Meanwhile, as women have been able to find more freedom, men’s gender roles have stayed relatively static as they continue to hold power in society. In that sense, eschewing exclusive heterosexuality could be seen as part of women breaking out of traditional gender roles. “Fifty years ago, you couldn’t have a life if you didn’t marry a man and settle down because he needed to provide for you,” adds Morgan. Though he doesn’t discount the LGBTQ+ movement’s effect on people identifying as sexually fluid today, Massy believes feminism and the women’s movement play a role in why more women identify this way than men – especially as no equivalent men’s movement has enabled men to break out of historical, gender-based restrictions in the same way. “Progress has really been made around the female gender role and less around the male gender role,” says Massey. However, these changes affected men and women differently.
Massey and his colleagues largely chalk up the notable change to cultural shifts, like the progress of feminism and the women’s movement, which both changed the socio-political landscape significantly over the past several decades. But gender roles – and how they both have and have not changed – may be a significant factor. “All of this is too complicated to pin on one thing,” says Elizabeth Morgan, associate professor of psychology at Springfield College in Massachusetts, US. Across the board, more women have been reporting more same-sex attraction, year-over-year, than their male counterparts. Other surveys from around the world, including in the UK and the Netherlands, present similar findings. Meanwhile, men’s attraction and sexual behaviour stayed mostly static in the same time frame: about 85% reported sexual attraction to women only, and close to 90% reported engaging in sex exclusively with women. The number of women exclusively having sex with men also dropped between those years. In 2019, 65% of women reported only being attracted to men, a notable decrease from 77% in 2011.
They found that between 20, college-age women had increasingly moved away from exclusive heterosexuality. “Why don't we go back and look and see if there's been any trends?” “We thought, gosh, we've collected this data for 10 years,” says Massey, an ssociate professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Binghamton University. They’d never before looked at how that data changed over time – until Massey and colleagues recently realised they were sitting on a treasure trove of information about sexual attraction.
In each of their studies, they asked participants to report their sexual orientation and gender. Sean Massey and his colleagues at the Binghamton Human Sexualities Research Lab in New York have been studying sexual behaviours for about a decade. With these new insights, however, the question remains: what does this mean for sexual fluidity in the future for all genders? So, what accounts for this discrepancy? Experts believe there are many factors that feed into this progression, especially changes in social climate that have let women break out of conventional gender roles and identities. With the open dialogue, sexual identities are becoming less rigid and more fluid.īut new data show that this shift is more prevalent in one group: in many countries, women are embracing sexual fluidity now at much higher rates than they have in the past, and more significantly than men are overall. People seem increasingly open to discussing their sexuality, and more unconventional, even formerly “invisible”, identities have become part of an increasingly mainstream discourse.
Where there was once a single, well-known rainbow pride flag, today, a wide array of colourful flags fly to showcase the diversity of orientations. The way we think about sexuality is changing.
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