So what's this all about? Why does alcohol seem to increase straight people's interest in experimenting with gay sex? It likely has something to do with the fact that alcohol reduces our anxieties and inhibitions in general, thereby leading us to consider trying all kinds of things we might not normally attempt, sexually and otherwise. Their interest in the female target followed the same pattern. In other words, as women consumed more alcohol, they become more sexually interested in people of both the opposite and the same sex. Specifically, sober women expressed very low interest in the guy, but the more women drank, the more interested they became. Whereas men's interest in the opposite sex didn't change depending on how much they drank, it did for women. The results, however, were a little different for women. While guys who had nothing to drink reported next to no interest in getting it on with a dude, guys who said they'd had more than ten drinks expressed almost as much interest in the man as they did the woman. Basically, alcohol didn't seem to affect whether guys were DTF with an attractive woman.īut the more that guys drank, the more interested they became in the male target. What they found was that, for men, they were equally willing to have sex with the female target no matter how little or how much they'd had to drink. The researchers looked at how the amount of alcohol consumed was related to sexual interest in the target. Men also expressed more sexual interest overall than women, consistent with a large body of research that finds men tend to be more open to casual sex with strangers. In a surprise to no one, the men were more interested when the video featured a woman rather than a man, whereas women showed the reverse pattern. Afterward, they rated how willing they would be to perform various acts with the person in the video-everything from buying them a drink to going home together to having sex.
In addition, they watched a 40 second video of either a physically attractive man or woman drinking at a bar and chatting with the bartender. They had the participants complete a survey, which included questions about how many drinks they'd had that night. In the study, researchers approached 83 heterosexual adults who were walking between bars in a Midwestern town late at night. But a new study just published in The Journal of Social Psychology adds an intriguing twist to that experiment, suggesting that beer goggles don't just increase straight men and women's attraction to people of the opposite sex, but also to people of the same sex.