There is a big difference between asking someone to choose a label like straight or gay in a survey and asking if they ever think about sex/romance with someone of the same sex or would ever consider going into such a relationship.
I would identify as cis straight if it’s just the multiple choice, but like bisexual with 90% straightness if I could choose a point on a spectrum.
I think that’s a fair point and a reason to think there are far more people with a particular sexual orientation that are not aware of or do not identify with their sexual orientation than people with that sexual orientation who are aware and honest about their orientation.
The public health practices around targeting “men who have sex with men” as a demographic sort of confirms we’re not in a neutral context where everyone who actually is homosexual will admit to themselves or others that they are homosexual (even when they’re willing to admit as men they sleep with other men).
But this makes it very difficult to know what the real numbers are, and sometimes even how to define the sexualities, but regardless we don’t have anything like the numbers being floated about only 10% of people are straight, at least as far as I know - like others I would like to see citations or evidence to back that claim.
I found this paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1529100616637616 (very low effort first citation on wikipedia) that discusses all the nuances and difficulties of estimating sexual orientation. And they mention some figures of 93% of men and 87% of women stating they are not even a tiny bit gay, so it does seem that the figures in the first comment are extreme.
Thought you might also want to know about this brilliant line in the paper: If one cannot reliably make a male human become attracted to other males by cutting off his penis in infancy and rearing him as a girl, then what other psychosocial intervention could plausibly have that effect?
(In response to 6/7 men who lost their penis at birth and were raised as girls ending up identifying as heterosexual men as adults. The last identifying as a bisexual woman.)
There is a big difference between asking someone to choose a label like straight or gay in a survey and asking if they ever think about sex/romance with someone of the same sex or would ever consider going into such a relationship.
I would identify as cis straight if it’s just the multiple choice, but like bisexual with 90% straightness if I could choose a point on a spectrum.
I think that’s a fair point and a reason to think there are far more people with a particular sexual orientation that are not aware of or do not identify with their sexual orientation than people with that sexual orientation who are aware and honest about their orientation.
The public health practices around targeting “men who have sex with men” as a demographic sort of confirms we’re not in a neutral context where everyone who actually is homosexual will admit to themselves or others that they are homosexual (even when they’re willing to admit as men they sleep with other men).
But this makes it very difficult to know what the real numbers are, and sometimes even how to define the sexualities, but regardless we don’t have anything like the numbers being floated about only 10% of people are straight, at least as far as I know - like others I would like to see citations or evidence to back that claim.
I found this paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1529100616637616 (very low effort first citation on wikipedia) that discusses all the nuances and difficulties of estimating sexual orientation. And they mention some figures of 93% of men and 87% of women stating they are not even a tiny bit gay, so it does seem that the figures in the first comment are extreme.
Thought you might also want to know about this brilliant line in the paper: If one cannot reliably make a male human become attracted to other males by cutting off his penis in infancy and rearing him as a girl, then what other psychosocial intervention could plausibly have that effect?
(In response to 6/7 men who lost their penis at birth and were raised as girls ending up identifying as heterosexual men as adults. The last identifying as a bisexual woman.)