Betydningen av seksuell erfaring, tiltrekning og identitet for ...

in the middle area – representing young people reporting both experiences
and attractions – is extremely small (females) or non-existent (males) as we
isolate respondents with French kissing-experiences only (A, B). This is due
to the fact that most of the respondents reporting both dimensions of
homosexual attraction had experienced fondling above the waist or genital
contact with someone of their own sex. When isolating the small group of
young men with one or more experiences of genital contact, the largest area
combines experiences and attractions, homosexual genital contact without
such attractions coming next. The corresponding group of young women is
more than twice as large in number, but is distributed more evenly across the
seven combinations.
In the present study, 93.3 per cent of the males and 71.5 per cent of the
females had had neither homosexual experiences nor attractions and could
thus be categorised as heterosexuals, following the manner of thinking of
Friedman et al.’s study (2004). A far smaller group consisting of 3.2 per cent
of the males and 8.1 per cent of the females reported homosexual desire,
romantic feelings or both, which may suggest a homosexual orientation
(Friedman et al 2004). However, a small minority among the young males
and quite a large minority among the young women fitted into neither of
these categories (3.5 per cent of the males and 26.3 per cent of the females),
reporting a combination of experiences and attractions that does not match.
Discussion – Making sense of homosexual behaviour in
adolescence
The results presented so far illustrate a landscape of sexual behaviour and
attractions that is far from both unitary heterosexual and binary
homosexual/heterosexual. We found that a varying minority up to 27 per
cent have one or more forms of homosexual experience, that homosexual
experiences were positively correlated with heterosexual experiences and at
the same time relatively loosely related to homosexual attractions. A
weakness of the study might be that we have no knowledge of possible
temporal concurrence of behaviour and attractions. In addition, among those
refraining from answering questions on same-sex sexual experience, some
may be reluctant to admit such experience and thus contribute to deflate the
prevalence of homosexual experience of the sample. Still, we may conclude
that there is no evidence of the ‘either-or’ relationship between homo- and
heterosexual experiences among youth that is often assumed to apply to
adult GLB people in public opinion (Dempsey, Hillier and Harrison 2001).
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– NOVA Rapport 1/07 –