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Margaret Nichols, Ph.D. Director Bisexuality in Women: Myths, Realities, and Implications for Therapy

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Margaret Nichols, Ph.D. Director Bisexuality in Women: Myths, Realities, and Implications for Therapy Margaret Nichols, Ph.D. Director Bisexuality in Women: Myths, Realities, and Implications for Therapy 1 Introduction As Fritz Klein and Timothy Wolf point out in their introduction to Bisexualities: Theory and Research (1985, p. xv):"The history of research into bisexuality until now could almost be characterized as nonexistent." In recent decades, bisexuality has been variously described as counterfeit, illusory, or pathological. Although some notable figures in psychology, including Sigmund Freud and John Money, have believed that all humans have a bisexual potential, and despite the evidence from Alfred Kinsey showing that significantly higher percentages of people exhibit bisexual behavior than exclusively homosexual behavior, it is still widely believed that any individual with sexual experience with both sexes is either "really" heterosexual, or more recently, "really" gay. Gary Zinik describes this belief as the "conflict model" of bisexuality: Underlying the conflict model of bisexuality is the notion that sexual orientation is a dichotomy: One is either heterosexual or homosexual. This dichotomous notion derives from the following logic. Since men and women are viewed as opposite sexes, it appears contradictory that anyone could eroticize two opposite things at the same time. Attraction to one sex would logically rule out attraction to the other, or else lead to psychological dissonance and conflict. It follows that people claiming to be bisexual are: (1) experiencing identity conflict or confusion; (2) living in an inherently temporary or transitional stage which masks the person's true underlying sexual orientation (presumably homosexual); and (3) employing the label as a method of either consciously denying or unconsciously defending against one's true homosexual preference. (1985, p. 9) While hundreds of research studies have investigated homosexuality, little interest has been taken in bisexuality. The investigation of bisexuality holds rich promise for our understanding of some of the basic structures of human sexuality; but to look clearly at bisexuality requires discarding some cherished conceptions. Most basically, one must move from a dualistic notion of sexual orientation to a more expansive vision of sexuality. At the very least, one must acknowledge the existence of what Hanson and Evans (1985) call the "Excluded Middle": that is, those people whose sexual orientation lies between the endpoints of the Kinsey Scale. Just as recent research on psychological androgyny has emphasized the mutual compatibility of "masculine" and "feminine" attributes, in contrast to dualistic notions that once viewed these traits as mutually exclusive, concepts of sexual orientation must include the reality that attractions to men and women can exist side by side in the same person. Exploring bisexuality in depth leads to an even more radical revising of our views on sexuality. Klein, Sepekoff, and Wolf (1985) have a model of sexual orientation that differentiates seven variables, including sexual attraction, behavior, fantasies, emotional preference, social preference, self-identification, and hetero/gay lifestyle. Some feminist theorists have gone further and challenge the idea of the primacy of gender of object choice as a dimension of sexual orientation. Califia (1983), for example, reveals that many men and women who practice S&M care more about whether a potential partner is dominant or submissive than they do about the gender of that partner. And in fact, several reports corroborate that some bisexuals maintain that gender is an irrelevant dimension of their attractions to people (Coons, 1972; Zinik, 1983). To understand bisexuality in women, then, and to do therapy with women who may be bisexual, requires nothing less than completely discarding some of the concepts of sexuality with which we have been raised, which have been considered scientific axioms and psychotherapeutic truths Bisexuality In Women: The Evidence From Research It is difficult to ascertain 2 the rates of bisexuality in women, and one can do so only inferentially. Part of the problem lines in how one defines bisexuality. Most researchers have found that individuals who report exactly equal attractions to both men and women (the most narrow definition of bisexuality) are quire rare. Beyond this narrow definition, estimates of bisexuality vary according to whether one uses the criterion of attraction or fantasy only, actual behavior, or self-identification/self-label. As one would expect, estimates based only on fantasy or attraction are quite high. Masters and Johnson (1978), for example, found that what they term "cross-preference encounters" were the third most frequent category of sexual fantasy for both homosexual males and homosexual females, the fourth most frequent fantasy for heterosexual males and the fifth most frequent fantasy for heterosexual females. Bell and Weinberg (1978) report that only about half of gay men and half of gay women rate their feelings as exclusively gay. Hyde (1982), in interpreting data from both the Kinsey surveys of the 1940s and the Hunt survey of the 1970s, estimates that behaviorally, about 75% of men and 85% of women are exclusively heterosexual, 2% of men and less than 1% of women are exclusively homosexual, and nearly 25% of men and 15% of women are behaviorally bisexual. Bell and Weinberg (1978) report that nearly all of their samples of gay men and women have had behavioral heterosexual experience, and estimate that one-third of men and an even higher percentage of lesbians exhibit what they call a "partial bisexual style": i.e., attractions and behavior that are somewhat heterosexual. Moreover even amnnp their "heterosexual" control group, only three-quarters of the males and 90% of the women were exclusively behaviorally heterosexual! The "Playboy Sex Survey" (Playboy, 1983) found that 3% of males and 1% of females identified themselves as bisexual, and Klein (1980), in a Forum magazine survey, found that 56% of his respondents identified themselves as bisexual, with more men than women reporting this bisexual orientation. Clearly, bisexual self-identification is much lower than bisexual behavior, which is in turn lower than bisexual fantasy or attraction. Bisexual behavior, and perhaps bisexual attractions, are higher among self-identified gays than among self-identified heterosexuals. This data is not surprising in a society which, first, stigmatizes homosexuality and, second, teaches us to polarize sexual orientation. In such a society, one would expect the incidence of bisexual behavior to lag far behind incidence of bisexual fantasy or attraction. Furthermore, one would expect individuals to "choose up sides": i.e., to self-identify as either gay or straight, with far fewer people identifying as homosexual. One would also expect, in such a culture, that the label "gay" might become something of a "residual category," a label that might more precisely mean "not exclusively heterosexual." Nichols (1985), found that measures of various dimensions of sexual orientation (fantasy, romantic attraction, past and current sexual behavior, etc.) were more discrepant for those who self-label as gay than for those who self-label as heterosexual. This data, together with the studies reporting high degrees of bisexual feelings and behavior among homosexuals, corroborate the notion that "gay" is a residual category in this culture. In general, we can assume that self-label gives us less than a total picture of sexual orientation. In the same study, Nichols found that self-label correlated highly only with "behavior in the last year." Interestingly, there is little or no data to confirm the popular view that women are more bisexual than men. It is true, however, that lesbians are more likely to have been married than gay men (Bell & Weinberg, 1978; Jay & Young, 1979; Masters & Johnson, 1979); but gay men tend to stay married longer than lesbian women and report more marital satisfaction (Bell & Weinberg, 1978). Thus, it appears that 3 women are "less likely to behave sexually in accordance to their true interests" (Bell & Weinberg, 1978, p. 60), perhaps explaining findings of less bisexual and homosexual behavior in women and further complicating the clinical picture of sexual orientation for women. What characterizes bisexuality in women, beyond data on incidence? How do bisexual men and women compare with one another? Most of what we know comes from research on self-identified bisexuals; this research is summarized well by Zinik (1985). He reports that: Most bisexuals, whether male or female, first eroticize the opposite sex and identify as heterosexual, recognizing their homosexual interests in adulthood. However, some "life-long homosexuals" spontaneously develop heterosexual interests and become bisexual in mid-life. The incidence of this later phenomenon may be rising (Nichols & Paul, 1986). Bisexual males and bisexual females both report similar levels of erotic excitement with male and female partners. However, both males and females report more emotional satisfaction with female partners. Both male and female bisexuals report falling in love with women more often than with men, although many report falling in love with both genders. These data are interesting because they echo observations of many gay men, who say they are more sexually attracted to men but more emotionally attracted to women (and thus define their orientation on the basis of their sexual preference). And some lesbians, who say they are
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