Bisexuality not a transitional phase among women: Study

The researchers in the United States have carried out a study and found bisexuality in women is a distinctive sexual orientation and not a transitional stage which some females adopt on their way to lesbianism.

According to the study’s lead author Lisa M. Diamond of the University of Utah, “This research provides the first empirical examination of competing assumptions about the nature of bisexuality, both as a sexual identity label and as a pattern of nonexclusive sexual attraction and behaviour.

“The findings demonstrate considerable fluidity in bisexual, unlabelled and lesbian women’s attractions, behaviours and identities and contribute to researchers’ understanding of the complexity of sexual-minority development over the life span.” The researchers came to the conclusion after analysing nearly 80 non-heterosexual women over a period of 10 years, according to the ‘scienceDaily’.

In the study, they used interview data collected five times over a decade from the participant women who identified as lesbian, bisexual or unlabelled. The subjects initially ranged in age from 18 to 25 years old.

The researchers found that bisexual and unlabelled women were more likely than lesbians to change their identity over the course of the study, but they tended to switch between bisexual and unlabelled rather than to settle on lesbian or heterosexual as their identities.

Seventeen per cent of respondents switched from a bisexual or unlabelled identity to heterosexual during the study -- but more than half of these women switched back to bisexual or unlabelled by the end.

By year ten, most of the women were involved in long-term monogamous relationships -- 70 per cent of the self-identified lesbians, 89 per cent of the bisexuals, 85 per cent of the unlabelled women and 67 per cent of those who were then calling themselves heterosexual.

Women’s definitions of lesbianism appeared to permit more flexibility in behaviour than their definitions of heterosexuality. For example, of the women who identified as lesbians in the last round of interviews, 15 per cent reported having sexual contact with a man during the prior two years.

In contrast, none of the women who settled on a heterosexual label at that point reported having sexual contact with a woman within the previous two years.