Having spent significant time on social media and the internet, I am used to clickbait titles about social studies, ranging from “Bearded men more likely to fight, cheat and steal” to “GMO crops will eat your baby” (fine, I made that up!) to “Attention! Every woman is either gay or bisexual, but never completely straight” (I just…wish I had made that up!). However, that last one reinforced my steadily waning respect for how the scientific method, and I use those two words loosely, tends to get applied and propagated nowadays.

It doesn’t help that online news sources and social media tend to trumpet such studies with as little nuance as possible. The study’s original name, “Sexual Arousal and Masculinity-Femininity of Women”, transforms into either the salacious “Women are ‘either bisexual or gay but NEVER straight’: Females become aroused by naked videos of both sexes” or the overly simplistic “No woman ‘totally straight’, study says”. Only the rare article displays some nuance, as does IFLScience, deigning to use “suggests” in the title and noting that the study is highly limited in scope, since its “research base falls into the Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic—or WEIRD—demographic.” Considering that fact and the way these titles function, I am marginally disappointed to not have encountered an Indian source arguing that the study shows all Western women are queer and we need to close our borders before they invade and seduce good Indian women and, possibly, Gau Mata.

Sadly, selling things inaccurately for attention is hardly restricted to webpages. The study leader, Dr. Gerulf Rieger (from the Department of Psychology, University of Essex) proclaimed, “Even though the majority of women identify as straight, our research clearly demonstrates that when it comes to what turns them on, they are either bisexual or gay, but never straight”. A closer look at the study reveals that the “never” actually means a total of 72%, which would be akin to me saying that I have never been shorter than three feet in height. Later, Rieger admitted that “never” was an exaggeration and that he actually meant to say that “the majority of women who identify as straight are not straight in their sexual arousal”.

I was curious how the good doctor detects sexual arousal and evidently he does so by, among other things, looking at pupil dilation. Really? When did enlarging of your pupils automatically translate to sexual arousal and, even better, when did arousal become the same thing as sexuality? By that logic, I must be biryani-sexual, chocolate-sexual and ice-cream-sexual, considering what happens to my eyes when I see such things. Or, as a friend of mine observed, photo-sexual, given how eyes basically work. Not to mention that if sexual arousal automatically translates to sexuality, then, based on admittedly anecdotal information (but with much higher than 72% agreement), Tom Hiddleston radiates an aura that turns all women heterosexual (and a lot of men gay). Rieger’s study evidently also relies on looking at blood flow to the genitals, but, as any 14-year-old boy can tell you, that is just as likely to result from, say, a change in wind patterns as arousal. Or things like, say, menstruation, which has a bit of a connection with blood and genitals. So it is utterly surprising that other studies show that the photoplethysmography (say that thrice quickly!) method used by Rieger “cannot even accurately predict the self-reported arousal of straight women”.

As part of his methodological problems, Rieger evidently has issues with definition. He claimed that the study showed that “Although some lesbians were more masculine in their sexual arousal, and others were more masculine in their behaviours, there was no indication that these were the same women”. In fact, he deduced (with what I imagine to be the same fascinated awe as Archimedes watching his loofah fall out of the bathtub), “This shows us that how women appear in public does not mean that we know anything about their sexual role preferences”.

The above statements raise so many questions. How does one define “masculine” sexual arousal? Is it when one’s eyes roll back as blood retreats from the brain or when one rushes up to some hapless woman on the bus and rubs against her? For that matter, what exactly are lesbians who are “masculine in their behaviours”? Ones who wear flannel or throw overarm? Does a lesbian who counts as “more masculine” in her behaviour on Monday get bumped from the category if she puts on lipstick and watches Nach Baliye on Wednesday? What if she is a bad cook but excellent at folding laundry? Does that make the researchers’ heads explode? (Understandably, maybe, since that describes me and I’m told I’m a lousy lesbian.) And how exactly, in 2015, does someone require a “scientific” study to show that women’s appearance in public does not map onto their sexual preferences? Especially since women are consistently and regularly shamed around the planet for even implying in public that they have sex, let alone sexual preferences. Inquiring minds want to know!

The problem, of course, is that this study, like so many that gain attention online, is hugely flawed due to both underlying assumptions and lack of scientific rigour. It draws its simplistic definitions and narrow categories (masculine/feminine; straight/gay/bisexual) from the society around it, uses them to set the parameters of the study (and even the participants, drawn from a tiny subset of society), and then thoughtlessly makes universalising claims about that very same society based on the results. This is presumably why Rieger, in an older study (subtly titled “Male bisexual arousal: a matter of curiosity?”, argued that male bisexuality does not exist. All women are queer and men are never genuinely bisexual? This — utterly coincidentally, I’m sure — sounds like the sort of opinions that a bunch of frat boys would express over some beers. While one cannot avoid being unaffected by one’s context, the more awareness one has of that context the more one can mediate the effect—and that is true for scientific studies just as much as for anything else.

Maybe Rieger’s study will eventually be shown to have some validity. Considering, however, the premises that it works with, I’m not holding my breath. If only there was a study (hah! See what I did there?) to see whether such social studies tend to be true. Oh, wait  —there is. An investigation of 100 major psychology studies published in three major journals showed that 60 did not hold up when retested.

That doesn’t mean you can’t trust anything out there, of course. But it does mean that you should take such studies with a serious pinch of salt and investigate before you work them into your dinner conversation. And please, please don’t presume to tell straight women you know that science proves they are lying  — unless you want to discover what science says about the effect of a knee contacting your nether regions. And yes, the internet will fill you in on that too.