almost as common as female heterosexuality here, as you would expect
I initially misparsed this as “the female bisexuality rate is as expected.” I see that isn’t what you meant, but had to re-read two or three times. Just FYI.
I feel like a 42.2% bisexuality rate among LW women is surprising enough to say something, but I’m not sure what.
It is interesting. IME in real life and in OkCupid, female self-identification as bisexual correlates quite strongly with the geek/liberal/poly/kinky meme complex (edit: mirroring your experiences, didn’t read carefully enough). Out of my top matches in OkCupid, over 80% of women interested in men seem to self-report as bisexual.
However, also IME, bisexual identification usually doesn’t imply being biromantic! Many of those women have had, or would like to have, sexual experiences with other women, but still may prefer men in romantic relationships almost exclusively.
FWIW, I support adding a question about romantic orientation in the next survey.
I initially misparsed this as “the female bisexuality rate is as expected.” I see that isn’t what you meant, but had to re-read two or three times. Just FYI.
Grammar modified to be clearer, thanks for pointing that out.
While an appealing hypothesis, if that were the case I would expect roughly the same percentage for the general public. The wiki of a million lies suggests the actual rate for the general public is in the low single digits.
As clever as this phrase is, it is tragically ambiguous. I’m guessing 65% chance Wikipedia, 30% RationalWiki, 3% our local wiki, 2% other. How did I do?
It seems that women are borderline bisexual by nature. For example, heterosexual women are significantly more likely to want to dance with other women than heterosexual men are to dance with other men, and the same thing is true for all sorts of other activities that have some kind of borderline relationship with sexual activities. So perhaps there is a kind of implicit bisexuality there which is more often made explicit in the case of Less Wrong women than other women, perhaps on account of higher introspection or the like.
I am suspicious of this as an explanation. Most straight-identified women I know who will dance with/jokingly flirt with other women are in fact straight and not ‘implicitly bisexual’; plenty of them live in environments where there’d be no social cost to being bisexual, and they are introspective enough that ‘they are actually just straight and don’t interpret those behaviors as sexual/romantic’ seems most likely.
Men face higher social penalties for being gay or bisexual (and presumably for being thought to be gay or bisexual) which seems a more likely explanation for why they don’t do things that could be perceived as showing romantic interest toward men (like dancing or ‘joking’ flirting) than that women are borderline bisexual by nature.
I initially misparsed this as “the female bisexuality rate is as expected.” I see that isn’t what you meant, but had to re-read two or three times. Just FYI.
I feel like a 42.2% bisexuality rate among LW women is surprising enough to say something, but I’m not sure what.
It is interesting. IME in real life and in OkCupid, female self-identification as bisexual correlates quite strongly with the geek/liberal/poly/kinky meme complex (edit: mirroring your experiences, didn’t read carefully enough). Out of my top matches in OkCupid, over 80% of women interested in men seem to self-report as bisexual.
However, also IME, bisexual identification usually doesn’t imply being biromantic! Many of those women have had, or would like to have, sexual experiences with other women, but still may prefer men in romantic relationships almost exclusively.
FWIW, I support adding a question about romantic orientation in the next survey.
Great line from OkCupid:
Anecdotally, this matches my experience (both on OKC and the “bisexual but hereroromantic” thing with three of my four most recent sexual partners).
Grammar modified to be clearer, thanks for pointing that out.
All I’ve come up with is a half-formed joke about how human females really are intrinsically attractive after all.
While an appealing hypothesis, if that were the case I would expect roughly the same percentage for the general public. The wiki of a million lies suggests the actual rate for the general public is in the low single digits.
As clever as this phrase is, it is tragically ambiguous. I’m guessing 65% chance Wikipedia, 30% RationalWiki, 3% our local wiki, 2% other. How did I do?
I meant Wikipedia. I’ve actually never heard the phrase applied to any other wiki. It’s certainly not original to me.
Thanks!
None of the other wikis you list are big enough to have more than maybe 75,000 lies.
Are you counting talk pages? I’d expect those to have a higher density of lies than the main namespace.
Sure, but I’d expect that smaller wikis have exponentially less talk, because there’s fewer people to do the talking.
It seems that women are borderline bisexual by nature. For example, heterosexual women are significantly more likely to want to dance with other women than heterosexual men are to dance with other men, and the same thing is true for all sorts of other activities that have some kind of borderline relationship with sexual activities. So perhaps there is a kind of implicit bisexuality there which is more often made explicit in the case of Less Wrong women than other women, perhaps on account of higher introspection or the like.
I am suspicious of this as an explanation. Most straight-identified women I know who will dance with/jokingly flirt with other women are in fact straight and not ‘implicitly bisexual’; plenty of them live in environments where there’d be no social cost to being bisexual, and they are introspective enough that ‘they are actually just straight and don’t interpret those behaviors as sexual/romantic’ seems most likely.
Men face higher social penalties for being gay or bisexual (and presumably for being thought to be gay or bisexual) which seems a more likely explanation for why they don’t do things that could be perceived as showing romantic interest toward men (like dancing or ‘joking’ flirting) than that women are borderline bisexual by nature.