Being Sexually Fluid

The way we think about sexuality is changing. 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. People seem increasingly open to discussing their sexuality, and more unconventional, even formerly “invisible”, identities have become part of an increasingly mainstream discourse. With the open dialogue, sexual identities are becoming less rigid and more fluid.

But 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.

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 these new insights, however, the question remains: what does this mean for sexual fluidity in the future for all genders?

A notable shift
Sean Massey and his colleagues at the Binghamton Human Sexualities Research Lab in New York have been studying sexual behaviours for about a decade. In each of their studies, they asked participants to report their sexual orientation and gender. 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.

“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. “Why don't we go back and look and see if there's been any trends?”

They found that between 2011 and 2019, college-age women had increasingly moved away from exclusive heterosexuality. In 2019, 65% of women reported only being attracted to men, a notable decrease from 77% in 2011. The number of women exclusively having sex with men also dropped between those years. 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.