Julia Shaw: belief

Transcript context

…What’s the biggest thing that people misunderstand about bisexuality? The biggest thing that researchers find people misunderstand about bisexuality is that it’s a phase and that it’s this idea that it’s transient, that it’s always changing, and that it’s a stepping stone. So, I think a lot of people still see bisexuality as on the way to gay town. Sort of like you’re on your way, but you haven’t quite committed and you’re still stuck in expectations of society. You haven’t quite let go yet, but really you’re gay. And that’s especially true for men. And so when you look at research on bisexual men, which is actually how the research started. So, I think now when we think of bisexuality, we think of women. And it’s true that today, twice as many women identify as bisexual as men. But if you look at the history of this and the research on bisexuality over time, it was the other way around. Someone called Alfred Kinsey was one of the first sexuality researchers in recent history, certainly, and he, after World War II, did this really big study of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, it was called. He was a biologist himself, and so he thought of taxonomies, and he was doing research on gall wasps, so insects. And this idea of human sexuality was sort of thrown at him after the war because there’s also this whole move to get people to, well, reproduce and to rebuild America. And so sexuality was partly, and sex, specifically, was becoming more of an area of interest, both in terms of research and in terms of policy and funding. And so Alfred Kinsey was asked, “Do you want to do a class on human sexual behavior?” And he was like, “I know nothing about this.” And so he spent about a year just listening to students’ questions about what they wanted to know about sex, and he realized that he was looking for research to try and build up this course that he was probably going to teach, and he realized that he couldn’t answer most of their questions because the research hadn’t been done. And so a lot of the questions were around, “What is normal?” You know, “If I feel this during sex, is that normal? How often do people have sex? Should I want these? What about these fantasies? What does it mean? What if I have homosexual fantasies? What if I engage in this kind of…” And so he was looking at all of these questions and collating them, and then he went out and did these huge studies, and he interviewed thousands of people himself, but also had all these research assistants who were out there interviewing people in America about their sexual behavior, which, I mean, just picture the time. This is the 1940s. This is quite a conservative time. I mean, certainly more than we might expect now. interviewing people in America about their sexual behavior, which, I mean, just picture the time. This is the 1940s. This is quite a conservative time. I mean, certainly more than we might expect now. And here’s this researcher asking incredibly personal questions about thousands and thousands and thousands of people, and he ended up finding, and this is one of the big findings in this book that he published called Sexual Behavior in The Human Male, which was a bestseller for an entire year. He sold out auditoriums. They had to sometimes add the room next to the room he was in because there was so much desire to go to his lectures about sex that they had to connect radios to other halls to give people enough space to sit down. He was basically a rock star, and again, I think this challenges the misconception we have about sexuality, that we think of it as this sort of woke thing now… …that the rainbow flag and all this stuff is sort of this modern invention almost. But if you… this is the ’40s. This was happening. People were going to these talks. People were having these conversations, and he created something called the Kinsey Scale. And so the Kinsey Scale is from zero to six, and he found that it was not useful to apply a binary to people’s sexual desires and sexual orientation. It was more useful to put them on a continuum because most people were not exclusively homosexual or exclusively heterosexual. Most people were somewhere in between. And so zero was exclusively heterosexual tendencies, and six was exclusively homosexual, and he would place people based on all of the things they told him somewhere on the scale, and about half of men were somewhere in the middle, not exclusively either, and about a quarter of women. Now think about the time.…

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