You know how Miley Cyrus says she has a ‘fluid’ sexuality (and gender identity), Kristen Stewart isn’t quite coming out of the closet and Cara Delevingne prefers to not use labels? Well, either these celebrities are the figureheads of a new form of sexual identification or they’re just a product of their society, as a new survey says that almost half of young people aged 18-24 identify as neither gay nor straight.
The YouGov study got over 1,000 participants to place their sexuality on a scale from 0-6 (the Kinsey scale, where 0 means exclusively heterosexual and 6 means exclusively homosexual and all the numbers inbetween are gradations from one to the other). And while 46% of them declared they were 0 – exclusively heterosexual and 6% declared they were 6 – exclusively homosexual – there were plenty of results scattered within the non-binary parts of the chart.
While this does happen amongst all adults in general, it wasn’t nearly as much, with 72% of people declaring themselves 0, and 4% saying they were 6.
The idea is that sexuality is a spectrum, that people are thinking progressively and not seeing gender as an obstacle to love. That said, it would be pretty interesting to see a gender breakdown of these results.
Because if it’s mostly women who’re declaring themselves as not 100% straight, that could mean all manner of things – on the good side, the advantage to being a woman is that you can explore your sexuality in a way that men really aren’t allowed to by society. Well, we say it’s good, that means it’s good for women and worth looking at why men – who get so many more freedoms than women in so many other parts of life – aren’t free to explore their sexual identity.
On the downside, all this female bisexuality (or whatever people are labelling or not labelling it) could just be a by-product of young people’s exposure to porn, making you wonder what else women are doing that they’ve picked up from porn, and how much they’re doing it for their own pleasure and not some male fantasy.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.