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I don't think this is remotely universal. On the contrary being flex is pretty rare, as any gay man will tell you. I want to stress that straights, gays and lesbians actually exist and they're not lying when they say they're only aroused by one sex.
But also, yeah theres a reason everyone jokes about the "straight" guy into femboys.
I actually suspect it is more common than you think. Look at prison sexuality, Afghanistan's bacha bazi, and ancient Greek homosexuality.
What I think they all have in common, is that if you sex segregate a population, some men who aren't really "bi", and who would self identify as straight in most circumstances in a modern context, will have sex with smaller weaker men (often of the more effeminate variety, where they can be had.)
But I think this would be less common in less sex segregated places like the United States as a whole.
I don't think that sexuality can be partially a product of one's culture or coercive environment has much to do with the initial notion of how, e.g. a lesbian who doesn't find sex with a male who self-identifies as a woman is being transphobic, where we're using "transphobic" to mean something to be judged as irrational or morally negative or. If you ran an experiment of sticking one lesbian in prison with a bunch of trans women, I'm sure on at least a few of the trials, the lesbian would find sex with the trans women to be fine or even desirable, but the situation in real life that we're dealing with is where lesbians aren't so limited in their choice of partners.
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Better yet, look at how much prison sexuality differs just between the different Anglo cultures. I’ve watched the occasional Ladbible / Insider interviews of British career criminals and several remarked that the ”watch out when picking up the soap” (while of course an obvious exaggeration) is an American thing and does not work the same in British prisons. Clearly the amount of flex is heavily affected by cultural factors.
I have an alternative explanation for why american prisons are gayer than british prisons. In america a lot of the prison population is black and blacks are twice as likely to be gay and whites.
I don't think the population that answers "gay" in polls is the same population that is likely to be the top in dub-consensual male sex in prisons.
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I think pure orientations are more common than zoomer self-reports would indicate, but rarer than naive 5% statistics would indicate. And like most things there seems to be a spectrum.
That said, genital preference seems to be the strongest binary, with exceptions, which is important because hormones and self-care can change your secondary sex characteristics to a degree but not your junk. I’m familiar with the GAMPs, roughly ‘straight’ men with low genital preference and quite adjacent to your referenced femboy enjoyers, but I’m not familiar with women having a similar phenomenon (though given how situational women’s attraction is, who knows, and there are obvious… anatomical considerations that are relevant in that case).
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