Ongoing reminder that I am trying to transition off of Substack. I’m currently in the process of building up the whole archive on my own little website — remember personal websites? — but for now, if you feel icky about supporting Substack, all posts that appear here also appear on my Patreon. They are available for free, but I wouldn’t be mad if you gave me $1 (or more!) a month.
When I have a critical mass of people on Patreon I will likely wind down operations here, FYI.
There’s a new University of Michigan-helmed study about bisexuality, peeps, and it just dropped in Science Advances — and the press release has been picked up by all the usual suspects because… I guess “science!” and “bisexuality!” is just too tempting a combo to ignore.
Although I am the daughter of two scientists, I don’t really have the scientific literacy to understand all the nuances of what’s being said in the study (although, to be fair, neither do anything of the journalists breathlessly copy-pasting the press release for it). But I can tell you this: the general gist is that the authors want to know why same-sex sexual behavior isn’t evolutionarily selected against given that, you know, you need a dingus and a hooha to make a baby. And the conclusions that they seem come to are:
Being a monosexual queer has different genetic roots from being a bisexual
Being a bisexual man is associated with more risk taking behavior, which in turn means having more babies
Monosexual gays are going to die out because they’re not doing enough baby making
I’m exaggerating a little on that last one, but only a little, I mean really, what other interpretation do we have for this: “eSSB (exclusive same-sex sexual behavior)-associated alleles are likely being selected against at present.”
Anyway. The whole thing just leaves me with a very weird taste in my mouth. As a general rule, my eyes start to glaze over whenever anyone gets too obsessive about the genetic roots of queerness, and the additional layer of trying to figure out why queer people still exist when queer sex means no babies is just… it feels a little Just So Stories for PhDs, you know?
I don’t personally buy into this idea that there has to be some logical explanation for why queer people exist. We just do, you know? Why does there have to be some evolutionary explanation for our existence, some biological advantage? We simply exist, and that should be enough.
It’s also not lost on me — as it apparently is on the people behind this study — that straight people give birth to bisexuals and monosexual queers all the time. Indeed, you yourself might have straight parents! So this idea that “the gay genes” and “the bi genes” are only being preserved by gays and bisexuals ourselves seems simply… untrue… and that right there just feels like it undermines the very foundation of the study (maybe it doesn’t though? If you have better science literacy than me, let me know). Certainly this idea that monosexual queers are being… genetically selected against… seems like an absolutely bizarre conclusion to come to.
But hey: I’m no scientist.
And yet, the main point for me — the main point that always comes up whenever a study like this drops — is that I simply do not understand the rationale behind this research. What does it matter why the bisexuals exist? An explanation is unlikely to change the fact that we exist. It just seems like so much dancing around the actually worthwhile questions, the research that might actually improve the lives of queers, in order to… generate sensationalist headlines about those risk-taking bisexual men.
Ah. Maybe that’s the point then.
Anyway. Here’s hoping, as always, that we get better bisexual research in 2024. I’m not optimistic about that possibility. But it sure would be nice.
I wonder what is meant by ‘takes more risks’ is it ‘has more sex’? More importantly, in the spirit of being attracted to everything, I love the names of the authors, so catchy as to sound almost pseudonyms - Siliang Song and Jianzhi Zhang.
Yeah that seems weird.
One thing I vaguely remember seeing before was a suggestion that having gay or asexual siblings helps your kids because of meaning alternate caretakers who don't have kids of their own which felt less incoherent at least.