Controversial research led by Psychology lecturer, Dr Gerulf Rieger at the University of Essex studied up to 345 females to find out whether women, who identify as straight, are stimulated by both men and women.
To uncover true human sexuality through physiological queues, the study used eye-tracking technology to measure pupil dilation instead of genital arousal to prove the theory because you can’t control eye dilation.
The results, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have flipped age-old beliefs about hetero sexual orientation, for starters. It showed that a whopping 82 per cent of the women tested were aroused by both sexes. Of the women who identified as heterosexual, 74 per cent were strongly aroused by videos of both attractive men and attractive women.
So, does that mean, we’re all a little bit bisexual or gay?
Perhaps, as the results did not apply to self-identified lesbians, these women “responded more to their preferred sex [women] over the other sex,” Rieger told Mic. “However, none of the women, not even straight women, responded more strongly to males than to females.”
Wowsers. Talk about taking your girl crush to the next level…
“Even though the majority of women identify as straight, our research clearly demonstrates that when it comes to their physiological sexual arousal, they are either bisexual or gay but never straight,” Rieger said.
So, what do you think, girls? Is it just that we find women attractive because of our obsession with beauty in all its forms? Or is that women find other women psychologically and physiologically attractive? Or maybe it’s that women are more in touch with each other’s feelings and tend to empathise generally and be happy to physically express things more easily.
I’m not entirely convinced that a study is going to force me to be attracted to other women. Or that the study is entirely trustworthy either. We all know sexual preferences are broad and come with many a nuance. Men, after all, are quite simple when it comes to sexual desire, but women’s sexual responses are, well and probably always will be, a bit of a mystery.
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