More and More People Consider Themselves Bisexual

A new national survey done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and published on Thursday, revealed that more and more people consider themselves bisexual. According to Debby Herbenick, who is a professor at the Indiana University, says that the recent findings could be because bisexuality has been talked about a lot in the past years made it easier for a lot of people to identify with it.

The survey involved more than 9,000 Americans, with ages between 18 and 44. The questions they were given were if they are attracted by the same or opposite gender, the types of sexual experiences they had, and if they believe to be straight, bisexual, lesbian or gay. The interviews took place since 2011 until 2013, and were part of the National Survey of Family Growth. A previous similar survey done between 2006 and 2010 by CDC showed similar findings. 1.9% of men declared themselves as being homosexuals, while 1.3% of women said that they were lesbians.

This time, more women had sexual experiences with other women, with 17.4% in the latest survey and only 14.3% between 2006 and 2010. More men and women identified themselves as being bisexual. The number of bisexual women increased from 3.9% to  5.5%, and the number of bisexual men increased from 1.2% to 2%. Herbenick said that the number of bisexual men and women continues to grow, but that it can be hard to adopt this position. Bisexual people are judged not only by heterosexuals, but by homosexuals as well.

Another trend that has been observed is that women were more likely to be bisexual than men, and they also had more sexual contact with the same gender. From the 9,000 people surveyed, 6.2% of men said that they had same gender sexual contact, while 17.4% of the women had lesbian experiences.

The lead author of the survey demographer Casey E. Copen, said that women were given more opportunities to say that they had a same gender sexual contact. Women were asked about oral sex and any other lesbian experience, whereas the questions the men were asked were limited to oral or anal sex. She believes that this might be the reason why such few men identified as being gay. This report found 1.9% men to be gay, while other studies show that the more accurate number comes close to 4% or even 6%.

In the last years, Copen noticed that more and more people consider themselves bisexual. The women especially have been identifying themselves as being bisexual, rather than lesbians.

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