[QUOTE=JohnBckWLD]
If rumors flying around the blogshere are to be believed, shame on me - and the NYT - for giving any credence to this study. It’ll be interesting to see if any of the following items are unsubstantiated hearsay or character assasination. According to info popping up on the net, Dr. J. Michael Bailey’s[ul][li]Been linked to a racist, neo-eugenics movement called the Human Biodiversity Institute by the Southern Poverty Law Center[]More silly and offensive comments include: most transexuals are “especially motivated” to shoplift and “especially suited to prostitution.”[]Claims if it became possible to genetically identify a fetus as “gay” and a parent chose to abort because they wanted a straight child, this would be “morally neutral” & that he’s not anti-gay, just “pro-parental liberty.”Lost his chairmanship of the psychology dept. at Northwestern just last year because of ethics charges related to earlier research.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
WOW!
I particularly like the shoplifting part… Who knew??
[QUOTE=JohnBckWLD]
According to info popping up on the net, Dr. J. Michael Bailey’s[ul][li]Been linked to a racist, neo-eugenics movement called the Human Biodiversity Institute by the Southern Poverty Law Center[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
To start things off let me state that I think this “study” appears to me to be bunkum. Profoundly unscientific and clearly biased. That said, the Human Biodiversity Institute actually has some fairly scholarly and intellectual articles and I wouldn’t place much stock in what the SPLC has to say about anything. They are scare-mongerers with very questionable leadership and accounting practices. I would not hold them up as a barometer of anything other than how not-for-profit acts are abused.
To the topic at hand, I believe that a man can be bi-sexual and I pray that all women are bi-sexual
They’re not. Bailey is nothing if not a lightning rod, so let me speak a bit from personal experience; I’m likely to be the only poster here who knows the guy.
His Human Sexuality class is among the most popular undergrad classes at Northwestern. I never took it, but many of my friends did. (It’s popular because he does unusual things like bringing in a dominatrix to address the class.) My feeling, from having many of his lectures regurgitated to me, is that he often leaves his students with the impression that stereotypes (like “gay men are promiscuous” are true instead of, possibly, generalizations grouded in fact). But he’s no racist or bigot as far as I know. If he’d ever espoused racist in class I’m sure I’d have heard about it and read about it in the campus paper. The fact that another NU prof, Arthur Butz, is a Holocaust denier is no secret. (If anyone’s curious, Butz wrote “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century,” which was - is? - a major piece of Holocaust Denier literature despite subsequent debunking.)
That said, Bailey has his share of theories that irritate the hell out of some groups, and it’s not impossible that people would try to smear him as a result. In the one long chat I had with him, he did say that’s what the situation was. I grant that you’d expect that. At that time - about a year ago - he was still chair of the psych department. He is not anymore. If it’s related to the allegations, I can’t find anything that substantiates that.
His most controversial theories relate to transsexuals, who as a group seem to passionately loathe him. Why? One reason is his book, “The Man Who Would Be Queen,” in which he theorizes - although apparently he didn’t come up with it himself - that transsexuals are either gay, or “autogynephiles” (men in love with the idea of themselves as women).
Obviously I did go to Northwestern and I did write for the Daily Northwestern for a while, but I wasn’t involved with any of the stories I’ve linked to here. I’ve got my own questions about his ethics, and I’m not sure what to make of the allegations against him. I think it’s something reasonable people can disagree about. But to give him a wide berth, even if you think he’s a dope I’d dispute that he’s a monster. In case my experience incomplete, I have already started asking my friends who did take the class if they feel differently than I do. The one who has responded me so far says that he is not a racist or homophobe. He taught that homosexuality is an orientation and not a choice, and not morally wrong.
The NYT article on the study was well-balanced in my opinion. The headline, no, but the rest was okay. Especially given how hard it is to find good science writing. They summarized the study’s findings and did not hesitate to point out its shortcomings and unanswered questions. The study certainly did not find that bisexuality don’t exist. It deals only with men. Just looking at what they summarize, it sure sounds like the men surveyed had a gap between what they said aroused them and what actually did. Further study is warranted there, I think. I was amused by the article: as soon as they mentioned Northwestern, I realized Bailey was going to get involved and somebody was going to be pissed.
Allow me to address this more specifically. This is not a rebuke of JohnBckWLD, just my response to these claims.
[QUOTE=JohnBckWLD]
According to info popping up on the net, Dr. J. Michael Bailey’s[ul][li]Been linked to a racist, neo-eugenics movement called the Human Biodiversity Institute by the Southern Poverty Law Center[/quote][/li]
One of the links I posted debunks this to my satisfaction.
[quote]
[list][li]More silly and offensive comments include: most transexuals are “especially motivated” to shoplift and “especially suited to prostitution.”[/li][/quote]
Depending on how you take this - I have not read his book either - this is neither silly nor offensive. He may mean that transsexual who chooses to buy clothes of the “wrong” gender for fear of social rebuke has a reason to steal them. I think his use of the word “motivation” makes this very plausible. Either way, you have to admit there’s no context here.
The LESS biased of the two articles I found about these remarks (I googled “pro-parental liberty” and “Bailey”) was from the Chicago Free Press, a gay and lesbian newspaper.
[quote]
[list][li]Claims if it became possible to genetically identify a fetus as “gay” and a parent chose to abort because they wanted a straight child, this would be “morally neutral” & that he’s not anti-gay, just “pro-parental liberty.”[/li][/quote]
I can easily imagine Bailey saying this. This is a man who thinks very much in terms of biology and probably just doesn’t have the same moral sensibilities as most people. Some people really would argue that this is a question of individual liberties and rights, I grant that most people (myself included) don’t look at it that way. I don’t think this is an example of anti-gay prejudice because I don’t think he has that.
[quote]
[list][li]Lost his chairmanship of the psychology dept. at Northwestern just last year because of ethics charges related to earlier research.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
As I say, he’s no longer chair, and the ethics charges are real. Whether they’re credible, I don’t know, but certainly I wouldn’t be surprised if he did give up the job and return to teaching because of the investigations.
An incredibly small amount of births are true hermaphrodites. Births with conditions qualifying as intersexed are much more common.
Re Transexuals
Due to the fact that many places din’t include transexuals in discrimination laws and the cost of hormones, counseling, and surgery a disproportionate number of transexuals are prostitutes. Suited to it? Only in that they fit a particular fetish niche and often have no other choice for a job.
Re Autogynephylia
A more accurate description would be ‘Men who are so in love with the vagina, that they decide to become the thing they idolize’. If this study is by the same moron who came up with that autogynephylia, I feel comfortable dismissing it.
Full context: Bailey is talking about a transsexual who has what he considers a “male” attitude toward sex. She is a prostitute - a post-op transsexual who was a prostitute before her surgery as well - and of her, he says “her ability to enjoy emotionally meaningless sex appears male-typical. In this sense, homosexual transsexuals might be especially well-suited to prostitution.”
Which sounds dumb, but it’s an observation, not a value judgment. However he says something that comes across as really awful on page 184:
“Most homosexuals transsexuals have also learned how to live on the streets. At one time or another many of them have resorted to shoplifting or prostitution or both. This reflects their willingness to forgo conventional routes, especially those that cost extra time or money.”
Which makes it sound like he’s calling them sleazy and/or lazy instead of saying that difficult circumstances often lead them to do this.
This is actually from the very same page as the other quote (185); it’s the first sentence of the next paragraph. It reads in full:
“As for shoplifting, homosexual transsexuals are not well suited as much as especially motivated. For many, their taste in clothing is much more expensive than their income allows.” Not calling them the criminal element. He says a few sentences later (on 186) that “Living on the edge is more out of necessity than desire. Most of the homosexual transsexuals I talked to had similar dreams for the future. They wanted to get their surgery (if they had not had it yet) and meet a nice, attractive, and financially stable heterosexual man who would marry and take care of them. This is obviously similar to the hopes of many nontranssexual women.”
A statement of that sort should have also prefaced the “forgoing conventional routes” comment. It’s also worth noting that Bailey refers to them as women in the first place. I don’t think a bigot would do that.
So there’s the context for those quotes and that segment of the book.
Then why does he refer to mtf transexuals who are attracted to men as “homosexual”? If he thinks of them as women, then he should refer to their attraction to men as heterosexual.
To add to Marley23’s comments, I actually took Michael Bailey’s Human Sexuality class last year. I found it fascinating, and while it’s entirely possible that he overstated some things (some students and colleagues judge him harsher than I feel qualified to on this, some don’t), I have intellectual respect for him on the whole. I agree with the Higher Education Chronicle’s assessment of him as a soft-spoken “academic nerd,” and he really does seem to see things in very matter-of-fact, scientific ways, without concern for emotions involved. To me, he appears intelligent, concerned with carefully thinking things through. I think it’s possible that he goes a little overboard in seeking out the politically incorrect answers to things, and he’s a little on the sleazy side (more on that later), but I couldn’t fathom his being homophobic, nor do I have any reason to believe he’s racist. In class he always legitimized homosexuality; in fact it’s one of his specialties, particularly the seeking of biological causes for it. I think he may have overemphasized the “gays are promiscuous” thing–for example, a panel of gay guys he brought to speak to us didn’t include a single gay man who believes in monogamy, and I know that some of those exist–but then he was trying to make a point about what is true on average. He gave solid backing for it–evolutionarily speaking, men need to have sex with lots of women to have more offspring, women only need one male who will invest in her and the child, so men are on average more interested in casual sex; so, gay men are more promiscuous not because they’re gay but because they’re men having sex with other men, who are less limiting in how much casual sex they will give out. Bailey was always careful to point out in lectures, however, that these things are true ON AVERAGE and that exceptions exist.
For the record, I also seem to remember his talking in lectures about theories that male bisexuality probably doesn’t actually exist, so he probably had this study in mind or was working on it at the time I took the class.
There is that, but then he also says stuff like this that does address difficult circumstances (on the same page):
I do wonder a little at his basing his generalizations on nine transsexuals that he happened to have met in Chicago-area bars. Seems that might skew things a little, and then there are those two women who are accusing him of leaving out their stories because they didn’t fit his theories. I need to go back and read his book again, I’m a little hazy on it at this point.
Hermaphrodites and transsexuals aren’t necessarily the same thing. Sure, some hermaphrodites have surgery so their genitals look like one sex or the other (sometimes at birth), but plenty of transsexuals appear to be totally physically male or female already before they decide to change over. And Bailey’s theory (actually not HIS theory originally, as has been stated already) is not that there is no transsexualism; rather, that the causes for it aren’t what people think (the typical “woman trapped in a man’s body” scenario). I don’t remember whether he addressed female to male transsexualism, again I’d have to give the book another look.
As for the questions about his ethics, I honestly don’t know what to think. From several of the articles cited earlier, it’s still unclear whether his book actually counted as hard-and-fast “scientific research” that required the same ethics guidelines with “research subjects” as other scholarly research. Bailey says he’s done nothing wrong on that front. And if the book doesn’t count as scholarly research, it’s probably less ethically wrong if he did in fact sleep with one of these transsexual acquaintances, though it’s still pretty sleazy, and I could believe that he did it. He’s no stranger to a little sketchiness: I’m personally acquainted with a student whom he slept with, and I’ve heard unsubstantiated rumors that there are plenty of others where that came from (but that, at least, he never pressures anybody and backs off if they say no). So I could believe that he’d sleep with a research subject, but then again, I could also believe that these organized groups of transsexuals who are positively foaming at the mouth over his theories would try to destroy him. I find this a likely scenario for the other allegations of using people’s stories without permission; then again it could also be either an honest or deliberate oversight on his part. Who knows.
Now, back to the OP…
I think it’s very valuable. It’s knowledge for the sake of knowledge, as has been said, but not frivolously so. It helps us understand more about human behavior and identity. Yes, each person is unique and has a unique identity, but we’re all human beings, with similar bodies and genetic material and basic desires, and as such have a lot in common. Learning about the ways in which we are similar to other people gives us something to work from when figuring out our own identities. Specifically in this case, learning the exact nature of gender identity issues or differences in sexual orientation can help us better understand those who have them, help them better understand themselves, and be able to respond appropriately to their needs. Whether this particular study has done that is another issue entirely, but I see no need to dismiss such studies on the whole as unnecessary “pigeon-holing.”
And for me personally, I’m very curious to know more about bisexuality, since I identify myself as bisexual. I’m a woman, so the earlier study rather than this most recent one applies to me, but I’m still curious about gender identity and sexual orientation in general. I think that there’s definitely a biologically determining factor in, say, homosexuality, but I don’t know what to think about bisexuality and the general fact that sexual orientation can be quite fluid for those on either end of the spectrum. My experience was that embracing bisexuality was almost a conscious choice; I’d had fleeting crushes on a few girls in early years that I’d repressed because I was worried about being “gay,” and having crushes on girls seemed “gross,” but when a boyfriend encouraged me to open my mind to the possibility, the more I thought about it, the more appealing it seemed. Perhaps I just tapped into a latency that a lot of women have but ignore or only embrace when they’re drunk. =P It’s confusing for me; I feel that it’s a part of my identity and is something I want to share with close friends, but at the same time I feel like it’s not actually that big a deal because so many women are or could be bisexual but just don’t admit it. And then I feel that I’m in a sort of no-man’s-land with regards to not exactly fitting in with either gay or straight identity.
[QUOTE=matt_mcl]
[li]A person who is attracted to, for example, males, will be attracted to ALL males, so they’ll definitely be attracted to the ones in these photographs we happen to have right here.[/li][/QUOTE]
In addition to his insipid comments on transsexuality, this is the biggest problem I had with the study. The vast majority of straight porn and most gay porn does not turn me on, so if I had been in the study, he probably would have ‘discovered’ that I was really asexual. A lot of the bisexual men that I know have a preference for a ‘type’ of man. If he had let them men bring their own porn or select from a wide variety of videos, then I would give his ‘findings’ more weight.
