Just how permissive are the beliefs of non-heterosexuals?

Studies of gay and bisexual men show that they are more sexually permissive in their behavior, and likewise for bisexual women compared to straight or lesbian women. But sexual behavior is always constrained by the simple fact that it takes two. Why don't we look at their beliefs on sexually permissive behavior, which might give us a purer view of the differences between heterosexuals and non-heterosexuals.

(I collapse gay and bisexual males into a single non-heterosexual group, but preserve the three-part division among females, because that's what the findings on arousal argue for. Men are aroused either by male or female erotic images, but not by both; whereas some women truly are aroused by both.)

We will treat "sexual permissiveness" as a personality trait or preference that's too tough to measure precisely, but that we can investigate using La Griffe du Lion's method of thresholds. We imagine sexual permissiveness as a continuous trait -- some people score really low, others really high, and everything in between. At some point toward the high-end of this spectrum, we set a threshold and ask what percent of the various groups score above that threshold? We can then use this to figure out how far apart the average scores of the various groups are, assuming the trait to be normally distributed. Knowing that, we can also predict what ratio of one group to another we would expect at some extreme value of the trait -- far out into the right tail.

To identify a clearly high-end threshold for sexual permissiveness, consider what your beliefs are about two 14 to 16 year-olds having sex. The General Social Survey asks just such a question: is it always wrong, almost always wrong, sometimes wrong, or not wrong at all? As you look at higher values of sexual permissiveness, at some point you reach the value where the person is permissive enough to think that teenage sex is OK (maybe with provisos) rather than always wrong. Here is a picture to help see what I mean:


Along the spectrum of permissiveness, at the low end we find people who believe that oral sex is OK -- people whose value is to the left of that point are not even that permissive -- while farther to the right, we find people who are permissive enough to believe that teenage sex is OK. Farther to the right still, we find people with ever more permissive beliefs, perhaps going so far as to condone public unprotected sex. A group of people will have a distribution of values along this spectrum, and we'll assume it's normal for convenience and because most personality traits are made to be normal too. We also assume the various groups have the same variance.

By finding out what percent of some group lies to the right of our threshold point, we can work backward to determine what z-score this threshold represents for the group. Doing this for two groups, we can find the difference between the means of each. For example, if 16% of group A exceeds the threshold, while just 2.5% of group B exceeds the threshold, that implies that the threshold is +1 S.D. above A's mean and +2 S.D. above B's mean. That means that there is a difference of 2 - 1 = 1 S.D. between the two group's means, favoring A.

Furthermore, knowing how far apart the two groups are on average, we can extrapolate what the A-to-B ratio would be at an even further extreme value that we haven't even observed. Obviously there will be more A's than B's (if the two groups are the same size), but the question is by how much. These extreme value predictions are useful because we find extremes more fascinating than averages, and it may be harder to get honest answers out of people as we ask more and more extreme questions.

Now back to sexual permissiveness. The GSS allows two ways to figure out who is heterosexual or not. One is straightforward and asks what sex your sex partners have been over the last 5 years: only male, male and female, or only female. They also ask how many male (or female) partners you've had since age 18. If a male answers 0 partners, he's straight; if he answers 1 or more, he's not. You can do the same for females; bisexuals have to answer 1 or more partners for both questions. The sample sizes are a bit larger using the second method, but the results are very similar. So I'll show the graphs for both methods, but I'll only use the second one in applying the method of thresholds.

First, here are the graphs for male heterosexuals vs. non-heterosexuals, for the first and then second method:



Straight males are more likely to say teenage sex is always wrong, while gay males are more permissive -- although a bare majority of them still think it's always wrong. Next, the differences among females for the first and then second method:



Notice first that females overall are less permissive than males -- no surprise there. Lesbians are more permissive than straight females, but not nearly by the same gap as the one separating gay and straight males. However, there is a yawning chasm separating bisexual females not only from the other female groups but even from both male groups! This result about their beliefs is consistent with their sexual behavior, as surveys (including the GSS) routinely show that bisexual females lead over-sexed lives. They have a general "wild child" mindset, so it shouldn't be surprising that those who think teenage sex is always wrong are in the minority among bisexual women.

(I've looked at responses to this teenage sex question across all sorts of demographic groups, and aside from GSS respondents who are youngsters themselves, I haven't found a single group where the majority think it is OK, let alone one where one estimate puts them at over 60%. Very wild indeed.)

Comparing gay to straight males, we find a difference in means of 0.31 S.D. favoring gay males. Comparing lesbian to straight females, there is a 0.17 S.D. gap favoring lesbians. And comparing bisexual to straight females, there is a 0.68 S.D. gap favoring bisexuals. To make this more intuitive, let's pretend we were talking about height instead of sexual permissiveness. It's as if gay men were 0.92 inches "taller" than straight men on average; as if lesbians were 0.51 inches "taller" than straight women on average; and as if bisexual women were 2 inches "taller" than straight women on average. You might notice the gay-straight gap in the real world, probably not the lesbian-straight gap, but almost certainly you'd notice the bisexual-straight gap.

Now suppose we wanted to predict how much one group would predominate at an even more extreme value along the permissiveness spectrum. That might be holding the belief that it's OK to have unprotected sex in public -- or actually having done so. These extremes are harder to investigate directly because the events that would tip us off to people being there are incredibly rare, and asking people if they've ever had unprotected sex in public may not give us very reliable answers. So we turn to the method of thresholds and ask what ratio of non-heterosexuals to heterosexuals we predict to find at, say, the value of 3 S.D. above the heterosexual average.

Obviously this won't tell us what to expect in the real world since the straight and non-straight populations are very different in size. Still, we'll pretend they were the same size in order to highlight how different the various groups are. In a moment, I'll re-adjust these ratios to reflect the groups' real sizes in order to get better real-world predictions.

At the extreme value of 3 S.D. above the straight male mean, we expect a gay-to-straight ratio of 2.6 to 1. At the value of 3 S.D. above the straight female mean, we expect a lesbian-to-straight ratio of 1.7 to 1, and a bisexual-to-straight ratio of 7.6 to 1! Clearly the minds of heterosexuals and non-heterosexuals are not the same on average.

Correcting for the huge differences in population size between straights and non-straights, I've used the GSS to figure out what percent of the male and female population are gay, straight, or bisexual. For males, 96% are straight and 4% gay. For females, 96.4% are straight, 2% are lesbian, and 1.6% are bisexual. In the real world, then, we expect 9.2 straight males for every gay male at the extreme; 28.1 straight females for every lesbian; and 8 straight females for every bisexual female. The larger point remains, though: non-heterosexuals, especially bisexual women, are more permissive in the beliefs -- and so presumably in their actions -- than heterosexuals.

As an analogy, consider the fact that Ashkenazi Jewish people score much higher (about 1 S.D.) on IQ tests than other Europeans. Still, because Jews make up such a small fraction of the overall population (about 2%), it will still be the case that non-Jewish Europeans will outnumber Jews at extreme IQ levels. The first fact tells us that a representative person from the two groups will be pretty different, perhaps due to their ancestors facing different evolutionary selection pressures or due to having different hormone levels or whatever. The second fact tells us that we shouldn't let the first fact lead us to expect a majority of the unusual group at unusual levels, unless the two groups are similar in size.

GSS variables used: teensex, sex, sexsex5, nummen, numwomen