60 Percent of Hetero Women Are Attracted to Other Women, Duh

Hi! Have you ever had sex or made out with or kissed or cuddled suggestively in your underpants with a straight girl? Me too! Why? Because 60 percent of heterosexual women are attracted to other women, according to Shane, your pants and a new study from Boise State University.

The study interviewed 484 heterosexual women. 60 percent said they were sexually attracted to other women, 45 percent had kissed another woman and 50 percent had same-sex sexual fantasies.

Elizabeth Morgan, the study’s cohort leader, has concluded that “women, due to their friendlier nature, are often more openly affectionate with others of the same-sex.’ Also:

Women are encouraged to be emotionally close to each other. That provides an opportunity for intimacy and romantic feelings to develop.”

Mmmk. But seriously, why are 60 percent of heterosexual women attracted to other women? Because women look good. See:

These numbers have changed over time (in 1994, scientists found only 7.5% of ALL women reporting same-sex desire) and every time a new survey like this comes out, it turns out that more and more girls want to ride the hobby horse with you all the way around the Niagara Falls area, over the river and through the woods.

In 2010, OKCupid found that amongst its users, 1 in 3 straight women had hooked up with another woman, and of those who haven’t, 1 in 4 would like to. However the most recent survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found only 13% of all women had participated in same-sex behavior — and that includes the lesbians, bisexuals and queers. So now you can add all of the numbers up and divide them by the chance that Kristen Stewart likes girls and make a game plan for Friday night.

hey brah wanna make out

In a 2007 interview with feminist author Jennifer Baumgardner, who used to date Amy Ray, Baumgardner spoke on this generational shift:

Do you think ladies dating ladies is actually more common now, or is it just more visible?
It’s more common and obviously more visible. Visibility gives people the idea to do things. Acting on a desire is based on having opportunities. You know in the movie version of The Hours when, out of nowhere, the ’40s housewife kisses her neighbor? Stuff like that did happen, but there was no framework to put it in. I think now there are a lot of entry points to kissing a girl.

It’s almost become a rite of passage.
My mom would be shocked to learn that any of her friends had kissed a girl. I don’t know if it’s just that they wouldn’t own up to it, but I’ve grilled her and she hasn’t done it. I can’t think of any of my own friends who haven’t. It is still shocking if you thought you were straight to suddenly be in love with a woman, but I think it makes a difference that you’re not as likely to be rejected by your family, or fired, or beaten up.

Go find a straight girl to make out with but don’t get emotionally involved. Maybe you can help her discover her latent bisexuality or homosexuality or otherwise queeriosity, and then she can come fight about labels on the internet.  Is queeriosity a word? It should be.

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Riese

Riese is the 41-year-old Co-Founder of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in nine books, magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. She's Jewish and has a cute dog named Carol. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

Riese has written 3159 articles for us.

143 Comments

  1. I don’t know what to make of this. That seems like a really high number. That article doesn’t explain the methodology. I think if you ask people about their sexual attraction, you’ll get a range of some people thinking that means someone you’d literally be interested in having sex with to other people thinking someone is merely attractive. I’ve indeed been with “straight” women, but they always later realized they were gay or bisexual. So, hm… maybe half of all straight women or gay or bi? YES!

    I like queeriosity.

    • I don’t take these statistics seriously.

      Women change their views about who they are attracted to, in the same way they change their fashion. A lot of them can’t think for themselves and copy each other, as they do with fashion.

  2. I intuitively think this is true, but i find it hard to take someone purporting to be a scientist seriously who says that “women, due to their friendlier nature, are often more openly affectionate with others of the same-sex.” Right, those friendly natures of ours. Along with our uniform, genetically determined love of the color pink, nail polish, and gossip.

  3. I’m straight, but my secret fantasy is to be the object of a lesbian crush. I’m awful, I know.

    I can’t say that I am *sexually attracted* to other women, though. I can look at a woman and think, “She is so pretty”, but not in the sense that I want to touch her boobies or her cooch.

    But there IS something about Scarlett from The Real L Word…I’m also not above admitting that I kind of have a crush on Whitney.

  4. I also wonder a bit at how high these numbers are. And if the students were all from their university. Perhaps their university is just really bi-curious. And then I consider going back to college.

  5. I’d want to see how they asked the question before I’m sold on that statistic. However, that being said, I could believe it considering how pervasive it is in our culture to view women as sexual objects of desire. This ubiquitous evaluation of women as sexual/attractive people when combined with the factors the researchers list, such as the more permissiveness of women folk affection could result in this homosexy queeriosity.

    Also, queeriosity is my new favorite word.

  6. Given my own “research” to this matter and being into anime, I always felt the intense displays of straight girl (platonic???) affection to be really, really, well intense and gay from straight girls that love anime.

    DOES ANYONE ELSE HAVE ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE!??!! SHARE PLEASE!

  7. my first question is: how on earth did anyone at boise state get support to do a study on non-straightness?? color me surprised.

    second is, how exactly are we defining attraction? this seems very vague.

  8. Anyone know what the actual study was titled? I started procrastinating from researching for a project and hopped my fav site here to find exactly what i was looking for! As much as i’d love to entitle my paper “queeriosity” i think i should probably find the legit article.

  9. I hate these labels. Jeez, way to make this MORE confusing for me. Although, it’s statistics. You know girls and math – we don’t do the maths so well, according to many.

    Can I just call myself what I want to call myself (a bisexual 2 on the Kinsey scale) without being scrutinized? Can’t I be bisexual without ever kissing or being with a woman?

  10. Well, I was going to read the article but then you put that photo of Sarah Shahi right at the top. And now I can’t read. So no educational progress will come from this AS and it’s your fault.

  11. While I was at uni, an alt woman in my residences said: ‘I’m straight, but women often often get more interested in other women in their 40s, so I might be gay when I’m older.’ I thought: ‘Whoa! Really? I’ve never heard of that!’

    At that point, I’d already been through my ‘Might I be gay?’ wonderings, since (on the whole) I found queer women better and more interesting company than men or straight women, but I’d rather reluctantly come to the conclusion that I was straight, since I found men attractive. Then I completely unexpectedly fell in love with a woman when I was 39.

    Honestly, I now wonder whether I was always bi, but never realised it, since orientation is often presented as an extreme of either gay or straight (with ‘gay’ meaning only Kinsey 6 and maybe 5, rather than meaning all people who are not completely straight, as it used to). When I think back, I definitely had crushes on girls and women from childhood, but just didn’t recognise them as crushes. And my few close woman friends have said for years that they’ve never had such close or intense friendships as they have with me (groan, slap head). Thanks, socialisation.

    So maybe this really means 60% of ‘straight’ women are actually Kinsey 1-4 bi, but are unaware of it for part or all of their lives. Like, if if a woman is attracted to men sexually (as she’s socially expected to be) then obviously she’s straight, right? Right?!!

    • THIS.

      SO many of my bi friends have spent significant periods of their life thinking that because they were attracted to men, they had to be straight. Because bisexuality isn’t a thing.

      I wonder if the researchers addressed the issue of the the difficulty and taboo of identifying as bi.

    • THIS.
      I totally neglected the idea that I could be interested in women at all, just because I’m interested in men. Even though I would check girls out a LOT. And definitely had crushes on girls before, but just told myself they were really intense friendships.
      Then I found Autostraddle (and tumblr). Then the Calendar Girls feature on Autostraddle. Anddd then I figured out I was queer.
      Looking back I’m shocked I never realized it sooner, but I guess that’s what happens when being straight is the default.

    • I’m in this same boat right now. I’m 31, a little over a year out of my one and only relationship (with a man). Very little sexual experience, lots of close girlfriends… Always really interested in gay culture. I’m probably a lot queerer than I thought. I’m happy to be realizing it now, and I accept and embrace all of it!

    • This is a very interesting phenomenon. I’ve been kinda watching it from the older generation sidelines and seeing it happen with a lot of my younger friends, both gay, bi and straight who are in their late-teens/20s/early 30s.

      But recently, 3 of my closest straight woman friends in their mid-30s to early-40s (1 happily-married, 1 unhappily-married-at-the-moment-but-it’ll-work-out friend, 1 single) have initiated conversations about how they’re disappointed about the lack of or small numbers of previous lady-lady relationships they’ve been able to enjoy so far. All of them seem to be pretty set on making it happen, they just don’t know when. But I frequently heard the word soon spoken.

      Because we discussed it, I can confidently state that the planetary gravity of 40 is affecting their attitudes towards it. 40 creates a *very* strong pull since it is such a “Damn! I AM kinda getting old! I wanna DO SHIT!!… like NOW!” kind of landmark age. (One of those women just learned and now surfs 2-3x/week. One’s taking aikido and the other’s starting 2 new businesses. It’s inspirational. I gotta step it up.)

      40 is an age of much change and we’re living in such an era of great change.
      I think these two factors combined are creating beautiful waves and opportunities.

      And since everything’s always about me, of course, and since I apparently have the absolute worst flirt-dar (this has been told me by, oh maybe, 15-20 friends), I am now re-playing the conversations with the women I mentioned above and picking up flirt vibes on re-play. Could be a joyous holiday season after all. That would be nice for a change. They’re all wonderful, but obviously, there are ethics involved. But hey, 1 open marriage and a single woman who’s rad as hell. So who knows.

      Whatever. The news in general is not surprising to me. In fact, I think I read another article recently that referred to a poll that said that 85% of the straight women they’d surveyed would be open to at least making out with another woman. I’ll have to delve through my bookmarks and try to find it again.

    • Yeah, I’ve always suspected that the majority of people are actually bisexual to at least some degree, but just don’t realize it/want to admit it.

      Not everybody. And particularly I think most gay-identified people have considered the possibility of their being bi and concluded that they’re definitely not. But I think there are loads and loads of straight-identified people in denial.

      • I agree. I think that although we’ve fought and won so many battles that have generated better understanding and minimized the stigma of being queer, that there’s STILL a long ways to go until we’re accepted easily by a large majority of the population (Well, durr. That was a stupidly obvious assertion.)

        But I’m absolutely sure that we won’t have any accurate population figures on how many people are actually gay, bi, or straight until being queer has lost its stigma. I mean, there will always be haters, probably for the next hundred years at least.

        But, over the next few generations, I think that we will progressively be considered “normal” first-class citizens by the majority of the populace. And when that happens, a lot of the people who currently choose to live a heterosexual or DL lifestyle to avoid being ostracized, hurt, murdered, and denigrated, will have the opportunity to follow their hearts. Furthermore, when being gay no longer carries a stigma, I predict that a lot more kids will follow their hearts and love the people they fall in love with.

        And that day can’t come too soon for me.

        Last note: In fact, behind all the frothy, hate-spewing of NOM and FOTF and all those other Xtian Taliban groups, is a legitimate fear. There will be more gay people in society. Absofuckinglutely right.

        When people stop terrorizing children, threatening them with familial rejection and molding them to their screwed-up Biblical ideas of what’s acceptable, more kids will have the option to explore their sexuality as they see fit. As the media and the internet provide increasing numbers of examples of real, happy, successful queers, they will be promoting the idea that being gay is okay. Damn straight. That’s just what we’re fighting for. But not the way that the NOMMERs characterize it: we don’t want to “turn” anyone gay, we just want people to have the freedom to make their own choices about their own sexuality.

        • Things have changes SO MUCH in the last 20 years, that it’s hard to believe. When I was coming out in 1987, my only role models were books with queer stories, and even those were hard to find in the regular public library – my college library was so much more helpful. There were no gay characters on TV, or movies, unless they died a tragic death in the end. I remember when Chaz Bono was outed as a lesbian in the tabloids, which was so horrible for him at the time, but god, we read every single word of it because… wow! Someone famous like us.

    • Luisa, Im 53 year old woman, so I have been around a while. Married for nearly 20 years to my husband but have always had interest in other women. I have to agree with you I really believe all women are basicly bi sexual. He is my only guy but I have had several special ladyfriends for all my life. I am not lesbian but only part lesbian, love it!!!

    • Bi sexual women are very common and until the last several years, they stayed hidden in the closet. I myself identify with the bi ladies and have had relationships with both men and women. I am a 34 year old woman and from my experiences, I would guess that the 60% figure is correct.

  12. Prove it?? It’s a matter of definition, if you are attracted to more than one sex, you are bisexual!

    Seriously, after transsexuality, bisexuality has this huge stigma, it’s like people are afraid to talk about it!

    • I think by “prove it” she maybe meant something salacious. Or maybe that was just me. :)

      But I think really good study might prove just that; that most people (I suspect this of men, too) fall somewhere on the 1-4 range of the kinsey scale with the 0 = opposite sex and 6 = same sex exclusives being in the minority.

      But the stigma about same-sex attraction is still really high, especially for men, that lots of people don’t feel comfortable saying it out loud.

      The fact that this was a survey of college students says a lot; younger folks from a generation that’s more open-minded, and a further subset of folks that are in higher education, so they’ve perhaps focused on the topic in a course, or just been open to learning about it…

      I still think the numbers seem really high, though. I’d like to see the study repeated a bunch of times.

      • Re: the stigma with men – that’s why I’ve always been really suspicious of these claims that women are supposedly more sexually-fluid than men are. I think that it’s just that female bisexuality is more socially acceptable than male bisexuality and, thus, there are more women willing to admit to it.

  13. “Go find a straight girl to make out with but don’t get emotionally involved.”

    This is the best advice ever ever.

    I also wonder how this study defines “attraction.” I think kissing another woman is a lot different from actually wanting to get up in her lady business. My best friend has kissed girls (and enjoyed it) but considers herself straight because she has no interest in anything below a woman’s belt.

    • That is a pretty key point! I was one of the few very out women in my college, and I had intimate relations in college with a number of women who were very into the kissing and very into having stuff done to them, but weren’t terribly interested in my lady business. That can be fun for awhile, but eventually you want a girl who is as interested in examining your private parts as you are hers.

      I doubt that was covered in any detail in that study.

  14. Hmm, 60 percent, eh? Out of the last four girls I kissed, only one of them actually identified as queer, which would put the levels of queeriosity I’ve encountered at 75 PERCENT.

    I need to conduct further research on this extremely important topic.

  15. I always thought they were just making out/snuggling with me because that’s what straight women do together and why not do it with me too? I’m glad that now I know better and sad for all those missed opportunities!

  16. I don’t get it. I realise it’s generally a good thing to let people label themselves however the fuck they want, but I seriously don’t understand the thinking behind someone being ‘heterosexual but also attracted to women’. People can call themselves what they like, but at the end of the day your orientation isn’t defined by the words you put on it, but on the actual feelings you have.

    • A guy I know is in a relationship with a lesbian. IDK, maybe she means she’s a Kinsey 5 or 5 and a half, and it’s only the occasional guy she finds exceptional that attracts her? Like, if she hadn’t met him, maybe she would never have been with a man in her life?

    • The actual feelings a person has are often not done justice by any of the labels available.

      Maybe a woman is attracted to men as well as butch and non-binary people because they are sufficiently different from her.
      Maybe the majority of people a woman is attracted to are men.
      Maybe a woman is emotionally attracted to anyone, but sexually only to men, or sexually to anyone, but romantically only to men, and thus sees only hetero relationships as viable and thus defining.

      There are all sorts of reasons that heterosexual might be either a more useful or a more accurate identity for a woman who is attracted to men and others.

  17. The fact that I can’t find any full citations of this article or even that it has actually been published is driving me crazy. Seriously, from Elizabeth Morgan’s web page on the BSU website, none of her listed publications match this info in participant pool size or research question. And none of the articles online that reference this study have any other researchers mentioned.

  18. I had a conversation with two of my straight female friends recently where they said that they watch exclusively lesbian porn. Then they talked about how they might want to have sex with a woman “just to see”. That conversation plus this article equals me never being able to talk myself out of crushes on straight girls ever again.

  19. i wonder why these same surveys don’t ask these lady hungry straight girls what happens when they fall in love with the lesbian they’ve just banged?

    i feel like the answers would be one of these choices:

    1) she has the frightening realization that she’s in love with you and then runs away screaming never to return another one of your calls.

    2) she immediately cheats on you with a boy just to make sure she’s not a real lesbian and that there’s just something about you that turns her on.

    3) she starts dating a boy, for realzies, but still hangs on to you and had sex with you because really there’s just something about you and if you really love her you’ll understand why she needs him too

    4) she realizes she’s a super dyke, f*cks you and then goes on to f*ck everyone you know

    5) she’s just kind of a dope sweet chick that thinks you’re super cute and hasn’t ever kissed a girl before…and man her lips are so soft…

    i mean this is just based on my own personal experience. also, it sounds like i’m bagging and maybe i am but it sucks when it’s happening to you. when you’re the one who likes the girl who won’t admit she actually likes you back.

    but i’m sure for the girl on the other side, all of these feelings are super hard to deal with so much love to you ladies.

    i guess my main point was that they always do sex and attraction surveys when all i wanna do is talk about love thangs

    • It’s hard not to bag a bit when you get caught in the maelstrom of someone trying to figure out their own sexual orientation, especially when they’re pretty awesome. For people from my generation and bagging on bisexuals in general, that’s where a lot of that negativity towards the idea of bisexuality comes from; personal heartbreak. It takes distance to gain perspective and understand that this girl absolutely crushed you not because of you but because she was trying to cope with her own inner storm fronts. It took a long time for me to get there, and it’s only through listening to the younger generation of bisexual women trying to break through that prejudice that I’m starting to get it, and get protective of what they’re going through, finally.

  20. I kind of with the whole Kinsey Scale theory. I mean, I feel pretty damn gay. I must admit though, I’ve had crushes on boys before (mostly when I was going through puberty), but…I don’t want to cut myself off from the possibility of loving a man…a hairy, sweaty, stinky man…. well…..

  21. I was so sure I was straight, dated lots of guys, then decided to ‘experiment’ at varsity.
    Needless to say I am now a big ol’ homo, head over heels for my girlfriend.
    I could never go back from sweet lady kisses, and I’m surprised anybody could!

  22. This is very interesting… I have recently started to hook up with a “straight” girl, but don’t know what to do about it. She said she would be open to something, but that nothing would probably come from it.

  23. *Read read read, scroll, read read read, scroll- sees Sarah Shahi for .0000001 seconds and immediately proceeds to go into cardiac arrest*

    I was taken by surprise. Somewhat pleasantly but surprised none-the-less. Damn it.

  24. Ha! TransienT, I did the exact same things. I originally found this because I had searched ‘I’m a lesbian and only straight girls like me’ because it sucks. It’s a problem I have, and I always end up hurt. Etc etc anyway! This was hilarious and validating to find.

  25. I really understand why so many women want sex with another woman,I have went down on several pretty women and it is REALLY wonderful!! Its a wonderful taste and I swallow all her moisture than I can. If I was a female I know that I would be a bi. I have never been to bed with a female who didnt like receiving oral. Its a very beautiful part of sex and men AND women should enjoy that part of a woman.

    • My advice is to spend some time working in a care home. If you do it seriously and with selfless compassion, which is the only real love that exists, you will soon lose all your fantasies about women’s “beauty”. And perhaps you will become a real man rather than a slave.

  26. This goes to show how disinterested women are in men. These women likely hate men more than they like women. It is probably because these women can never be men and therefore have penis envy. Even though men aren’t, as feminists like to put it “the lords of creation” that doesn’t stop them from holding men responsible for everything bad including menstrual cramps etc. If there was true equality, women would like men as much as men like women.

  27. it seems more and more women nowadays are into other women, instead of us straight men that are seriously looking to meet a good woman and have a relationship. it sucks as it is for me to keep going out and dealing with this garbage, and i hope that i can just be at the right place at the right time. i was married myself at one time, and my wife cheated on me with another woman. i never mistreated her in anyway at all, and i was a very caring and loving husband. and what is very sad is that this trend seems to be increasing, and what about us men that really would know how to treat a woman well?

  28. In 2010, OKCupid found that amongst its users, 1 in 3 straight women had hooked up with another woman, and of those who haven’t, 1 in 4 would like to. However the most recent survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found only 13% of all women had participated in same-sex behavior — and that includes the lesbians, bisexuals and queers. So now you can add all of the numbers up and divide them by the chance that Kristen Stewart likes girls and make a game plan for Friday night.

    okcupid is a joke. how many fake accounts? You can’t base that off of real world population in the real world only 10% of women have “one time” girls gone wild type incidents mostly in college and when under the influence and they end up regretting it because guess what they are straight.

  29. I’m confused. You say 60 percent of “hetero” women are attracted to other women. Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? Wouldn’t they be bisexual? What percentage of lesbians are attracted to men? Wouldn’t they be bi, too? What exactly do you mean by “hetero”?

  30. I am a 59 year old widow who always considered myself straight BUT after several years of being a widow have developed a close relationship to a couple who were very close friends to my husband and I. She and I became involved and it was all I could think of. after becoming lovers, I moved in with them and now we all share the same bed. We all consider that we are his wives and I so thrilled. For me, sex has never been better!! She and I often make love during the day and we both make love to him in the evenings. For years I craved sex and now my dreams have came true !!

  31. Pingback: El peligroso mito sobre el sexo en el que debes dejar de creer ya | | A que te encuentro

  32. due to cultural norms women are more likely to fall on a spectrum than men.

    it is “acceptable,” if not encouraged, for women to experiment with other women. this allows them to be more open about it.

    it likely even creates situations where women exaggerate if not completely fabricate an attraction to other women or to lesbian activity because heterosexual men find it a turn on & therefore the potential that a woman might fool around with other women or better yet invite a man to participate increases her desirability for A LOT of men.

    men are forced into a far more binary option. As a man if u are not straight u are gay. it doesn’t matter the degree to which a man is interested in, fantasized about or has participated in non-heterosexual sex, anything other than strict attraction to females only qualifies a man as gay. he may never have acted on it, but if a thought even crosses his mind he would be considered gay in mainstream straight male culture.

    ALL of these things factored together are the reason for such massive disparities between female-female attraction & make-male. MOST people are likely on a spectrum, most people (female & male included) are not likely to discuss it openly. females are very obviously more likely to discuss it.

    I do think there is significantly more FF attraction than MM even if we were to get honest answers about everyone’s tendencies because females in western culture have long been associated with soft, sensual, nurturing, beauty, etc. & females finding themselves attracted to society’s standard of those attributes is more likely than “mostly” straight men suddenly wanting the rugged, weathered, worn, hard stereotype of a man.

    2 women can fill the same role in our society much easier than 2 men can.

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