Celebrities like Miley Cyrus and Kristen Stewart are refusing to let people label their sexualities. And they're definitely not alone. According to a new survey, more and more young people are recognizing that sexuality doesn't have to be an "either-or" decision.
Opinion database YouGov surveyed 1000 Americans about sexuality, and asked them where they landed on the Kinsey scale, a spectrum of sexuality where 0 is completely heterosexual and 6 is completely homosexual. (The Kinsey scale was developed in the 1940s, and is sometimes criticized for being outdated. But the study results are still a fascinating look at changing sexuality.)
Among respondents who were 18 to 29 years old, only 64 percent said they were exclusively heterosexual, and 2 percent said they were exclusively homosexual; 29 percent landed somewhere in the middle of the scale, and the rest said they weren't sure. And it's not just an American phenomenon; YouGov also found that half of young British people identified as somewhere in the middle as well.
Younger people were also more likely to believe that sexuality existed on a scale. The older the respondent, the less likely they were to say their sexuality was fluid, though 12 percent of heterosexual respondents said they had a sexual encounter with a member of the same sex. Only eight percent of respondents who were 45 to 64 said they ranked between 1 and 5 on the Kinsey scale.
Stewart, for her part, totally predicted this in an interview earlier this year. "I think in three or four years, there are going to be a whole lot more people who don't think it's necessary to figure out if you're gay or straight," she said. "It's like, just do your thing."
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Megan Friedman is the former managing editor of the Newsroom at Hearst. She's worked at NBC and Time, and is a graduate of Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism.
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