supposed to be 21 heterosexual data points, but I could only distinguish 20, with perhaps some debate on two of those, due to overlapping data points. Of the 22 bisexual men, I could only distinguish 21 data points. While I have 25 data points for the 25 homosexual men, some may be somewhat in error due to overlaps also. But, the effects of these problems are small on the results I will discuss.
Now by looking at the data for local regions of the Kinsey scale self-identification, one sees that the results in the range from 0 through 1 are similar and they average -1.31, showing a considerable genital preference for women in the heterosexual men. But at the other end of the scale, the men with Kinsey scores from 4 through 6 are very similar and average 1.47, indicating a stronger preference for genital arousal by male stimuli than heterosexual men had for arousal by women. Those males who self-rated as 2.5, 3, or 3.5 had similar degrees of preference and they did prefer male stimuli. This preference was substantially weaker than that of the men scoring themselves 4s or more. Finally, the men choosing scores of 1.5 and 2 had a slight preference for women with an average of -0.23.
While the men in the 2.5 to 3.5 range might have been expected to have an average genital arousal differential closer to zero, they certainly are a distinguishable group from those scoring themselves 4 or more, who are quite homosexual judging the genital response alone. It would appear that the men scoring themselves 1.5 and 2 are the men actually more in the mid-range zone one would normally consider bisexual. But, I would note again that this is a study of small numbers of men, chosen by a method that might selectively pick out men more sexually adventurous and even inclined to be interested in same sex stimuli, and that the film clips used for the male-male sex may have been more novel and exciting than those used for the female-female sex stimuli. A reverse novelty effect may explain why two men who rated themselves 6s and one who rated himself a 5.5, were actually more stimulated by the female stimuli than by the male stimuli. For some men who are immersed in homosexual activities regularly, woman on woman sex may sometimes be more novel and exciting.
On the other hand, a great many men only somewhat or occasionally attracted to men are very insistent in seeing themselves as heterosexual. Generally those men more attracted to women than men have every incentive in our society to crowd the low Kinsey numbers and to fear to venture out into higher numbers. A certain bias for men choosing higher Kinsey numbers being more attracted to men than a linear scale would suggest is not surprising. But, it is also not surprising that the men in the 1.5 to 3.5 range distinguish themselves both from heterosexuals and homosexuals based on their genital arousal responses. They do rightly see themselves as different by genital arousal and by subjective arousal as well.
It is highly instructive to look at the distribution of men in each self-rating group with respect to their genital arousal differential measurement. One man with Kinsey score 0 had a genital measurement of about -0.5 indicating a very substantial sexual response to males. One man in the 0.5 Kinsey group had a measured response very near the average of those who rated themselves 1.5 or 2 on the Kinsey scale. One man who self-rated a 1, was slightly more attracted to men genitally. It might be best to ignore the self ratings for a moment and simply look at how many men seem to fall enough in a middle ground by genital response to be considered bisexual. Looking at the data, there are plenty of men measuring near -2 who are quite heterosexual. There are also many measuring near 2 who are quite homosexual. It would seem to be reasonable to consider those who measure between -1 and 1 as bisexual then. They are certainly not as strongly polarized as those men with differential scores near 2 or -2. There are at least 18 such men in the middle ground, which includes 5 who rated themselves 5.5 or 6 on the Kinsey scale and 5 who rated themselves 0, 0.5, or 1 on the Kinsey scale! The remaining 8 genitally bisexual men had rated themselves from 1.5 to 3.5. Substantial genital arousal by the same sex is very commonplace across the entire self-rated Kinsey scale!
Those men who chose Kinsey numbers of 4 and 4.5 might simply be indicating that they are willing to consider having sex with a woman who might arouse them, or that they have at some time been aroused by a woman and they are simply acknowledging that fact. This is a more mental activity choice than a merely genital reaction to some general and anonymous film sexual stimulation. These men may be predominantly homosexual, which their number choice indicates them to be in their self-assessment, but they may also be more aware of the fact that women can offer them some genital and mental sexual stimulation.
We do not well-understand the degree to which we are biochemically predisposed to be attracted by one sex or another and how our minds through our thinking processes and fantasizing come to influence our attractions. It would not be surprising if heterosexual and homosexual men tend to be more biochemically hardwired, while those who are bisexual are less hardwired and more mentally attuned to the attractions of both sexes. They do often say that they respond more to the person's character than to the person's sex. That suggests a higher degree of mental input, which is fully consistent with the subjective arousal response observed in the Bailey study. It may also make sense that the mental response occurs first in some bisexual men and then, with some delay, the genital arousal occurs. The short and choppy film stimuli would not be conducive to a genital response delayed by a mental response. I think we can be sure the 2-minute clips neglected character development and got right down to mechanical sex, so this stimuli should have under-stimulated those bisexual men whose attraction to one sex or other was not adequately addressed by the film clips. This will systematically make some bisexual men appear to be either heterosexual or homosexual. This is most definitely not a random type error.
The investigators of this study seem to alternate between good distinctions and interpretations and clearly wrong interpretations. The abstract seems to state their findings well, but the fourth sentence of the Discussion Section says
On average, both homosexual and heterosexual men had much higher arousal to one sex than to the other, and this was equally true of the bisexual men.As we saw in the table above, this is not true unless one lumps the homosexual men of Kinsey scores 4 and 4.5 in with the rest of the bisexual men and performs that very gross average. This is a failure to handle the data in a manner consistent with the actual data. One should not let a pre-conceived notion lead one astray when interpreting the data. Just as the genital arousal difference data for men who rated themselves 4 and 4.5 match that of the men who self-rated as 5, 5.5, and 6, so does the subjective arousal difference data. There is no way to distinguish the men rating themselves 4 and higher in this study from one another by any of the measurements made.
Bailey and company conclude by saying:
...our results suggest that male bisexuality is not simply the sum of, or the intermediate between, heterosexual and homosexual orientation. Indeed, with respect to sexual arousal and attraction, it remains to be shown that male bisexuality exists. Thus, future research should also explore nonsexual reasons why some men might prefer a bisexual identity to a homosexual or heterosexual identity.The first claim that bisexuality may not be either the sum of or the intermediate of heterosexuality or homosexuality, may be true. But, their differential genital arousal does clearly distinguish them from both heterosexuals and homosexuals in the Kinsey range from 1.5 to 3.5. Their subjective responses also distinguish them. Finally, we also note that the number of men with intermediate scale genital contrast scores taken across the entire self-rated Kinsey scale was substantial. This questioning of the very existence of bisexuality is disingenuous. It flies in the face of the results of this study and this expression of doubt became the primary subject of extensive media attention. This study should have concluded that though their participation pool was limited and the stimulating media had shortcomings, the data tends to confirm that bisexual men do exist both on the basis of differential genital arousal and differential subjective arousal. Not only do they exist, but many of them self-rate themselves as either heterosexual or homosexual.
Better studies with larger numbers of participants are needed. The brain arousal scan approach they mention should be used in combination with the genital strain gauge measurements and subjective measurements. The stimuli used need to be examined for their effects on results as well. Do longer film clips with some effort to develop desirable character make a difference? It is important to know whether it makes a difference if one shows bisexual men two women making love, a man and a woman making love, or two men making love. Does it make a difference if the films show people making love or just having mechanical sex?
It also needs to be remembered that general stimuli by people unknown to the respondent does not work well for many people. A man really may experience little arousal for most women or most men, but a great deal of arousal for some particular man or woman. A man may only look at women when walking down the street, yet be very attracted to one of his golf and hunting male friends. Is he not bisexual, even if he only responds then to the film clips of the two women having sex? Or what if he has only had sex with women but he has a specific fantasy based on no particular man but based on a circumstance in which he finds himself with a man and this sexual fantasy is very arousing? Is he not bisexual again even if this circumstance was not presented by the study film clip? One can substitute man and woman in each of these questions as well.
When all is said and done, I do not think the existence of bisexual men will be doubted. But clearly, science knows little about them and this is a great shortcoming in our understanding human sexuality. Meanwhile, it is really bad manners to tell someone who self-identifies as bisexual that he does not exist or that he is simply lying to himself. Before doing such a thing, one ought to know what one is talking about.
This post was revised on 17 September 2011.
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