Bisexuality, in human sexuality, is the sexual interest and attraction for members of the own sex and of the opposite sex. A bisexual is therefore a person with both heterosexual and homosexual desires.
Some clinical surveys suggest that significant numbers of people experience bisexual desires and engage in bisexual activities. As tolerance for homosexual behavior increased in many societies in the late 20th century, so did the number of people identifying as bisexual.
Today, a very wide range of sexual orientations has been recognized. For science, it is interesting to study human arousal; and, for this, female sexuality is one of the most fascinating branches.
Through a series of tests, such as MRI, scientists can analyze the neural response to arousal of women of different sexual orientation.
With 76 volunteers (all of them with an age range ranging from 25 to 50 years), a team of scientists investigated in 2018 the changes in the brains of the subjects when viewing a series of erotic images and videos . The women were classified into three categories: homosexual, heterosexual, and bisexual.
The focus of attention was on the ventral striatum, an area of the brain associated with desire. The intention was to expand on the previous findings of the sexual psychophysiology literature, in which it is suggested that homosexual women have greater category specificity (in relation to heterosexual and bisexual women) in their responses to male and female erotic stimuli.
The results showed the following: the subjective and neural responses of homosexual women reflected a greater influence towards female stimuli, compared to bisexual and heterosexual women, whose responses did not differ significantly.
These same patterns were studied with full brain analyzes, with homosexual women showing more extensive category-specific activations in areas of visual and auditory processing.
For their part, bisexual women tend to show more mixed patterns. They present more receptive activations to female stimuli in the sensory processing areas and, on the contrary, more receptive activations to male stimuli in the areas associated with social cognition.
Study conclusions
Although the neural data presented are aligned with previously observed patterns in genital and subjective arousal in women, the truth is that the relationship between arousal patterns, orientation and the development of sexual motivation in women is still unknown.
The study supports previous findings that women tend not to show potentially category-specific responses to erotic stimuli, the researchers say, while gay women in particular show somewhat higher specificity than heterosexual and bisexual women.
Looking ahead, future research is expected to explore the extent to which women’s non-specific sexual response contributes to erotic plasticity (i.e., context-related sexual change) and sexual fluidity (i.e., change over time).
Reference: Adam Safron, Victoria Klimaj, David Sylva, AM Rosenthal, Meng Li, Martin Walter, and J. Michael Bailey. Scientific Reports (2018). DOI: 10.1038 / s41598-017-18372-0
