Women are either bisexual or gay but “never straight!”

Woman, especially her sexuality, provides the object of endless commentary, description, supposition. But the result of all the telling only deepens the enigma and makes woman's erotic force something that male storytelling can never quite explain or contain.

Peter Brooks

So, I read a really interesting article the other day I thought I’d share. To be honest, it’s not new news, it relates to a study conducted in 2015, I obviously missed it first time around! The study concluded that no woman is "totally straight" and that women's sexualities are more complex than men's – no shit Sherlock!

The study goes onto say; gay women tend to be exclusively sexually attracted to women, (again with the Sherlock thing!), while straight women are more likely to be aroused by both sexes – interesting thinks I!

Researchers asked 345 women about their sexual preferences and compared these with their arousal levels when shown videos of attractive men and women. They found 28% of straight women were mostly aroused by their preferred sex, compared with 68% of gay women.

The University of Essex study concluded that no woman is "totally straight"

The study, led by Dr Gerulf Rieger from the University of Essex and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, measured the arousal of women using eye tracking devices and direct measures of physiological sexual response. Previous studies had already suggested that straight women were aroused by both sexes when tested, but researchers had never looked at whether the same was true for gay women.

Dr Rieger said the study's conclusion that women who identified as being completely gay were much more aroused by their preferred sex was "amazing" – He needs to get out more and meet more women!

He went on to say their sexual arousal patterns were much more similar to men, whose responses tend to very accurately mirror their stated sexual preferences. Dr Rieger said: "In the past we thought it was true of all women that they were aroused by both sexes. The fact that it appears this is not the case is amazing."

Dr Rieger said it was not known why gay women were more often only aroused by their preferred sex, but he believes it may be to do with the amount of testosterone female babies receive in the womb. It was possible, he said, that women who experienced testosterone early in pregnancy had sexual behaviours that were more similar to men, but this has not yet been proven. He said tests showed similar behaviours occurring in monkeys.

Dr Rieger said the wider conclusions of the study was that, while the majority of women identified as straight: "Our research shows that, when it comes to what turns them on, they are usually bisexual or gay, but never totally straight". /me Raises and eyebrow!

However, he added the research did not necessarily mean women were repressing their true sexual preferences, but that their sexualities were simply more complex than men's.

"When it comes to straight women and sexual arousal there is such a disconnect between what a woman tells me and what her body does.

"It suggests that it's a different world for women when it comes to their sexualities."

Of course, since the publication of the paper many other sexual health researchers have cried foul, claiming that the techniques used by Dr Rieger were crude and the results not statistically significant. I think about myself and most of my friends and actually there is an element of good old-fashioned common sense here so, I don’t know, I quite like the idea – let me know what you think?

What’s on this week?