Out of curiosity, if I’d avoided mentioning how she self-identifies and had instead told you that “she has had sex with other women before and has asked me if it’s OK if she sleeps with other women while we’re dating (or brings them home for a threesome)… but has never shown or claimed any interest in actually dating another woman” (all of which is, incidentally, true), what would your response have been? Framed that way, one could assume that she’s actually bi or even lesbian and the only reason she’s dating me instead of one of those girls is because she wants to avoid the social or family stigma of homosexuality.
Or you could take me at my word. It’s not like you’re in any position to verify one way or the other, where she in particular is concerned, unless you’re one of the handful of people who actually know who I am speaking of and know her preferences at least as well as I do.
It also doesn’t matter for the point I raised (about how some people have different targets for sexual and romantic attraction) unless you intended to imply that not only is she personally actually neatly classifiable under the existing system but so is everybody else who would claim otherwise. That is a theory which only takes one counterexample to disprove (as I provided, although one could then debate the necessity of writing the survey to accommodate however many people have this “non-standard” categorization).
Do you have an actual response to my claim that the survey should account for the possibility that people may be romantically and sexually attracted to different genders?
REALITY: 80% of self-identified bisexuals are only interested in one gender.
OkCupid is a gay- and bi-friendly place and it’s not our intention here to call into question anyone’s sexual identity. But when we looked into messaging trends by sexuality, we were very surprised at what we found. People who describe themselves as bisexual overwhelmingly message either one sex or the other, not both as you might expect. Site-wide, here’s how it breaks out:
This suggests that bisexuality is often either a hedge for gay people or a label adopted by straights to appear more sexually adventurous to their (straight) matches.
That’s a valid point. On the other hand, as a dating site, OKC messaging is probably going to be skewed towards the gender that one is interested in pursuing a relationship with (though maybe that’s just the way I use it; as soon as I typed it I felt sure there were plenty of people just looking to hook up). When the topic is sexual orientation vs. romantic orientation, I’m not sure that OKC is the best source of data. I can’t deny the specific claim that a large proportion of ostensibly bi people appear to not be both bisexual and biromantic.
This strikes me as suspiciously like “she’d straight but identifies as bi because it’s fashionable”.
Out of curiosity, if I’d avoided mentioning how she self-identifies and had instead told you that “she has had sex with other women before and has asked me if it’s OK if she sleeps with other women while we’re dating (or brings them home for a threesome)… but has never shown or claimed any interest in actually dating another woman” (all of which is, incidentally, true), what would your response have been? Framed that way, one could assume that she’s actually bi or even lesbian and the only reason she’s dating me instead of one of those girls is because she wants to avoid the social or family stigma of homosexuality.
Or you could take me at my word. It’s not like you’re in any position to verify one way or the other, where she in particular is concerned, unless you’re one of the handful of people who actually know who I am speaking of and know her preferences at least as well as I do.
It also doesn’t matter for the point I raised (about how some people have different targets for sexual and romantic attraction) unless you intended to imply that not only is she personally actually neatly classifiable under the existing system but so is everybody else who would claim otherwise. That is a theory which only takes one counterexample to disprove (as I provided, although one could then debate the necessity of writing the survey to accommodate however many people have this “non-standard” categorization).
Do you have an actual response to my claim that the survey should account for the possibility that people may be romantically and sexually attracted to different genders?
What would you expect it to look like if in fact she found both men and woman sexually attractive but only men romantically attractive, as she claims?
See also the OKCupid Trends post about The Big Lies People Tell In Online Dating.
That’s a valid point. On the other hand, as a dating site, OKC messaging is probably going to be skewed towards the gender that one is interested in pursuing a relationship with (though maybe that’s just the way I use it; as soon as I typed it I felt sure there were plenty of people just looking to hook up). When the topic is sexual orientation vs. romantic orientation, I’m not sure that OKC is the best source of data. I can’t deny the specific claim that a large proportion of ostensibly bi people appear to not be both bisexual and biromantic.