They made a choice, but they are not aware of it. They didn’t just sit down one day and say to themselves, “Okay, from today onward, I’m gonna be queer.”
As I said, it’s the product of life experience and upbringing, and because it was their life, it seems perfectly natural to them. I know one lady that is a lesbian; she had an abusive father who treated her like dirt. Is that why she is a lesbian? Don’t know, but I imagine it played a big role in it. IANA shrink, so take that as an educated guess and nothing more.
It means that we don’t know about a method yet. I’m simply shaving with Occam’s razor here - the simplest solution is usually the correct one. If someone does discover a “gay gene”, then I will revise my thinking, because that will be a simpler, more fundamental solution.
See, but that’s the brilliance of it! The definition of bisexuality is both heterosexual and homosexual, meaning that the idea of exclusivity is implied.
Well, sure. That goes without saying.
And this is why the line is not ‘enjoys sexual behaivor’, but ‘thinks sexy thoughts about’. Fantasizes, in other words. Straight men in prison, to take your example, may have sex with other men, but probably don’t fantasize about men all of a sudden.
Sure. I acknowledge that sexuality as a whole is incredibly complicated. But, the definitions of the single axis of hetero/homo are much less complicated than we think they are. That’s all I’m saying.
:dubious: If it’s a fundamental nature, wouldn’t it be more likely to be genetic? People don’t choose their height.
Why would sexuality being a choice be simpler than sexuality being genetic? I’ve never heard that argument before.
Thank you for the funniest thing I’ve read all week. Truly, you are a master comedian.
Oh, wait, you’re serious? In which case - :dubious:
What you’re saying, as someone who isn’t gay and therefore can’t possibly know, is that gay people (unlike straight people as I’ve seen no mention in your other posts about this happening) at some point make a subconscious decision to be gay. How would that even work? And if it’s a subconscious choice, then calling it a choice is a real stretch. Also, you do realise that homosexual desire and behaviour has existed long before the concept of exclusive homosexuality has, right? So deciding subconsciously to be gay wouldn’t apply to someone born in a time where homosexual behaviour wasn’t widely known or talked about (pretty much any time before the 20th century), or conversely wasn’t worth commenting on (I’m thinking pre-Christian societies).
Finally, got any evidence for this? Or is this all just a belief you have. If the latter that’s all well and good, but I just want to be clear that’s the case and you’re not putting this out as anything more then a personal belief as opposed to a testable theory.
While there is some evidence of a genetic factor to sexual preference, it’s still relatively weak. I suspect that most of it is trained, but like religion or whatever, it’s taught at such a young age that for most of us it becomes essentially immutable. We simply refuse to think about it.
But of course for some percent of people it almost certainly is genetic, and that’s even more immutable.
Either way, so long as everyone is happy, consenting, and causes no harm, I don’t really give a damn.
:dubious: Is “trained” really the word you’re going for? Trained by who? You’re comparing someone being gay to learning a religion?
And don’t even bother trying to argue with Clothahump. The only thing he dislikes more than homosexuality is religion. Which seems bizarre, but there you go.
But…people do think about it, all the time. Scientists do research on the topic. I don’t see what you’re saying.
I don’t see how this meshes with the real world at all. If sexual orientation is trained, or taught, why are there so very many gay people who have trouble coming out to their parents because being gay goes against what they were taught as children?
I’m comparing straightness to learning a religion. Most likely most of us would be able to get it up and screw anything that looked screwable if we hadn’t conditioned ourselves to not think that way.
Because a) many people who are gay are people who are genetically inclined towards homosexuality (maybe as much as 52%), b) what you develop as doesn’t necessarily have much to do with your parents. Society doesn’t actively teach sexual preference, it’s just something that we expect kids to pick up explicitly by watching how we interact.
Just because you have a particular upbringing doesn’t mean it will take. You might see Mickey and Minnie Mouse getting particularly friendly but just thinking “Well gee, it’s nice when people get particularly friendly with one another” and then you randomly start thinking of your best friend (who is of your same sex) and thinking “Gosh, it would be nice to get particularly friendly with him.” You failed at connecting the opposite-sex factor to the relationship. But you’ve made the connection of your same-sex friend and particularly friendly relationships at such a young age that you’ve self-indoctrinated yourself in this way of thinking. In all your future relationships you’re asking yourself whether they match up to your old best friend (who is of your sex), instead of whether they match up to Minnie Mouse.
Once again, this is the problem with defining sexuality in terms of, “If you had to…”. Sexuality is about wanting. Not what a person settles for, or decides to pursue, or is forced into doing, but about what they want to do (sexually).
You’re reading too much into my sentence. And really the larger nitpick would be that I used the word “screw” rather than “harbor emotional attraction to.” My post wasn’t very rigorously academically phrased.
I’m saying that what a person wants to do sexually and emotionally is something that, when you’re born, is likely fairly fluid. Our best evidence indicates that there’s only a ~52% chance that someone who is homosexual was so because of genetic factors. Now we can assume that sexuality falls on a bell curve. If that was so, though, you would expect that there would be a larger number of bisexuals than gays, this doesn’t seem to be so, which indicates that anyone who is fairly fluid (genetically), will have chosen a side rather than stay in the middle. There is some amount of artificial, social force that tries to force people to one end or another. And we know that ~48% of homosexuals were genetically fluid (though they may no longer be practicably fluid).
The real question is where the bell curve lies. It could and probably is set up biologically to prefer exclusive opposite-sex attraction. But knowing that society will itself force people towards opposite-sex attraction, there’s probably not a strong preference for straightness. Overall, say that there’s a decent bet that double the number of people are genetically straight as those who are genetically homosexual. That still only makes it so that 5% of the population is genetically exclusively straight, 2.5% genetically exclusively homosexual, and the remaining 92.5% floating free in varying levels of bisexuality (until social indoctrination kicks in.) Knowing that early childhood learning becomes fairly inelastic, it becomes entirely feasible that this would be strong enough to carry through life without further genetic prompting. With the data we have, this premise is entirely reasonable. It might be wrong and in fact it’s 20X more likely to be exclusively, genetically straight, but I don’t know that we can prove that one way or another until we fully understand genetics.
Actually no. I never had any sexual activity in jails or prison except for being nearly raped and or abused when I was young and didn’t know how to protect myself.
I wasn’t going after you, it was a sincere question. Were you very heterosexual at that time, and looking back find it somewhat ironic that you are more open now?
