Is there such a thing as “bi voice”? Researchers tried to find out & here’s what they learned…
published in The Journal of Sex and Research, found that people couldn’t accurately detect bisexuality in bi men’s voices. Even more interesting, the study’s participants regarded bi men’s voices as more masculine than straight men’s voices.Psychology researchers at the University of Sydney had 70 self-identified heterosexual participants listen to recordings of 60 men’s voices: 20 of the recordings were of gay men, 20 were of bi men, and 20 were straight.
The participants had to live in Australia for more than five years to become used to Australian accents.Each recording had the men reciting the following line from Australia’s national anthem: “Australians all let us rejoice, For we are one and free; We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil; Our home is girt by sea.” The recordings were made on each man’s smartphone without any additional instructions from researchers.After hearing each voice, participants were asked to categorize each man’s sexual orientation and to decide how masculine or feminine it sounded on a nine-point scale.
Researchers expected that participants would consider the bi men’s voices as “more feminine than straight men, but less feminine than gay men.”But while the participants correctly categorized the sexual orientations of the gay and straight speakers “at rates greater than chance” (that is, better than a random guess), participants were unable to tell which voices belonged to bi men at rates greater than chance.“Bisexual voices were consistently misperceived as being the most exclusively female attracted, and, contrary to expectations, were perceived as the most masculine sounding of all the speakers,” the study found.Researchers wrote that stereotypically “gay voices” in English-speaking men.
