Gender Differences and Sexual Orientation
Men tend to have higher SOI scores and be more unrestricted than women across a variety of cultures. However, there is more variability in scores within each gender than between men and women, indicating that although the average man is less restricted than the average woman, individuals may vary in sociosexual orientation regardless of gender.
Bisexual women are significantly less restricted in their sociosexual attitudes than both lesbian and heterosexual women. Bisexual women are also the most unrestricted in sociosexual behavior, followed by lesbians and then, heterosexual women. Gay and bisexual men are similar to heterosexual men in sociosexual attitudes, in that they express relatively unrestricted attitudes relative to women. However, gay men are the most unrestricted in sociosexual behavior, followed by bisexual men and then, heterosexual men. This may be because gay men have more potential mating partners who prefer short-term, casual sexual encounters.
Read more about this topic: Sociosexual Orientation
Famous quotes containing the words gender, differences and/or orientation:
“Most women of [the WW II] generation have but one image of good motherhood—the one their mothers embodied. . . . Anything done “for the sake of the children” justified, even ennobled the mother’s role. Motherhood was tantamount to martyrdom during that unique era when children were gods. Those who appeared to put their own needs first were castigated and shunned—the ultimate damnation for a gender trained to be wholly dependent on the acceptance and praise of others.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“The country is fed up with children and their problems. For the first time in history, the differences in outlook between people raising children and those who are not are beginning to assume some political significance. This difference is already a part of the conflicts in local school politics. It may spread to other levels of government. Society has less time for the concerns of those who raise the young or try to teach them.”
—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)
“Institutions of higher education in the United States are products of Western society in which masculine values like an orientation toward achievement and objectivity are valued over cooperation, connectedness and subjectivity.”
—Yolanda Moses (b. 1946)