Now available in paperback

Sexual Fluidity is an account of a research project that changed direction: Diamond found something she hadn’t been looking for. All she had originally set out to study was ‘variability in women’s sexual pathways’, but it was soon clear that ‘variability’ didn’t do justice to what she was hearing from the women she interviewed, and that previous research in these areas had been flawed in ways that limited the scope of the stories women had to tell about their experiences. None of the previous research, for example, included more than one follow-up assessment interview, and the follow-up took place after a relatively short interval. Earlier studies had ‘focused only on adults who had self-identified as gay/lesbian/bisexual back in the 1970s and 1980s’, whereas she wanted to find out about women who were coming out now, women who had ‘grown up with much greater exposure to ideas about same-sex sexuality than had previous generations’. They would, she thought, be less likely to experience variations in their sexual development as resulting from repression or ignorance, and they would be less impressed by the available sexual categories. And last but not least, previous studies, of which Kinsey’s is the most famous, ‘relied primarily on numerical measures of sexuality’, whereas Diamond wanted to conduct ‘in-depth interviews, during which women could be prompted, with the assurance of confidentiality, to reflect on and reveal such deeply personal information’. As a result the book has many riveting accounts by women of their own experiences of sexual attraction and distraction. Diamond never makes her interviewees sound less interesting than her conclusions about them.

(LRB 19 June 2008)

Harvard | hardback 333 pp. |ISBN: 9780674026247