A recent study claiming that there’s no such thing as truly straight women has been doing the rounds this week. Dr Gerulf Rieger led the study- helped out, by the way, by none other than Dr Michael Bailey. Yep, that guy who decided a few years ago that bi men don’t exist. And that trans women are really gay men. Or, er, very straight men. Anything but women.

This latest offering involved measuring how women’s pupils dilated watching porn. The findings? Unless you’re a lesbian, your pupils dilate across the board. Doesn’t matter if the gender matches up to who you fancy, or if you report being aroused at the time.

They also looked into whether lesbians IDing as masculine or feminine correlated with whether they were sexually more masculine or feminine- that is, whether their pupils only dilated to women or to people regardless of gender. In a finding that will surprise precisely zero queer women? Not a connection in sight.

I’m not going to take pot-shots at the study design or the well-known biases of the researchers. That would be far too easy. Also, Autostraddle said it better than I ever could. Continue reading “No such thing as straight women? The real danger behind this study.” →