sexual orientation

Kristie, Dmitriy T.M., and Tiffany L. sent in this post at OkCupid comparing 3.2 million profiles of straight people to those of gays and lesbians. Undermining the persistent stereotype that gays are more sexually promiscuous than straight individuals, OkCupid users, gay and straight, reported the same median number of sex partners (6), and the overall pattern is nearly identical regardless of sexual orientation:

And sexual encounters with someone of the same sex aren’t limited to people who identify as gay. Here are the results from a survey of 252,900 users who identify themselves as straight; about a third have either had at least one same-sex sexual encounter, or would like to:

Straight-identified women were significantly more likely to report a same-sex experience (and that it was pleasurable) or interest than were straight men. Here’s the pie chart for women:

And this is for men:

My guess is a lot of people will attribute that to women “playing” at being bisexual or going through a “stage,” but it seems likely to me that part of what is going on is that men’s gender performance is policed so much more harshly and constantly that men suffer greater consequences for same-sex encounters and have more reason to avoid them and to avoid even thinking of them as a possibility.

Reports of same-sex encounters or interest varied significantly by region. In the map, orange = higher rates, blue = lower (OkCupid doesn’t give any percents to go with the different colors, sorry):

There’s other data on personality profiles and, uh, the number of people who think the earth is larger than the sun (!) at the original post.

Also see our previous post on race, gender, and preferences on OkCupid.

A secret on PostSecret today nicely captures how women’s magazines are relentlessly guy-centric:

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight posted this graph that shows changes in attitudes toward same-sex marriage over time (each dot represents a poll Silver considers reliable). As he points out, there seems to be an acceleration in positive attitudes toward same-sex marriage:

CNN just conducted the first poll showing that a majority of Americans believe same-sex marriage should be legal. That’s just one poll, and we’ll need to see more data, obviously. But we can clearly see that an increasing number of polls show the % favoring same-sex marriage at or above 45%. A regression of all the polls shows a 4 percentage point increase in the last 16 months alone. If this trend continues, we should be nearing the point where differences in support for and opposition to same-sex marriage would fall within the margin of error.

Silver suggests that activism among gay and lesbian rights groups, including a specific push for recognition of same-sex marriages, has led to more acceptance:

Something to bear in mind is that it’s only been fairly recently that gay rights groups — and other liberals and libertarians — shifted toward a strategy of explicitly calling for full equity in marriage rights, rather than finding civil unions to be an acceptable compromise…it seems that, in general, “having the debate” is helpful to the gay marriage cause…

Of course, presuming this trend continues and we soon have a majority (even if not an overwhelming one) of Americans supporting legalization of same-sex marriage, that does not necessarily translate into legalization. Acceptance of same-sex marriage is surely unevenly distributed across the U.S. If legalization is left to the states, we can assume some will be much more likely to accept same-sex marriages than others, continuing the patchwork system we have now where gays and lesbians may find themselves married in one state but unmarried if they go on vacation to a neighboring one. National legislation to legalize same-sex marriage would be strongly opposed by a number of legislators from districts where acceptance is below the national average; I’m guessing that even many Democrats, who are usually depicted as more friendly to gay and lesbian rights than Republicans, would not go so far as to vote to legalize gay marriage in the near future. During the campaign, Obama and Biden clearly stated that they supported civil unions but not marriage for same-sex couples.

On the other hand, the federal judicial system could take this out of the hands of Congress and the Senate, or individual states; same-sex marriage could be legalized whether or not a majority of Americans supported it. But short of that, while changes in public attitudes toward same-sex marriage certainly present an encouraging picture for supporters, I think legislative action to actually legalize it is likely to lag significantly behind overall public acceptance.

Michael Kimmel forwarded me a blog post at Gallup updating their data on acceptance of homosexuality in the U.S.  In 2009, “morally acceptable” eeked out a win over “morally wrong” and, in 2010, it took a resounding lead:

Who is driving this increase in acceptance of homosexuality?  Other than young people, that is, and the move to the words “gay” and “lesbian.”

Gallup offers some really interesting answers to that question.

First, men are driving it.  Women are only marginally more supportive of homosexuality today compared to 2006.  But men, especially young men, but older men too, are significantly more supportive.  A full 14% of men have changed their mind in the last four years!  Women started out more supportive than men, but men have caught up.

Second, while members of all political parties and religions reported show increases in their level of acceptance of gays and lesbians, it is the politically moderate that are really pushing the percentages up.  Eleven percent of independents and 14% of moderates changed their mind about homosexuality between 2006 and 2010.  They are now as likely as democrats to endorse homosexuality (but still fall behind self-described liberals).  One in 20 Republicans and conservatives also changed their mind, though in overall acceptance rate they still fall far behind everyone else.

Finally, among religiously-affiliated Americans, Catholics were the most likely to change their mind to favor homosexuality.  They are as likely as political Democrats to support gays and lesbians.  Religious non-Christians and the non-religious, however, kick everybody’s asses with 84% and 85% of them saying that gay and lesbian relations are “morally acceptable.”

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

I wish I could spend all of my time in New Orleans, my favorite city in the world, so my friends are kind enough to send anything they run across that involves the Crescent City. Two friends forwarded a recent New York Times article on the rise of “sissy bounce,” a new take on bounce — an energetic form of rap/hip hop that originated in New Orleans. “Sissy bounce” refers to a handful of transgendered/gay rappers, some of whom perform in drag. Katey Red and Big Freedia are two of the biggest names in “sissy bounce.”

Caroline Heldman is a professor of politics at Occidental College. You can follow her at her blog and on Twitter and Facebook.

Following up on our most recent re-cap of data analysis from OkCupid, sent in by Sara P. and an Anonymous Reader, in this post I summarize their findings on reported sexual orientation and recorded messaging.

It turns out that a whopping 80% of all users who identify as bisexual message men or women, but not both.

The reasons for this are likely complex, diverse, and not immediately obvious.

Blogger Christian Rudder’s hypothesis:

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. You can actually see these trends in action…

The figure below plots age against the percent of self-identified bisexual men who message both men and women, only women, or only men.  The percent that are bi in practice as well as theory message both men and women drops by about half between the ages of 18 and 54 (from about 20% to about 10%), but men in their 30s and early 40s are much more likely to message only women.  Ticking biological clocks and hopes for a wife and kids perhaps?

The narrowing blue swatch may reflect the possibility that men who once identified as bisexual have come to terms with being plain ol’ gay (but the data isn’t longitudinal, so it may be a cohort thing instead of a life stage thing).

Or perhaps the distribution is the result of an interaction between age and who it’s easy to meet.  Maybe young bisexual guys have an easy time meeting women and turn to the internet to meet men; whereas men in their 30s and beyond find it easy to meet men and so turn to the internet to meet women?

Other ideas?

For women who identify as bisexual, the percentages messaging both men and women, just women, and just men show less of a trend across age.

Overall, however, 75% of women who identify as bisexual are not messaging both men and women.  Rudder suggests that there may be a social desirability factor here; that is, that straight women know that men are into bisexual chicks and, so, they claim to be bi in order to appeal to the dudes.

UPDATE: I recommend reading the comments thread for a great discussion of sexual fluidity, the meaningulness of labels like “bisexuality,” and lots more good ideas for why this data looks like it does.

Also from OK Cupid: the racial politics of dating, what women want, how attractiveness matters, age, gender, and the shape of the dating pool, older women want more sex, and the lies love-seekers tell.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Crossposted at Jezebel.

Courtesy of Talking Points Memo (via Comics with Problems), I have for you a link to the entire graphic novel (comic book? I’m not sure what to call this thing) Dignity & Respect: A Training Guide on Homosexual Conduct Policy. Here’s the cover:

If the cover hasn’t clued you in yet, this is a book meant to educate soldiers about the U.S. Army’s 1993 Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy (which applies to other branches of the military as well). It covers what the policy means, what to do if you have “credible evidence” that someone is engaging in homosexual activities (being gay is ok, you just can’t do anything), the Army’s anti-harassment policy (you know, you can turn someone in for being gay and ruin their military career, but you can’t be rude), and provides scenarios of situations that might occur and how a soldier should react.

Among other things you can learn that it’s not ok to imply a male soldier would go on a date with another man, but apparently it’s ok to say that no man on earth would ever go out with a female soldier in your unit:

I’m not going to put up every page here, since you can easily get them all at the links above, but it’s worth at least skimming. It’s…something. I cannot imagine that any soldier, even ones who cared about the issue a lot one way or the other, took this book seriously.

I will give them credit, though: the characters are extremely diverse in terms of race/ethnicity and gender.

Stephanie DeH., Cara McC., and our intern, Lauren McGuire, sent in this CPR certification campaign that embraces the idea that sex sells.  I initially added it to our post on using sex to sell unlikely things (e.g., organ donation and sea monkeys), but I changed my mind and decided it deserved its own discussion.

What was interesting to me about this example is the sexualization of the possibility of dying. The fact that a person might die is apparently not serious enough to make it unsexy.  It actually took me a minute to even notice the weirdness of sexualizing the risk of death.  After I noticed I thought “How crazy!”  But then I thought again: in a society that regularly sexualizes violence and murder, the sexualization of near-death is par for the course (which, of course, is why it didn’t strike me as particularly weird in the first place.

NSFW and possibly triggering, so images are after the jump:

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