@rat_avatar, I will readily admit to relying on my spidey sense, which is probably more grounded than you’d be willing to appreciate, which is fine. I actually think that my request for data on the sexuality of prisoners is the best chance we have at making progress on this issue. The situation we need is essentially a deserted island full of previously married men. What do their orientations look like a number of years later? Those who are most eager to discredit my argument might try to find evidence that this kind of sexual preference adaptation never happens to really put my argument to rest.
Your initial preference is (according to my argument) not a choice, however, it is learned, and can, with effort, be modified.
I would ask that the moderators move this to IMHO then, there is nothing to debate here, it is purely idle speculation.
The evidence is that that’s impossible, and even trying to do so causes major emotional trauma, occasionally enough to lead to suicide.
Given that there is scant genetic evidence even in identical twins it is then almost certainly due to non-shared environmental influences - you agreed yourself. Now, according to my argument these influences affect the learning of sexual preference - you basically agree with this by agreeing that the influences are environmental. Therefore, the hypothesis that it is learned is apparently a quite good hypothesis. The other part, whether it can be modified with experience, is one that we are still working on.
The strange thing to me is that you would come at me strongly with a weak behavioral genetic argument and then claim that i’m the one who is idly speculating.
Can Sexual Orientation Change? A Long-Running Saga
(Note that I haven’t read this, I just figured I’d give due diligence to the issue by spending 15 seconds performing a Google search. I will probably read some of it later)
Have I ever claimed it is 100% genetic? That is a straw-man
If you have scarlet fever at 6 months, is that a learned trait when you get Sydenham’s chorea?
You need to demonstrate the sexual preference is even learned.
It’s not an argument for why they should receive human rights. It’s an argument that they’re not making a misguided choice and they are not engaging in some kind of a sinister campaign to “convert” people to the gay lifestyle or fool people into becoming gay.
Have I ever claimed it is 100% genetic? That is a straw-man
If you have scarlet fever at 6 months, is that a learned trait if you develop Sydenham’s chorea later in life? That is what you are arguing right now
You need to demonstrate the sexual preference is even learned.
Random plastering of data is a pretty bad idea.
(bolding mine)
Even without talking about the issues with Spitzer’s study it is quite clear that that study is not useful as a cite for your claim.
You’d probably do better arguing that everyone is born gay and learn to be heterosexual. When I was very young, in the '50s, I was inundated with heterosexual cues. I’m straight - even at age 6 I found Annette very interesting on the Mickey Mouse Club, but I think the argument that I got brainwashed into being straight would have more evidence than one that a gay person got brainwashed into being gay despite the almost total lack of role models back then.
Your prison and military stores are pointless, First, you’d have to show that someone leave prison acted gay as opposed to have gay experiences in the lack of others. Second, you’d have to show that someone who did do this wasn’t really gay but repressed. Until you give some evidence of this, you are confusing experience with tendency.
Maybe we’re talking at cross purposes here. What you’ve linked to is a legal argument that compares sexuality to ethnicity or race, the point being that all of those traits are immutable that if the government can’t discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity, it shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate based on sexuality either. There’s no “they can’t help it” component to this argument. The other reason the “choice” thing comes up is in response to the bullshit I mentioned earlier about gays trying to rope people into the homosexual lifestyle.
It is your hypothesis; why have you not tried to discover that point, yourself?
Then produce that evidence.
The Navy situation has long been recognized–even back in the days when homosexuality was regarded as a deliberate perversion and through the years when it was regarded as an illness–as the response of sexual beings placed in a situation where their normal sexual outlets are not available. As with the prison situation, same sex encounters appear to be simply the actions of men with no other outlet for sexual expression. (When you got leave, did everyone head for the bathhouses? Or did they make their way to the brothels?)
Of course not. I was not addressing you with my comments, although you might have taken my note of your lack of evidence as an opening to actually provide some.
The studies fail to control for cognitive dissonance. Changing your sexuality intentionally would be analogous to changing your religion - you must restructure huge portions of your ego (unlearning dissonance-inducing knowledge) and it is a painful process for many people. That does not make it impossible, and indeed, without a proof, calling something impossible is stretching it.
Plenty of Christian groups (an unfortunate coincidence) have compiled evidence suggesting sexual preference is learned. The arguments against these points are 1) the evidence doesn’t come from studies 2) the evidence that does come from studies comes from studies that weren’t well controlled and 3) even if the case reports are true they were probably born gay and only just realized it or have only temporarily convinced themselves they are no longer straight.
The best argument for genetics is that there is a) a measured small genetic component and b) a mysterious gene environment interaction in the womb that we can’t yet measure that explains nearly all of the variance in sexuality.
Personally, I’m going with sexuality being largely learned. However, I admit that there is a genetic component and there could be a strong unmeasured early component that we will discover that explains all the variance. I now await measured replies indicating that the strong voices against the learning argument recognize that they don’t have evidence either way, and that they are actually closer to undecided on the issue.
Ok - so we have at least one person who is willing to admit that if you place a bunch of men on a ship that they will become attracted to eachother. I mean, we have two people, but since it was merely my personal experience we previously had to take this evidence as a grain of salt (or did we?).
As I previously indicated, I think sexuality is more continuous than dichotomous. Thus, although they would still prefer women, they can also be attracted to men. This is basically all the evidence I need - it is exactly my experiment in which cognitive dissonance has been reduced, and in that experiment sexuality adapts.
If it can be unlearned, why don’t we have more evidence of people who have successfully changed their sexual orientation? It’s not like no one has ever attempted this before.
Here’s some info from a study I looked up for a previous thread:
And these weren’t all, or even mostly, teenagers forced into religious “ex-gay” programs by their families. About three quarters of the people in this study had sought out “ex-gay” therapy for themselves, and a majority saw licensed mental health practitioners.
ETA:
I’d be interested to see a study showing that changing one’s religion causes significant long-term psychological harm or drives people to attempt suicide.
Actually, threads like this have come up so often that I’ve become totally bored with it (we even have a yawning smilie :o). It’s no longer even interesting to me that people who don’t even know me spend time picking my sexuality apart as if it somehow actually mattered to you. It shouldn’t. The only real truth in this thread is that it doesn’t matter why I am what I am . . . any more than it matters why you are what you are.
All I know is that I had my first same-sex fantasy at the age of 5, and it contained several specific preferences that have remained so to this day, over 60 years later. But I can’t imagine what may have occurred in my first 5 years that would establish, not only my sexual preference but also specific lifetime likes and dislikes. I can only conclude that I was “born this way.”
But in actuality it no longer really matters to me. I’ve heard all the arguments many times over, and made a few myself, and it’s time to focus my energy on things that are more relevant.
If there’s any validity to this, one of my hands is a straight guy and the other is a lesbian. Both are wrong.
Good attempt at spin, but your interpretation is wrong.
I doubt that men “become attracted to each other” in the situation described. Rather, some men are willing to seek release even in non-standard ways.
I also notice that you failed to answer the question regarding their behavior on leave. Unless these men with “learned” sexual appetites shunned (straight) brothels and sought out gay bathhouses when they went on leave, you are simply supporting my contention that sexual activity that takes place in unusual situations under stress cannot be reliably used to support a claim of “learned” desires.
Rather than providing “evidence,” you have simply latched onto an anecdote that you are spinning to your own beliefs. Nothing in your scenario speaks to attraction.
If a person hates sulphurous water and finds himself or herself in a situation in which their only source of water is sulphurous, it is rather an odd claim that they have learned to like it if they happen to drink it to survive.
Discovering what a person will do under stressful situations with limited resources and opportunities says nothing about a person’s sexual orientation and whether that person can “learn” to be attracted to one sex or the other.
One more point: you continue to refer to the “failure” of the “genetic” explanation while steadfastly ignoring the fact that no proponent of innate sexual orientation on this thread has held out genes as the source of that orientation. The “genetic” claim remains a straw man argument as long as you ignore those who propose that sexual orientation might be based on placental chemicals, birth order, or some unidentified source, alone or in combination with other sources which may or may not include genetics.
There is value in pointing out that people are ‘born that way’ because there are others who insist that homosexuality is a choice, and people can just un-choose their sexual orientation if they don’t wish to be persecuted. That’s a dumb argument that needs to be stamped out by cold scientific fact. But that’s entirely separate from arguing for the rights of competent adults to do what they wish if they aren’t demonstrably harming anyone else.