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lukeprog comments on Procedural Knowledge Gaps - Less Wrong
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Beware that if you manage to become bisexual somehow, this can significantly damage a man's prospects with many women. For a huge percentage of women, bisexual men are not as attractive (manly) as strictly heterosexual men.
For the foreseeable future, I'm going to be exclusively dating poly or poly-friendly girls anyway. I don't think being bi would hurt me within that subpopulation -- does that seem wrong?
(One data point: my girlfriend has only-half-jokingly claimed that if I really want to make her happy, I ought to make out with one of my male friends and send her photos)
It won't hurt in any way. The pure heterosexual or pure homosexual are slightly odd in most poly scenes.
And everyone knows about straight guys kissing to get the chicks ...
Don't do it!!!!
She definitely wants to have something she can blackmail you with if the need arises!
He can only be blackmailed with such photos if he would mind having them displayed to some third party.
Indeed.
...that's all I can really think of.
But he might benefit from having her think she's blackmailing him.
No such luck -- I've already e-mailed her this thread.
I do not get how making out with a male is considered a blackmail worthy offense.
Well, it would likely prevent a guy from running for political office or becoming a CEO of a major corporation, for instance. Or at least make it very difficult. There are only a few openly gay politicians, and even then they have to fit certain social ideals.
I'm already quite publicly a polyamorous sex-positive atheist, I'm not running for political office any time soon
I wonder which you would get the most flack for. Reminds me of this one. (!TVTropes-link!)
Unfortunately, in the US today, probably atheism.
Okay, I cross that off then. How about naturism? In east Germany its a trivial part of the culture. In the US it seems to be a highly stigmatized lifestyle.
I'm trying to picture this scenario and can't stop laughing =P.
I actually know a girl who succeeded in getting male friends of hers to pose for that kind of picture.
I suspect it would be trivial to do so in most modern US college-type situations.
Poly-friendly != bi-friendly, necessarily, but I'd definitely agree that your odds are better than in the mainstream community.
I have heard from some people that having a reputation as bisexual has increased their prospects with women. I suspect this is dependent on location, social circle, and attractiveness.
It may also be that a large percentage of women are no longer interested, but enough of the women that remain are significantly more interested- and so you go from, say, 20 women who might date you to 10 women who might date you, of whom 2 want to. Overall prospects down, but easy prospects up.
(I will comment, though, that this probably has to do way more with the masculine/feminine balance of the people in question than their sexual history or orientation.)
I didn't select my friends from (a conservative Christian) college for lgbt-friendliness or non-conformist dating styles or really anything at all, besides maybe an enjoyment of genre television or some connection to friends I already had. And yet it turned out that at least a third of the women in my social circle share my love of hot bi guys and m/m in general. Also, m/m fanservice for the benefit of female fans seems to be rather a common thing for hot young male celebrities to do in certain cultures, such as Japan.
I've found that just meeting more people solves this one nicely. The percentage difference is not overwhelming, and you really won't want those people anyway.
I disagree with the "you really won't want those people anyway." I suspect the loss of attraction many women feel if they hear a guy has been with another guy has marginal 'conscious choice' in it.
But anyway, I've followed this thread too long. I don't really have any expertise on bisexuality - I've just heard lots of straight women tell me it turns them off.
I think the reason for that is that so many gay men go through a phase, as part of their coming out, where they claim bisexuality for a while. This, combined with the fact that there seem to be relatively few numbers of truly bisexual men, means that a significant percentage of the pool of men presenting as bisexual are actually gay. So going out with a bisexual guy is really risky from the woman's point of view.
I'll admit, when I run into people who talk like this, I generally assume that they are weighting the costs of a relationship ending badly due to a boyfriend turning out gay significantly higher than the costs of a relationship ending badly for other reasons.
But perhaps that's unfair of me; perhaps, as you suggest, it's really just about probability estimates.
Would you mind putting some numbers around "really risky"?
That is... if S is the chance of a relationship ending badly with a partner who identifies as straight, and B is the chance of it ending badly with a partner who identifies as bi, what's your estimate and confidence level for (B-S)?
Well, my numbers would be a bit skewed by the fact that I quite happily date bisexual women (I am one myself). Should I put the non-straight women in S or B? Or make a third category L?
Your skew is fine... I'm just interested in clarification of your original claim, however skewed it may be, that going out with a bisexual guy is really risky because a significant percentage of the pool of men presenting as bisexual are actually gay.
That said, given that your original claim was about men, I should have said if S is the chance of a relationship ending badly with a male partner who identifies as straight, and B is the chance of it ending badly with a male partner who identifies as bi. Point taken.
Well, for S, most relationships end "badly" (in a breakup, at least), so I guess I'll ballpark that at 90 percent.
For B, I estimate that 34 percent of men presenting as bi are actually gay (going from this study.) I'll assume that a relationship with the other 66 percent of bi guys would have the same 90 percent failure rate as the S group, but that a relationship with one of the 34 would have a 100 percent failure rate. So B overall is 93.4.
It's only a few percentage points higher, yes, but the fact that S is already high doesn't do much to change the fact that if you have one (small) dating pool where fully a third of the dudes are essentially just looking for beards, a straight woman loses little by excluding that pool, and improves her prospects overall.
For a more extreme position, Rieger, Chivers, and Bailey (ETA: here) find that 75% of self-identified bi men get erections from gay porn, 25% from straight porn, though reported arousal is bisexual.
ETA: that is a quote from press coverage. It pushes a bit farther than the paper and does not match the data. The direct quotes in the press coverage suggest to me that the fault is the authors, not the reporters. The text of the paper is more cautious, but I think also misleading.
Eyeballing the data, I would say that 1/2 of bis respond only to gay porn, 1/4 only to straight porn, and 1/4 uniformly. Also, 1/4 of straights and gays respond uniformly. (this is after removing 1/3 of all orientations that have no genital response)
What is more interesting is that reported arousal to the porn fits self-identification pretty well. It would be interesting to how the gap between genital and reported arousal varies across individuals. Some patterns would suggest that people are lying to themselves while others that the gap is due to sexuality being complicated. I was amused that straights admitted to being aroused by gay porn, while gays did not admit to being aroused by straight porn; but I suspect that the sample of straights was pretty biased.
One of the things that amused me about that report when I read it was realizing that while I am often aroused by actual women, most mainstream straight porn does nothing for me.
I can only assume that many straight men find porn more arousing than actual women, since the whole point of porn is to be a superstimulus, so there seems to be a difference there.
Are those sets disjoint?
Agreed.
I would say, speaking from other bisexual men I know as well as myself, that if bisexuality turned someone off that would in fact reduce their attractiveness, in the general case.
But yeah, we both only have anecdotes at this stage :-)
I'm reminded of coming out as bi to a high-school friend of mine, who allowed after some consideration that he was pretty squicked by the notion, but he saw no particular reason why either one of us should pay much attention to that reaction.
Which I can respect, actually.
Though admittedly it would turn me off in a prospective partner.
Nobody is required to signal their sexual preferences far and wide. That is personal information, to be revealed if and when you deem it appropriate or beneficial. This means that becoming bisexual merely gives you more options, without interfering with your existing options unless you choose to let it change your signalling strategy. That said, humans are notoriously bad at making decisions when burdened with extra choices!
Also, a lot depends on whether the people I am approaching for dates share a social community.
If they do, then if I want to keep control over who becomes aware of my sexual preferences, I need to expend additional effort to prevent that information from traveling through that community... that is, it stops being "private" and starts being "secret."
This is otherwise known as "being in the closet" in some communities.
Fortunately it is a closet full of beautiful women who you find highly attractive. Such a better closet to be in than the one homosexuals have had to hide themselves in at times. :)
Sure, given a choice between having to keep all of my sexual attractions secret, and only having to keep half of them secret, the latter is far better. Agreed.
Of course, even better is to not have to keep any of them secret, and to instead be able to reveal whatever information about my sexual preferences I choose to reveal without fear of negative consequences.
All of that said: perhaps I've lost track of context.
MBlume's parent comment framed bisexuality as an improvement, and lukeprog warned that there were costs to it. You countered that those costs can be averted by keeping one's bisexuality secret. But that seems to completely subvert MBlume's original point... if I'm in the closet about being bisexual, how is that an improvement over being heterosexual?
It seems the choice is, instead, between having your attraction and sexual appreciation mechanism biologically crippled so as to halve the potential partners or to give yourself the option of specialising your signalling as to optimise your chances within a specific target niche or of seeking more diverse experience.
Neutral returns as a worst case makes the point a good one. :)
Well, in my own life, the additional option of living in a social context in which honest signaling about gender-selection with respect to attraction and sexual appreciation doesn't have especially negative consequences became available, and that has worked pretty well for me.
I've lived the "specializing my signaling" lifestyle before; I don't prefer it. The returns of such signal-specialization can be worse than neutral in some cases.
But if it works for you, that's great.
You don't have to be in the closet with everyone. Just treat it as something personal that you only tell people once you know them and trust them enough, and you've gauged their reaction to casual mentions of bisexuality.
Agreed that avoiding keeping just most people from knowing about my relationship preferences isn't as difficult as keeping everyone from knowing about them.
Of course, as above, even better is to be able to reveal whatever information about my relationship preferences I choose to reveal without fear of negative consequences.
You don't have to tell them that...