Exploring sexual orientation beyond genital arousal: Using large-scale online dating contact behavior to study male and female bisexuality.

Jabbour et al. (1) examine the extent to which men who self-report bisexual orientation exhibit bisexual genital arousal, employing a larger sample than had been used in previous research (n = 588 who provided self-reported arousal data; n = 474 with genital responses). The results confirm that men who report attraction to both sexes are also more genitally aroused by both sexes; therefore, they speculate that sample size and systematic differences between samples of bisexual men (including miscategorization) may have contributed to inconsistent results in previous studies. What the research in this field has so far failed to explore is how important insights can be generated beyond measurements of genital arousal or subjective orientation; for example, by exploring real-world online dating contact behavior as a way of measuring revealed preferences. Such data also offer the advantage of substantially larger sample sizes than historical laboratory studies.

Our dataset comprises online dating contact behavior from 946 bisexual men and 623 bisexual women (2), allowing us to go beyond just looking at male bisexuality. Jabbour et al. (1) in fact stress how “converging lines of evidence suggest that there are important differences in the expression of male and female sexual orientation, perhaps especially bisexuality” (p. 18370). However, by simply exploring the distribution of bisexual online dating participants who prefer to contact exclusively 1) same sex only, 2) opposite sex only, and 3) both sexes, we find no statistically significant difference between bisexual men and women (n = 1,569; χ2 test: P = 0.166). In fact, we find relatively more bisexual men (74.52%) contacting both sexes compared with bisexual women (70.63%), and fewer bisexual men (12.47%) contacting men only compared with bisexual women contacting women only (15.57%). When exploring the contact behavior of bisexual men and women according to their Kinsey scale (KS) (Fig. 1), none of the respondents scoring between 0 and 5 exhibits a difference in the distribution of contact preferences between bisexual men or women (χ2 tests, P > 0.1). The overall pattern of change in the relative share of contact types across the KS does appear symmetrical for both sexes. However, the rate of such difference across the spectrum is not (e.g., for KS = 1, 23.5% of bisexual males who contact women only are not represented in KS = 5 by the 54.1% bisexual males who contact men only).

Fig. 1.

Bisexual men/women contact according to their Kinsey scale.

While miscategorization undoubtedly exists in the bisexual male population, the fact that online dating contact behavior shows no statistically significant sex difference suggests that it likely also exists in the bisexual female population, and that previous sex difference findings relating to genital blood flow assessments and their association with sexual orientation may be problematic (3, 4). That Jabbour et al. (1) excluded 26.73% of bisexual males for “insufficient genital arousal for meaningful analysis” (p. 18375) speaks to such issues. This therefore suggests the importance of mixed methods to understand bisexual orientation and alternative proxies for arousal and revealed preferences. As Zivony (5) argues, the complexity of sexual orientation cannot be reduced to genital arousal. However, contrary to Zivony (5), we encourage sexual orientation scientists to look beyond subjective measures and utilize the plethora of new field data available.