Sex at Dawn

Those who claim this just means men are more likely to be repressing some universal human bisexuality will have to consider sexologist Michael Bailey’s fMRI scans of gay and straight men’s brains while they viewed pornographic photos. They reacted as men tend to do: simply and directly. The gay guys liked the photos showing men with men, while the straight guys were into the photos featuring women. Bailey was looking for activation of the brain regions associated with inhibition, to see whether his subjects were denying a bisexual tendency. No dice. Neither gay nor straight men showed unusual activation of these regions while viewing the photos. Other experiments using subliminal images have generated similar results: gay men, straight men, and lesbians all responded as predicted by their stated sexual orientation, while nominally straight women (“I contain multitudes”) responded to just about everything. This is just how we’re wired, not the result of repression or denial.¹⁴

Of course, signs of repression aren’t hard to find in sex research. There’s plenty. For example, one of the long-standing mysteries of human sexuality has been that heterosexual men tend to report having more sexual encounters and partners than heterosexual women do—a mathematical impossibility. Psychologists Terry Fisher and Michele Alexander decided to take a closer look at people’s claims regarding age of first sexual experienc^ number of partners, and frequency of sexual encounters. Fisher and Alexander set up three different testing conditions:

2. The subjects could answer the questions privately and anonymously.

3. The subjects had electrodes placed on their hand, arm, and neck—believing themselves (falsely) to be hooked up to a lie detector.

Women who thought their answers might be seen reported an average of 2.6 sexual partners (all the subjects were college students younger than twenty-five). Those who thought their answers were anonymous reported 3.4 partners, while those who thought their lies would be detected reported an average of 4.4 partners. So, while women admitted to 70 percent more sexual partners when they thought they couldn’t fib, the men’s answers showed almost no variation. Sex researchers, physicians, and psychologists (and parents) need to remember that women’s answers to such questions may depend on when, where, and how the question is asked, as well as who’s asking.