A federal health statistics report with pages of numbers and tables was a surprising place to find the spark for an intriguing puzzle about sexuality. In 2011, a major nationally representative survey found that women with the lowest levels of educational attainment reported the highest lifetime prevalence of sex with other women (Chandra et al. 2011). The majority of these women also had sexual experiences with men. These findings contradicted dominant stereotypes about bisexuality and attracted attention: The New York Times described how the finding was surprising because it challenged the idea that college was a “hive of same-sex experimentation” (Lewin 2011). For far too long, when many people pictured a bisexual woman, they imagined someone who is sexually adventurous and gets lots of attention at college parties for making out with her friends. These images come from a partial and slanted view of reality that is reinforced in pop culture, including novels, movies, and popular songs like Katy Perry’s megahit “I Kissed a Girl” (Rupp and Taylor 2010). But, perhaps most surprisingly, these inaccurate images have also come from social science.
The goal of this chapter is to identify and interrogate social perceptions of bisexual women. In particular, this chapter uses the conceptual lens of sexual fluidity to understand how gender, race, and class shape ideas about bisexuality. Along the way, this chapter considers how the norms of social science – a “business as usual” approach to conducting research – can produce partial, unreliable, or invalid facts about sexuality. There is a feedback loop between the production of scientific knowledge, society’s pervasive sexual stereotypes, and even the ideas people hold about themselves. In the case of women’s sexual fluidity, social research has focused on the experiences of middle-class, white women, shaping mainstream beliefs about who is most likely to have bisexual desires, behaviors, and identities and causing researchers to overlook sexual fluidity in less-privileged populations.
Mainstream media narratives are not the only sources of information that tend to highlight the stories and lives of more privileged women living on the progressive campuses of selective universities. The social sciences have traditionally done this as well, in part because these are the individuals and communities that the professors conducting the research have the easiest access to. This is not necessarily a criticism. If they were to post signs in local shops recruiting paid participants for an experiment in the psychology department or a focus group in the sociology department, most respondents would likely live nearby, be familiar with the places in the advertisements, and feel comfortable enough with the idea of participating in research to contact the phone number on the tear-away tab. Researchers get ideas and questions from the environment and people around them. But if those environments and people are homogeneous (all the same), that would present a crucial limitation of research meant to be more broadly generalizable. In other words, if professors’ research studies were made up entirely of participants who were similar to each other (in terms of age, race, socioeconomic status, and living environment) the resulting findings would not represent everybody. This is precisely what had been happening in social research on sexuality throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
The earliest social surveys of sexuality, conducted before World War II, focused entirely on convenience samples (people the researcher had easy access to) of homogeneous groups such as college students, sororities, or army recruits (Ericksen and Steffen 1999). In the immediate post-war period, zoologist-turned-sociologist Alfred Kinsey became a household name after publishing two explosive books documenting a rainbow of variation in human sexuality (Drucker 2014; Kinsey 1948). Kinsey recruited thousands of people to participate in lengthy sexual life-history interviews using snowball sampling: He would ask each participant for the contact information of more people he should interview, gradually building a bigger and bigger collection of people who could be traced to each other through social networks. Journalists and researchers alike criticized his methods for not randomly selecting participants from the entire population (the gold standard of representative generalizable research). But compared to anything else that came before, Kinsey was meticulous in collecting and analyzing his interview data, and his resulting books (one about women and the other about men) contained the most detailed and comprehensive sexuality statistics ever compiled. In the decades following Kinsey’s first explosive look at the private sex lives of Americans, a new generation of sexuality scholars conducted research on the gay rights movement, lesbian and gay civic life, and the development of sexual identity. These studies focused on people, communities, organizations, and spaces that were disproportionately white.
In the post-war decades through the present, it became more common for the federal government to fund large-scale surveys that included a range of sexuality topics, such as relationships, pregnancy, contraception, and sexual behavior. These topics were important to public health officials, doctors, epidemiologists, economists, teachers, and more, so collecting scientific data that could inform public policy was a financial and research priority. These topics were also more acceptable to the average American and came under less scrutiny and criticism than the types of questions that sexuality scholars like Kinsey asked. Research was often designed with this in mind. For example, when the government first started the largest family and fertility population survey that is still ongoing today, only married (white) women were included because it was a social taboo to ask unmarried women about sex, even if they had children. On the other hand, it was an uphill battle to use public funding to conduct research on sexuality topics like orgasm, pleasure, foreplay, extramarital sexuality, polyamory, or homosexuality (Laumann et al. 1994; Westbrook et al. 2021).
This brief history of the development of social studies of sexuality illustrates that researchers often had to make tough choices between, on the one hand, conducting research that drew on federal resources to collect socially acceptable data from a large and diverse group of people, or, on the other hand, conducting research that was narrower in scope and used convenience samples (people the researcher has easy access to) but could study more niche topics (Bullough 1994). Over time, these research choices led to largely distinct and separate bodies of social science research about young women’s sexualities. One reason that the sexuality statistic introduced earlier (in which women with the least education reported the most same-gender sexual activity) became a popular puzzle was that it fell precisely into a gap between what sexuality scholars had typically studied.
The classrooms, clubs, and campuses of selective universities are a specific context within which to learn about women’s sexuality. What researchers learn about sexuality in these spaces may not be generalizable beyond the elite campus. Despite acknowledging this as a limitation of their research, much of the contemporary body of knowledge about sexuality is built from studies of college students. A major touchstone within this scholarship is the theory of sexual fluidity (Diamond 2008), an idea developed by a psychology professor and sexuality researcher about how young women’s sexuality could be context-dependent and change over time but nevertheless be experienced as a deep and authentic identity. The major book on the topic was based on years of research with college women, and it was not until many years later that the original author and other researchers began to see how sexual fluidity also was a part of life experience and identity for many young men, too.
In national social science research surveying large diverse populations, the topics and questions had to be carefully vetted, agreed upon, and tested by many people over many years. This research predominantly took the form of standardized survey questionnaires on socially acceptable topics in which the resulting data could be aggregated to produce sexuality statistics about the broader population. This research investigated gendered life experiences such as pregnancy, parenting, sex, contraceptive use, and relationships. It is common for the research to focus on people between the ages of 18 and 24. These ages make up a developmental life stage referred to as the transition to adulthood (a phrase common among public health, demography, and psychology researchers to indicate this important life stage). It is a time when life can start to diverge strongly along race and socioeconomic status, with more privileged women going away to college, dating casually or participating in campus hookup culture, and delaying parenthood to focus on their educations and future careers. Disadvantaged women of the same age, meanwhile, are more likely to seek the flexibility and affordability of commuting to school or studying part-time while balancing families of their own and paid jobs.
Social demography (the study of how cultural, political, and economic factors shape human populations; emphasizing statistics about birth, death, disease, fertility, and migration) could uncover information on sexual topics that were easier to get everyone to agree was important – teenage pregnancy, unmarried moms, sexually transmitted disease, risky sex, and violence. By contrast, same-gender sex was much more taboo and so was less likely to be asked about on a survey. Demographic research (by way of sampling randomly from large populations) included women with all kinds of nonheterosexual experiences and identities – it just did not ask specifically about them. Meanwhile, sex researchers were refining theoretical concepts like hookup culture and sexual fluidity without being able to test their ideas on women beyond the progressive campuses of elite colleges and universities. The norms, strengths, and weaknesses of different methodologies of sex research were building differentiated knowledges where we learned about pleasure, desire, and identity by studying privileged women, whereas we learned about risk, disparity, and violence in the studies that also included disadvantaged women.
The Relationship Dynamics and Social Life (RDSL) study followed 1,000 young women in the transition to adulthood for two-and-a-half years. RDSL collected short weekly surveys from participants to learn more about the prevalence, causes, and consequences of unplanned pregnancy. Most social demography and fertility research, including studies like RDSL, have not traditionally collected data on sexual orientation or same-gender relationships. But lesbian and bisexual women are part of these studies anyway since participants are recruited randomly from the broader population.
Before I went to graduate school, I had a job where my task was to handle questions, comments, and complaints that came from RDSL participants. Most people who contacted me had simple questions about their incentive payment or getting technical support with the website, but some inquiries came from women telling me their partner was another woman and requesting guidance on how to answer the survey questions about sex and birth control. Like other fertility studies, RDSL did not ask whether the participant’s partner was a man or a woman, and many questions about attitudes toward sex did not include a specific definition of what they meant. The RDSL research team wanted to learn more about the lesbian and bisexual women in the survey, so I wrote new survey questions about sexual identity, behavior, and attraction. The questions were intentionally broad to be able to identify all women who wanted to report any same-gender attraction or romantic or sexual experience, and any type of nonheterosexual identity (including queer and rejecting the confining boxes of identity labels). Of the 579 women who filled out this special one-time supplemental survey, 213 – over one-third of RDSL participants – gave at least one nonheterosexual response (Budnick 2016; Ela and Budnick 2017).
Because RDSL had a racially and socioeconomically diverse sample representative of the broader population, I was able to interview women that many sexualities researchers usually might not be able to reach. By combining the methods and topics used by different social research traditions (asking in-depth questions on topics like desire in a diverse random sample representing the general population), I was able to begin putting the pieces of the puzzle together to understand women’s bisexuality beyond college campuses.
Disadvantaged women (including poorer women and women of color) have earlier pathways toward parenthood and family formation and are less comfortable participating in the hookup culture (an environment that accepts and encourages casual sexual behavior; also an important topic in the sociology of sexuality) popular on college campuses. Sexualities research has found that the number of women having same-gender sex declines as they get older (the stereotype is of college women hooking up with other women but eventually “settling down” with a man). These two documented patterns intersect earlier in the lives of the women I interviewed. The possibilities for lesbian and bisexual identification and same-gender sex are limited in two important ways: young moms prioritize their identity as good and self-sacrificing parents first, and women who have settled into committed relationships with men instead of exploring and hooking up described feeling like their nonheterosexual desires, experiences, or identity were no longer relevant.
The survey research participants I interviewed had reported having same-gender attraction, sexual experiences with women, or an identity other than “straight.” They told me about reconsidering their sexual identity, relationships, and values once they became mothers. For many, this did not leave space for exploring their attraction to women. One woman I interviewed described making big changes to her social circle after having her daughter, whom she conceived with an on-again/off-again boyfriend. She severed friendships with a gay man and lesbian woman she used to be close to after moving back into her childhood home with her parents. Although she grew more socially progressive and explored her sexuality as she grew up, all of that shifted to reflect her religious and conservative context once she became a mom. Another woman told me a similar story of becoming more conservative and less tolerant of the gay people in her life once she became a mom, out of fear that her child would grow up marginalized and teased. Both of these women were confronting the challenge to integrate sexual acceptance and exploration within their intolerant conservative communities once they were in a position where they had to depend on those communities to help raise their children. After becoming a mom in their late teens or early twenties, the women I interviewed described viewing their same-gender attraction or bisexual identity as less relevant. They talked about how nothing was more important than being a good mom. Fulfilling the social expectations of what it meant to be a “good mother” meant putting yourself aside, sacrificing for your family, and settling down. More privileged women of the same ages were putting off serious relationships and family plans in favor of identity development projects. While college women embarked on summer internships, study abroad semesters, or sex-positive exploration of identity and desire, less-privileged women of the same ages were forced to hurry through comparative stages of the transition to adulthood. As for bisexuality? Once these young moms saw the space for their own sexuality shrinking, they said goodbye to all that.
Stemming from the stereotype that bisexual women are adventurous and have an insatiable sexual appetite, there is a social perception that bisexuality fundamentally conflicts with monogamy. This could not be farther from the truth. As sexualities scholars know, sexual desires, behaviors, and identity are distinct concepts. Sexual fluidity theory describes how sexual orientation, attraction, and behavior can be discordant (not match up) and change over time. The women I interviewed who recalled being “out and proud” as bisexual and dating women in high school told me how they struggled to find a place for these parts of themselves within the context of their relationship to their boyfriend or husband (recall that it is common among all women for bisexual identification and behavior to decline over time, but disadvantaged women settle down with men and become moms earlier in life). In multiple interviews, women described how threesomes could be a lower-stakes way to raise the issue of same-gender desire with their partner. Threesomes (actually having one or simply fantasizing about it) could be a way to offload desire and longing while still including their different-gender partner and without challenging their relationship.
Sociology – like all types of science – is something that humans make and do. The findings that come from our research must be understood in their context. Sociologists work hard to make sure there is a good match between their research topic, research question, and research method. But sociology is a large field and today’s sociologists use different methods and approaches for learning about the social issues they study. For example, a sociologist who wants to learn more about college hookup culture could live in a dorm to learn about student life up close and personal (ethnography), send questionnaires to thousands of people (survey research), or sit down with a few carefully chosen people and ask them all a similar set of in-depth questions (qualitative interviewing). Depending on what the sociologist wants to know, they might use a different method of analysis. This can be challenging for social science when the different research produces different information or focuses on different people or places. However, this can be wonderful for social science when the sociologists read each other’s work to identify overlaps, divergences, missing pieces, and puzzles. When different kinds of research are put in conversation in this way, the resulting knowledge grows stronger and better (something feminist philosopher of science Sandra Harding calls strong objectivity).
Another goal many social scientists and sexualities scholars share is a commitment to intersectionality. This means researchers must consider how multiple identities (such as race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic status) come together and interact, uniquely shaping individual people and social groups. By interviewing women recruited from the RDSL study, I was able to see how sexual identity is shaped by race, class, parenthood, and space (specifically the environment of college campuses). Although there may have once been two main bodies of research in the sociology of sexuality using different methods to study different topics (that is, large surveys that did not ask about same-gender desire, behavior, or identity versus smaller studies that focused on elite college students), it is critical to know that there is a rich tradition of sociologists – many featured in this book – using convenience samples to examine people from historically marginalized groups. The idea of two divided camps of research is quickly becoming history. Today’s sociology of sexualities has expanded dramatically in a couple of ways shaped precisely by the people reading this book. First, the internet has transformed the way researchers find, recruit, and study people, making almost anybody convenient to sample. Second, research about higher education has been so widely critiqued for focusing on elites that studying college today means including first-generation, disadvantaged, and other historically represented students and more types of institutional settings.
This chapter used the sociology of bisexuality as a case to think through these issues and illustrate what new information can be learned when sociologists are creative with methods and data.
Jamie Budnick is NICHD Postdoctoral Fellow in the Population Studies Center at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, USA. She is a sociologist specializing in gender, sexuality, and feminist science studies. Her research focuses on the social construction of sexuality knowledge, particularly the knowledge produced through demography and population measurement. Through an account of the social lives of sexuality statistics, her book project, The New Gay Science: How Demography Shaped Sexuality Knowledge and LGBTQ Politics, examines how demographic sexuality knowledge and the sexual minority demographic were co-produced. Her research has also explored reproductive health, intimate partner violence, social survey measures, and sexual identity and has been published in the American Sociological Review, Contexts, Demography, Gender & Society, and Sexualities.