Contributed by: ElyseRomano on Saturday, October 23 2010 @ 03:08 pm
Last modified on
Have you ever had a sexual encounter with someone of the same sex?
The 252,900 straight people OkCupid polled in their newest study, "Gay Sex vs. Straight Sex," provided surprising results: nearly a quarter responded that they had participated in a same-sex experience, and an additional 11% reported that they had not but would like to.
Writer Christian Rudder then broke down the replies to the inquiry geographically, creating a color-coded map of the "straight people who either have had or would like to have a same-sex experience in the continental U.S. and lower Canada." Most of the results are predictable - the West Coast and the North East are more gay curious, while the Southern states are significantly less so - but some are unexpected. Even in the states that reported being less interested in exploring same-sex experiences, pockets of gay curiosity, in cities like Austin and Madison, can be found. And perhaps most interestingly of all, Canada is entirely orange and red, the colors that indicate the highest level of gay curiosity, from coast to coast.
In a brief aside, Rudder discusses the "many awful things our elected officials have said about gay people" that he encountered while writing his post, mentioning in particular a quote from Jim Demint: "If a person is a practicing homosexual, they should not be teaching in our schools." Rudder facetiously notes that "a fun game to play with stuff like this is to replace the words 'homosexual' and 'gay' with 'politician,'" because "then you have something that's actually true," and then proceeds to attempt to discredit Demint's claim by searching through the answers to match questions. What he finds is "one question with a surprising disparity, not between orientations, but between genders."
The question is straightforward - "Which is bigger: the earth or the sun?" You'd think that anyone who passed the 4th grade would be able to answer this simple astronomy query with ease, but it appears that was not the case - over 10% of straight women incorrectly answered that the earth is larger than the sun, and just under 10% of gay women answered similarly. The men fared much better: only 5% of gay men, and fewer than 5% of straight men, got the question wrong.
Rudder's results can be summed up in one word: Yikes. Perhaps we'd all be better off abandoning our academic pursuits in favor of moving to Canada and exploring our same-sex inclinations.
Stick around for a review of the final findings of OkCupid's "Gay Sex vs. Straight Sex" study, in which Rudder evaluates the personality traits that are most associated with each orientation, revisits the fun of the "The REAL 'Stuff White People Like'" study, and attempts to define "the norm."