Born This Way? Science Could Explain Why You're a Bottom

Researchers believe that your sex-role in the bedroom might be more biological than you think.

University of Toronto researchers took to the streets of Canada at Pride events and surveyed more than 240 gay men about their sex-role preferences, as well as asked questions about their siblings, whether they were right or left-handed, and gender conformity in childhood. 

The survey found that bottoms are more likely to be gender-nonconforming, left-handed, and have older brothers. They also found a correlation between having older sisters and being versatile in the bedroom.

Is this enough to correlate being left-handed with wanting to bottom? VanderLaan, an assistant professor at the University that held the survey, believes so. “One thing about handedness is we know it’s related to brain organization and we know that it takes place really early," VanderLaan explained. "People very early in life — infants and children — will show hand preference for activities. That’s what makes handedness such a valuable marker is that it tells us about a particular developmental window.”

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But just because it's a pattern doesn't mean it's always 100 percent true.

VanderLaan realizes that bedroom preferences are obviously more complicated than just being left-handed. “Sex role identity development is a complex process that unfolds over decades, so the idea that some early life developmental experience that happened in the womb has a direct impact on someone’s sex-role behavior decades later. That seems potentially a little too simplistic and we certainly don’t have demonstrative evidence that that sort of scenario is indeed the case.”

Read the full Jezebel article here.