Researchers in Cyprus gathered info about men’s sexual desire for lesbians. Then, having satisfied their desire to collect that info, the researchers explained what it means to them. The study is:
“The evolution of female same-sex attraction: The male choice hypothesis,” Menelaos Apostolou [pictured here], Marios Shialos, Michalis Khalil, and Vana Paschali, Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 116, 2017, pp. 372–378.
The authors, at the University of Nicosia, Cyprus, explain: “this paper proposed a theoretical framework where, during the period of human evolution, same-sex attractions in women were under positive selection. The source of positive selection has been male preferences for opposite-sex sex partners who experienced same-sex attractions.”
Apostolou, Shialos, Khalil, and Paschali gathered data: “This theoretical framework was used to generate four predictions that were tested in two online studies which employed a total of 1509 heterosexual participants. ”
Apostolou, Shialos, Khalil, and Paschali explain that the data confirms their expectations about what some men find sexually attractive about some women sometimes:
“It was found that… a considerable proportion of heterosexual men desired partners who experienced same-sex attractions. In addition, it was found that men were more sexually excited than women by the same-sex infidelity of their partners, and they desired more than women, their opposite-sex partners to have sex with same-sex individuals. Finally, participants’ preferences were contingent on the seriousness of the relationships, with same-sex attraction to be preferred more in short-term than in a long-term partner.”
Apostolou, Shialos, Khalil, and Paschali arrive at a new understanding about evolution:
“These findings were employed in understanding the evolutionary origins of same-sex attraction in women…. Men’s desire for women who are attracted to other women selects for women who are attracted to other women. In turn, male desires, along with factors such as arranged marriage, which weakened the negative fitness costs of same-sex attraction, can explain the relatively high frequency of this trait in the population.”
BONUS: The newspaper El País supplies its own interpretation of this study, pointing out that “no homosexual woman has been interviewed in this study.”