The graph is rather poorly made, and not what I was linking. It does not report the amount of answers or the percentage of the population that falls within a given category. Rather, the blue shaded region represents how homosexual a given region is. It in no way attempts to link a category with the frequency with which that category appears in human society.
Quote:
Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories... The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects.
While emphasizing the continuity of the gradations between exclusively heterosexual and exclusively homosexual histories, it has seemed desirable to develop some sort of classification which could be based on the relative amounts of heterosexual and homosexual experience or response in each history [...] An individual may be assigned a position on this scale, for each period in his life. [...] A seven-point scale comes nearer to showing the many gradations that actually exist." (Kinsey, et al. (1948). pp. 639, 656)
This is work that was done in the forties and fifties, at a time when homosexuality was considered a mental illness and was treated with electro shock therapy. Alfred Kinsey's work was very controversial to say the least. Arathain and Taskiss are merely holdovers from that time period. Our current understanding of human sexuality is that Kinsey does not cover the whole range of human sexuality, but this is akin to stating that Isaac Newton's laws of motion do not cover the whole range of physics. Newtonian mechanics got us to the moon, and Kinsey's scale, while not complete, is a remarkable starting point. There is a difference between, "This is what we thought fifty years ago, and it's wrong," and, "This is what we thought fifty years ago, but there's more."
As to the graph, cognitive bias, and so forth, let's look once again at the first sentence of that quote. It is nice and comforting as a heterosexual male to think that I am completely and utterly straight. That thought keeps my masculinity from being called into question. It is also misleading. The extreme ends of the spectrum, the completely heterosexual and completely homosexual areas, are largely fictitious. This is not to say that they absolutely do not exist, as there are a few people who fall into either category, just like there are people who are totally disinterested in sex altogether, but these people are rare. What the lay population think of as "totally straight" is actually a 1 on Kinsey's scale - that is, incidentally homosexual. As a heterosexual male, that is an absolutely frightening thought.
To use Arathain's definition, there are no straight men on this board. It's fine to use his definition, but it does not imply what he (and everyone he's arguing with) seem to think it implies. If straight is totally heterosexual, and everything else is varying levels of gay, then we are all gay men. (Well, there's probably one totally heterosexual male on the board - we'll say it's Kaffis for the sake of argument). Perhaps, he is right. Maybe we should start supporting our more intensely gay brethren, and wear the following badge with pride:
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