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lukeprog comments on Procedural Knowledge Gaps - Less Wrong
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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.
One of the numerous problems with that study. I consider it completely worthless.
Wait, what? No! Not at all! The point of porn is to help you when you don't have an actual woman to have sex with. It's never as arousing as an actual woman. It's like a microwave dinner when you're hungry but don't have the time or money to cook or go to a restaurant.
The point of porn is to be as arousing as possible so people want to watch and hopefully pay for it. I doubt that nobody finds it more arousing than having an actual partner, because it can depict things they're unlikely to be able to see or do with a partner. I don't think I've heard of anyone claiming to find live action porn more arousing than real sex, but 2D complexes appear to be a real thing.
I think I'd split the difference. Porn can't give you interactivity or a lot of partner stimuli, so it attempts to compensate by superstimulating what it does have access to. It would of course be good for porn producers if they came up with something that was better than actual sex for most people, but thanks to the format's limited sensory bandwidth that's probably impossible.
If the Rieger/Chivers/Bailey results are reliable, this might suggest that male bisexuality's associated with a preference for sexual stimulation other than what straight porn gives you. This ought to be testable, but I don't know of any studies that have made the attempt.
I didn't mean "...to have sex with." I meant actual women. Who can sometimes be arousing even if I'm not having sex with them. As can men. Others' mileage may, of course, vary.
In the study, 1/3 of the men, uniformly across all orientations, had no genital response. Also, 1/3 had no subjective response, though I don't see any indication in the paper whether they were the same people.
(nods) I would also be interested to see what the correlations were between response-to-porn and response-to-people. Lots of interpretations of studies of this sort seem to treat the former as a proxy for the latter, so if it turned out that they were not strongly linked the interpretations might be misleading.
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.