Bisexuality

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A baker's dozen on Human sexuality

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Bisexuality (also known as swinging both wayz, or playing for both teams) refers to romantic or sexual attraction to both males and females. Contrary to popular myth, bisexuals rarely are attracted to both genders equally, and normally have preference for one or the other. For example, a person may be happy to have homosexual encounters for fun or just sex, but not as a relationship. The Kinsey scale, developed by sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, provides for these sort of variances in attraction for one sex or another; 7 points ranging from purely heterosexual at 1 to purely homosexual at 7, with 4 in the middle. Although this is a quite simplified model and doesn't take into account special exceptions (such as the "I'd go for for..." game), it works well enough to indicate preferences.

[edit] Attitudes

The conventional wisdom on the matter is that women are more likely to be bisexual than men.^[1] However, this may be due to the fact that bisexual women are more "socially acceptable" than bisexual men in the modern world. It's certainly true that whenever the word "threesome" is bounced around in popular culture it invariably implies that the third person is female, and the vast majority of pr0n rarely shows more than one man in the same scene.

Some detractors of bisexuality believe (a stance generally considered incorrect by sex educators and psychiatrists, not to mention bisexuals themselves) that bisexuals are actually homosexuals in denial, or perhaps homosexual or heterosexual but too confused to admit either way. These negative attitudes often come just as much from the "gay community" as they do from the "straight community", and thus B in LGBT can often be a very separate issue to the others.

[edit] Relation to reparative therapy

Joseph Nicolosi, Ph.D., in his book Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality; a clinical approach,^[2] seems to advocate for a very similar scale to Kinsey's. He states, "Each individual falls somewhere along the heterosexual-homosexual continuum, possibly moving from one direction to the other during different life stages." This heterosexual-homosexual continuum is remarkably similar to Kinsey's, and suggests that the reparative therapy model is not so much changing homosexual orientation, but simply changing the activities of bisexuals, a theory supported by follow-up studies.^{[citation needed]}

The concept of bisexuality is related to pansexuality, which assumes more than two genders or gender expressions. According to Woody Allen, bisexuality doubles your chances of getting a date on a Saturday night (see, they're not confused, they're just greedy).

[edit] Footnotes

1. ↑ Although this may be skewed by the existence of the Suicide Girls, for whom bisexuality is a prerequisite.
2. ↑ http://www.narth.com/docs/repair.html