Does this imply that the human race is drastically more sexually fluid than most species when allowed to be without oppression? Or that the culture gen z has grown up in helps cultivate a more fluid preference?
I grew up in the 80s, so I’m trying to understand, but it’s tough meshing statements like this with my experiences.
Please don’t misunderstand this post as disapproval. Just confusion.
I’ve got an older bro who is ambidextrous due to not being allowed to be left-handed in kindergarten (and beyond). He got held back due to “developmental” problems. I can’t believe the teachers and principal were so dumb that they couldn’t connect the dots as to what was really going on.
I’m cross dominant. I do some things left handed, some things right handed, and a select few I can do with either. Elementary school was weird. My teachers couldn’t comprehend that I write with my right hand but use scissors with my left. For years I was forced to use right handed scissors held awkwardly in my left hand. To this day, I’m not particularly good with scissors.
I’m cross dominant but consider myself left handed mainly because I do the fine motor stuff writing, eating, etc. with my left hand. Out side of scissors I don’t think I’ve ever felt forced to use a hand that didn’t feel comfortable, stupid scissors.
Baseball (and sports in general) are wonderful man made examples of evolution and how selection pressure can force the expression of certain traits. About 25% of MLB players are left handed, versus about 10% in the general population.
A similar thing has occurred in the NBA where the average height is about 6’6” (or 198.6cm for those opposed to Freedom Units), which is about 8 inches taller than the average American male.
Doubtless, you can look at any top level professional sport league and find some physical trait (or set of traits) that is wholly disproportionate compared to the general population due to those traits providing some advantage(s) that is unique to that game.
Also huge swaths of bi people and a lot of people who are now understood as gay and trans as opposed to straight people who hate their body and life but got rejected from hormones
The best explanation I’ve heard is that it’s similar to the stats for left-handed people. Way back in the day, almost no one “identified” as being left-handed. But once the stigma against left-handedness was eliminated, the numbers went up.
So in other words, yes, it’s a reflection of LGBTQ+ becoming more acceptable, particularly among Gen Z. There could be other factors, but that’s probably the main one.
I get your point, but “most”? I’ve had 5 male dogs of my own over 40-ish years, and have known or met many, many others and I’ve never once had my leg humped.
It’s mostly bisexuals. You know like Julius Caesar, Alexander of Macedon, and large swaths of people in cultures where same gender romance or sex is acceptable in certain circumstances so long as you also marry and have children.
Not arguing but also something I hadn’t heard before. That there has been an absolutely massive increase in # of people identifying as bi and that that is the majority of LGBTQ+
I can’t recall any off the top of my head and it’s definitely anecdotally been my experience as someone who came out about a decade ago and has been a geek about queer history for about that long. Like there are definitely more homosexuals and a lot more open trans people (but trans people are estimated at absolute highest to be 1% of the population, and more realistic high end estimates last I checked are .3%-.5%), but bi folks have been coming out of the woodwork.
Human appear to be about halfway between chimps and bonobos on the primate spectrum. The violence of chimps combined with the fluid sexual social habits of bonobos lol
We are the only animal with cultural locks on gender expression. If we didn’t have such hang ups about gender norms we would not really notice someone being LGBT. Paradoxically the more regressive and strict people are about gender roles the more people you have that don’t fit within those gender roles.
Theres long been a camp that argues the vast majority of people are bisexual (myself included). That’s also where pretty much all of the recent growth comes from. Interestingly, most of that comes from bisexual women, while bisexual men consistently self report at levels lower than gay men.
There are lots of men who identify as straight but have sex with other men. So much so that medical literature often uses MSM as a category instead of gay. There’s an entire DL subculture among African American men.
Anywhere you go you can download Grindr and find oodles of guys who are in heterosexual marriages. The stigma is pretty strong, they probably can’t even internally recognize themselves as somewhat bisexual.
This is particularly relevant as it relates to how silly this topic and its reactions are. We absolutely KNOW that the current number is an undercount, and yet it’s still really hard for people to grasp that the percentage is that high.
I mean, sexuality is a spectrum. It’s statistically unlikely that a large part of the population is at the exact borders of the spectrum and not even slightly in between.
Especially since afaik physical attraction is just a matter of appearance, and there’s very masculine women or very feminine men.
It’s a confluence of factors. LGBTQIA+ is sort of a gender/sexuallity/ phenotype physicality solidarity alliance and the actual boundries has grown in scope since the 80’s.
Like take for instance asexual people. Asexuallity became a part of the solidarity when people reached out over the internet and and started realizing that there were a lot of people who just don’t feel sexual attraction and that there are certain widely accepted forms of social coercion that revolve around pushing people towards sexual attraction. But asexuallity as a part of the LGBTQIA only really became a thing in the early 2000’s. Non-binary trans identities are much the same. A lot of people were feeling the way they did about themselves in isolation but they had no frame of reference to think that they were not just the odd person out.
The other half is a society wide re-examination of compulsory heterosexuallity/cis gender hegemony. There are way more people out there who no longer define themselves by who they’ve chosen to have physical sexual experience with and now a lot more people are more frank about defining themselves by the range of people they are attracted to. Like if the majority of people artificially penalize a bi-person for choosing a same sex relationship a lot of people will just take the easier path and just narrow their choices or keep their liasons with the restricted choice secret and not assume the label.
I before I came out as trans initially figured I didn’t count as trans because I both wasn’t physically transitioning and my industry is somewhat hostile to trans people so I was very closeted ao I figured the label only really belonged to the people brave enough to live out of the closet… But eventually someone found me and was like “No, it’s not aspirational. Even deep in the closet you are still trans.”
This combination of destigmatization, solidarity messaging, the inclusion of whole other groups (like intersex people, gender minorities, asexuals) broadening the scope and outreach to the closeted means that more people generally self identify as LGBTQIA or queer.
Animal kingdom wise we’re still less observably sexual fluid than other primates. Bisexuality is actually pretty ubiquitous particularly amongst male primates with it actually being the overwhelming norm in some species so chances are we are probably actually haven’t seen the curve level off from suppressive stigma.
I would assume they are more honestly/aware of their preference.
I am a gay dude, and I have had friends/coworkers who identified as straight say things like “Why does everyone need to label things? I am 100% straight, but sometimes on a road trip, you just wanna suck the other guy off. Both of us are still straight though”
Every time I have heard thigns like this, it’s GenX, or older Millennial. Older than that, they don’t bring up “queer” things, younger than that, they just say that they are “mostly straight”, or “barely-bi”, or “up for whatever”.
Have you heard about bonobos? They shag anyone for anything and they’re one of our closest relatives. Friends have mutual wanks. Enemies have makeup sex. Threesomes, foursomes. Horny bunch of fuckers.
LGBT as a category has been increased a lot over the years. Asexual or people who don’t feel they conform to super strict gender norms are all included as “queer” now. So I imagine it’s a combo of things, some people being trendy, some people being freer and not feeling the need to hide, some people who previously didn’t identify being included.
Left handedness was persecuted and after it stopped being persecuted there was a massive rise in people who were left handed. But it plateaued and has remained pretty stable since then.
My (admittedly relatively hot) take as a younger millennial indoctrinated by the 2nd wave feminists (who weren’t huge on the third wave) is that what gender means has shifted. I didn’t experience myself as particularly gendered growing up in the 90s and early 00s and certainly wouldn’t consider it part of my inner essence. I don’t give a shit how strangers refer to me or whether they think I’m a dude or not. I found it to be a slightly annoying category imposed by everyone else. Something I needed to understand because it impacted how I was received by others, but not something that was core to my self-understanding. In school I studied the humanities which reaffirmed to me that gender was an annoying external category that put people in boxes—we didn’t want gay female CEOs, we wanted to get rid of gender altogether.
I think gen Z actually has a similar thought but instead of doing away with the gender categories many have chosen, on an individual level, to make them their own a bit more in line with 3rd wave ‘boss bitch’ vibes. This still undermines the oppressive nature of the gender roles because it it kind of divorces gender from the societal gender role.
The 11% dip for the GOP makes sense. Their policies are just not in line with what young people value.
That said, the +24% gain in LGBTQ+ identification is fascinating and I would love to know how nature, nurture, taboo, and oppression play impact that. This would be a really cool time to be in university and studying human sexuality and gender.
We are indeed more sexually fluid than most species and given it’s “most” and not “all”, this isn’t unprecedented. It’s also not a new phenomena, in Ancient Greek and early-mid Ancient Roman societies queerness was quite common. In fact homosexuality was so prevalent that that the Romans didn’t even have a word for heterosexual/homosexual; instead one was either dominant or submissive (e.g. giving or receiving) with the assumption being that most were bisexual and would take partners as they saw fit.
There would still be a stigma around being the receptive partner. The idea being that a higher status man can penetrate lower status people (younger men, slaves, women). A high status man being penetrated by a lower status person would be worthy of mockery.
Samurai were gay as fuck though. Sengoku period you could even be romantic with other dudes, women are for making babies. I have an 1940s (iirc) English translation of a book of 16th century gay samurai love stories - the guy who wrote the forward thought it was because “mongoloid” people look more feminine 😅
Some of it is a rejection of previous values - toxic masculinity and toxic femininity. Some of it may be standing with their peers even if it does not apply directly to them. Some of it is trendiness. Some doctors are even predatory, seeking to sell their extraordinarily expensive surgeries for tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Older, established trans communities in Europe even are shocked at how young we allow surgeries in the USA, before someone knows who they truly are.
Mainly we just have an extremist society here, egged on in large part by our predatory clickbait media that always has to come up with something to say sell, so it ignores the >80% in the middle and focuses exclusively on the flashiest content it can find. And then kids hear that and wonder how they fit into it - ofc they never see the “middle ground”, b/c in the media it just isn’t there.
Take a look also at how shockingly high rates of suicide and opioid and other drug use are. The younger generations are desperate to become anything else besides what boomers are telling them they must be: literal slaves to the corporate empires.:-(
Putting sexuality in such a defined state is relatively new in human culture. So most often no one would have the worlds to talk about it or even know it could be classified differently.
Our closest related species gets it on so much in so many ways it is one STD away from extinction. It might be that we really are like this. Maybe the norm for humans was to have random homosexual and hetrosexual orgies everywhere. It was only because it became important to know who the daddy was that things changed? Or the sampling of the survey wasn’t great. You know groundbreaking or meaningless.
I think about cultures that have a focus on same sex sexual contact- most people, if they had been born there would probably participate. If they’re born somewhere where it’s forbidden, most people don’t engage in it.
Some people are hardwired about it in either direction, but the majority are more flexible
I’m a bit confused by this.
Does this imply that the human race is drastically more sexually fluid than most species when allowed to be without oppression? Or that the culture gen z has grown up in helps cultivate a more fluid preference?
I grew up in the 80s, so I’m trying to understand, but it’s tough meshing statements like this with my experiences.
Please don’t misunderstand this post as disapproval. Just confusion.
Amazing what not punishing things does
I’ve got an older bro who is ambidextrous due to not being allowed to be left-handed in kindergarten (and beyond). He got held back due to “developmental” problems. I can’t believe the teachers and principal were so dumb that they couldn’t connect the dots as to what was really going on.
I’m cross dominant. I do some things left handed, some things right handed, and a select few I can do with either. Elementary school was weird. My teachers couldn’t comprehend that I write with my right hand but use scissors with my left. For years I was forced to use right handed scissors held awkwardly in my left hand. To this day, I’m not particularly good with scissors.
I’m cross dominant but consider myself left handed mainly because I do the fine motor stuff writing, eating, etc. with my left hand. Out side of scissors I don’t think I’ve ever felt forced to use a hand that didn’t feel comfortable, stupid scissors.
Baseball?
Baseball (and sports in general) are wonderful man made examples of evolution and how selection pressure can force the expression of certain traits. About 25% of MLB players are left handed, versus about 10% in the general population.
A similar thing has occurred in the NBA where the average height is about 6’6” (or 198.6cm for those opposed to Freedom Units), which is about 8 inches taller than the average American male.
Doubtless, you can look at any top level professional sport league and find some physical trait (or set of traits) that is wholly disproportionate compared to the general population due to those traits providing some advantage(s) that is unique to that game.
That’s true… And what I was (jokingly) referencing…
But, my Dad’s mother, my Granny…
She was a natural Lefty…
And musically inclined…
Her Daddy slacked the strings on the family guitar before he left for work…
She figured out how to tune that instrument…
Those in her church, later, made fun of her for playing backwards chords, because she was a lefty. .
She learned to play the other way, too… And she taught me both…
There’s so many sides and nuances to every thought in our lives…
It was a harmless joke, but it has roots in my reality…
This shit is so often much deeper than we think…
You made a fuckin hell of a statement, but it’s without context or understanding…
I was just making an off-handed joke…
There is a fucking shitload of lefties in baseball… Because it fucks with the righties when they’re batting…
When people use that many ellipses it makes it look like they haven’t made up their mind, so their opinions can be ignored.
Oh I thought it was like a poem or something because of all the line breaks and ellipses. But it’s just a regular comment?
I think it’s mostly that very few of them identify as Republican.
But also, the less stigma around gender expression, the more kids will be open to explore theirs.
That’s not what the data said.
https://www.axios.com/2024/01/23/gen-z-less-religious-more-liberal-lgbtq
Identifying as Republican went from 32% in the Boomer Generation to 21% in Gen Z. Identifying as LGBTQ+ went from 4% with Boomers to 28% with Gen Z.
Both changes are major, but the LGBTQ+ change is massive.
It’s probably worth mentioning we recognize certain types of people as part of the LGBTQ+ umbrella who were not before. Asexual people, for example.
Also huge swaths of bi people and a lot of people who are now understood as gay and trans as opposed to straight people who hate their body and life but got rejected from hormones
The best explanation I’ve heard is that it’s similar to the stats for left-handed people. Way back in the day, almost no one “identified” as being left-handed. But once the stigma against left-handedness was eliminated, the numbers went up.
So in other words, yes, it’s a reflection of LGBTQ+ becoming more acceptable, particularly among Gen Z. There could be other factors, but that’s probably the main one.
28% seems huge, though. Are there any other animals like that? I’m kind of confused how it’s that high even with acceptance lol.
Most male dogs hump your leg regardless of who you are
Male ducks will even do necrophilia with other males.
I get your point, but “most”? I’ve had 5 male dogs of my own over 40-ish years, and have known or met many, many others and I’ve never once had my leg humped.
Most (male dogs that hump)
Maybe they don’t think you’re hot enough /s
It’s mostly bisexuals. You know like Julius Caesar, Alexander of Macedon, and large swaths of people in cultures where same gender romance or sex is acceptable in certain circumstances so long as you also marry and have children.
Is there data to back that claim up?
Not arguing but also something I hadn’t heard before. That there has been an absolutely massive increase in # of people identifying as bi and that that is the majority of LGBTQ+
I can’t recall any off the top of my head and it’s definitely anecdotally been my experience as someone who came out about a decade ago and has been a geek about queer history for about that long. Like there are definitely more homosexuals and a lot more open trans people (but trans people are estimated at absolute highest to be 1% of the population, and more realistic high end estimates last I checked are .3%-.5%), but bi folks have been coming out of the woodwork.
Shakespeare too
Yes. Bonobos.
Human appear to be about halfway between chimps and bonobos on the primate spectrum. The violence of chimps combined with the fluid sexual social habits of bonobos lol
https://phys.org/news/2019-09-insights-same-sex-sexual-interactions-important.amp
The article pointed out that the same sex encounters were only high for females, idk if that’s that similar to humans.
We are the only animal with cultural locks on gender expression. If we didn’t have such hang ups about gender norms we would not really notice someone being LGBT. Paradoxically the more regressive and strict people are about gender roles the more people you have that don’t fit within those gender roles.
Theres long been a camp that argues the vast majority of people are bisexual (myself included). That’s also where pretty much all of the recent growth comes from. Interestingly, most of that comes from bisexual women, while bisexual men consistently self report at levels lower than gay men.
There are lots of men who identify as straight but have sex with other men. So much so that medical literature often uses MSM as a category instead of gay. There’s an entire DL subculture among African American men.
Anywhere you go you can download Grindr and find oodles of guys who are in heterosexual marriages. The stigma is pretty strong, they probably can’t even internally recognize themselves as somewhat bisexual.
This is particularly relevant as it relates to how silly this topic and its reactions are. We absolutely KNOW that the current number is an undercount, and yet it’s still really hard for people to grasp that the percentage is that high.
I mean, sexuality is a spectrum. It’s statistically unlikely that a large part of the population is at the exact borders of the spectrum and not even slightly in between.
Especially since afaik physical attraction is just a matter of appearance, and there’s very masculine women or very feminine men.
Bonobos
It’s a confluence of factors. LGBTQIA+ is sort of a gender/sexuallity/ phenotype physicality solidarity alliance and the actual boundries has grown in scope since the 80’s.
Like take for instance asexual people. Asexuallity became a part of the solidarity when people reached out over the internet and and started realizing that there were a lot of people who just don’t feel sexual attraction and that there are certain widely accepted forms of social coercion that revolve around pushing people towards sexual attraction. But asexuallity as a part of the LGBTQIA only really became a thing in the early 2000’s. Non-binary trans identities are much the same. A lot of people were feeling the way they did about themselves in isolation but they had no frame of reference to think that they were not just the odd person out.
The other half is a society wide re-examination of compulsory heterosexuallity/cis gender hegemony. There are way more people out there who no longer define themselves by who they’ve chosen to have physical sexual experience with and now a lot more people are more frank about defining themselves by the range of people they are attracted to. Like if the majority of people artificially penalize a bi-person for choosing a same sex relationship a lot of people will just take the easier path and just narrow their choices or keep their liasons with the restricted choice secret and not assume the label.
I before I came out as trans initially figured I didn’t count as trans because I both wasn’t physically transitioning and my industry is somewhat hostile to trans people so I was very closeted ao I figured the label only really belonged to the people brave enough to live out of the closet… But eventually someone found me and was like “No, it’s not aspirational. Even deep in the closet you are still trans.”
This combination of destigmatization, solidarity messaging, the inclusion of whole other groups (like intersex people, gender minorities, asexuals) broadening the scope and outreach to the closeted means that more people generally self identify as LGBTQIA or queer.
Animal kingdom wise we’re still less observably sexual fluid than other primates. Bisexuality is actually pretty ubiquitous particularly amongst male primates with it actually being the overwhelming norm in some species so chances are we are probably actually haven’t seen the curve level off from suppressive stigma.
I believe it’s your first option, acceptance for being yourself is the normal instead of a beating from your parents like pre 2000.
I would assume they are more honestly/aware of their preference.
I am a gay dude, and I have had friends/coworkers who identified as straight say things like “Why does everyone need to label things? I am 100% straight, but sometimes on a road trip, you just wanna suck the other guy off. Both of us are still straight though”
Every time I have heard thigns like this, it’s GenX, or older Millennial. Older than that, they don’t bring up “queer” things, younger than that, they just say that they are “mostly straight”, or “barely-bi”, or “up for whatever”.
Yepppppp, the kinsey 1s and 2s are really common and there was a time when even 3s and some 4s would identify as straight.
Have you heard about bonobos? They shag anyone for anything and they’re one of our closest relatives. Friends have mutual wanks. Enemies have makeup sex. Threesomes, foursomes. Horny bunch of fuckers.
I think most species are more fluid than you realize, and humans are just normal. Especially for apes that share a common ancestor with bonobos.
LGBT as a category has been increased a lot over the years. Asexual or people who don’t feel they conform to super strict gender norms are all included as “queer” now. So I imagine it’s a combo of things, some people being trendy, some people being freer and not feeling the need to hide, some people who previously didn’t identify being included.
Left handedness was persecuted and after it stopped being persecuted there was a massive rise in people who were left handed. But it plateaued and has remained pretty stable since then.
My (admittedly relatively hot) take as a younger millennial indoctrinated by the 2nd wave feminists (who weren’t huge on the third wave) is that what gender means has shifted. I didn’t experience myself as particularly gendered growing up in the 90s and early 00s and certainly wouldn’t consider it part of my inner essence. I don’t give a shit how strangers refer to me or whether they think I’m a dude or not. I found it to be a slightly annoying category imposed by everyone else. Something I needed to understand because it impacted how I was received by others, but not something that was core to my self-understanding. In school I studied the humanities which reaffirmed to me that gender was an annoying external category that put people in boxes—we didn’t want gay female CEOs, we wanted to get rid of gender altogether.
I think gen Z actually has a similar thought but instead of doing away with the gender categories many have chosen, on an individual level, to make them their own a bit more in line with 3rd wave ‘boss bitch’ vibes. This still undermines the oppressive nature of the gender roles because it it kind of divorces gender from the societal gender role.
Well said
The 11% dip for the GOP makes sense. Their policies are just not in line with what young people value.
That said, the +24% gain in LGBTQ+ identification is fascinating and I would love to know how nature, nurture, taboo, and oppression play impact that. This would be a really cool time to be in university and studying human sexuality and gender.
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We are indeed more sexually fluid than most species and given it’s “most” and not “all”, this isn’t unprecedented. It’s also not a new phenomena, in Ancient Greek and early-mid Ancient Roman societies queerness was quite common. In fact homosexuality was so prevalent that that the Romans didn’t even have a word for heterosexual/homosexual; instead one was either dominant or submissive (e.g. giving or receiving) with the assumption being that most were bisexual and would take partners as they saw fit.
There would still be a stigma around being the receptive partner. The idea being that a higher status man can penetrate lower status people (younger men, slaves, women). A high status man being penetrated by a lower status person would be worthy of mockery.
Samurai were gay as fuck though. Sengoku period you could even be romantic with other dudes, women are for making babies. I have an 1940s (iirc) English translation of a book of 16th century gay samurai love stories - the guy who wrote the forward thought it was because “mongoloid” people look more feminine 😅
LGBTQ came out if the closet and GOP went in.
fingers crossed it means there’s five gen z Republicans and they don’t know how to vote
Some of it is a rejection of previous values - toxic masculinity and toxic femininity. Some of it may be standing with their peers even if it does not apply directly to them. Some of it is trendiness. Some doctors are even predatory, seeking to sell their extraordinarily expensive surgeries for tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Older, established trans communities in Europe even are shocked at how young we allow surgeries in the USA, before someone knows who they truly are.
Mainly we just have an extremist society here, egged on in large part by our predatory clickbait media that always has to come up with something to
saysell, so it ignores the >80% in the middle and focuses exclusively on the flashiest content it can find. And then kids hear that and wonder how they fit into it - ofc they never see the “middle ground”, b/c in the media it just isn’t there.Take a look also at how shockingly high rates of suicide and opioid and other drug use are. The younger generations are desperate to become anything else besides what boomers are telling them they must be: literal slaves to the corporate empires.:-(
Putting sexuality in such a defined state is relatively new in human culture. So most often no one would have the worlds to talk about it or even know it could be classified differently.
Our closest related species gets it on so much in so many ways it is one STD away from extinction. It might be that we really are like this. Maybe the norm for humans was to have random homosexual and hetrosexual orgies everywhere. It was only because it became important to know who the daddy was that things changed? Or the sampling of the survey wasn’t great. You know groundbreaking or meaningless.
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No, they’re just not being persecuted by narrow-minded superstitious assholes like in past decades.
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I think about cultures that have a focus on same sex sexual contact- most people, if they had been born there would probably participate. If they’re born somewhere where it’s forbidden, most people don’t engage in it.
Some people are hardwired about it in either direction, but the majority are more flexible