Chaim Amalek emails: Luke’s religious guide Rabbi Rabb repeatedly asserts that “everyone is bisexual”, and further claims that the Torah itself implicitly acknowledges this. However, hard research conducted by some scientists suggests that it does not, or that if it does, it must be fairly rare.
Here’s the money shot of the piece:
In the experiment, psychologists at Northwestern University and the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto used advertisements in gay and alternative newspapers to recruit 101 young adult men. Thirty-three of the men identified themselves as bisexual, 30 as straight and 38 as homosexual.
The researchers asked the men about their sexual desires and rated them on a scale from 0 to 6 on sexual orientation, with 0 to 1 indicating heterosexuality, and 5 to 6 indicating homosexuality. Bisexuality was measured by scores in the middle range.
Seated alone in a laboratory room, the men then watched a series of erotic movies, some involving only women, others involving only men.
Using a sensor to monitor sexual arousal, the researchers found what they expected: gay men showed arousal to images of men and little arousal to images of women, and heterosexual men showed arousal to women but not to men.
But the men in the study who described themselves as bisexual did not have patterns of arousal that were consistent with their stated attraction to men and to women. Instead, about three-quarters of the group had arousal patterns identical to those of gay men; the rest were indistinguishable from heterosexuals.
“Regardless of whether the men were gay, straight or bisexual, they showed about four times more arousal” to one sex or the other, said Gerulf Rieger, a graduate psychology student at Northwestern and the study’s lead author.
FRIENDLY FRED EMAILS: “I am highly skeptical about the claim that everyone is bisexual. Even if I were on a desert island with nothing but men, I still could not imagine shtupping another guy.”
Rabbi Rabbs emails: Chaim,
Thank you for watching our Torah Talks and for your feedback. Nothing in that study you quoted contradicts anything in Torah, and even if it did, Torah wouldn’t care.
As I have stated many times, every person has at least a little bit of attraction for both genders. Some people have huge attractions for one gender, but not so much the other, while some have huge attractions for both genders, while some have very little for either.
The study showed exactly that.
