I think there’s been a lot of sexological and psychological research suggesting that men’s sexuality is more rigid than women’s and that women are inherently more sexually fluid.
And what I argue in the book is that even that research is situated within some long-held beliefs about the fundamental difference between men and women that are not accurate from a feminist perspective. It’s interesting, because if you look at this belief that women’s sexuality is more receptive - it’s more fluid, it’s triggered by external stimuli, that women have the capacity to be sort of aroused by anything and everything - it really just reinforces what we want to believe about women, which is that women are always sexually available people. So one selling point for me in the book was to think about, Why are we telling this really different story about women’s sexuality? With men, on the other hand, the idea that they have this hardwired heterosexual impulse to spread their seed and that that’s relatively inflexible, also kind of reinforces the party line about heteronormativity and also frankly, patriarchy. You take readers on sort of a 20 th-century American tour of heterosexual dabbling in homosexual behavior, and there was never a lack of evidence that such dabbling took place.