Nearly half of 18-24-year-olds say they're 'not fully straight', survey finds

return2ozma@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 253 points –
Nearly half of 18-24-year-olds say they're 'not fully straight', survey finds
thepinknews.com
61

This is no fucking surprise - sexuality is a spectrum and it's rare to be at a full extreme of one of those. I'm glad this new generation will be less ashamed of themselves though!

I'm straight, 100%. I know because I've been very close to trying, and figured out I was too straight to go through with it. If you had asked me when I was 18-24, I would probably not be so sure. Being "bicurious" around that age seems to be quite common, but is probably (my speculation) not closely linked to the proportion of people who are actually not straight.

Well I was bicurious around that age and am now bisexual, so my anecdote nullifies yours

Well I'll bring the average to 66% but I'm not going to say which direction to mess up the math.

Your affinity for chaos betrays your bisexuality…

Just to further confuse the math, I was 100% sure I was straight at that age, but turns out I am aroace.

I thought I was ace at that age but it turns out it was just birth control messing with hormones. I'm sure I'm straight now.

With some rounding, we can get that up another 3% ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Somebody who is sexually attracted to the same sex but doesn't to through with it is not 100% straight.

It's at least 15% gay.

I had something similar and was mildly crestfallen when it turned out that dating a dude feels extremely similar to dating women. I thought it would be like... orange-flavored? Or at least spicier? Religions hyped it up for so long, I thought there'd be some sort of difference. Kinda just feels like dating a best friend, regardless of gender. :)

I still find women attractive, but I'll be damned if this relationship with my bf isn't the best one I've ever had.

I mean, yes...? That's the way sexuality works. Very few people are completely straight or completely gay. A fantastic example is prison; you put a bunch of guys in prison, and most of them are going to be having sex with other men, at least sometimes. It's not that they're not straight in any normal sense, but that the overall sex drive is strong enough to overcome gender preferences.

It's just not a big deal. Let people be people, as long as everyone involved is consenting, and they aren't causing direct, immediate harm to other people.

Kinda wild to bring up the sexual repression that we punish our prisoners with, that contributes to the negative outcomes of our "correctional" system, and conclude that it's "not a big deal".

I know what you're trying to say, but this is the worst example I can imagine.

Would you prefer I used the British Navy in the tall ships era as an example instead?

Same principle: when you have a bunch of people together with no access to their preferred gender, they're going to tend to have sex with their non-preferred gender.

The big deal is that kids are comfortable saying as such. Heteronormativity is still very much the norm

Heteronormativity is still very much the norm

Maybe for 30+. It absolutely is not the norm for younger generations. Heck, at that age no one wants to be normal in any case: it’s seen as boring and potentially problematic. All this is to say that I think a lot more people say they are sexually fluid than are actively seeking non-hetero relationships.

I think this is one thing that evolves with age rather than being generational. In the 90s a lot of teens and early college students identified very publicly as bi. A few years later, most of the people I knew settled into one way or the other as their hormones came down to earth and their social status settled.

I wonder what the survey questions were like? I mean, it's completely reasonable to find someone of the same sex attractive... There's a pic of Pierce Brosnan floating around the fediverse right now and that man is dapper AF. Doesn't mean I want to have his babies but he's sure as hell attractive. So if someone put a question on a survey that asked if you can find someone of the same sex attractive, would that qualify as "not fully straight"? Even if you have zero interest outside of that admiration of someone's physical appearance? I'd assume it would be impossible to be "fully straight" for most anyone if that were the criteria...

This is somehow evidence that society is falling apart. /s

That's interesting! I am curious to know what the scale was (what does it mean being fully straight?), if someone find the report and shares the link, that would be great. I looked for it but I could only find summaries.

Was this information collected also in previous surveys? Is there a trend we can observe?

Survey done by Durex. Durex was also that news site "ally of the year". Interesting. Usually whenever I think of polls I feel like people who aren't directly interested in the topic don't take the poll.

Like if you said there was a polls about video games, I might take it. But a poll about guns id probably pass on.

But I welcome a more open culture, so would be neat if true.

Yeah but I could only find past issues of the Global Sex Survey. I am specifically interested in the scale used for questions (and their results).

Maybe it will take some time for the report to be published though

The scale is likely the Kinsey scale. A 0-6 scale of sexuality. Zero is completely straight and six is completely gay.

Most people find themselves somewhere in the middle, even if they don't admit it.

I'm somewhere in the range of 1--1.5

I'm firmly attracted to the opposite gender, but might make an exception if the person had a personality that was super compatible with my own. But it's not something I'm going to seek out.

But do you think that in the survey they simply asked people where they "place" themselves on the scale, or they had questions that were used to infer the value? I am genuinely curious because I didn't know this scale before, and I honestly have no idea what it means being a 1 vs a 2, even after reading the scale, it's very abstract. So I am wondering what possible questions were in the survey. Unfortunately, I still did not find the full report.

Methodology would be nice to know, but I think the Kinsey scale is abstract for a reason. It's a tool to allow a person to broaden their own understanding of themselves.

I remember a saying “every female is a few drinks away from a girl on girl encounter.”

That's just a male fantasy that they love to project onto all women and i'm so fucking sick of it. Just like the 'everyone loves boobs' garbage.

Straight woman here. I'm sorry but boobs are fantastic and I've never met another girl who disagreed.

There's sometimes a performative aspect to it that isn't quite the same thing as attraction. Though I suppose it depends how "straightness" is being defined?

I think the cultural concept of straightness is just getting some of the starch taken out of it. There's more room for ambiguity in human behavior than a lot of people realize.

And yet they show lesbians as a thumbnail/front picture. It’s obvious, that todays society clearly favours women’s bisexuality right out of sexual desires and (yes of course) the liberation of women. Bisexuality of Man are still beeing held back in society’s discourse, not just because it’s mainly without „general“ sexual desire by the ruling class which also reproduces its patriarchal world believes, but because todays feminism is all about empowering only women to fight against this and not empowering men to fight against the system that is also suppressing them. It’s true, that we need what current feminism is doing right now more then ever, but I want to live in a future where boys are also getting good grades in schools and have the same sexual freedom based on cultural expressions as women have, without being the only sex that lives less long and lies in war trenches.

Bisexuality of Man are still beeing held back in society’s discourse

Saying this while eating a big bowl of popcorn and watching Challengers