and whether or not being a bi woman is a “transitional” stage of life.
The study of 79 non-heterosexual women over 10 years found that bisexual women maintained a stable pattern of attraction to both sexes. In addition, the research appears to have debunked the stereotype that bisexual women are uninterested in or unable to commit to long-term monogamous relationships.
“This research provides the first empirical examination of competing assumptions about the nature of bisexuality, both as a sexual identity label and as a pattern of nonexclusive sexual attraction and behavior,” wrote University of Utah psychologist Lisa M. Diamond, PhD, who conducted the study. “The findings demonstrate considerable fluidity in bisexual, unlabeled and lesbian women’s attractions, behaviors and identities and contribute to researchers’ understanding of the complexity of sexual-minority development over the life span.”
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Among Diamond’s findings:
* Bisexual and unlabeled women were more likely than lesbians to change their identity over the course of the study, but they tended to switch between bisexual and unlabeled rather than to settle on lesbian or heterosexual as their identities.
* Seventeen percent of respondents switched from a bisexual or unlabeled identity to heterosexual during the study — but more than half of these women switched back to bisexual or unlabeled by the end.
* Women’s definitions of lesbianism appeared to permit more flexibility in behavior than their definitions of heterosexuality. For example, of the women who identified as lesbian in the last round of interviews, 15 percent reported having sexual contact with a man during the prior two years. In contrast, none of the women who settled on a heterosexual label at that point reported having sexual contact with a woman within the previous two years.
read the whole thing on the Science Blog, edited by our friend Ben Sullivan who has been very quietly running the fine blog for 5-6 years.
