Here's what he says:

As for [the writer's male cousin] "playing for the other team" at college, ACK, that can indeed be just a phase—but for women, not men. Heterosexual and homosexual women, if legit scientific research is to be believed, "tend to become sexually aroused by both male and female erotica, and, thus, have a bisexual arousal pattern," according to the results of a 2003 study conducted at LUG-infested Northwestern University. Men, on the other hand, prefer erotica that plays exclusively to their professed sexual orientation. Which means, of course, that female sexuality is a fluid and male sexuality is a solid. Or something.

And ladies? Pointing out your fluid sexuality isn't an insult. It's a compliment — hell, it's a freakin' superpower.

Hmm, seems to me I covered the topic of what turns on the ladies before and found that the scientist who wrote the most recent studies on this said:

To conclude that women are bisexual on the basis of their sexual responding overlooks the complexity and multidimensionality of female sexuality.

Also, if you don't have time to go back and read it, (statistically speaking) women get minimally aroused by watching pretty much anything fuck — including monkeys — but that doesn't make us all bestialists either. Sexuality isn't about who you want to watch fuck, it involves who you actually want to fuck. And if men don't or —in my opinion, more likely — can't express as wide a range of bisexuality as women, maybe that has more to do with the taboos around male hetero- and bisexuality than anything else.

I've known bisexual men and they have it hard (heh) from both ends (sorry, can't stop) of the spectrum. A close friend of mine in college was bisexual, and gay men didn't want to get into a relationship with him, convinced he would leave for a more socially-acceptable female life partner, and women often didn't want to sleep with him knowing he'd had a guy's dick up his ass. I've heard plenty of gay men comment that they wouldn't want to get involved with a bisexual man. I've had one of my close gay friends admit that he is (years after coming out) still attracted to women here and there but that it was usually too much trouble to date women because of the lack of acceptance from certain quarters in his social circle. Bisexual men and women are often considered "really" gay but trying to fit in, rather than there being a wide acceptance that they are actually bisexual. And Dan Savage is a good example of this stereotype, as he tells his reader that the cousin is obviously just a closet case but that, perhaps, his fiancée is the kind of woman who likes a gay guy (as though having a bisexual open relationship is just soooo weird). It's such a weirdly and disturbingly normative answer for a columnist who is all about letting people know the safest way to drink other people's urine.

Oh, and about how female bisexuality is a superpower? Yeah, if playing at or displaying an attraction to women for the sake of titillating men is super, or a power. Maybe us bile-spewing ladies just get annoyed when everyone keeps telling us we are bisexual, Dan, because some of us aren't and the ones who actually are aren't doing it for anyone's benefit but their own.

Ladies, Pointing Out Your Fluid Sexuality Isn't an Insult, It's a Freakin' Superpower [Village Voice]
Savage Love December 5, 2007 [AV Club]
What Women Want (Maybe) [New York Times]

Chivers' research shows that women are more easily aroused than men (no, seriously, it does), except when it comes to looking at hot naked men doing non-sexual things. I think I can speak for a number of straight women here when I say that even the hottest naked guy can do bad-naked things and that, sometimes, a flaccid penis on even a hot guy jumping around isn't going to get my engine running. But women do get physiologically aroused by naked women bouncing around, all kinds of porn and even monkeys fucking. And, thus Salon and the New York Times declare us all a little bisexual. [Insert long sigh here]

Chivers does her best to point out that what one fantasizes about or gets randomly turned on by doesn't have anything to do with what you are actually interested in doing.

To conclude that women are bisexual on the basis of their sexual responding overlooks the complexity and multidimensionality of female sexuality.

Not that anyone cares, of course, because it's not as a good a story as us ladies are all one small push away from eating each other out with great gusto.

But if we all stopped and thought about it for a second, we all are aroused by things, or fantasize about things to get aroused, that have no actual interest for us sexually. I've had sex dreams about women, fantasized about group sex, public sex, the dirtiest of anonymous sex, sex in public places, sex with inappropriate people... none of which I've ever done or really made any effort to do in the last 14+ years of sex-having because they don't hold any real-world interest for me. I don't think that fantasies of having a threesome makes you a swinger, or that getting aroused watching monkeys fucking means that you're into bestiality, or that fantasizing about S&M makes you a closet submissive, and thus I don't think that getting aroused at the sight of women bouncing up and down (images, notably, that we're strongly culturally socialized to think of as sexy) makes an otherwise straight woman bisexual.

This might be a little nurture-over-nature for most people, but I would expect that in a culture that fetishizes the female form in so many ways and does not fetishize the male form in the same way women would naturally be more aroused by random naked women than random naked men because so much of sexuality is in your head anyway. And, in a culture in which the male homosexual taboo is so strong, I would equally expect that many, many men would not find images of hot naked guys sexy because male sexuality is not all in their dicks, either — it's in their heads as well, jostling around with their taboos. But maybe I'm just trying to justify my closet bisexuality. That's probably what the New York Times would tell me, just before the Grey Lady tried to stick her tongue in my mouth.

What Women Want (Maybe) [New York Times]
Are All Women An little Bit Bi? [Salon Broadsheet]