Mentally Handicapped and Sexual Preference

Factual Questions
1

I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to phrase this so that someone doesn’t take offense at this, but I mean no insult to anyone.

Where I work, one of our coworkers is mentally handicapped, and while he does develop crushes on women, I gather the impression from things he says, that he would enjoy a sexual encounter with a male as much as he would a female.

I’m wondering if anyone has done a study on mentally handicapped people and sexual preference. Because, it would seem to me that if there was such a study and it said that the mentally handicapped had no sexual preference, then the argument that some folks make that sexual preference has more to do with societal conditioning, than genetics, would be true.

2

This isn’t really a direct answer, but I know that when mischeif-lover was working in homes for retarded adults (for about 5 years, total) the inmates were discouraged from having sexual contact with others. Masturbation, on the other hand, was encouraged as normal and healthy (although they did try to teach appropriate times and places).

I imagine that the rationale behind this approach was that it is difficult to assess consent or lack thereof amoung mentally handicapped indiviuals. There is always the question of manipulation, even if both (or all) parties are mentally handicapped. There are also the ethical and practical considerations of dealing with pregnancy and eventual childrearing. Furthermore, in a group home setting, most contact is with employees, who are obviously legally and ethically forbidden to be sexually invovled with the residents.

So I doubt that its particularly possible to research gender preference in retarded adults, because there is so much societal conditioning that happens in these populations. I’ll wander off to do a PubMed search, though.

mischievous

3

A quick PubMed search reveals a couple of interesting things:

  1. Retarded adolescents and adults exhibit both heterosexual and homosexual behaviors. (I mean, duh, but it had to be said.)

  2. There is documented, massive discomfort amoung institutional, medical, and home-based caretakers regarding sexual behavior in retarded individuals. This is even worse regarding homosexual behavior.

  3. When interviewed, retarded individuals have a documented hypersensitivity to interviewer bias. They tend to say what they think the person asking wants to hear, even more than normal adults. They also have a tendency to say yes to everything.

The combination of the above reinforces my original thought - the reported sexual preferences of retarded indiviuals is likely to be massively biased. I found an attempt to design a questionaire that would account for the above question biases, but no evidence that this questionaire had ever been used (which does mean it hasn’t, I couldn’t find it quickly). Even if the questionaire is well-designed, though, I would expect that previous conditioning would bias the results. Remember, retarded people are less able to take a stand against what they are told are the societal norms than normal people are.

So I think that as an avenue to investigate “natural” human sexuality, researching the mentally handicapped is not useful.

mischievous