14 DAY TRIAL // Apparently, "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" have increasingly become two artificial terms defined by a human society obsessed with order. People say homosexuality is not natural, but this is nonsense: if we look anywhere in nature, we will detect animal homosexuality all around... Sexual orientation variation not matching the gender could be genetically normal. Human traits can be genetically established in two ways: fairly discrete, like eye color, or falling along a continuum, like the height.
A 2007 research made by Robert Epstein on 18,000 subjects shows that being strictly either "gay" or "straight" is misleading. Sexual orientation was found to lie on a smooth continuum, and the way people state their orientation is often a poor predictor of their true sexual behaviors and fantasies. It appeared that less than 10 % of the people score as "pure" heterosexual or homosexual and, on average, females are more inclined towards a homosexual orientation than men .
"My study suggests that characterizing sexual orientation properly requires two numbers: mean sexual orientation (where a given person lies on the continuum) and sexual orientation range (how much flexibility or "choice" the person has in expressing that orientation, which also forms a continuum)", said Epstein.
A new study published in Developmental Psychology further shows that female bisexuality is a fairly distinct sexual orientation, not something experimental or a passage to lesbianism. 79 non-heterosexual female subjects, identified as lesbian, bisexual or unlabeled, were followed up over 10 years (for five times) and displayed a stable pattern of attraction to both sexes. The subjects were aged 18 to 25 at the beginning of the research and, unlike in urban legends, they were found to commit to long-term monogamous relationships.
"This research provides the first empirical examination of competing assumptions about the nature of bisexuality, both as a sexual identity label and as a pattern of nonexclusive sexual attraction and behavior. The findings demonstrate considerable fluidity in bisexual, unlabeled and lesbian women's attractions, behaviors and identities and contribute to researchers' understanding of the complexity of sexual-minority development over the life span," wrote lead researcher Dr Lisa M. Diamond, psychologist at the University of Utah.
Diamond discovered that the bisexual and unlabeled women were more likely to change their sexual preferences in time than the lesbians, but more between bisexual and unlabeled than choosing a strictly lesbian or heterosexual way. 17 % of subjects went from a bisexual or unlabeled preference to heterosexual during the 10 years, but over 50 % of them returned to bisexual or unlabeled status by the end.
To the end of the research, the majority of the subjects were committed in long-term (over one year) monogamous relationships: 70 % of the lesbians, 89 % of the bisexuals, 85 % of the unlabeled women and 67 % of those identifying as heterosexual.
Lesbianism resulted to be more flexible than female heterosexuality. 15 % of the self identified lesbians had heterosexual sex in the last two years, while none of the heterosexual women had lesbian sex in the last two years.
"This provides further support for the notion that female sexuality is relatively fluid and that the distinction between lesbian and bisexual women is not a rigid one," wrote Diamond.