I’m pretty sure neither of those words were the ones you were looking for.
I agree that unconscious biases are not necessarily permanent. But I do not think rational thought can change them.
This is based on my (limited) understanding of psychology and neurology, specifically that psychological reinforcement is accompanied by physical changes to the structure of your brain, such that the threshold for the relevant set of neurons to fire is lowered. It’s like muscle memory for your brain. Sexual attraction is all impulse, it’s not a conscious decision. Just like relying on muscle memory.
So that is the sense in which I mean, sexual attraction is not rational, nor can it be changed by any amount of reason. Years of culture have reinforced the idea that I should think women are attractive and men are not, and in my case it has worked - no amount of thinking can make me attracted to men.
~Max
Why the assumption that it’s not innate or genetic? Sexuality appears to have at least some component that is genetic, at least some component that is inborn but not genetic (possibly from the hormonal environment in the womb), at least some component that is in some way learned, and at least some component of completely unknown origin. To put it in experimental terms, identical twins are more likely to have the same sexuality than fraternal twins, fraternal twins are more likely to have the same sexuality than non-twin siblings, and children raised together are more likely to have the same sexuality than children of the same degree of relatedness but raised separately (and in no case is the correlation absolute: Even identical twins raised together can have different sexualities). Biology is never simple. I’m not sure what the current research is on the relative proportion of those factors.
I would argue that this goes to show why you can’t always do a one-to-one swap. It very much seems like gender-based attraction is hardwired, based on the fact that “conversion therapy” does not work. If attraction based on gender were social, then we should be able to change it. But it very much seems we can’t.
As such, I don’t think it makes sense to analyze gender preferences in sexual attraction the same way we do racial preferences. I’ve never seen any indication that racial preferences in sexual attraction are entirely innate, and can’t be changed with more exposure. No one seems to be born with a racial preference in sexual attraction.
I note that the concept of “sexuality” in the sense of sexual preference seems to be built around the idea that gender preferences are innate. We define terms like homosexuality when the genders are the same, heterosexuality when they are different, bisexuality for both male and female, and pansexuality for all genders. The same is true of romanticism in the same context, e.g. homoromanticism and panromanticism, as well as eroticism, e.g. homoerotic and heteroerotic.
I also note that it aligns with the perceptions of transgender individuals, whether or not they align with binary gender. They all feel like their assigned gender is wrong to some degree. Those being socialized as a particular gender do not necessarily wind up with that gender identity.
It really does seem like gender is something different. Sure, exactly what traits get assigned to which gender seems to be somewhat socially defined, but gender itself seems to be biological in nature, as is our sexual, romantic, and erotic attraction to it.
Of course cultural norms play a certain role in sexual preferences, but the whole idea that sexual preferences are bigoted and solely rooted in cultural norms is…odd. The linked article was interesting but by no means scientific. The author is a matchmaker, not a social scientist, and doesn’t seem to have researched how other factors besides sexual attraction factored into one’s stated ethnic preferences.
And how far do we take this? Cultural taboos against incest and sex with children serve a positive good. Should they be categorized as bigotry?
And let’s look at this another way: are you going to say that someone who is gay is bigoted because they don’t find other genders attractive? Is the theory that they were somehow immune to the cultural influences that supposedly shaped sexual preferences in others?
This really boils down to the old nature-vs.-nurture debate, doesn’t it? I think it’s a mistake to go all in on one and ignore the other. We’re complex creatures.
Does this apply to unconscious biases? A person can fully accept and internalize the idea that all races should be treated equally… give the subject a thorough rational evaluation… yet still be unable to distinguish Black men’s faces in a police lineup. Or during a police sting operation. The neurological basis for treating races with due diligence may simply not be there, as I was writing in response to Jimmy_Chitwood.
~Max
I think it does, yes. It can take work to overcome socially conditioned racial assumptions, but they can still be overcome.
Sorry! Ancient Greek pederasty, although there was overlap with pedagogy.
~Max
Right, and this is an example of bias that is cultural but not bigoted.
If you’ve spent a lot of time with people of group X, you’re more likely to gain dating history with that group, and that will also make people of group X look more like dating candidates in the future.
Yes there is also some degree of “forbidden fruit” and/or “opposites attract”, but overall, when you look at things like marriage stats, hookups within the familiar group are much more common.
That familiar group can be smaller than it appears to be to outsiders. It doesn’t matter which race you are talking about , there are sub-groups. When I tried to find statistics on intermarriage, the statistics were broken down into combinations of Asian , White, Black/African-American and Hispanic. Some had separate statistics for American Indian and Alaska Natives and for Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islanders. What none of them did was broke it down any more than that - but in my experience * it seems to be more common to see interracial relationships ( a Black person in a relationship with an Asian person) than relationships with two people belonging to different groups of the same non-white ** race ( someone of Japanese descent in a relationship with someone of Chinese descent). Which kind of suggests to me that it’s matter of cultural similarity more than race.
* which may of course not be representative.
** I have an idea about why it only seems to be that way with non-white couples - let’s just say a lot of white people in the US don’t seem to have a cultural identity other than “white”.
My question to the OP is: even if sexual preference does make a person a bigot, so what? In nearly all other instances bigotry hurts others. But in instances of sexual attraction and love, how does the “bigotry” harm the out group? If you are not attracted to males, for example, but tried to set that aside and date a man for equality sake, you are doing harm, not good.
I don’t see how ANY sexual preference can be bigoted.
Part of it is, what are you going to do about it? Force people to date? That’s wrong. Dating, sexual relations are optional, we can partake of many partners, many situations, or none at all.
If someone chooses to be very exacting in their choice of partners, that is still their choice. Even if the choices are racial in nature.
There many more people in the world that we will never have dating/sexual relations with. Our behavior with those greater groups determines our racism.
And anyway, sexual relations don’t mean that the person can’t be racist in their non-sexual actions. See the American South.
Unless I missed the memo, the generally accepted idea is that homosexuals are “born that way”. This would apply to heterosexuals too, No? Nobody is accusing homosexual men of being misogynist (bigoted) for not being sexually attracted to woman.
Racial preferences I think are socially influenced. But I don’t necessarily agree that is racially based or just based on skin color. There are plenty of BIPOC super models/ celebrities I am sexually attracted to. But my understanding of what an attractive woman looks like is heavily dictated by society. BIPOC attractive woman have, IMO, have a certain body type that more conforms to the white leggy blonde super models I grew up with. So while I might be sexually attracted to Sade, I am not sexually attracted to Cardi B.
A beautiful woman is a beautiful woman. You can debate why all woman aren’t beautiful to us fickle males, but this phenomenon exist.
These are two different things. Attraction to one sex or the other (or both) is innate. How you treat someone whose attraction is different from yours is cultural (as we’ve seen in the last 20 years or so.) Bigotry toward those with different sexual preference from yours is more like racism than sexual attraction.
Culture does play a part when someone with the “wrong” preference pretends to have the “right” preference to fit in. But I don’t think culture truly changes the preference.
I haven’t seen evidence that they can be overcome in one lifetime. What can be overcome is acting upon them. If you know that you are at least somewhat racist, you can examine your intended actions in that light and refuse to act on them.
The next generation who grows up seeing fewer racist role models will likely have less racism to deal with.
It may have been stated before but I’ll throw my 2 cents in:
White het guy: “I’m not really attracted to women with Asian features”. – harmless preference
White het guy: “I’m not attracted to Asian women and no white guy should date/marry them” – bigot
Interesting OP.
My take is as reductive as invoking a dictionary definition:
- Recognize a distinction; differentiate.
“babies can discriminate between different facial expressions of emotion”
- make an unjust or prejudicial distinction in the treatment of different categories of people, especially on the grounds of race, sex, age, or disability.
“existing employment policies discriminate against women”
If I am utterly mad about African-American women but am uninterested in Latina women (for dating, sex, marriage, etc.), then – provided my ‘discrimination’ goes no farther than that – I think it’s discrimination (case #1) but not discrimination (case #2).
I discriminate against oatmeal when I choose eggs for breakfast, but oatmeal suffers no real, systemic, insidious harm (NB: except, perhaps, in the eyes of Quaker Oats and PepsiCo).
But just like it’s unreasonable, for example, to expect a journalist to never allow any of their personal beliefs to color their work, it’s probably incumbent upon each of us to understand how well we really are “doing Case 1 but not Case 2” discrimination.
Yes it is bigotry. However, it is a mostly acceptable form of bigotry.
It’s not your own, specific preference that makes you a bigot.
A bigot is one who generalises his own, very specific preferences and thinks that these are the only valid ones, and anyone whose preferences deviate from these specific preferences is a bloody pervert
I’m with Anaglyph , when it comes to how I deal with people in this aspect of life. You like who you like, don’t impose it on others (including those you like).
–
And really this all is sounding to me like one of those instances where the discussion hangs heavily not on the facts but on the weight we give the word that describes them. Pretty much universally, we all agree that you like who you like, that’s normal, and nobody is going to, nor should, force or shame you into going for who/what you are not inclined towards to begin with.
The tension is in using that word to describe it. Because we also have an implicit consensus that that word means something we must NOT do, say, or even think, if we are “good”. We are programmed to hear it as accusatory.
Yes, that was precisely my point.
You don’t believe its possible for a person to become less racist over time?