#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex

Where this was said

Sexual fetishes

At 1:35:18 · chapter starts 1:20:21

This is the episode's most extended single topic. Shaw begins by explaining why bisexual research is hard to find: the term 'bisexual' is confused in academic databases and researchers have shifted to terms like 'plurisexual' or 'pansexual.' The history of Kinsey is then explored at length: a biologist studying wasps who was handed a sexuality research project and spent a year just listening to students' questions about sex before conducting thousands of interviews across America. His Kinsey Scale (0 = exclusively heterosexual, 6 = exclusively homosexual) found roughly half of men sitting in the middle — not exclusively either — at a time when this was genuinely radical ^{[1] — Julia Shaw "In the 1940s, Alfred Kinsey — a biologist who studied wasps — sold out auditoriums talking about human sexuality. His Kinsey Scale showed t…" 1:46:00 Play} . Shaw explains the historical reversal: bisexuality research started with men (partly due to the post-war homosocial environment of veterans), but today twice as many women identify as bisexual as men, partly because bisexual men still face hostility from both straight and gay communities. The Klein Grid is introduced as a richer multidimensional tool covering attraction, behavior, fantasies, social preference, lifestyle, and self-identification across past, present, and ideal. Shaw reveals she came out as bisexual in her book Evil and subsequently wrote Bi specifically to create the mainstream scientific literature on bisexuality that didn't exist. She discusses the mental health consequences for bisexual people — higher rates of self-harm, isolation, and sexual violence — largely attributable to feeling unwelcome in both straight and queer communities. The chapter ends with her fear, expressed with genuine emotion, that the rights of bisexual and queer people are not permanently secure.