@Shrimpus: I'm not comfortable using a single research's conclusions to make judgements on bisexuality unless I know the methodology, the variable definitions, how sampling was done, and whether or not the results have been replicated. With what you've given, it sounds like there can be a hell of a lot of potential confounding variables and alternate interpretations of the data that would undermine "most bisexual men are really just gay" conclusion.

edited 25th Feb '11 5:56:15 PM by Sparkysharps

^^ You...do know what it means to analyze empirical data, right?

I mean first off you can measure variance and use stuff like soft margins to classify how precise you are. It's not like you try to lock down exact numbers so much as look for general feedback.

Beyond that, if someone handed you histograms measuring people's genital engorgement at various types of sexual content and there's a way bigger bump at the right end for one thing than another, or a scattergram of things that cause at least X arousal in your sampling and the dots are mostly focused in two localized chunks...I mean, there's something to be drawn from it, and you can even calculate how significant the effect is and how confident you are of its relevance.

Now you can argue semantics of methodology, math, and whether there was something else in play in a given experiment, but to just say it's impossible to analyze at all in any way is not right. A statistic is just something you observe over lots of individuals who all have their own reasons for sharing that characteristic, but the fact remains that they still have a tendency to share it.

edited 25th Feb '11 6:12:31 PM by Pykrete

drunkscriblerian: Do not worry, we can classify it. The problem is getting deep down enough for us to have actual empiric evidence to draw a reasonable conclusion. The problem is that we nowhere near it, hence a conclusion is ridicule to be drawn yet.

What Pyrkete said.

And as to why I want to quantify sexuality? I am a robot vampire who is fueled by robbing the wonder and mystery from the world

edited 25th Feb '11 6:41:27 PM by Shrimpus

I am confused as to how Pyrkete's response to CDA in any way refers to or addresses my concerns about the study's methodology and potential failures to address or control for confounding variables.

I wasn't responding to you. CDA was saying it was impossible to apply any quantitative analysis to at all, which it's not. Poking holes in a specific study's methodology is fine, poke away — though for something like bisexuality you do eventually have to draw some kind of line for the sake of a starting place, even if it's one with a soft margin.

edited 25th Feb '11 6:31:28 PM by Pykrete

Pykrete, I've been through university - I'm fully aware of the process of research, collation and analysis of data, and trending. What I'm less clear on is how gathering grotesquely flawed, meaningless, irrelevant percentage data actually adds anything to the process in this case. I specified qualititative not quantitative because the percentages make it more of a numbers game than they should. It simply isn't possible to assign meaningful percentages of sexual attraction, and because of that I'd say the numbers would harm a study. The margin for error would surely be at least 30/40% either way, and that to me invalidates the study.

The facts can be examined and studied, and trends established without such numbers.

Apologies. I wasn't trying to suggest you were. It's just Shrimpus seems to be responding to me by directing me to your post.

(Alternatively, Shrimpus is simply also responding to CAD and simply left out an additional . If that's which case, sorry for the confusion.)

edited 25th Feb '11 6:35:22 PM by Sparkysharps

Uh... yeah.. sorry

edited 25th Feb '11 6:42:17 PM by Shrimpus

No.

You're wrong. Just plain wrong. I am not a gay man faking it, I am an honest-to-god bisexual man.

Okay? So? I never said that bisexual men didn't exist just that they were comparatively rare.

Meh, I don't know guys. My roomate came out to me and his brother, who is a good friend of mine, that he was bi about two years ago. I think the reason why he said he was bi and not gay was because he thought our reaction would be more favorable if we considered him someone who still enjoyed pussy.

By now we've all just pretty much accepted that he's gay, and he doesn't do anything to tell people otherwise. It's really fun to talk about ladyparts with him around though, grosses him out so bad when I use words like "purple cabbage" and "meat curtains". ;)

I'm pan with a fixation on gender. Does that count as bi?

If you are attracted to all gender identities and sexes then no you're still pansexual. You just have certain preferences for some genders. I for example have a preference towards girls.

Where are you getting the 30/40% error? You're already making a quantitative analysis on something you just got through saying you can't.

Furthermore, it's not especially uncommon to see large variances. It's a characteristic of how your data is distributed, just like the mean or sample density, and can even itself indicate some other significant factor. You can come up with two classes of data whose intervals overlap a huge chunk of their intervals, but still have notable differences in their centers and endpoints (muscle mass between sexes). You can come up with two classes of data with similar means and variances but drastically different distributions that can mean very different things (concentrated in a bell curve, in off-center clusters, or fairly constant throughout?).

Even for really weird results, we have a shitload of tools to analyze, classify, and look for patterns. If you'd like, I can link you slides from a Data Mining course here, very interesting stuff. A lot of it deals with how to handle and weight error in various circumstances.

As for a meaningful measurement for this topic, frequency and severity of genital engorgement is a good place to start, with the understanding that we also suspect it might be caused by other things and would need to triangulate results somehow via other criteria and studies. We've previously been using vaginal lubrication, which is starting to seem like it had problems because upon comparing it to other factors we found it could be caused by too many other things and that may have skewed our results. That's not a failure of the analytical process, it's a success — even if we might have to chuck some old data, we know why, and we came out of it having learned something we didn't know before.

edited 25th Feb '11 7:31:55 PM by Pykrete

I believe it's the "most bisexual men are in fact gay" (which in turn indirectly asserts that he is likely faking it and/or deluding himself, whether that was your intention or not) bit he was taking offense to. Many of us bisexual folks are a bit sore about the "you're not REALLY bi" thing.

edited 25th Feb '11 7:39:36 PM by Sparkysharps

I freely admit I was making a guess with that, but then that only proves my point. I really don't see how the margin for error could be kept within a limit that would make the study reasonable. Basically, what good does someone saying they are, say, 81% heterosexual against 76% heterosexual, when there's no way of the person themselves knowing what their figure would be for that? It's meaningless numbers, and could be for any given case out by tens of percentiles. That being a possibility for almost everyone in the study, the results would quickly become meaningless.

You're not measuring what they say. You're measuring (involuntary) physical response.

edited 25th Feb '11 7:42:34 PM by Pykrete

We may be arguing at cross-purposes here. My argument is against any attempt to designate people as X% hetero/homo/whatever else sexual, since I honestly don't believe it's meaningfully possible to do. If that's not what you're suggesting can/should be done then I'm not actually disputing anything you're saying.

I think there might be some issues with using involuntary sexual responses as an operational definition for sexual orientation — namely, that involuntary sexual responses can be a giant fucking crapshoot themselves.

edited 25th Feb '11 7:48:46 PM by Sparkysharps

What more meaningful rubric do you have for sexual attraction than involuntary sexual response? Isn't that the whole point? I mean half the reason we have to measure that is because people are going to have massive biases we have to get around and we already have a skewed perception of our demographic through various taboos, misconceptions, and, yes, fads that might push someone to say something that's not right.

Yeah there are problems with it and it'd be a good idea to try and triangulate results through other kinds of measurement (say, brain response in the "I want to tap that" lobe) and see if they line up somewhat. But at some point you have to pick something and see what happens.

edited 25th Feb '11 8:03:52 PM by Pykrete

I think the latter idea might be a good starting direction (I'm not saying we should scrap the whole idea and never look back. I've just dealt with sexual response difficulties enough personally to know that they don't always accurately reflect sexual desire, so I'm kinda cautious about their use as an operational definition). I figure we should at least try to figure out just how much involuntary responses (or lack of them) match up to expressed sexual identity on a regular basis before we start using them to make generalizations on sexuality as a whole.

Fair enough. I get what you're saying, and you're right.