"Dear Dr. Diamond, I never thought this would happen to me, but…"
By Amanda, Lindsay and Jessica all, for myriad reasons, shred this ridiculous NYT story, which somehow made the front page of the Science Section. Read their posts first. On a less substantive note, this line from the story made me laugh out loud in a coffee shop:
Although only a small number of women identify themselves as bisexual, Dr. Bailey said, bisexual arousal may for them in fact be the norm.
Researchers have little sense yet of how these differences may affect behavior, or sexual identity. In the mid-1990’s, Dr. Diamond recruited a group of 90 women at gay pride parades, academic conferences on gender issues and other venues. About half of the women called themselves lesbians, a third identified as bisexual and the rest claimed no sexual orientation. In follow-up interviews over the last 10 years, Dr. Diamond has found that most of these women have had relationships both with men and women.
“Most of them seem to lean one way or the other, but that doesn’t preclude them from having a relationship with the nonpreferred sex,” she said. “You may be mostly interested in women but, hey, the guy who delivers the pizza is really hot, and what are you going to do?”
Seriously, what the hell–was this story submitted by Alan Sokal under a pseudonym? Did the Times pick up an Onion story off the newswire by mistake? Via Fantasy Life, the wonderfully named The Major Fall, The Minor Lift noticed this as well:
Great. We’ve mentioned the mainstreaming of porn in this space before (you’ll remember that we’re all for it) but when reputable [I’m not sure about this–ed.] researchers start cribbing their theories from the back of the box of Pizza Sluts 5, maybe things have gone to far. On the other hand, it was way back in 1916 when Albert Einstein himself postulated that “the laws of general relativity are the same for all observers, even if they are accelerated with respect to each other. Until, of course, the well-muscled plumber comes to lay the pipes. Bowm-chicka-bowm-bowm-da-na-nah.*” So maybe she’s just part of a longstanding scientific tradition. *This was Einstein’s favored way of representing porn movie soundtracks. Heisenberg later challenged this presentation, favoring the “bowm-chicka-chicka-bowm” hypothesis.
I think this may be the most self-parodoic thing the Times has put forth since that “how on earth can two straight men dine together without profound awkwardness?” thing. Excluding anything written by John Tierney, of course.