Some comments on statistics vis-a-vis female bisexuality...
subd said:
In the last 2 decades simply because "men" find it erotic....
How do you know this is the reason? Or that 20 years is the time period?
subd said:
...the majority of young women now practice sex with other women. I wouldn't want to argue numbers, but having periodically worked at night clubs over the last 20 years as an evening job... well... the numbers are, at least half to 75% of young women will do erotic things with other women.
This assertion implies you did accurate surveys, but that would have precluded doing your nightclub job so you probably didn't. Accurate surveys would have required you to count the number of women who came in each evening and were actually in the club (i.e., didn't depart); have a method for recognizing them as individuals (to avoid double-counting); reliably count how many actually had sex with other women while in the club (as opposed to hugging or touching in other ways — most women, like most men, don't have sex in public), etc. Thus, your "statistics" are highly suspect, at best.
Also, your "statistics" are strongly dependent on the kind of night clubs you worked in, since different kinds of clubs attract different kinds of women and men. Were they strip clubs? Bars with live music and dancing but no stripping? Bars that served liquor but no dancing and no stripping?
subd said:
So by the numbers, to me this is learned behavior or the overcoming of hangups etc. I certainly wouldn't label most of these girls lesbian or bisexual.
How do you know what their background is, and whether their behavior is "learned" or "hereditary"? And, why not? What's the matter with being lesbian or bisexual (or transgendered, for that matter)?
Here's an example that shows your "statistics" are almost-certainly badly skewed. At a local strip club I frequent with some regularity, a woman I had become friends with mentioned to me, probably about 1-1/2 years ago, that "90% of the strip dancers there are bisexual." I interpreted that as meaning she thought a substantial percentage of them were, not actually 90%. She went on to say a fair amount of cunilingus (by the strip dancers, of each other) goes on in their dressing room between dances.
Later, I quoted the "90% comment" to another strip dancer I had become friends with and asked her if she would agree with that. There was a long pause... I could see the gears turning in her head. Finally, she said: "Not 90%. Three or four of them are." That would be roughly 20 to 25 (or perhaps 30)%. (The number of women who dance there varies through time.)
Twenty to thirty percent — let alone 90% — of the dancers in a strip club being bisexual is, needless to say, far and away greater than the approximately 3% of the female population at large being "lesbian" — presumably most of them actually bisexual — stated by Baker (1996).
But, did I conclude Baker is wrong and "twenty to thirty percent" of the female population is, in reality, bisexual? No, of course not. The high percentage in my local strip club — and in other strip clubs, presumably — is caused by that being a place where women who are attracted to women can be sexually turned on much or most of the time (since all of them are scantily-dressed, and sometimes nude), and where they can act on their feelings of being turned on (by having woman-to-woman sex in the dressing room, between dances).
In my local strip club, it's not unusual at all to see women who have come in by themselves or in groups of two or three, who — when a stripper is pole dancing — are obviously turned on by that, and the pole dancers respond accordingly. I once asked one of the strip dancers if those women (who come into the club as customers, without men) are lesbians or bisexual. She said, "yes." But, that doesn't imply anything about the female population at large. Rather, it implies bisexual (and exclusive lesbian) women are concentrated in the club because of the nature of the place.
