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Gender and Binegativity: Men’s and Women’s Attitudes Toward Male and Female Bisexuals

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A Correction to this article was published on 02 February 2022

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Abstract

This study assessed the influence of gender on attitudes about bisexuals. A total of 164 heterosexual female and 89 heterosexual male undergraduates completed the Biphobia Scale (Mulick & Wright, 2002), rewritten to refer to bisexual men and bisexual women and thus re-named the Gender-Specific Binegativity Scale. A mixed-design ANOVA revealed an interaction between rater’s sex and target’s sex: women equally accepted bisexual men and bisexual women, but men were less accepting of bisexual men than bisexual women. A mediation analysis indicated the relationship between rater’s sex and greater acceptance of bisexual women was partially explained by eroticization of female same-sex sexuality. Finally, participants also responded to two open-ended items, which provided additional information about the content of binegativity: participants described male bisexuals negatively, as gender-nonconforming, and labeled them “really gay,” whereas participants described female bisexuals positively, as sexy, and labeled them “really heterosexual.” These findings suggest multiple underlying beliefs about bisexuals that contribute to binegativity, particularly against bisexual men. Results also confirm the importance of considering gender (of both the target and the rater) when assessing sexual prejudice.

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Notes

  1. An initial comparison between the White participants and the participants of color on the three attitude scales of interest (GSBS-Men, GSBS-Women, and Eroticization of Lesbian Sex) showed no racial differences (all t values <1.67, all ps > .09). Substantive analyses proceeded without considering race.

  2. Levene’s tests indicated that these data violated the assumption of equality of variances (GSBS-Men p < .001; GSBS-Women p < .05), with the men’s sample showing a larger variance than the women’s sample in both cases. However, after applying an inverse transformation and re-analyzing the data, the results of the ANOVA remained the same (F values dropped slightly, but all p values remained <.001). We concluded that heterogeneity of variance did not unduly affect our results and, therefore, all analyses rely on the untransformed values.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departments of Psychology and Women’s & Gender Studies, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA, USA

    Megan R. Yost

  2. Department of Psychology, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA, USA

    Genéa D. Thomas

  3. Department of Psychology, Dickinson College, P.O.Box 1773, Carlisle, PA, 17013, USA

    Megan R. Yost

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Correspondence to Megan R. Yost.

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Yost, M.R., Thomas, G.D. Gender and Binegativity: Men’s and Women’s Attitudes Toward Male and Female Bisexuals. Arch Sex Behav 41, 691–702 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-011-9767-8

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