Why should I accept Paglia’s common sense and empathy and intuition? That can’t be backed up with data at all; it’s just self-proclaimed expertise. I don’t understand the point of this tangent in any event since almost everybody in this thread agreed that sexuality is not entirely genetic before you brought Paglia into it. The claim that sexuality is purely caused by family dynamics is at least equally ridiculous if not moreso.
There’s no evidence that she’s right. Claims without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Where are the people with credentials who have any evidence that she’s right?
Science doesn’t work by accepting anecdotes as data or by using our gut instincts as a baseline for reality.
There’s a big difference between discussing the social/political ramifications of various real or potential scientific studies on sexuality and the purely scientific ramifications of the same.
You’re attempting to disguise the former with the latter, which is where you’re getting most of the pushback.
Fine, then don’t waste time quoting “researchers in the field” who hypothesize about “prenatal hormone environment changes.” The evidence for that appears pretty thin and speculative, and the reason for increased likelihood of homosexuality the farther down in the birth order could just as easily be due to family dynamics.
(And you scorning the idea doesn’t make it invalid (remember idea of evidence?) There’s actually a lot of good evidence that birth order effects things like ambition, rebelliousness, etc. I.e., high-level behaviors.
The original point got lost. Someone at the end of page asserted authoratatively that how someone is raised has been shown to have no correlation with homosexuality. I was asking for a citation for that (and mentioning Camille Paglia as an interesting aside.)
I would just like to say that personally, the devil showed up to me one day and tempted me with many things. “Do you want power? Money? All the women you could dream of? An immense intellect? A perfect physique? Or, how about a lust for the same sex that will cause you consternation, ostracize you from your community and family, and vastly limit your potential dating pool while possibly increasing your chance of contracting one of the worst viruses mankind has ever known?”
Been gay ever since. I always assumed that’s how people became gay. Who could turn that shit down?
And in all seriousness, the birth order study(ies) that have been done accounted for being raised. They also looked at adopted sons who were raised by other families, and not always as the youngest boy in the family, and there was no difference in whether or not he turned out to be gay.
So, it’s not the fact that the youngest boy is raised differently by the family, it happens in the uterus.
The way knowledge works is that things with predictive value have a chance of being valid, but random stuff you are saying after-the-fact has basically no claim to being particularly valid.
If Paglia could, say, take read detailed case studies of randomly selected families and accurately identify if a given family member in their teens would be gay or not, she might have a point.
But everyone has “family dynamics”, and if you already know someone is gay, of course you can look at their “family dynamics” and come up with something or another you can construe as being related to homosexuality. I’m an only child in a family of distant men and strong, slightly emotionally overbearing women, I was bullied in school and never quite fit in. If it turned out that I was a lesbian, you’d have plenty of fodder to construct explanations out of. But I’m not a lesbian, and anything you came up with would be nothing more than a just-so story.
The evidence may be incomplete and there may be some speculation involved, but there is evidence. It’s more credible than evidence based on the unspecified, unverified observations of Camille Paglia because it can be reviewed and its flaws and virtues can be discussed. The prenatal hormone theory has not been proved, but there is some compelling evidence in its favor. The fact that you don’t trust researchers doesn’t mean nobody else should.
Is “how someone is raised” the same as “family dynamics?” The second sounds like a much broader category to me.
I agree with everything you’re saying (and I think the study you propose would be really interesting.)
Without asking it to be taken at gospel, I’d just argue that family dynamics effects every aspect of our personality–it would be odd for it to have nothing to do with sexual orientation. (And I was mentioning Paglia as a point of interest.)
People have said it’s been ruled out as having anything to do with it. This is where I’m really curious if this is just dogma, or have there been any actual (well-designed, honest) studies done.
I think I did accurately address your “family dynamics” argument though. If you’ll go familiarize yourself with the scientific literature, you’ll find that there haven’t been any findings to support that family dynamics have any effect on sexuality.
If family dynamics were an important factor in determining sexuality, you would expect to find studies that show an increased chance of being gay if you are raised by a single mom, single dad, with lots of brothers, with lots of sisters, with parents who get divorced while the boy in question is young, etc. Unfortunately for the family dynamics theory, nothing like that has ever been discovered.
The only thing that seems to help predict sexuality is birth order, hair whorl, and relative finger lengths. And even then, that only seems to work for men.
Now it just sounds like you’re arguing for the sake of arguing.
(And I’m not saying we shouldn’t trust all those pointy-head science types. I’m a scientist. I’m saying the social sciences have been shown to have a lot of problems lately, and even the retraction-rate for non social sciences has gone up dramatically recently. All of which is to say, scientific research related to hot-button issues like this is in a bit of a crisis–it pays to be very skeptical of any single study that hasn’t been repeated and thoroughly vetted.)
I’d call birth order potentially related to family dynamics (as stated earlier, it has been shown to be related to ambition and rebelliousness. Biological?, psychological?–not sure that’s been determined, though rebelliousness is overwhelmingly thought to be related to psychological dynamics of being first-born.)
The finger-length thing certainly argues for biology and it is weird how many of things things just apply to men and not women.
Yeah Howard Dean was really counting on those bigots supporting him :rolleyes: If someone interprets Howard Dean’s statement as such if I think they would also be the type of person who interprets anything he has to say as the words of Satan.
I think you’re wrong on that-- I’m not gay, but know a lot of gay people do find the “it’s genetic–leave them alone” argument as condescending and implicitly derogatory.
There were birth placement studies that compared data with children not raised in the same household as the other siblings due to adoption deaths or divorce and the correlation to birth placement and homosexuality remained consistent. So there is a good argument to be made it is not a function of family dynamic.
I’m not arguing for the sake of arguing. Definitions matter, and family dynamics are not the same thing as “the way someone was raised.” Family dynamics should include all family interactions and “the way someone was raised” sounds like it just means parenting. This relates to what you were talking about because you responded to a comment about blaming sexuality on the parents or the mother.
Which is different then what you stated. I am gay and know plenty of other gay people and don’t know of any who feels Howard Dean statement was intended to be demeaning towards gay people when he was championing for our rights before any other governor. Yet you were implying it could be interpreted as such. Sure it could, be but I am arguing the anyone doing so at that time was going to misinterpret his message regardless of his statement or intent.
I think you completely misunderstood what Shagnasty was saying. Far from being “an antiquated idea that’s been soundly disproven”, his information is 100% correct. Merely having an XY chromosome does not cause you to have a male body plan and brain structure; normal development requires that the fetus be exposed to the right hormones at the right time in its development. The existence of 5-alpha reductase deficiency, and how it can be simulated by a pregnant woman being exposed to Avodart or similar medications, demonstrates this.
What you’re arguing against sounds more like the whole “blank slate” thing; that’s the theory that led to David Reimer’s problems.
Maybe so…I just think politically he would have had a greater chance of “winning over” more people who were somewhere in the middle by sticking to the “this is another form of love…” argument.