By now, most of us are familiar with the July 5 New York Times article about a study in which researchers showed people porn and measured how aroused they got. The conclusion: although bisexuality may exist among women, guys are either gay, straight or lying.

    We've been back and forth on bisexuality for ages, and we always end up in the same place: maybe for chicks — because after all, who really knows with chicks, am I right? — but with guys, it's either experimentation (that thing with that guy you did when you were fourteen), confusion (Mr. and Mrs. Wilde, Elton and Mrs. John) or a pose (Bowie). So you could see this most recent study as an affirmation of common sense, proof of something we all really knew anyway.

    Except that this study, like so many lab-based studies of human sexuality, fucked it all up. Porn is not sex. It's related to sex, it can lead to various forms of sex, but it doesn't take much reflection to realize that what turns men

on in porn is different from what turns them on in actual, down-in-the-trenches sex. Most men, for instance, would balk at rape. Ditto incest, and any number of other things that fill the aisles of your local triple-X shop. Imagine a study that showed men rape-fantasy videos and concluded that most men would rape a woman if they got the chance. If we put the late Andrea Dworkin — thankfully now buried in the footnotes, where she belongs — to one side, I think we can safely say that just ain't so.

    Now, I like women. I like having sex with women. But I tend to download guys. My sexual tastes and my porn predilections overlap and influence each other, but they are different things. Porn is simpler than sex. Porn is like
one of those hammers the doctor takes to your knee. People sell themselves short when they blur the valuable distinctions between this kind of reflex and actual, full, real, human sex. Porn is physical. Sex is far more than half
mental and emotional. Even for we brutish, brutish men.

    Don't believe me? Start saying Kaddish next time you're having sex with a Jewish guy, or the Lord's Prayer if he's a Christian. Better yet, mention his mother, or yours. And you can — we all know this — use that same tap to turn him on, too. Depending on who he is, whispering various sorts of things in his ear, anything from sweet nothings to dirty somethings will get him more aroused. Or just tell him he's got a big cock; that usually does it.

    Say you're an average man and you love your average wife and you have sex with her an average of three times a week. You would almost certainly not spend money, or even download time, on porn featuring a woman who was in the same hotness bracket as your wife. And yet, as you fuck her, you realize that you don't always have to think of Sheryl Crow or the Olsen twins to get it up and, further, when you think about it, you don't figure you're settling in any way; your actual, real-life ideal is not Mary-Kate or Jenna Jameson. Your wife, in other words, is turning you on in real life, with various real-life tools that extend beyond cup size and landing-pad design — in a way she should not were you put in a room with a Velcro strap around your dick and asked to watch someone like her doing naughty things on TV.

    The study, then, like any number before it, is fundamentally flawed, as these studies will continue to be as long as scientists and funding agencies are too squeamish to test people in actual sexual situations, taking cues from, say, Girls

Gone Wild or seancody.com, and ask people to actually have sex with a variety of different people in a variety of different situations for a variety of different reasons over a variety of periods of time.
A study like that, well executed, would bring us closer to an understanding of the way our sexuality works. But it would still not be nearly as accurate as any number of little experiments we can do on ourselves.

    Like this one, a slight twist on those labs' use of porn: first, figure out one thing that really turns you on about sex. For guys, it's often visual. I like watching my dick go into things. Based on the way most porn is shot, I'm going to assume I'm not alone. Next, download some porn with a gender-split that doesn't usually interest you. Go to your friendly neighborhood free porn site and, using the framing and zoom functions of your chosen media player, focus on the image of the cock going in and out of whatever it is. (If you can't find a clip that doesn't include distracting shifts to faces and other, non-essential body parts, just put the relevant bit on "loop" — a freely downloadable video-editing program will help you out with this one. If that all sounds too much, cropping stills from newsgroups and turning a few of them into a slideshow can be easier.) Now clear your mind of whatever nasty notions you have of the sexual practices of the team you don't play for and concentrate on the cock and hole. It won't be long before you get a physical reaction to this mental exercise.

    Though it may seem so in the abstract, this is really no more forced or artificial than trying calamari when you think it might be gross to eat squid; and it's certainly not as bad as going into a lab and strapping yourself down in front of a bank of cameras.

    Once you have done this and, I suspect, been successful, you will have proved one small, simple but significant thing to yourself: that the part of a sexual act or relationship you may have assumed was reflex is, in fact, alterable by non-reflexive concerns (a set that includes emotion, intellect, Jack Daniels, E and desire for money). This doesn't mean you have to start fucking that other gender if you don't already. It just means that you'll have a slightly more accurate understanding of the way sex actually works for us humans. What you do with that understanding is entirely up to you.

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