Actually, there may be some scientific validity to your theory (which many men share) that women are all naturally bisexuals.
[quote]When a heterosexual woman, without warning, finds another woman attractive, it seems like a mistake. She looks up and sees this other woman â this dear friend, this casual acquaintance, or this marvelous cleavage on the silver screen â and she is curiously aroused. Sheâs at a loss. So it was for Geri, a heterosexual 19-year-old who, for one brief moment, wanted to kiss her best friend.
âI donât know why I would want to do that,â says Geri, a college student in New Jersey who asked that her last name not be used. âI know Iâm straight and I like my men, and it would just be too weird. I guess I was confused by it.â She was 16 at the time, talking loudly at a party, her breath stained with alcohol. A boy at the party jokingly suggested that she kiss her friend, a girl she lived next door to for years. And suddenly, it seemed like a good idea. No, it was a great idea. Not just a peck, but a real kiss, the kind of genuine thing Clark Gable would applaud. As if on autopilot, Geri says, she told her friend of this new desire â and then quickly pulled back. This wasnât her. She didnât know what she wanted.
Geri and her friend still laugh about that night, although she hasnât settled on what caused such an impulsive, erratic desire. Sometimes she blames the booze, but sheâs not convinced. Whatever it was, she says, she knows one thing for sure: if she were a guy, this probably wouldnât have happened. âGuys are programmed to fuck, and girls arenât like that,â she says. âGirls are more sensual, and the mood has to be right. It doesnât matter whoâs doing it, it just has to be right.â And on that night, somehow, the mood was right.
But if a study recently released from Northwestern University is correct, Geriâs desire was almost more natural than her heterosexuality. In her case, and the cases of countless other women, her biological impulses spontaneously bubbled up. As the study shows, women may be naturally aroused by both sexes, and what turns them on may have little to do with their sexual orientation.
For the study, more than 90 gay and straight men, women and male-to-female transsexuals were shown erotic film scenes with a probe attached to their genitals to indicate when they were aroused. Both the men and the transsexuals were only aroused by scenes that featured members of their preferred sex, while women were aroused by all the films â whether they featured lesbian scenes, gay male scenes or mixed-sexes scenes.
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She says most people are sexually attracted to both sexes, even if the attraction is as lopsided as 95 percent for one sex and 5 percent for the other. âI do think that thereâs a lot more wiggle room with regard to desire and love than most people are usually comfortable acknowledging.â She says she has studied cases of women who fall hopelessly in love with a female friend, and even though both women are heterosexual, they will date and have sex and feel fully satisfied. But yet, they are not lesbians, she says. Their interest is only in each other, spurred by an emotional bond that turned sexual â and if the relationship ends, as she has seen happen, the women both go back to happily dating men.
One woman she studied had lived with a female friend for over a year, and the woman would spend hours walking along streets, trying to decide if she was attracted to other women or not. It turns out, she never was. âPeople can experience strong sexual attractions that are totally unusual to the rest of their experience,â Diamond says. âTheyâre situational. In one setting and one circumstance, it may seem possible.â
So if this is true, why are straight women turned on by lesbian porn? Bailey has a number of theories, and he feels heâll get closer to the answer once his research team repeats the study â but this time, theyâll monitor brain waves instead of genitals. He said thereâs a chance the women arenât actually being turned on by the porn, but that their stimulation is a hard-wired biological defense. Much like a woman who becomes genitally aroused while being raped, Bailey said, women may only be creating lubricant so that they are not damaged by something penetrating them â something his probes had registered as a sexual stimulation. âGenital arousal in women is not the same thing as being in the mood,â he says.
Or, he says, it could be something quite different: All women may be naturally bisexual, and society shapes most of them into heterosexuals. He says this could be an evolutionary trait, because women didnât have to develop a sexual orientation when men, as the historically dominant species, were the ones always seeking out mates.
But as some skeptics of the study suggest, women may not be guided by their biology at all, but only by the sexual images and stereotypes around them. American culture, for what itâs worth, is a drooling teenage boy. It is obsessed with the female body, sprinkling a busty silhouette or a seductive midriff on any object that needs extra pizzazz. The country will tolerate a male sexual figure every so often, with his remarkably hairless torso and abs like a plate of chicken nuggets, but the penis is categorically off-limits. Where Americans see sex, they see only breasts â at the movies, in magazine ads, through the perky shreds of fabric that pass as bikinis. And therefore, both American men and women have come to associate the very essence of sex with the female form, according to sex therapist Wendy Maltz, coauthor of âPrivate Thoughts: Exploring the Power of Womenâs Sexual Fantasies.â So, she says, when the straight women in the study were becoming aroused by watching lesbian porn, they were only responding to a culturally programmed symbol of sex. âLetâs take both men and women who had never been exposed to any visual imagery of sex, and then letâs hook them up and see what goes on, and I think youâd find different reactions.â
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What do women want?