Photo by Flickr user The mofoJT. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Now if you only the abstract below you might conclude the only possible explanation for women "evolving" same-sex desire was (what a surprise, *cough*Rule of Desire #1*cough*) for "the kids!" Since women having sex for any reason other than getting pregnant or getting help raising their kids would be intolerable! Inconceivable!
Born Both Ways: The Alloparenting Hypothesis for Sexual Fluidity in Women
Barry X. Kuhle, Department of Psychology, University of Scranton; Sarah Radtke, Department of Psychology, Ryerson University
Abstract
Given the primacy of reproduction, same-sex sexual behavior poses an evolutionary puzzle. Why would selection fashion motivational mechanisms to engage in sexual behaviors with members of the same sex? We propose the alloparenting hypothesis, which posits that sexual fluidity in women is a contingent adaptation that increased ancestral women’s ability to form pair bonds with female alloparents who helped them rear children to reproductive age. Ancestral women recurrently faced the adaptive problems of securing resources and care for their offspring, but were frequently confronted with either a dearth of paternal resources due to their mates’ death, an absence of paternal investment due to rape, or a divestment of paternal resources due to their mates’ extra-pair mating efforts. A fluid sexuality would have helped ancestral women secure resources and care for their offspring by promoting the acquisition of allomothering investment from unrelated women. Under this view, most heterosexual women are born with the capacity to form romantic bonds with both sexes. Sexual fluidity is a conditional reproductive strategy with pursuit of men as the default strategy and same-sex sexual responsiveness triggered when inadequate paternal investment occurs or when women with alloparenting capabilities are encountered. Discussion focuses on (a) evidence for alloparenting and sexual fluidity in humans and other primates; (b) alternative explanations for sexual fluidity in women; and(c) fourteen circumstances predicted to promote same-sex sexual behavior in women.
Sign!
And reading just the abstract you might conclude that they conclude there could be no other possible mechanism whereby women would form sexual attachments with other women there's therefore absolute certainty that heterosexual women have "sexual fluidity." It's all about the conditional reproductive strategies, see.
But if you read the actual paper (PDF here) you'd realize that, no, they qualify their assertions to such a bizarre degree that... you kind of wonder why they bothered in the first place.
The sentence to watch while reading the thing seems to be this "Under this view, most heterosexual women are born with the capacity to form romantic bonds with both sexes." Really, rather than trying to justify their assertion that nominally hetero women form same-sex sexual relationships to facilitate childrearing (a.k.a. alloparenting) they mostly seem to be speculating about why, let alone how, women "evolved" to have hawt girl-on-girl action.
Did I say "sigh" already? I guess I already did.
Did you know that, based on research lesbians report enjoying sex with men less? Did you know, further, that women who've been abused and/or been victims of sexual violence seem to have more difficulty forming same-sex relationships with men? Did you know that heterosexual women in isolation from opposite-sex partners are more likely to form same-sex relationships when confined (as in a harem or... I dunno... jail) with only other women? Yes, yes, and yes! Because, for the kids, see? It's gotta be! Because...
More interestingly, did you know that out of the 14 "testable hypotheses" they propose only the first four seem to have been studied? Or that out of some of those you really, really have to scratch deep to find something that sort of resembles confirmation? Son of a gun! What a whacky way to practice science!
Oh well, at least baseless, experiment-free "research" papers beats getting college coeds to give you unprotected blowjobs to "confirm" whether your semen is an antidepressant.
What's so $%!#% frustrating for me is that I actually believe humans evolve certain psychological tendencies and behaviors! I even believe it's likely that some of our behaviors are sexually selected for! But empty owl whiz like this stuff just makes anything else anyone tries do do less credible. And therefore discourages people who might someday turn out to be competent scientists from giving it a whirl.
Note: in the end notes the article was apparently rejected and then resubmitted. It may first have been rejected by Penthouse Letters. :-P