Julia Shaw

I think the right way to think about it is that I'm not attracted to most people, but I can be attracted to people regardless of gender.

Much like you're probably not attracted to most people, but you are attracted to people of a certain gender maybe.

And so it's the same as being heterosexual in terms of potentially my pool of people who I might be interested in.

It's just that their gender is irrelevant.

The biggest thing that researchers find people misunderstand about bisexuality is that it's a phase and that it's this idea that it's transient, that it's always changing and that it's a stepping stone.

So I think a lot of people still see bisexuality as on the way to gay town, sort of like...

You're on your way, but you haven't quite committed and you're still stuck in expectations of society.

You haven't quite let go yet, but really you're gay.

And that's especially true for men.

And so when you look at research on bisexual men, which is actually how the research started.

So I think now when we think of bisexuality, we think of women.

And it's true that today, twice as many women identify as bisexual as men.

But if you look at the history of this and the research on bisexuality over time, it was the other way around.

So someone called Alfred Kinsey was one of the first sexuality researchers in recent history, certainly.

And he, after World War II, did this really big study of sexual behavior in the human male, it was called.

He was a biologist himself.

And so he thought in taxonomies and he was doing research on gall wasps, so insects.

And this idea of human sexuality was sort of thrown at him.

After the war, because there's also this whole move to get people to reproduce and to rebuild America.

And so sexuality was partly, and sex specifically, was becoming more of an area of interest, both in terms of research and in terms of policy and funding.