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A new study has revealed that more women than men are open to having same sex relationships. Female subjects proved to be more flexible in their sexual orientation and more likely to say that they are bisexual.
But it turns out that there are a few key differences between women who are likely to say that they are attracted to both men and women, and women who are likely to say that they are only attracted to men.
While Elizabeth Aura McClintock, sociologist over at the University of Notre Dame and study author, did not want to claim that more attractive women are completely straight because they have a much better chance of attracting good looking men, and less attractive women are more likely to be bisexual because they settle for what they can get, fact remains that the results seem to point that way.
Female subjects rated by the interviewers as being more attractive were more likely to say that they are completely straight, whereas female subjects rated by the interviewers as being less attractive were more likely to say that they are bisexual.
McClintock offered a statement to Live Science insisting that “I do not claim that women become lesbians because they are not attractive enough to get men”. She went to add that if this was true, we could also look at the more attractive women and say that they simply never got the chance to start a relationship with a member of the same sex “because they are caught up in the pressure of hetero-normativity”.
But McClintock almost contradicts herself when she says that the less attractive women feel less pressured to adhere to the above mentioned hetero-normativity as that freedom comes precisely from being approached by fewer members of the opposite sex.
On top of this, the study also showed that highly educated women were also more likely to say that they are completely straight, and that female subjects in general were three (3) times more likely than men to switch their sexual orientation by the end of the study.
Evolutionary psychologists inform that this last finding makes perfect sense from an evolutionary point of view. Historically speaking, women who had partners that either ran away with someone else or died during war, and women who experienced rape, usually paired up with another member of the same sex because it made it a lot easier for them to take care of their children. Going at it alone would have been much harder.
The study appears to reinforce this theory as women who had a child before they were 22 were more likely to say that they are not completely straight, whereas women who had children in their late 20s were more likely to say that they are completely straight.
As for the male subjects in the study, they were the opposite of the female subject. Highly educated men were more likely to say that they are attracted to both women and men, whereas men who had a child before they were 22 were more likely to say that they are completely straight.
This may also make sense from an evolutionary point of view as women have historically been the ones to take care of children.
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