Talk:Erotic plasticity

This article requires an expert's contribution. I have merely completed some fairly basic copyediting. --Soulparadox 08:54, 21 April 2012 (UTC)

Sweeping Assertions
This article contains at least one devastatingly sweeping assertion, As women have been found to possess a weaker sex drive than men. This is supported by a reference to a paper by Baumeister, the originator of the erotic plasticity concept. Apart from the use of the vague term "sex drive", such an assertion seems to me to be pure POV. A rephrasing to state that the argument/theory is based on such a POV might be more fitting. Everybody got to be somewhere! (talk) 16:34, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I've replaced 'found' with 'theorised' in this sentence, as I don't think the evidence is clear enough to report it as undisputed fact. Robofish (talk) 17:59, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

More sweeping assertions: In section "Sexual fluidity" is stated as a matter of fact that women's sexuality is more fluid than men's, and the link goes to the work of Diamond. Well, that's just Diamond's opinion, and notice that her research was done ONLY in lesbian and bisexual women. The results of that research conclude that lesbians are rarely exclusively attracted to women, but in no case entitle her to extrapolate that to all women. The same goes for the line "women are more likely than men to engage in homosexual behaviour". WHAAAAAAAAAAT!!!? Almost ALL research done worldwide shows that the amount of men who engage in homosexual behaviours is bigger (sometimes much bigger) than the amount of women. A single anecdotical study is not enough to invalidate years of previous and well grounded studies and statistics (no need to talk about the absolute prevalence of men's homo-bisexuality through history). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.216.119.208 (talk) 16:35, 18 July 2012 (UTC)
 * I have reverted you. What you did was change the wording to text that is not supported by the sources. While Diamond may have been comparing lesbian-identified women's sexuality to gay men's (I'll need to read over all that again), she was also speaking of women's sexuality in general as compared to men's (which seems to be based on this or other research of hers). I'm not sure about "the amount of men who engage in homosexual behaviours [being] bigger (sometimes much bigger) than the amount of women," but there are sources other than Diamond, reliable sources, asserting that women are more likely than men to engage in homosexual behavior. As the lead at this point in time states, various reasons have been given for this -- "factors such as religion, culture and education have a greater affect on women’s sexual behaviors." And most assuredly, as can be seen, society is more open to lesbianism than male homosexuality. And so Diamond likely means that women are more open than men to the idea of engaging in homosexual behavior. This article is about erotic plasticity, after all, meaning how socially flexible and responsive someone's sex drive/sexuality is. The lead does say "The female erotic plasticity hypothesis states that women have higher erotic plasticity than men. Men, on the other hand, remain relatively rigid after puberty but can still be affected by these factors." But, anyway, what I mainly want to get at with your changes is that Diamond was not suggesting that sexual orientation can change, not literally at least; she was suggesting that sexuality/sexual identity can change, hence what I (and some sources) mean when I (they) state "lesbian-identified." A person can have a heterosexual identity/sexuality, but a gay or lesbian sexual orientation (as in the sex they truly desire), for example. In Diamond's study, the women who were always only exclusively sexually attracted to women did not show sexual interest in men. So if going by the strict definition of lesbian -- women who are only exclusively romantically/sexually attracted to women -- the "true lesbians" were still lesbians; the other women were simply lesbian-identified. And Lippa does not state that "bisexual women tend to have higher sex drives," something you also inaccurately altered from its original text. You obviously concluded the women as bisexual because it says "attracted to both women and men," but we are supposed to go by what the sources say. The way you changed the text made it seem that these women also have higher sex drives than lesbians and gay men, when the comparison there is between heterosexual men and heterosexual women. And having greater erotic plasticity does not necessarily equate to higher sex drive. Again, erotic plasticity is about how socially flexible and responsive someone's sex drive/sexuality is.


 * And as for the starter of this section doubting that "women have been found to possess a weaker sex drive than men," this has been supported by different studies. It mostly has to do with the higher levels of testosterone that men produce.


 * The way to deal with these studies so that they don't seem "sweeping," unless supported by scientific consensus, is to attribute them to the authors. For example, "According to Lisa Diamond," like I did in this link. 199.229.232.42 (talk) 06:24, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

I knew ideologues would flip and whine over this article. Surprised there's not more hate. "bias bias bias". You people are so predictable. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.110.146.196 (talk) 20:53, 5 February 2018 (UTC)

Biased article?
Why is this article so heavily biased towards female sexual fluidity? It cites a lot of research done by individuals who try to prove that only women are sexually fluid (all of them very recent research, by the way), but conveniently ignores the bulk of evidence as far as male sexual fluidity is concerned, evidence with deeper roots in culture and history, also. Just a quick examination of history (Ancient Greece or Rome, for example), non-Western cultures (both ancient and modern), and behaviour in all-male environments (prison, Army, gender-segregated schools), shows that male sexuality is as fluid, if not more, as female's. You don't need to cite particular research to prove this; it's self-evident and common knowledge. Why is it being ignored, then? Or is it that this article is just about a recent theory about female sexuality, and not about real behaviour and history? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.125.33.252 (talk) 01:15, 27 August 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm thinking that the article's content has less to do with bias against male sexual fluidity, and more about the researchers having not found it to the same extent that they have in females. The intro of the article, which I partly cited above, partially answers why the article is the way it is. And, actually, we do "need to cite particular research to prove this," using WP:Reliable sources, per WP:Verifiability. 199.229.232.42 (talk) 00:51, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

What? Researchers haven't found proof of male sexual fluidity!? Then I suppose that extensive historical documents and anthropological studies showing that male same-sex experimentation is as old as humanity, and present in every single culture and time, don't count as much as a couple of dubious studies made by a couple of researchers a couple of years ago. Yeah, sure... Not to mention that upon examination of historical data, the prevalence of male same-sex behaviours over female's is overwhelming, and the same happens among animals. The article also ignores conveniently about Kinsey's studies, which showed that homosexual behaviours were quite more frequent in men than in women (well, it ignores MOST statistics worldwide, which show the same results). This article IS biased, period. And if these researchers haven't found proof of male sexual fluidity in their studies, it's because they don't want to conduct those studies in the first place because, you know, "that would make straight men feel so insecure about their sexuality, and God forbids that!" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.125.33.252 (talk) 15:09, 5 September 2012 (UTC)
 * I did not state "no researchers have found proof of male sexual fluidity." I stated that the researchers have not found it to the same extent that they have in females. Still, I don't entirely believe that "upon examination of historical data, the prevalence of male same-sex [sexual] behaviours over female's is overwhelming, and the same happens among animals." While such data may be overwhelming for human males in contrast to human female same-sex sexual behaviors, that could also be because human male same-sex sexual behaviors were studied more/were taken more seriously. Human male same-sex sexual behaviors have usually been viewed as more threatening than human female same-sex sexual behaviors. And I'd rather not take your word for it at all that male same-sex sexual behavior outweighs female same-sex sexual behavior among non-human animals. You can go by your opinion and WP:Original research, but Wikipedia is not supposed to work that way. 199.229.232.42 (talk) 11:16, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

The only research that pretends to prove that female bisexuality is more common than male bisexuality is that conducted by L. Diamond and Lippa, both of them controversial. Diamond studied above all lesbian, bisexual and unlabeled women, not straight ones, and found that many of them changed labels over time. That tells us NOTHING about real inherent bisexuality or fluidity. It only tells us that those women changed their labels. And Lippa used an entirely subjective questionnaire to draw his conclusions. Only because straight women with high libido confessed increased attraction to both genders, while straight men with high libido didn't, means nothing about real attraction or behaviour. Men are known to lie about their homosexual tendencies much more than women, because the stigma associated is much worse. Also, there's plenty of evidence that shows that high libido (caused by hormones during teenage years, by long periods without female companionship, or by drugs like alcohol or crystal meth) is associated with more likeliness for homosexual behaviours in straight men. Sexologist Joe Kort has the same opinion: http://straightguise.blogspot.com.es/2008/07/high-sex-drive-is-associated-with.html The effects of increased libido (caused by alcohol) on homosexual tendencies has been observed as well in fruit flies: http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080103/full/news.2007.402.html

So apart from that couple of research, most evidence (historical, cultural, statistics, animal behaviour and so on) points towards the direction that bisexuality in men is no less common than in women, and most probably, MORE common in fact. The idea that female homosexuality is less known through history just because nobody paid attention to it it's a fallacy. Women's sexuality was closely watched over. "Deviations" like adultery were as known in women as in men; there's no reason to think that homosexual "sins" were invisible in women, when adultery was certainly not invisible. And if it's true that homosexuality in women wasn't as taboo as in men, then for the same reason, it would have been more visible as well. So, if there are less accounts of homosexuality in women, is because it has always been less prevalent. Period. And the idea that homosexual behaviours are more common in male animals than in females, is not a theory. It's a proven fact. You can go read the article about it in Wikipedia, if you want. For most species, homosexual behaviours are exclusively male-male.

So no matter how you look at it. As long as this article only cites the little evidence we have for bisexuality being more common in women than in men, while it ignores all statistics or studies that show otherwise, the article is going to be biased and distorted. It cherry-picks only those pieces of evidence that support the ideas of the author, and silences everything that prove them wrong. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.11.22.223 (talk) 17:57, 14 October 2012 (UTC)


 * You are also forgetting Roy Baumeister, who coined the term "erotic plasticity" and argues that women have high plasticity, meaning that their sex drive can more easily change in response to external pressures, and men have low plasticity, and therefore have sex drives that are relatively inflexible. You have also either forgotten about or don't know of the research that was done by Gerulf Rieger, Meredith L. Chivers, and J. Michael Bailey on male bisexuality, which was/is also controversial because they concluded that bisexuality is rare or doesn't exist in men. A big part of the reason they came to that conclusion is because of how they define bisexuality. For some researchers, if a person has a sexual preference for one sex over the other, then that person is not bisexual. Have you ever heard of category-specificity? It refers to a person showing sexual arousal to the categories of people they prefer to have sex with. In one or two different studies, Chivers found that category-specific sexual arousal is more commonly found among men than women, meaning that women are more fluid in their sexual arousal patterns than men. Freund, K. found that heterosexual men experience much higher genital and subjective arousal to women than to men and that this pattern is reversed for homosexual men. Chivers (Reiger, G., Latty, E., & Bailey, J.M.) also found that women have a non-category-specific genital response pattern of sexual arousal, meaning their genital responses are only modestly related to their preferred category. However, female subjective responses are category-specific because they typically report their highest level of arousal to their preferred stimulus, although the reported difference in levels of arousal is typically much smaller than those in men.


 * So, given that bisexuality is not always defined as any sexual attraction/sexual activity to/with both sexes, "unlabeled" could include heterosexual women. Some of the women Diamond studied later identfied as heterosexual because they truly believe that they are. And, really, all any researcher can do when listing someone's sexual orientation is take their word that they are straight, gay or bisexual, aside from hooking them up to some machine and testing their sexual arousal patterns. You state that "Men are known to lie about their homosexual tendencies much more than women, because the stigma associated is much worse." and yet you also assert that female homosexuality was scrutinized just as much as male homosexuality? That sounds pretty contradictory. I didn't state that "nobody paid attention" to female homosexuality; I stated that "Human male same-sex sexual behaviors have usually been viewed as more threatening than human female same-sex sexual behaviors," something that you apparently agree with, and something that is supported by a lot of reliable sources. And because it is a factual statement, I do believe that if (IF) data on same-sex sexual behavior is overwhelming for human males in contrast to human females engaging in such activity, that it is likely "because human male same-sex sexual behaviors were studied more/were taken more seriously." And I'd still need to see a reliable source stating that "homosexual behaviours are more common in male animals than in female [animals]" and that this "is not a theory. It's a proven fact."


 * The bottomline is that, as I've stated before, Wikipedia mainly goes by WP:Reliable sources, WP:Verifiability, and WP:No original research when it comes to sourcing. Stuff about male bisexuality being just as common or more common than female bisexuality cannot be added to this article or any Wikipedia article without research supporting it. Not unless it's simply commentary from whatever researcher and this article's text makes it clear that it is simply commentary. Wikipedia does not care about your personal views (see WP:SOAPBOX). It cares about following its guideline and policies. And just as importantly, this article is not about female bisexuality vs. male bisexuality. It is about "erotic plasticity," a term coined by Roy Baumeister, and meaning "the degree to which someone's sex drive can be changed by cultural or social factors." It's about how socially flexible and responsive someone's sex drive/sexuality is. And given how society generally treats male homosexuality as more threatening than female homosexuality (with male homosexuality often facing greater hostility), which is discussed in a variety of sources, it's easy to see why Baumeister and others have concluded that erotic plasticity is greater in women than in men. Like the article states, "factors such as religion, culture and education have a greater affect on women's sexual behaviors." But it's not about what you or I see on this topic. It's about what reliable sources state. If there are reliable sources on erotic plasticity stating that men's sex drive is just as socially flexible/responsive, or more so, as/than women's, then add those sources. This is just the way Wikipedia works. 2001:648:2FFC:1112:A80C:EAFF:FE22:B990 (talk) 19:24, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

You are also forgetting Roy Baumeister, who coined the term "erotic plasticity" and argues that women have high plasticity, meaning that their sex drive can more easily change in response to external pressures, and men have low plasticity, and therefore have sex drives that are relatively inflexible.

Roy Baumeister was referring to plasticity in sex drive, NOT in sexual orientation. And following that logic, if men's sex drive is more inflexible, then they're more likely to engage in same-sex relationships when women are not available, while women could adjust better their sex drives and live in chastity. You're forgetting that point.

You have also either forgotten about or don't know of the research that was done by Gerulf Rieger, Meredith L. Chivers, and J. Michael Bailey on male bisexuality, which was/is also controversial because they concluded that bisexuality is rare or doesn't exist in men.

You may haven't heard of the study that the same researchers conducted later, debunking their first study, in which they found that male bisexuality certainly exists and isn't rare. You should update that.

''Chivers (Reiger, G., Latty, E., & Bailey, J.M.) also found that women have a non-category-specific genital response pattern of sexual arousal, meaning their genital responses are only modestly related to their preferred category. However, female subjective responses are category-specific because they typically report their highest level of arousal to their preferred stimulus, although the reported difference in levels of arousal is typically much smaller than those in men.''

Those same researchers found as well that female genitalia responded to pictures of bonobos mating, and this study (http://pss.sagepub.com/content/22/2/159.short) showed that they responded to consensual and non-consensual sex in the same degree, while male genitalia didn't. This, and the fact that the genital arousal was found to be automatic, faster than subjective awareness, has led to the hypothesis that vaginal arousal in these cases has nothing to do with sexual orientation, but it's just an automatic response to prevent damage during sex (the preparatory hypothesis). Chivers herself has stated this theory as a quite plausible explanation; it's in her research paper. So I don't know why everybody is ignoring that theory and using Chiver's study to support the idea that "all women are bisexual". I suppose that headline sells more magazines, huh? Not to mention the Adams' study in Georgia, that showed that a significant amount of heterosexual men became aroused with all kinds of porn (straight, gay and lesbian).

You state that "Men are known to lie about their homosexual tendencies much more than women, because the stigma associated is much worse.''" and yet you also assert that female homosexuality was scrutinized just as much as male homosexuality? That sounds pretty contradictory.''

I said that women "SEXUAL LIVES" were scrutinized as much as men's, not "WOMEN HOMOSEXUALITY". Women homosexuality has been completely ignored (and unknown) through history, which is quite eloquent in itself. What I wonder is, if female bisexuality is as rampant as they want us to believe, how on Earth has it been so ignored!?

And I'd still need to see a reliable source stating that "homosexual behaviours are more common in male animals than in female [animals]" and that this "is not a theory. It's a proven fact."

For starters, you could simply go to the Wikipedia article about animal homosexuality and count the examples of male-male sex against female-female sex.

But going to the point, I'm not against the "erotic plasticity" theory of Baumeister in itself. It's a theory like any other, and if it deserves its own article, no matter if the theory is right or wrong, so be it. What I'm against, is against the use of the theory (and of Diamond's, Chiver's, etc.) in this article to support the wild assumption that "women are more likely bisexual than men", as if that was a scientific and proven reality. Even if Baumeister's theory was about that (it isn't), that wouldn't suffice to make such a claim. It's as if somebody wrote an article about Freud, in which they spoke of the Ego, Superego and Id, as proven, real facts, instead as a theory. If you want to make an universal and all-encompassing claim, like that about female bisexuality being more common than male, sorry but no, you can't simply grab a couple of theories and studies and use them to ground it (specially when the studies may not speak about that, like the Chiver's one). Human sexuality is far more complex than chemistry. A couple of laboratory or statistical researches aren't enough to throw away history and social studies. As long as sexuality is influenced by culture and society, these subject-matters will have an important saying in the controversy. And, I reiterate, there's more than enough proof in history and culture about male fluid sexuality. Not only in Ancient Greece and Rome, but also in non-Western cultures (like those in which exist a "Third Gender"). The literature about it is ample. Ignoring all of this, just because some American researchers say otherwise, is more ethnocentric and near-sighted than anything else.

Tags/Disagreements
I'm not sure who slapped all the "unreliable medical source" tags on here, but I'm going to remove them because they make the article look extremely messy, and makes it difficult read. While I'm new to this whole editing thing and not 100% sure how to handle this situation, I know for a fact that passively aggressively sabotaging other people's work and the article as a whole isn't the best course of action.

If someone has legitimate, factual evidence that they can point to that supports the claim that the sources stated are unreliable, then to me that would mean they should mention in the article that there is some disagreement as to the results of the study and state their sources that show such. If it's an individual themselves that believes that a study is unreliable, in that case I'd think that it might be best to, again, state in the article that the findings of a given study are not necessarily agreed upon, link to the talk page, then state one's case there. That way rather than a reader being forced to read through a bunch of confusing, obnoxious tags all over the place, they can come to the talk page, look over what people have said in detail, and decide for themselves whether or not they agree or disagree. That to me personally sounds like a far better course of action.

Guys, I understand that issues like this are fairly controversial these days and many have strong beliefs related to them, but as I've said on other articles that end up looking like this one did, articles themselves are not places to be airing grievances with social issues. Talk pages aren't even technically supposed to be for that, but they're a far better option than trying to prove a point by borderline vandalizing a page.

Heck, I'm not ambivalent to the issue; even as a 21 y/o males I recognize we definitely need females, most times emotionally even more than physically, and I've always found the idea of that need being reciprocal between genders to be appealing, so I find the notion that females don't truly need us by nature to be both questionable and somewhat upsetting. I also don't believe females have lower sex drives, I simply believe their sex drives tend to manifest themselves somewhat differently than males' sex drives. The thing is that those are all personal beliefs, and therefore I would not place such in the article. The point of wiki isn't supposed to be to sway people's views or share personal opinions. The point is supposed to be to lay the facts out there in the most clear and unbiased fashion possible and let people decide for themselves what they want to believe. Penguinato23 (talk) 18:03, 22 September 2012 (UTC)
 * You really need to read up on WP:Verfiability. Such tags are added because almost all information in Wikipedia articles should be sourced, WP:Reliably sourced. See Citation needed; these tags alert readers that whatever tagged statement needs a source (a WP:Reliable one); not only do they let readers know that they probably shouldn't trust the unsourced statement(s), but it prompts readers to source the statement(s). We can't "mention in the article that there is some disagreement" without a WP:Reliable source stating so. I understand what you mean about too many of these tags being in articles, but that is why it is better to place Template:Unreferenced or Template:Refimprove at the top of the article and leave it at that. For other tags that are used on Wikipedia, see Template messages/Cleanup. 2001:648:2FFC:1112:A80C:EAFF:FE22:B990 (talk) 19:24, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

Possible explanations → Sex-drive differences
It would do a great deal of good to that sub-section if there was a study checking for correlation between sex drive and erotic plasticity.

Also, even though I'm not hopping for an affirmative answer to this one, I may as well ask, are you aware of any other hypotheses of erotic plasticity that we can add and source in that section? EIN (talk) 09:17, 9 February 2013 (UTC)


 * The more I think about it, the less credible it seems. One of the main features of erotic plasticity is attraction to persons regardless of their gender, which I'll call bisexuality, to oversimplify somewhat. Sociosexuality, which correlates with sex drive, correlates pretty well with female bisexuality. Sex drive correlates also with polygamy; women from within the polyamorous community predominantly identify as bisexual, pansexual or reject such labels outright. That is not to mention that bisexuality appears to be quite common among porn actors, who are indubitably no less libidinous than your average woman. EIN (talk) 07:15, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

The theory of Baumeister about erotic plasticity (which is what the article speaks about) has nothing to do with bisexuality, but rather with the better adaptation of women to social norms like celibacy or no sex before marriage. As such, is related with the lower sex drive of females. The section that talks about bisexuality is actually a reference to Lisa Diamond's "sexual fluidity" hypothesis, which has nothing to do with sex drive. I even doubt that it should be included in this article, since is a theory by other researcher and speaks of all-together different issues. Indeed, bisexual men and women have been found to have higher sex drives on average (see the Wikipedia article on "Bisexuality"). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.22.94.140 (talk) 08:04, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

Frankly, I think Baumeister might have confused cause and effect in his hypothesis. There tends to be higher variablity of sexual norms applied to women than men so "high sexual plasticity" in women is therefore more likely to be the result of that rather than cause of variation in sex drive. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.153.78.241 (talk) 13:48, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

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