Apparently free dating site okcupid also does surveys. Feministing highlights data on suicidal thoughts broken down by gender and sexuality (and nationality for Canada and US). They observe that bisexual women have the highest rate.
Now, it is not in the least surprising that there is a gender gap (women attempt suicide far more than men, though they succeed less often and women have higher rates of depression). It is not surprising that queer people have higher rates than straight people. It is interesting that bisexuals have higher rates than gays or lesbians. I think this is probably because gay people increasingly have an established community and established norms within society. Society still is not particularly equipped to handle bisexuals, especially bisexual men.
However, the evidence for this from the survey is shaky. The results from Canada seem to support this, the percentage of bi men is abnormally high in relative terms. I don’t really see a lot of other interesting trends (Canada has a larger gender gap and higher overall rate, though the sample size in Canada is smaller and this could be noise). It is perhaps interesting that bisexuals are worse off than gays but it is not surprising, sadly.
P.S. In other Feministing comments for today, I don’t think this on Playboy is very useful. Feminists like to talk about how media shapes the preferences of men, as if absent this men would suddenly en masse like obese women just as much as thin women. I don’t buy it. Taste varies greatly across men. If pop culture images were so powerful, men would have uniform preferences within a society. I guess I’m just not sufficiently postmodern to accept that all things are socially constructed.
