Stop Medicalising Bisexual Men
The case against phallometry, biphobia, and social prejudice dressed up as ‘science’. A critique of the PNAS article “Robust evidence for bisexual orientation among men”.
It’s official, bisexual men exist. These are the findings of a new research article. The article, “Robust evidence for bisexual orientation among men” published this week in the scientific journal PNAS, collates data from eight studies measuring the genital responses of bisexual-identified cisgender men to erotic stimuli. The goal of this research, its authors state, is to provide “empirical verification” of male bisexuality through “physiological processes rather than self-report.”
Who requires such evidence, you might ask? It would seem some of the authors themselves. Gerulf Rieger, a Reader in Psychology at the University of Essex who teaches a module on human sexuality, was “sceptical about [bisexual men’s] ability to be sexually aroused to both men and women.” In the article itself, the authors write, “There has long been skepticism among both scientists and laypersons that male bisexual orientation exists.” Now, however, it seems science has proven it does; they’ve got hard evidence.
Two pressing questions that emerge are, first, why such a study was deemed necessary and, second, what does it mean that such techniques are being used to ‘prove’ a sexuality’s existence?
Medical Biphobia
Back in 2005, one of the article’s co-authors, J Michael Bailey, led a study where he found that “with respect to sexual arousal and attraction, it remains to be shown that male bisexuality exists.” In a follow up study in 2012, Bailey worked with the American Institute of Bisexuality (AIB) to conclude that “some men have bisexual arousal patterns.”
Bisexual activist and scholar Shiri Eisner identifies the problems with the first Bailey study in Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution, contending that it medicalises and sexualises male bisexuality in order to deny it. (This study would inform the infamous New York Times article “Gay, Straight or Lying”). The second study, Eisner argues, “despite its ‘positive’ results…only deepened the problem further.” This is because the AIB funded and thus colluded with such an approach to ‘proving’ male bisexuality’s existence, contributing, Eisner writes, “to the medical control of bisexual men’s identities and lives: the perception that ‘experts’ are the authorities that get to define bisexuality; the attempt to normalize male bisexuality; and the isolation of bisexuality from political and social context.”
Social Prejudice in the Lab
These kinds of studies are predicated on the assumption that penile responses to different erotic stimuli hold the potential to confirm a sexuality’s existence. This technique (penile plethysmography or phallometry) was developed by Kurt Freund, a Czechoslovakian sexologist. It has since been used to facilitate aversion therapies, identify the sexualities of soldiers, test for paedophilic desires, and ascertain the veracity of migrants seeking asylum on the basis of their sexualities. Concerns over the validity of phallometric testing abound, but what remains clear is that it has been used as a technology for oppressive systems of power, the queerphobia of aversion therapy and the racism of immigration systems being two examples here.
The instrumentalisation of phallometry to offer a ‘scientific’ confirmation of social prejudices can be seen in an excerpt from Bailey’s transphobic book The Man Who Would Be Queen. He writes, “Freund…related that he was never able to find a subset of men who appeared bisexual in the lab. Although their data are less scientific, gay men share Freund’s skepticism. They have a saying: ‘You’re either gay, straight, or lying.’” Here, Bailey uses the discourse of science to confirm biphobic prejudice. Yet the fact that Bailey would later use the very same scientific method to ‘prove’ that bisexual men aren’t lying speaks, not to some wonderful scientific breakthrough, but to the uselessness of this method in the first place. But many queers have known this all along.
Homogenising Sexuality
When notions of desire, attraction, love, identity are eschewed in favour of measuring the tumescence of a cisgender man’s penis when watching different types of porn, we get an insight into how some researchers understand sexuality. Their technique presupposes that erectile responses in a scientific setting would be akin to those outside of it and that men with penises would invariably become erect watching porn featuring sex that aligns with their identities.
Here, there is no consideration that someone might not enjoy porn, that a porn viewer’s tastes might be quite particular, that the porn one enjoys might depict acts or bodies one doesn’t desire outside of it, or that a porn film offers a range of textual meanings and pleasures which can differ depending on how it’s viewed. Porn-viewing is a fundamentally flawed ‘stimulus’ with which to measure sexuality. There’s also a problem with how the erect penis is understood as ‘proof’ of arousal—anyone with a penis who has engaged in BDSM or even simply bottomed can tell you just how aroused one can become while flaccid. These researchers’ mode of engagement thus reveals the limiting and unimaginative ways sexuality is understood in the patriarchal, queerphobic, and cisnormative scientific tradition in which they are working.
Ignoring Queer Theory
The continued use of phallometry in this way shows contempt, not only for queer people and how we understand our desires and identities, but for decades of critical theory, gender studies, and queer studies. Important work in these fields has offered potent critiques of the medicalisation of sexuality, undertaken, for example, in the writing of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, and Paul Preciado. It is unlikely that researchers advocating phallometry will have read these works, which prove crucial in understanding how sexuality is produced, managed, normalised, pathologised, made intelligible, or rendered unthinkable.
The scientists who conduct phallometric testing, the ethics committees that approve it, and the bodies that fund it can only continue to do so because they choose to remain ignorant of the scholarship that we have developed and which, in turn, develops us. In academic contexts in which STEM subjects remain disproportionately funded over the arts and humanities, we must confront the damage wrought by the devaluing of the latter.
The Main Issues
There are a range of issues this recent study makes clear.
The continued use of phallometry despite the clear arguments against the medicalisation of sexuality voiced by queers and humanities scholars.
Some bisexual people remain complicit in these studies, with the board president of the AIB, John Sylla, listed as a coauthor.
There remains an illogical enchantment with corporeal data production, which is venerated as a ‘scientific criterion’ for the legitimation of sexual minorities.
Bisexuals have never fit neatly into the dominant categories that govern knowledge production. Western conceptions of sexuality remain structured by a cisgender monosexual binary which cannot make sense of us.
Rather than seek legitimation through collusion with these oppressive structures, bisexuals must reject these technologies of oppression altogether.
In societies that normalise monosexuality—through politics, legislation, medicine, education, culture—we will continue to be demarcated as illegitimate, dissimulative, excessive. Rather than seek to be incorporated into these systems of oppression, we must, instead, deploy the radical potential that can be found in our excess of them. Therein lies our power.
This article was written by Jacob Engelberg, a doctoral candidate at King's College London, researching bisexual transgression in cinema. Learn more about the author.
Before publishing, this article was reviewed by Dr Julia Shaw, honourary research associate in psychology at University College London.