February 14, 2014

The simplest model of bisexual females?

Gay males are defined by psychological, and even physical, stuntedness in childhood. Click on the category label "Gays" to see the wealth of posts supporting this view. It does better than the mainstream views that gays are feminized or hyper-masculinized.

They're Peter Pans who never grow out of the "girls are yucky" phase, which brings most or all of their other distinguishing traits along with it. Homosexuality in males is not just a sexual preference, it is a broader syndrome of dysfunction and depravity.

Now that I've established that to the best of my curiosity, I think it's time to move on to the two other non-hetero groups -- lesbians and bisexual women (there being no bisexual men: most are gay, some are straights trying to act "edgy"). Lesbians are too hard for me to spot in real life, and they don't stand out so much in society at large, so intuition will be lacking there. Let's start with the easier case of bisexuals.

Ideally the causes of bisexuality in women and gayness in men would be the same. Don't complicate the model if you don't need to. So, how does the psychological stuntedness model do with bi women?

The main thing that comes to mind is that they are the "wild child" type. They're not as infantilized as gays, though. They are more like horny and headstrong adolescents, fairly early adolescents, though -- middle school brats rather than college students. And they are bratty, just not as whiny as gays.

If the "gay germ" (in Greg Cochran's model) does something to halt or slow down maturation in the male brain, it could do something similar in the female brain. Same germ, similar effects, only not so extreme in intensity. Bi women tend to be intermediate between heterosexuals and gay men when it comes to deviance.

Why not so extreme? Women are less unstable than men. If there's any role of the X chromosome, women have a spare copy should one of them predispose toward harm. Male fitness is way more variable, so natural selection will only "see" the upper layers of the male distribution. Hence, males are the more disposable sex. Females have been designed to be more robust to such disruptions toward one extreme or the other. They are under-represented at both extremes.

So, if they got infected by the "gay germ," their maturation only slows down by half as much, and as adults they resemble middle schoolers rather than kindergarteners. That's if they got infected at the same age as males did. They could also just get infected at a later age, and the germ would have the same effect -- halt maturation to where it currently is. But then you'd have to explain why females got infected nearly 10 years after males did.

This post is off-the-cuff, so I'm not sure how broadly the model of "bi women as arrested middle schoolers" can account for the full suite of their characteristics. Having a high sex drive fits, and so does being willful, particularly toward authority figures. Below are more off-the-cuff thoughts on their traits that may or may not easily fit into this paradigm.

Masculinization. Bi girls are on the tomboy side in behavior, and as adults seem to have more masculine faces and perhaps skeletal structure generally (like narrower hips, broader shoulders). Testosterone levels peak in adolescence, are minimal for girls during childhood, and fall off very rapidly during their 20s and 30s as their body switches into mothering and grandmothering mode. Arresting their mind and body in adolescence would masculinize them as adults, although they wouldn't appear so relatively masculine during middle and high school, when the normal girls are also horny and headstrong.

Liking both guys and girls. This is their defining trait, so I might as well try to account for it. If their brain were arrested in childhood, they'd only like females. If it were arrested after menopause, they wouldn't really be attracted to anyone, though they'd probably prefer the company of women because they want a more peaceful and stable life, which men would disrupt. (Lesbians seem to be menopausal from an early age, but that's another topic.)

Female sexuality does seem more fluid and open than male, and early adolescent girls sometimes get practice kissing other girls at sleepovers or wherever. Girls are way more touchy-feely with each other in general at this age. This is intended, though, as practice for hooking a boy and marrying a man some day. It's only done with other girls because that makes it safer than doing so for real with a boy. In the case of bi girls, though, they don't out-grow this phase and mature into young adults who only prefer messing around with boys. Their maturation gets stuck in the phase of liking boys but feeling more comfortable playing with other girls, so that they're open for both.

That is a strong impression I get from them, BTW -- that guys to them are the real thing yet intimidating, and more of a sex object, while girls are more of a safe space where they can cuddle, make out, etc., and not worry about being judged by boys. It's very much like a sixth-grader would feel. It's not the other way around, where girls are mere sex objects while they romanticize guys.

More violent. This stems from having hormone levels frozen near adolescent levels. Anything that makes you think "hormonal" would follow from this general model.

There's more to look at, but those are a few random test cases that came to mind. I haven't given too much thought to this, so I'm not as convinced as I am of the "gay Peter Pan" model. Chime in with other well-known traits of theirs that need to be explained no matter which model it is.

16 comments:

  1. Prostitutes and sluts meet a lot of really unpleasant men. You can see why they'd get tired of us.

    ReplyDelete
  2. my experience with bisexual females was mostly in college. I joined a co-ed fraternity in 1988. It had been an typical all-male animal house type frat. It was known as the drug house on campus and was raided in 1985 which caused 12 of the members to get kicked out of school, and 3 went to prison and they were put on suspension for 2 years. So the enrollment was down to just 30 guys in 1987. We had a lot of "little sisters" but their rights were restricted - as a group they had one vote on all house matters. But for some reason in 1987 they decided to give them full rights and they had to pledge with the guys. I pledged in 1988. So we went from having "little sisters" who were more passive, hippy type girls who never intended to live in the house, to having more aggressive, sluttier type girls joining. Some of these girls turned out to be bisexual. When i moved into the house in 1989, there were 22 guys and 2 girls living in the house. When I moved out in 1992, we had 16 guys and 8 girls living in the house which started causing issues.

    I was very good friends with one of our sisters(Marie) She never moved into the house (most sisters never moved in) She was fun to party with, and enjoyed having discreet hook-ups but never seemed to want a boy friend. I would agree with your assessment that these girls had higher Testosterone levels, but on some level had fear of intimacy with boys. Marie was very discreet sexually, would generally try and hook up with the guys who were more stable and guys who had steady girlfriends. Marie would casually seduce us after we had quite a few drinks, and ask us to walk her home. This is how is occurred with me. She would say "your girlfriend will never know", but don't tell anyone. I didn't tell anyone, and a few years later realized she had done this same thing with 2 other brothers. But her last year in college one of the brothers fell in love with her . They needed up getting married, but after a year she left him for her lesbian girlfriend. I was a little surprised, but more surprised when she got married. I actually asked he why she was getting married, she was just 22, he was 24. She told me it was due to pressure from her family, they were conservative Italian Catholics.

    I remained friends with her, she moved to the village and became a macho dyke, cut her nice hair short, added some pounds, dressed like a man. She became like a lesbian Guido , hooking up with a different girl every week, still living with her feminine girlfriend. I asked her why she preferred women now, she told me it was because she liked being the dominant one in a relationship and this was not possible with men. She had a higher sex drive than most females, and enjoyed sex with men, but seemed to prefer the safety of females as they were less threatening to her. We would hang out in bars and check out women together, it was like hanging out with one of the guys.

    There were 3 other bisexuals I knew and dated in college. 2 had very high sex drives. one was a slut, one liked to experiment sexually and one was very pretty but messed up in the head (she had been molested when she was 12).
    The slut ended up getting in some crazy situations, like being gang banged at another frat, (which was filmed). She is a lesbian today. The Pretty one is married with 2 kids. The girl who liked to experiment became an alcoholic. The results were not too surprising.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I think a lot of them just claim bisexuality for the attention. Though, this would fit with your theory that they are middle-schoolers.

    ReplyDelete
  4. the phrenology of lesbians is thin lips, small eyes and what i call "puppet chins"

    ellen degeneres trifecta--cf. puppet chin lines: http://images.starpulse.com/Photos/Previews/Ellen-DeGeneres-s07.jpg

    rosie o'doneel, thin lips, small eyes, less pronounced puppet chin: http://thesnapper.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/People-Rosie-O-Donnell.JPEG.jpg

    paula poundstone trifecta--this is a male face on a female: http://www.ala.org/united/sites/ala.org.united/files/content/about/news/poundstone/paulaarms.jpg

    ReplyDelete
  5. Agnostic:"Lesbians are too hard for me to spot in real life, and they don't stand out so much in society at large, so intuition will be lacking there."

    Frankly, I think that a lot of that has to do with Bi/Hetero women muddying the waters by pretending to be be Lesbians. Genuine, 100% percent Lesbians, in my experience , are pretty easy to spot. The associated stigmata of their Lesbian status being: short, masculine style hair-cut (not a feminine bob or pixie), masculine clothing (men's polo shirts seem to be very popular; skirts are practically never worn, men's pants being preferred), strong interest in masculine sports (football, basketball, baseball, etc), etc. Of course, straight girls might exhibit anyone of these traits (except maybe the masculine-style short haircut; I've yet to see that on a straight girl), but any woman displaying all of these characteristics is almost certainly a Lesbian.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Girls kissing girls is gross. It seems deviant. I don't get it at all.

    Do you know people who did this in middle school or high school?

    ReplyDelete
  7. There were some bi girls, but I don't know if they kissed others girls during middle or high school. When I say "sometimes" practice kissing, I don't mean to suggest that it's very common. But that it's the extreme tail of a distribution of same-sex touchy-feeliness.

    Girls have a higher average for this distribution of behavior than boys do, so they're more likely than boys to practice kissing -- however infrequent it is in girls, it is completely absent in boys.

    At a lower, less extreme threshold, it might be something like hugging, holding hands, sharing a bed / spooning, brushing each other's hair, etc. Guys just don't do that stuff with each other.

    ReplyDelete
  8. And that distribution of same-sex touchy-feeliness shifts toward the hands-off direction as females age out of adolescence. Adolescents may give each other big hugs, share a bed, brush each other's hair, etc. -- but not adult women.

    So, the bi female would represent a permanent adolescent state, not the mature woman's state.

    ReplyDelete
  9. "the phrenology of lesbians is thin lips, small eyes and what i call "puppet chins" "

    That would fit the "lesbians as always-menopausal" model. Higher T relative to estrogen. Bi girls seem to have high levels of both, like your typical adolescent.

    Lesbians are also stereotyped as fat, and epidemiological studies back that up. However, they lump bi women in as well. The main studies are all about "lesbian and bisexual women," failing -- or refusing -- to look at them separately. Most of the samples are lesbian, and only a smaller number bi, so the higher combined obesity rate is mostly reflecting portly lesbians.

    Why don't they study bi women separate from lesbians, when everything points to them being radically different from each other? I guess that would go against presenting a united front against the heteronormative patriarchy, or something.

    Hard to think of any obese bi women, though, while it's easy to think of fat lesbians.

    Bi women are not pedomorphic like the gays are, though. They generally don't look like infantilized beanpoles. And they don't make infantilized facial expressions -- they can at least make somewhat grown-up faces.

    They seem to age better than normal women, without looking freakish like queers. That would fit being stuck in adolescence (not a bad time to be stuck lookswise for a woman).

    ReplyDelete
  10. "Girls have a higher average for this distribution of behavior than boys do"

    I doubt it, I still think that "bisexual" girls are just doing it to look exotic and attract boys. I thought you did a post awhile back about how the number of girls claiming to be bisexual soared during falling-crime.

    ReplyDelete
  11. In terms of homosexual face shapes

    http://i.imgur.com/BRovFFr.jpg

    shows morph shape differences between the homosexual and heterosexual faces (Valentova, et al.)

    While the following figures from "A brief review of shape, form, and allometry in geometric morphometrics, with applications to human facial morphology" () show the influences of aging (PC1) and testosterone (PC2) on male faces (Mitteroecker, et al)

    http://imgur.com/fRctzuH - with size related changes adjusted for, so you can see the differences of childlike and adultlike male faces once their different size is not a factor

    http://i.imgur.com/zCgexDY.png - without size adjusted for

    The "gay male" morph does look like the childlike but also testosteronized portions of the size adjusted PC plot.

    That makes sense to me, as the goal of a gay germ, or at least the behavioral phenotype of gay men, would combine a high degree of sensation seeking behavior associated with masculinization along with childlike degrees of immaturity, fondness for play, education and stories. A gay germ that just worked through a childlike channel wouldn't necessarily increase sexual behavior as much.

    I wonder if geeks would score along the lines of having slightly less facial maturity than the average adult straight man (which makes sense, as geeks are supposed to be playful, game obsessed, immature men), but more than gays (just enough to generally be interested in chicks and in team oriented techy building behavior), but slightly less masculinity than average men as well (as they tend to be rather functionally aesexual in terms of going out and getting dates, etc).

    ReplyDelete
  12. In Taiwan, where I currently live and work, there seem to be a truly enormous number of lesbians, and they look totally different from the ones I've seen in America. Extremely androgynous but not at all butch -- I often mistake them for boys when I first see them, but always for very sissy, "girly" (read: infantilized) boys -- they basically look like gays, but with somewhat softer facial features. (Narrow hips like gays, and always perfectly flat chests even by Chinese standards.) It's happened countless times: I'll point someone out to my Taiwanese wife and say "He's got to be gay," and she'll reply, "That's a girl!" Every time we've been able to verify it, she's been right -- and the person in question has been a lesbian.

    I've also met one or two American-style lesbians here, the kind you accurately describe as "always-menopausal," but the androgynous/faggy type is far more common -- unbelievably common, really; it seems to be something of an epidemic here.

    Based on this, it seems probable to me that "lesbianism" is not a unitary phenomenon the way male homosexuality apparently is -- that there are at least two different conditions, with little in common aside from the shared symptom of misdirected sexual attraction.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Weird. I don't think I've seen many non-hetero girls who had the super-infantilized look. That has always struck me as odd: females are presumably contracting the "gay germ" from the environment however the to-be-gay boys are, yet they don't show the same symptoms.

    Maybe something about Taiwanese or East Asians makes them more susceptible to its effects, and the women as well as the men show sissy symptoms?

    ReplyDelete
  14. Pure dribble

    ReplyDelete
  15. "there's no such thing as bisexual, that's just something they invented in the 90s to sell hair products." -- Liz Lemon in 30 Rock

    ReplyDelete

You MUST enter a nickname with the "Name/URL" option if you're not signed in. We can't follow who is saying what if everyone is "Anonymous."