Last month, the research journal Archives of Sexual Behavior — a journal which, I should note, was accused of having an anti-LGBTQ bias in 2023 — published a paper with the somewhat dense title “Sex and Sexual Orientation Differences in Dark Triad Traits, Sexual Excitation/Inhibition, and Sociosexuality.” I’ve read the paper, while it was a little too dry to keep my focus, the general gist seemed to be “let’s see if queer women are more like men than straight women/if queer men are more like women than straight men.”
You can probably guess that I don’t love this premise as it’s one that inherently ignores the range of gender diversity among queer people. It’s also one that, to my mind, doesn’t really make sense? If gay men are attracted to men because they’re inherently more womanly, then why would gay men be attracted to each other rather than, you know, manly men? (At least the outdated idea that it was only femme men and butch women who were queer, and that the femme women and butch men they hooked up with were just “normal” “straight” people who had been “lured” into deviance accounts for this.)
I will also note that I don’t like that this study exclusively drew its finding from a survey of 2000 Canadian college students, only a few hundred of whom can be classified as queer — and that’s only if we’re using the most generous possible definition of queer, where anything but a Kinsey 0 counts. (Yes, they used the Kinsey scale. Apparently people are still doing this!)
And lastly, I hate that the study makes use of the term “dark triad,” an incredibly stigmatizing way of referring to a collection of three traits that some believe are correlated with a particularly destructive personality type. I also, I have to be honest, find it somewhat bizarre that the researchers here chose to use the “dark triad” as a signifier of masculinity; the fact that men are more likely to be assessed as being narcissistic, Machiavellian, and, sigh, psychopathic doesn’t meant that this is some inherently male trait?
But what I really hate, even beyond this obviously flawed study, was what happened when it got out into the wild. At some point, either the researchers or their institution or someone at Archives of Sexual Behavior hired a publicist who alerted the New York Post to this study. And the resulting coverage was, um, really fucking gross:
Bisexual women are more like straight men in these ‘dark’ ways: study
You can read the full Post piece here (if you must), but I promise you that it will not give you more nuance than that headline provides. It’s basically just several hundred words, padded out with pseudoscientific lingo, making the argument that bi women are slutty, manipulative, and crazy; you know, basically men with boobs. (The fact that it is apparently unremarkable for straight men to be assessed as narcissistic, Machiavellian, and psychopathic is maybe something we should dig deeper into?)
I don’t think I need to explain to you that “bi women are crazy manipulative sluts” is basically Biphobia 101, or that “bi women are basically straight men but in women’s bodies” is a line that is often used to denigrate bisexual women. And not just right wing rags like the New York Post: this is the logic that lesbians and other queers will use to ostracize and shun bisexual women. Bi women are always positioned as a conduit through which straight men can infiltrate queer spaces, either by accompanying us as our boyfriends or, sigh, in the shape of our own insufficiently queer selves, which clearly can only adore women in the way that straight men do.
And the thing that is so hurtful about all this is that I like science quite a bit. I believe that science is a necessary and important part of bisexual liberation — after all, it is only through scientific research that we’ve been able to really understand the shape of biphobia, to see that bisexuals are, in fact, more vulnerable to poverty and abuse and mental and physical illness than our monosexual peers. But science can just as easily be used to oppress as it can be used to liberate. And bad science, in combo with biphobic media, does so much irreparable harm to our community.
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