A friend aware of my endless quest to teach the world that things are not so simple as "gay" and "straight" alerted me to this blog post by OKCupid. Several of its findings support the ideas of flexible sexuality in No Church in the Wild, so naturally I must write excitedly about them.
This is the breakdown of answers across all OKCupid users. About 30% of users answer openly that that have or would like to engage in a sexual encounter with someone of the same sex. When separated by biological gender, we find that about HALF of women on the site have or would like to try women. That the number is about 25% for male users utterly supports the position taken by the narrator in No Church in the Wild - women are more likely to talk about this desire if they have it than men are.
I'll pause for a moment to consider this sample set. OKCupid users are characteristically younger than those of, say, Match.com. It may simply be that people who are more open to experimentation tend to do their online dating on OKCupid in disproportionate numbers. But, given the geographic distribution of this graphic:
it seems that OKCupid isn't seeing a real difference between Miami, Austin, and San Francisco - not to mention that rural Texas and the state next to big, gay DC appear about the same color - so it's not just (young) Californians saying they'd like to try both - it's users located virtually everywhere. In this map, as you get redder, people identify as "more gay curious," and blue is "less gay curious." Oh, Canada. I also love how they have so effectively show the correlation of policital environment to expressed sexual desires.
But, folks, that's not all. Take a look at these data points:
Kinsey had only one axis on his scale: same sex attraction to opposite-sex attraction. OKCupid also tried to map "personality traits by orientation," and that graphic speaks to the need for two more axes: Active/Top and Passive/Bottom, plus Hypersexual to Asexual (anecdotally, 2% of the gay men in OKCupid's study seemed to have 25% of all gay male sex). Note that none of my axes is tagged to gender. Gender is a concept divorced from biological sex (ask Cassandra Gorgeous) that varies, like the other items, over time. But gender isn't relevant to where a person lands on this scale at any given time.
Once we build these X, Y, and Z axes, and identify a point in the cube that correlates to all three, we have an accurate picture of a sexual being. The shape of the composite graph for all of humanity may look something like a sphere with six tiny points at each corner - the result of a standard bell curve extended over each axis and then cross-referenced. Alternately, there could be an equal distribution of the population along each axis. Based on the OKCupid stats, however, the idea that the population is mostly at the edges of the axis is totally debunked. Please feel free to comment with your spot on the map so we can see...
To demonstrate, the first image shows my spot on this graph; the second image shows the position of Jackson (co-conspirator of No Church in the Wild):
Me (4.5/6 active, 5 of 6 hypersexual, 3 of 6 same-sex attracted):
Jackson (3/6 active, 3.5 of 6 hypersexual, 5.5 of 6 same-sex attracted):
This graphical difference is more illustrative of the difference between my personality and Jackson's than the words "gay" and "bisexual" could ever convey. I am always after it, happy with both sexes as partners, somewhat active. He is not predominately active or passive, after it an average amount, and pretty much happy only with same sex partners.
With the two additional axes of information we can get a clearer picture of the sexual compatibility of any two people. Along the hypersexuality axis, I likely need someone mapped in about the same spot so we want to get down a comparable amount of the time. Along the same-sex attraction scale, I'll likely be suited to someone (intellectually) who falls between my spot and the reciprocal spot on the other side of the axis (they have to be attracted to me, too, but might not like my flexible attractions as much in everyday conversation). The ideal match with respect to the active scale, however, is precisely on the mirrored point on the other edge of the graph (if I am ideally active /on top 70% of the time, my ideal mate wants to be active only about 30% of the time).
Perhaps I should submit this graph to OKCupid to help them improve their algorithm :)
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| Image from OKCupid |
This is the breakdown of answers across all OKCupid users. About 30% of users answer openly that that have or would like to engage in a sexual encounter with someone of the same sex. When separated by biological gender, we find that about HALF of women on the site have or would like to try women. That the number is about 25% for male users utterly supports the position taken by the narrator in No Church in the Wild - women are more likely to talk about this desire if they have it than men are.
I'll pause for a moment to consider this sample set. OKCupid users are characteristically younger than those of, say, Match.com. It may simply be that people who are more open to experimentation tend to do their online dating on OKCupid in disproportionate numbers. But, given the geographic distribution of this graphic:
 |
| Image from OKCupid |
But, folks, that's not all. Take a look at these data points:
- Only .1% or less of people who identify as gay even look for "straight" matches, debunking the notion that queers are always trying to recruit (clearly I am the exception to this statistic).
- People who identify as gay have the same median number of sexual partners as those who identify as straight.
- 1 in 3 "straight" women have hooked up with another woman and another 1 in 4 say they'd like to.
- Of "straight"-identifying men, 13% have had a same-sex experience, and another 5% haven't yet but would like to.
Kinsey had only one axis on his scale: same sex attraction to opposite-sex attraction. OKCupid also tried to map "personality traits by orientation," and that graphic speaks to the need for two more axes: Active/Top and Passive/Bottom, plus Hypersexual to Asexual (anecdotally, 2% of the gay men in OKCupid's study seemed to have 25% of all gay male sex). Note that none of my axes is tagged to gender. Gender is a concept divorced from biological sex (ask Cassandra Gorgeous) that varies, like the other items, over time. But gender isn't relevant to where a person lands on this scale at any given time.
Once we build these X, Y, and Z axes, and identify a point in the cube that correlates to all three, we have an accurate picture of a sexual being. The shape of the composite graph for all of humanity may look something like a sphere with six tiny points at each corner - the result of a standard bell curve extended over each axis and then cross-referenced. Alternately, there could be an equal distribution of the population along each axis. Based on the OKCupid stats, however, the idea that the population is mostly at the edges of the axis is totally debunked. Please feel free to comment with your spot on the map so we can see...
To demonstrate, the first image shows my spot on this graph; the second image shows the position of Jackson (co-conspirator of No Church in the Wild):
Me (4.5/6 active, 5 of 6 hypersexual, 3 of 6 same-sex attracted):
Jackson (3/6 active, 3.5 of 6 hypersexual, 5.5 of 6 same-sex attracted):
This graphical difference is more illustrative of the difference between my personality and Jackson's than the words "gay" and "bisexual" could ever convey. I am always after it, happy with both sexes as partners, somewhat active. He is not predominately active or passive, after it an average amount, and pretty much happy only with same sex partners.
With the two additional axes of information we can get a clearer picture of the sexual compatibility of any two people. Along the hypersexuality axis, I likely need someone mapped in about the same spot so we want to get down a comparable amount of the time. Along the same-sex attraction scale, I'll likely be suited to someone (intellectually) who falls between my spot and the reciprocal spot on the other side of the axis (they have to be attracted to me, too, but might not like my flexible attractions as much in everyday conversation). The ideal match with respect to the active scale, however, is precisely on the mirrored point on the other edge of the graph (if I am ideally active /on top 70% of the time, my ideal mate wants to be active only about 30% of the time).
Perhaps I should submit this graph to OKCupid to help them improve their algorithm :)
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