by Staff writer
While female sexuality appears to be more fluid, research suggests that male gayness is an inborn, unalterable, strongly genetically influenced trait.
Unlike men, who are usually sexually oriented solely toward either men or women, and whose sexuality is essentially fixed from puberty on, a decade of research by the University of Utah psychologist Lisa Diamond and others demonstrates that women have greater “erotic plasticity.”
This means that a woman’s sexual orientation can be shaped by cultural influences, altered by positive or negative experiences and intensified by feelings of love or attachment.
Women are far more likely than men to “report remarkably late and abrupt onset of same-sex sexuality, often after a heterosexual marriage,” Diamond wrote in January in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.
This sexual fluidity in women may emerge from the fact that, across the board, women are sexually aroused by images of both men and women (while men are typically only aroused by members of their preferred sex, proving women to be more bisexual than men).
Psychologist Dr Satoshi Kanazawa believes that evolution has led to women becoming open to intimacy with both genders.
He claims that sexual fluidity is a means of “reducing conflict and tension among co-wives in polygynous marriages”.
According to Dr Kanazawa, from the London School of Economics and Political Science, women do not have sexual orientations in the same sense as men do.
“Rather than being straight or gay, to whom women are sexually attracted may depend largely on the particular partner, their reproductive status, and other circumstances,”explained Dr Kanazawa.
Another research by psychologist Dr Gerulf Rieger also made the bold claim that women are either bisexual or gay but never straight!
