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Scientific Proof; The Invisible Bisexual Man Does Exist!
Over the decades bisexual men were forced into the shadows even as the gay community organized. Both the straight and the gay communities have often isolated bisexuals and referred to bisexuals as "fence straddlers" who cannot make up their mind to choose one side of the fence; either straight or gay. However, science has shown that bisexuals are in fact real people and are not mythical unicorns as previously thought, bisexuals HAVE made up their minds, we are attracted to both sexes!!
Since this is "stop bullying" month, this info may help young men feel validated if they feel sexual attraction towards same and opposite sex people. There is still a long road ahead for bisexual men, as neither the straight nor the gay community fully accepts the bisexual into their group. There are many organizations specifically for bisexuals, and yes, bisexuals have finally been proven to exist by science! All this time bisexuals thought they were mythical unicorns that nobody could see!
So if you are bisexual, please remember that you do not have to "choose a side of the fence"! The grass is equally green on both sides of the fence!!
"The invisible bisexual man"
Science has proven that they do exist, but bi guys say we're a long way from seeing sexuality in shades of gray
By Tracy Clark-Flory
"The big sex news of the week was that bisexual men exist.
OK, so a new study proving that bisexual men are aroused by both men and women didn't come as "news" to bi men, but most are nonetheless relieved by the results, because it will help to legitimize their identity in others' eyes. (This is especially true since prior research controversially reported that there was no evidence of male bisexuality.) Still, the more than dozen bisexual men that I interviewed about the study say it serves as a reminder of just how far they still have to go toward acceptance and understanding. Despite enormous strides made in the past decade for LGBT rights, male bisexuality remains a challenging idea and a unique taboo, even within sexually progressive circles.
A large part of that is because, culturally, we tend to think in terms of black-and-white, not shades of gray -- and that's especially true when it comes to the subject of sex. Rarely does a bisexual come out without fielding questions about which sex they like more -- the assumption being that they must lean one way or the other. It's true that many do: As Ryan from Vancouver wrote in an email, he puts an "emphasis on the 'preference' in 'sexual preference.'" He might be attracted to women more often than men, but believes he "could be attracted to pretty much anybody in the right circumstances, sexuality be damned." But there are also many bi men who describe their sexual attraction in much more fluid terms. The 27-year-old says: "To me, I look for and fall in love with the personality and the intelligence, and then the overall style of the person, never giving any thought to if they are 'male or female.'"
Romantic as it may be, that is a concept not so easily grasped by the general public -- which can make bisexual men feel invisible. Simon, a 26-year-old living in Brooklyn, N.Y., tells me, "Whenever, say, some prominent heterosexually married male public figure has a same-sex affair, literally everyone rolls their eyes at the 'closeted homosexual,'" he says. "I'm not sure I remember ever hearing someone seriously entertain the possibility that the philanderer was bisexual." Bisexuals are more visible than ever, but our cultural default, the shortcut we take to understand a person, is still: gay or straight?
It's amazing that this is still the case more than 60 decades after the Kinsey scale was introduced. "I think Kinsey's work laid a more realistic foundation for examining human sexuality," Ryan, a freelance writer, says. Even the bisexual label is problematic, because it functions "as a 'catch-all' for everything that isn't 100 percent gay or 100 percent straight," says 25-year-old Cameron of Chicago. "Human sexuality is complicated," he says. "Accepting that is probably one of the more difficult social challenges to overcome."
It can also present a significant internal challenge. "It's easy to get caught up in the idea that I must be one or the other," says Simon, the 20-something Brooklynite, which leads to self-doubt. If he has a less than inspiring hookup with a woman, suddenly the question becomes: Am I gay? If there aren't fireworks with a man, it's: Maybe I'm straight, after all. After so much interrogation by others, it's only natural to begin to interrogate yourself.
Even without any genuine questions about their identity, many bisexual men end up choosing a different label, depending on the circumstances. "I am either gay or heterosexual dependent upon the company I keep," says 49-year-old Ed. Some men identify as gay when they're dating a man and straight when they're dating a woman -- it's easier to go along with people's assumptions than it is to detail the subtle nuances of one's attractions.
The pressure to pick a side doesn't end there. A number of the older men I interviewed reported having found women, most often bisexual women, who were turned on by their identity, but several men in their 20s said that straight women were turned off by it. "I encounter lots of women who totally rule out relationships with men who've slept with men," says Simon. "It seems like straight women attach an 'ick' factor to bisexual men that straight men don't attach to bisexual women."
That's an area ripe for further research, but it seems likely that the "bi now, gay later" stereotype, and the perceived link between HIV and gay sex, might be factors. It doesn't help any that masculinity is so often equated with both heterosexuality and homophobia. For this reason, some bisexual men who are primarily attracted to women report that they identify as straight on dating sites. One bi man observed that "bisexual women seem to be the 'holy grail' of sexuality," especially in the straight world, but bi guys aren't fetishized to anywhere near the same degree.
The resistance to bisexuality doesn't just come from the fact that it requires shades-of-gray rather than black-or-white thinking. It also implicitly raises the possibility that we're all much more intricately sexually wired than we like to admit. Male bisexuality poses an even greater threat: The stakes of being "a little bit gay" are so much higher for men than for women."
Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter. More: Tracy Clark-Flory
article here;
http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/08/27/bisexuality
Here is the article detailing the scientific accounts that prove bisexuals are real and not mythical unicorns;
"No Surprise for Bisexual Men: Report Indicates They Exist"
By DAVID TULLER
Published: August 22, 2011
"In an unusual scientific about-face, researchers at Northwestern University have found evidence that at least some men who identify themselves as bisexual are, in fact, sexually aroused by both women and men.
The finding is not likely to surprise bisexuals, who have long asserted that attraction often is not limited to one sex. But for many years the question of bisexuality has bedeviled scientists. A widely publicized study published in 2005, also by researchers at Northwestern, reported that “with respect to sexual arousal and attraction, it remains to be shown that male bisexuality exists.”
That conclusion outraged bisexual men and women, who said it appeared to support a stereotype of bisexual men as closeted homosexuals.
In the new study, published online in the journal Biological Psychology, the researchers relied on more stringent criteria for selecting participants. To improve their chances of finding men aroused by women as well as men, the researchers recruited subjects from online venues specifically catering to bisexuals.
They also required participants to have had sexual experiences with at least two people of each sex and a romantic relationship of at least three months with at least one person of each sex.
Men in the 2005 study, on the other hand, were recruited through advertisements in gay-oriented and alternative publications and were identified as heterosexual, bisexual or homosexual based on responses to a standard questionnaire.
In both studies, men watched videos of male and female same-sex intimacy while genital sensors monitored their erectile responses. While the first study reported that the bisexuals generally resembled homosexuals in their responses, the new one finds that bisexual men responded to both the male and female videos, while gay and straight men in the study did not.
Both studies also found that bisexuals reported subjective arousal to both sexes, notwithstanding their genital responses. “Someone who is bisexual might say, ‘Well, duh!’” said Allen Rosenthal, the lead author of the new Northwestern study and a doctoral student in psychology at the university. “But this will be validating to a lot of bisexual men who had heard about the earlier work and felt that scientists weren’t getting them.”
The Northwestern study is the second one published this year to report a distinctive pattern of sexual arousal among bisexual men.
In March, a study in Archives of Sexual Behavior reported the results of a different approach to the question. As in the Northwestern study, the researchers showed participants erotic videos of two men and two women and monitored genital as well as subjective arousal. But they also included scenes of a man having sex with both a woman and another man, on the theory that these might appeal to bisexual men.
The researchers — Jerome Cerny, a retired psychology professor at Indiana State University, and Erick Janssen, a senior scientist at the Kinsey Institute — found that bisexual men were more likely than heterosexuals or gay men to experience both genital and subjective arousal while watching these videos.
Dr. Lisa Diamond, a psychology professor at the University of Utah and an expert on sexual orientation, said that the two new studies, taken together, represented a significant step toward demonstrating that bisexual men do have specific arousal patterns.
“I’ve interviewed a lot of individuals about how invalidating it is when their own family members think they’re confused or going through a stage or in denial,” she said. “These converging lines of evidence, using different methods and stimuli, give us the scientific confidence to say this is something real.”
The new studies are relatively small in size, making it hard to draw generalities, especially since bisexual men may have varying levels of sexual, romantic and emotional attraction to partners of either sex. And of course the studies reveal nothing about patterns of arousal among bisexual women. The Northwestern study included 100 men, closely split among bisexuals, heterosexuals and homosexuals. The study in Archives of Sexual Behavior included 59 participants, among them 13 bisexuals.
The new Northwestern study was financed in part by the American Institute of Bisexuality, a group that promotes research and education regarding bisexuality. Still, advocates expressed mixed feelings about the research.
Jim Larsen, 53, a chairman of the Bisexual Organizing Project, a Minnesota-based advocacy group, said the findings could help bisexuals still struggling to accept themselves.
“It’s great that they’ve come out with affirmation that bisexuality exists,” he said. “Having said that, they’re proving what we in the community already know. It’s insulting. I think it’s unfortunate that anyone doubts an individual who says, ‘This is what I am and who I am.’ ”
Ellyn Ruthstrom, president of the Bisexual Resource Center in Boston, echoed Mr. Larsen’s discomfort.
“This unfortunately reduces sexuality and relationships to just sexual stimulation,” Ms. Ruthstrom said. “Researchers want to fit bi attraction into a little box — you have to be exactly the same, attracted to men and women, and you’re bisexual. That’s nonsense. What I love is that people express their bisexuality in so many different ways.”
Despite her cautious praise of the new research, Dr. Diamond also noted that the kind of sexual arousal tested in the studies is only one element of sexual orientation and identity. And simply interpreting results about sexual arousal is complicated, because monitoring genital response to erotic images in a laboratory setting cannot replicate an actual human interaction, she added.
“Sexual arousal is a very complicated thing,” she said. “The real phenomenon in day-to-day life is extraordinarily messy and multifactorial.”
"
article here;
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/health/23bisexual.html
bisexual resources;
http://biresource.net/biresources.shtml
So if you are bisexual, please remember that you do not have to "choose a side of the fence"! The grass is equally green on both sides of the fence!!
"The invisible bisexual man"
Science has proven that they do exist, but bi guys say we're a long way from seeing sexuality in shades of gray
By Tracy Clark-Flory
"The big sex news of the week was that bisexual men exist.
OK, so a new study proving that bisexual men are aroused by both men and women didn't come as "news" to bi men, but most are nonetheless relieved by the results, because it will help to legitimize their identity in others' eyes. (This is especially true since prior research controversially reported that there was no evidence of male bisexuality.) Still, the more than dozen bisexual men that I interviewed about the study say it serves as a reminder of just how far they still have to go toward acceptance and understanding. Despite enormous strides made in the past decade for LGBT rights, male bisexuality remains a challenging idea and a unique taboo, even within sexually progressive circles.
A large part of that is because, culturally, we tend to think in terms of black-and-white, not shades of gray -- and that's especially true when it comes to the subject of sex. Rarely does a bisexual come out without fielding questions about which sex they like more -- the assumption being that they must lean one way or the other. It's true that many do: As Ryan from Vancouver wrote in an email, he puts an "emphasis on the 'preference' in 'sexual preference.'" He might be attracted to women more often than men, but believes he "could be attracted to pretty much anybody in the right circumstances, sexuality be damned." But there are also many bi men who describe their sexual attraction in much more fluid terms. The 27-year-old says: "To me, I look for and fall in love with the personality and the intelligence, and then the overall style of the person, never giving any thought to if they are 'male or female.'"
Romantic as it may be, that is a concept not so easily grasped by the general public -- which can make bisexual men feel invisible. Simon, a 26-year-old living in Brooklyn, N.Y., tells me, "Whenever, say, some prominent heterosexually married male public figure has a same-sex affair, literally everyone rolls their eyes at the 'closeted homosexual,'" he says. "I'm not sure I remember ever hearing someone seriously entertain the possibility that the philanderer was bisexual." Bisexuals are more visible than ever, but our cultural default, the shortcut we take to understand a person, is still: gay or straight?
It's amazing that this is still the case more than 60 decades after the Kinsey scale was introduced. "I think Kinsey's work laid a more realistic foundation for examining human sexuality," Ryan, a freelance writer, says. Even the bisexual label is problematic, because it functions "as a 'catch-all' for everything that isn't 100 percent gay or 100 percent straight," says 25-year-old Cameron of Chicago. "Human sexuality is complicated," he says. "Accepting that is probably one of the more difficult social challenges to overcome."
It can also present a significant internal challenge. "It's easy to get caught up in the idea that I must be one or the other," says Simon, the 20-something Brooklynite, which leads to self-doubt. If he has a less than inspiring hookup with a woman, suddenly the question becomes: Am I gay? If there aren't fireworks with a man, it's: Maybe I'm straight, after all. After so much interrogation by others, it's only natural to begin to interrogate yourself.
Even without any genuine questions about their identity, many bisexual men end up choosing a different label, depending on the circumstances. "I am either gay or heterosexual dependent upon the company I keep," says 49-year-old Ed. Some men identify as gay when they're dating a man and straight when they're dating a woman -- it's easier to go along with people's assumptions than it is to detail the subtle nuances of one's attractions.
The pressure to pick a side doesn't end there. A number of the older men I interviewed reported having found women, most often bisexual women, who were turned on by their identity, but several men in their 20s said that straight women were turned off by it. "I encounter lots of women who totally rule out relationships with men who've slept with men," says Simon. "It seems like straight women attach an 'ick' factor to bisexual men that straight men don't attach to bisexual women."
That's an area ripe for further research, but it seems likely that the "bi now, gay later" stereotype, and the perceived link between HIV and gay sex, might be factors. It doesn't help any that masculinity is so often equated with both heterosexuality and homophobia. For this reason, some bisexual men who are primarily attracted to women report that they identify as straight on dating sites. One bi man observed that "bisexual women seem to be the 'holy grail' of sexuality," especially in the straight world, but bi guys aren't fetishized to anywhere near the same degree.
The resistance to bisexuality doesn't just come from the fact that it requires shades-of-gray rather than black-or-white thinking. It also implicitly raises the possibility that we're all much more intricately sexually wired than we like to admit. Male bisexuality poses an even greater threat: The stakes of being "a little bit gay" are so much higher for men than for women."
Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter. More: Tracy Clark-Flory
article here;
http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/08/27/bisexuality
Here is the article detailing the scientific accounts that prove bisexuals are real and not mythical unicorns;
"No Surprise for Bisexual Men: Report Indicates They Exist"
By DAVID TULLER
Published: August 22, 2011
"In an unusual scientific about-face, researchers at Northwestern University have found evidence that at least some men who identify themselves as bisexual are, in fact, sexually aroused by both women and men.
The finding is not likely to surprise bisexuals, who have long asserted that attraction often is not limited to one sex. But for many years the question of bisexuality has bedeviled scientists. A widely publicized study published in 2005, also by researchers at Northwestern, reported that “with respect to sexual arousal and attraction, it remains to be shown that male bisexuality exists.”
That conclusion outraged bisexual men and women, who said it appeared to support a stereotype of bisexual men as closeted homosexuals.
In the new study, published online in the journal Biological Psychology, the researchers relied on more stringent criteria for selecting participants. To improve their chances of finding men aroused by women as well as men, the researchers recruited subjects from online venues specifically catering to bisexuals.
They also required participants to have had sexual experiences with at least two people of each sex and a romantic relationship of at least three months with at least one person of each sex.
Men in the 2005 study, on the other hand, were recruited through advertisements in gay-oriented and alternative publications and were identified as heterosexual, bisexual or homosexual based on responses to a standard questionnaire.
In both studies, men watched videos of male and female same-sex intimacy while genital sensors monitored their erectile responses. While the first study reported that the bisexuals generally resembled homosexuals in their responses, the new one finds that bisexual men responded to both the male and female videos, while gay and straight men in the study did not.
Both studies also found that bisexuals reported subjective arousal to both sexes, notwithstanding their genital responses. “Someone who is bisexual might say, ‘Well, duh!’” said Allen Rosenthal, the lead author of the new Northwestern study and a doctoral student in psychology at the university. “But this will be validating to a lot of bisexual men who had heard about the earlier work and felt that scientists weren’t getting them.”
The Northwestern study is the second one published this year to report a distinctive pattern of sexual arousal among bisexual men.
In March, a study in Archives of Sexual Behavior reported the results of a different approach to the question. As in the Northwestern study, the researchers showed participants erotic videos of two men and two women and monitored genital as well as subjective arousal. But they also included scenes of a man having sex with both a woman and another man, on the theory that these might appeal to bisexual men.
The researchers — Jerome Cerny, a retired psychology professor at Indiana State University, and Erick Janssen, a senior scientist at the Kinsey Institute — found that bisexual men were more likely than heterosexuals or gay men to experience both genital and subjective arousal while watching these videos.
Dr. Lisa Diamond, a psychology professor at the University of Utah and an expert on sexual orientation, said that the two new studies, taken together, represented a significant step toward demonstrating that bisexual men do have specific arousal patterns.
“I’ve interviewed a lot of individuals about how invalidating it is when their own family members think they’re confused or going through a stage or in denial,” she said. “These converging lines of evidence, using different methods and stimuli, give us the scientific confidence to say this is something real.”
The new studies are relatively small in size, making it hard to draw generalities, especially since bisexual men may have varying levels of sexual, romantic and emotional attraction to partners of either sex. And of course the studies reveal nothing about patterns of arousal among bisexual women. The Northwestern study included 100 men, closely split among bisexuals, heterosexuals and homosexuals. The study in Archives of Sexual Behavior included 59 participants, among them 13 bisexuals.
The new Northwestern study was financed in part by the American Institute of Bisexuality, a group that promotes research and education regarding bisexuality. Still, advocates expressed mixed feelings about the research.
Jim Larsen, 53, a chairman of the Bisexual Organizing Project, a Minnesota-based advocacy group, said the findings could help bisexuals still struggling to accept themselves.
“It’s great that they’ve come out with affirmation that bisexuality exists,” he said. “Having said that, they’re proving what we in the community already know. It’s insulting. I think it’s unfortunate that anyone doubts an individual who says, ‘This is what I am and who I am.’ ”
Ellyn Ruthstrom, president of the Bisexual Resource Center in Boston, echoed Mr. Larsen’s discomfort.
“This unfortunately reduces sexuality and relationships to just sexual stimulation,” Ms. Ruthstrom said. “Researchers want to fit bi attraction into a little box — you have to be exactly the same, attracted to men and women, and you’re bisexual. That’s nonsense. What I love is that people express their bisexuality in so many different ways.”
Despite her cautious praise of the new research, Dr. Diamond also noted that the kind of sexual arousal tested in the studies is only one element of sexual orientation and identity. And simply interpreting results about sexual arousal is complicated, because monitoring genital response to erotic images in a laboratory setting cannot replicate an actual human interaction, she added.
“Sexual arousal is a very complicated thing,” she said. “The real phenomenon in day-to-day life is extraordinarily messy and multifactorial.”
"
article here;
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/health/23bisexual.html
bisexual resources;
http://biresource.net/biresources.shtml
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