[LINK] "Study: Why Straight Women Are Often Close With Gay Men"

[rfmcdonald]

Thoughts, anyone, on the study described in Lindsay Abrams' article in The Atlantic?

[W]hen it avoids teetering into decorative accessory territory, the "unique and important bond shared between straight women and gay men" is both observable and understudied. So researchers at the University of Texas at Austin designed an experiment aimed at empirically evaluating how, exactly, both parties benefit from being soul mate friends.

To do so the researchers designed a fake internet persona -- "Jordan" -- and evaluated participants' ability to form a relationship with him based solely on his Facebook profile.

[. . .]

The results, published in Evolutionary Psychology, showed that straight women are more trusting of mating advice (the authors' preferred term) when it comes from a gay man, although they don't put any more faith in gay men's ability to help them find a mate than they do in straight men or women.

Gay men, too, were more likely to trust advice from straight women than from straight men or lesbians. They thought that straight women were more likely than gay men, but not significantly more likely than lesbians, to help them find a mate.

In all this, the researchers see support for their hypothesis that "close friendships between straight women and gay men may be characterized by a unique exchange of unbiased mating-relevant information that may not be available in their other relationships." This works, they propose, on two levels: first, the two aren't competing for mates; and second, they otherwise have a lot in common -- namely, being attracted to men. As the study's title puts it, they're "Friends with benefits, but without the sex."