Actually, confirmation of one’s suspicions about your neighbor Bob are, quite simply, none of one’s business. Why do we need a test to figure out whether Bob is gay? If Bob is gay and wishes you to know, he will tell you. If Bob is gay and does not wish you to know, he won’t tell you. If Bob is straight and wishes you to know, he’ll tell you. If Bob is straight and doesn’t wish you to know, he won’t tell you. In any case, the truth of Bob’s orientation is none of your business, unless Bob chooses to make it so.
So why are we arguing for a test of sexual orientation? Are we going to hand out little pins in the form of the object of the individual’s desire, to make cruising easier and safer? “Don’t cruise him, David. He’s wearing a vulva.”
Scientifically, a test would help to determine a more accurate estimate of the proportion of homosexual to heterosexual. Socially, Bob should be able to sleep with who he wants without worrying about his neighbor flashing him with a sex-o-meter and finding out which gender makes his flagpole salute.
well, if you scan the posts before you, some of us are arguing this point - saying the person’s self identification is the determining factor, whereas others see it totally as a given that behavior is the answer.
to which I would answer: I don’t like chocolate. If you see me eating chocolate ice cream that does not mean that my self identification as a ‘non chocolate fan’ has changed. I’m probably being polite.
I’m afraid i don’t quite understand people’s obsession with sorting out a binary taxonomy of sexuality. Lamia made the point quite a while ago, but has been largely ignored in the futile attempt to find some sort of scale or ruler by which we can measure and thus categorise people. Now, this may sound like the “impatient lecturing” that the OP wanted to avoid, but the OP also called for this to become a “battle of cites,” and so far references to gender theorists are conspicuous by their absence.
Issues of sex, gender, and sexuality have been constantly debated among scientists, scholars, legislators etc., at various levels of intellectual complexity.
Of these, gender seems to have been resolved most satisfactorily. Or at least to have gained the widest consensus. Even among those who believe that our sex and sexuality are in some way bio-genetically determined, there are many who concede that notions of gender are culturally constructed, and that what it means to be “man” or “woman” changes over time. Even a cursory examination of history shows that the ways of marking off one gender from another have changed considerably, and that the binary opposition of man-woman has not been a universal one.
While conceding the cultural (and, to use an academic buzzword, discursive) construction of gender, many (most?) people still believe that sex is a binary opposition that can be empirically tested by science. Some theorists have called this assumption into question over the last couple of decades, concentrating particularly on those people that are often referred to as “gender indeterminate” at birth, i.e., have micropenises, or ambiguously developed gonads, etc.
In her book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler points out some of the problems that confront scientific researchers working on this problem. We are told that the chromosomal characteristics of women are XX, and that men have XY chromosomes, but we then also are told that male and female can be identified by external genitalia. Well, which is it? Because the two sets of characteristics don’t always line up. Butler details the attempts of one group of researchers to explain what they call “XX males” and “XY females”, i.e. people with XX (“female”) chromosomes, but with observable “male” genitalia, and people with XY (“male”) chromosomes, but observable “female” genitalia. As Butler points out, the very decision to call such people “XX males” and “XY females” assumes the very designations that the researchers are seeking to explain. The use of the terms “male” and “female” here are taken from external genitalia, but, as Butler says:
Now, i don’t want to spend too much time on Judith Butler (and if you’re turned off by self-important academic jargon and obscurantism, i don’t really recommend her book either, although i do think it’s an important work). I simply wanted to point out that commonly-held notions of who we are and how we pigeon-hole ourselves and others is something that’s historically contingent.
This applies to sexuality as well, as some of the posts on this board have made abundantly (though perhaps unintentionally) clear.
Some have stated that sexuality should be determined by behavior, while others have asserted that behavior is a poor guide as it does not necessarily reflect “preference” or “orientation.”
Those who have, in turn, asserted preference and orientation as the key have still failed to expalin exactly how we might understand the sexuality of someone whose behavior contradicts their preference. Looking at this group’s most common example, the prisoner in a homosocial environment, we might then ask whether there is any difference between the “heterosexual” person who has a voluntary homosexual encounter on his first day in prison, and one who waits for five years and finally decides to give it a go? Is there a scale you can put these people on, and should we even try?
I was most amused by ambushed’s post, which stated:
Radical feminists would point to what they would probably call the phallocentric nature of this statement (i.e., the fact that all sexuality is assumed to reside in the penis). This not only implies that male sexuality is the only one worth thinking about, but that sexuality in men can be measured simply by blood flow to the penis. Some mornings i wake up with an erection that doesn’t go away until i pee; does that mean i’m urinosexual?
Theobroma even brings love into the equation. It should be obvious that this adds innumerable difficulties to any explanation of sexuality. Close friendships often have all the same emotions and dependencies of relationships, without the sex. This can apply to homosocial or heterosocial relationships. And this returns us to an earlier problem, because if the way i feel about my best male friend and the way i feel about my girlfriend are virtually indistinguishable to me, is the fact that i have sex with my girlfriend but not my male friend the only thing that separates the two relationships? And if so, we have gone full circle and are again explaining sexuality simply as sexual behavior.
For what it’s worth, i do think that categories such as man, woman, homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, etc., etc., are useful in many ways, and that even as we recognise that some of them are socially constrcuted rather than biologically determined, we can still use them to make sense of the world. But i think that try to determine, “once and for all” (from the OP), what makes someone homosexual is an unproductive task that usually ends up stigmatising people in its attempt to categorise them.
I was most amused by mhendo’s resorting to taking my words out of context, erecting a straw man argument out of them, and then using this unfair and fallacious assemblage as a launching platform for insults and sexist rhetoric.
Let’s see what mhendo decided to ignore at all costs, shall we? In the post he took out of context, I continued by writing:
mhendo, you might want to be more cautious in taking things out of context for your own amusement.
I see your point, but I think you’re using a certain measure of circular logic. “Sexual orientation” is in large part a cultural phenomenon. In some cultures, for example, among male “homosexuals” the inserter is thought of as being straight, while the insertee is thought of as being the equivalent of “gay.” Think, too, of cultures like ancient Greece, where man-boy sexual relationships were part of the fabric of life. So far as I know, such men were married and typically did not have sex with other men- or with girls. Were they straight? Bi?
The fact is that people are talking about “the gay gene” and the biological basis for sexuality, but we know too little about the phenomenon of human sexuality to really know what categories are valid, and which ones have been shaped too much by leftover cultural baggage from the barbarian goatherds of ancient Palestine.
From what I understand, one study which made the fewest assumptions about the nature of sexuality (in that it didn’t ask about preconceived categories like “gay” or “straight”) found that it’s fairly common for people’s sexual fantasies to involve genders with whom they would never consider actual intercourse. So instead of Kinsey’s simple spectrum, we now have a plane on which we can chart someone’s behavior vs. their fantasies. There are a few more wrinkles, that I’ll address below. For now, let me say that trying to gain an objective measure of “sexual orientation” might be like looking for a “Black gene” or “White gene”, since the categories we’re using might have no scientific validity,
This is the kind of statement I find problematic for two reasons:
Why should anyone have to prove their sexual orientation to anyone else? I’m not attacking your motives here, but I want to point out that there are a number of people who say things like, “X says he’s bi, but he’s really gay and is just trying to avoid bigotry” or “Y says she’s bi, but she’s really straight and is just trying to be cool.” (To choose the commonest examples.) There’s a tendency for some people (not necessarily you) to set themselves up as some sort of certifying authority, making judgements and demanding some sort of official decision from people about their sexual orientation. This ties in to…
… the fact that there’s an assumption that sexuality is either gay or straight, or either gay, straight, or bi, or is either K1, K2… etc., and that there’s a switch in your brain which is set one way or another, and you’re supposed to figure out as soon as possible which way that switch goes and act accordingly. Many bisexuals report having started out as gay or straight and having learned to appreciate the other gender. One typical response to such people is to say that they’re “confused.” After all, we all know that there’s a switch on your brain which is set before birth, blah, blah, blah, so clearly they were bi all along and didn’t realize it until they went through this elaborate self-deception about “learning to appreciate” the gender they were lusting after all along. Similarly, I imagine that people who don’t fit the classification scheme whatsoever (in that they fantasise about a gender without actually having sex with them) must really get a lot of heat about being “confused.” (Assuming, of course, they feel that their fantasies are anyone’s business.)
All in all, humans are far too complex for a simple approach of “Here’s the two categories/three categories/continuum, make up your mind what you are or else you’re confused.” Think of The Crying Game. Some people’s approach to the movie is, “I guess he was really bi after all, and didn’t know it until he met Dil.” In reality, there known real-life cases of gender confusion (for example, people who meet on the Internet and, after developing a strong relationship, meet for sex, only to find that one partner lied about his or her gender) in which people report that despite the change in perceived gender, their partner was still the same person, so gender didn’t seem so important anymore. Conversely, you can imagine someone in a monogamous marriage who realizes that he has been repressing his sexual feeling for other men, but chooses to remain faithful. Bi? Straight?
To choose a (very) different example, I like the work of Maxfield Parrish, but at some point I realized that there was no one particular work by him which I particularly liked. Beyond a little teasing from my wife, nobody would ever make a big deal of this. Nobody says I’m confused, or that my behavior means I objectively don’t like Maxfield Parrish and am just lying about liking him. If anyone did press me, I’d probably say that I like his style, but not his subject matter. But nobody presses me, because people don’t have preconceived categories about art appreciation which they demand that everyone conform to. And if you ask me, human sexuality has a lot more potential for complexity and complication than art appreciation, as we’ve already seen in this thread.
Bisexuality (particularly if “confused”) can become a dumping ground for anything that doesn’t fit preconceived notions, making claims about sexuality fail the criterion of Popperian falsifiability. If someone goes to a fundie quack to be “cured” of homosexuality and it doesn’t work, then people point to that as proof that the “cure” is completely bogus. But in the cases where people report that the cure worked? Oh, well, they were just bi all along and didn’t know it, and still refuse to admit it- so the “cure” is still bogus. And people who fantasise about a gender that they don’t have sex with? Definitely bi, definitely confused. If someone describes themselves as straight but is willing to have sex with someone of the same sex, because gender became irrelevant to their relationship? Confused bisexual, again.
For that matter, why does it count as a “sexual orientation” if a man is exclusively interested in other men, but not if he’s exclusively interested in fat women, transvestites, old women, etc?
Since I’m expected to provide a cite, I got most of this from a book named Vice Versa. IIRC the author was Marjorie Gardner, and she provides the more detailed cites to the primary literature that you’ll want.
Methinks that ambushed is a bit oversensitive. My “amusement” was not as his/her expense, as s/he seems to have believed, but at the expense of anyone who thought that measuring simple engorgement of the penis with blood was an adequate test of sexuality. And my reference to morning erections should maybe have been followed by a smiley, to convince the easily offended that i was being a little bit flippant.
I was actually well aware of the paragraph that ambushed alleges that i ignored “at all costs.” Maybe i should have made direct reference to it, and pointed out that any test which does nothing more than measure involuntary physical reaction (in men or women) to the stimulus of visual erotica is a long way from being a valid measurement of what we should accept as immeasurable.
These devices, known as “penile plethysmographs”, are notorious for being misused in both clinical studies and forensic examinations. There is some evidence that some men are turned on simply by wearing the plethysmograph, and that others are turned off by it, independently of the stimuli they are being presented with. There is also considerable evidence that shows that the plethysmograph can be manipulated by the subject relatively easily.
Finally, penile tumescence increases during stress, anger, and fright as well as during arousal, so it’s not clear that the reason for a particular increase in penile tumescence is due to an erotic response to a displayed image. I believe someone once did a penile plethysmograph study which included pictures of images that most people would consider nonsexual (live animals, dead animals, butchered animals, people in “nonsexual” poses, etc.), but which elicited significant responses from a significant number of subjects. The conclusion that one must reach from that study is either there’s more people with weird fetishes out there than we want to admit, or the penile plethysmograph is not a good device for measuring sexual arousal.
BTW, Leaper, I have read a few books that might be of interest, not so much on sexual orientation as about society’s attitudes about sexuality in general. One is Bound and Gagged, by (IIRC) Laura Kipnis, which talks about society’s responses towards pornography and definitions of “obscenity.” (This touches on the sexual orientation issue to the extent that it talks about how society constructs the idea of “obscenity” in terms of what we feel constitutes personal preference vs. a fetish.)
I’ve read another book on the history of western society’s attitudes towards sexuality, but it might take me a little while to dig up the title, if I can at all.
Well, yeah, I know that…my comment about the testing device not being able to tell the orientation of Bob was a tounge in cheek comment about the efficacy of the testing. What I mean to say is that scientifically, a test like that probably won’t increase our understanding of the numbers of gay men, because it’s such an intrusive testing method, you’re going to have trouble getting people to agree with it.
It also doesn’t solve the question that’s being asked here, which, really is, “What does it mean to be gay?” If Bob agrees to the test and we find out he does show an increase in penile size and such when he’s looking at pictures of men, does that mean he’s gay?
My thesis: An objective assessment of whether someone is straight or gay can best be determined by observing their behavior.
Objection 1: Behavior doesn’t necessarily reflect true internal feelings, because of the stigma still associated with being non-heterosexual, etc.
Response 1: Absolutely true. And the same social pressures will cloud any attempt to get people to admit their true feelings. I’m not saying that judging by behavior is perfect, only that it’s the least innaccurate of several poor options. Judging by behavior will often fail to correctly identify someone’s sexual orientation, and likely quite often. My hope is, however, it will screw up less often than any other method.
Objection 2: Behavior may change or be inconsistent.
Response 2: Absolutely true. The straight guy cooped up in jail may experiment with other inmates. Hence one cannot say that a single (or few) occurance makes one anything. It’s only the sum total of all behaviors over a very long period that can be used, and even then it’s still nowhere near a sure thing - see last part of Response 1.
Objection 3: Attempting to pidgeon-hole people into neat little boxes like “straight” and “gay” is innaccurate in the first place, because human sexuality isn’t black and white.
Response 3: Absolutely true. But since there are lots of stupid people in the world who cannot deal with complexity, and need to have everything reduced to an absolute, this objection rings rather hollow. Yes, we SHOULD live in an elegatarian society where people are judged only by the content of their character. But we don’t. We live in the real world, where people are arbitrarily labeled on a daily, if not hourly, basis. Rage all you want, stereotypes are not going away - as much as most intelligent people would like them to. As long as the concept of “straight” and “gay” exist, people are going to try and pidgeonhole each other.
In sum, I totally agree that judging sexual orientation by behavior has a lot of problems. I’m just at a loss to come up with anything better. And that’s my point - you say judging be behavior is not very accurate. I agree. But tell me a better way.
-Ben
I’ve worked w/governmental forms for years, it asked for racial background and gave a list of approved responses. These did not coincide w/realities. And, based on my own personal observations, ‘observable differences’ were not accurate either.
at the very least, with self determination, you won’t be in the tough position of having to justify to some one else what you think (based on your ‘behavioral observations’) their sexual category is.
(and you forgot one - for those who are celebate, there is no obervable behavior, so by that criteria, they should be declared as asexual,)
We don’t even have a straightforward way of determining what someone’s gender is. What the hell makes us think we can determine what gender they’d prefer to have sex with (assuming it even matters to them)?
I refuse to make it easier for you to try and fit people into an arbitrary, baseless and fundamentally flawed stereotype. That is, after all, what your question boils down to: “I have an incorrect picture of what people are like. Give me some criteria which I can use to make them fit into that picture.”
This board is dedicated to fighting ignorance. The idea that people are too stupid to grasp the intricacies of human sexuality, so we should codify a means by which to reduce things to an incorrect bipolar model, is repulsively cynical. Instead of trying to shoehorn people into neat little cubbyholes, we should be educating them as to the possibilities involved in being a sexual being.
Stereotypes have disappeared before. They will do so again. This particular stereotype is long overdue for a place in the dustbin of history. Stop trying to make the world fit your theories; redefine your theories to fit the world.
There seems to be a curious phenomenon observable in this thread, which I’ll call a trend towards the “mystification” of sexuality and some of the issues surrounding it.
There are posters who have suggested or even argued, to varying degrees, that “sexuality” or “sexual orientation” is somehow beyond definition and/or beyond empirical measurement. It sounds almost as if they’re described something supernatural or transcendent. Such premises, I would guess, are perhaps implicitly based on the kind of extreme psychological environmentalism which I would have thought we’d have left long behind us by now.
Almost everyone will agree that such obviously biologically related issues as human sexuality and sexual orientation and gender identification result from the real-world interaction between genes and environment. Are there still those who deny that genes have any bearing on this subject at all? I can scarcely imagine such a view being publicly expressed, but there are hints that some of the posters here may hold such a view as a hidden or unconscious assumption.
We are biological beings! There is no thought, no desire, no fantasy, certainly no behavior that is entirely free of genetic influence. This is most emphatically NOT to claim any kind of “genetic determinacy or pre-determinacy”! Life is far too complex for such a counter-factual and simplistic notion.
But the closer a behavior or psycho-behavioral “nexus” comes to the heart of biology – sexuality and/or reproductive-related behavior – the greater the role played by genetics and physiology. Sexuality and reproductive-related behaviors are just too critically important to, and powerfully impacted by, evolution for this not to be the case! We simply wouldn’t exist otherwise.
So this covert mysticism and ultra-environmental implications about sexuality and sexual orientation and the impossibility or irrelevance of measuring such is simply unwarranted. If something so genetically and biologically central exists, it is empirically measurable! Reading minds is not required, and the mystification of sexuality is counterproductive.
People do NOT choose their sexual partners or the gender of their sexual partners completely at random, nor merely as a result of environmental factors. Yes, there is undeniably a significant role played by learning and the environment, but these alone cannot possibly form the root of partner selection. Beneath the layers of environmental paint lies a genetic and physiological “structure” that is beyond the power of the environment alone to alter. Sexual orientation exists and is empirically discernable. All that can truthfully be said is that we do not, as yet, have a suitably reliable means to identify and measure such.
As for those who ask: “Why should we want to know?”, all I can say is that I don’t credit the view which states that “there are some things humanity shouldn’t know”. The fact that people might misuse such knowledge means only that we should strive to prevent such misuse rather than forbid the acquisition of the knowledge in the first place.
Well, when it’s really good sex… [sub]Oh, I’ve said too much…[/sub]
I think that’s the point we’re driving at - everyone has a sexuality, but there are so many factors at play that we, at least now, can’t say what truly is or what truly will be. We are constantly being influenced by our genes, our own actions, and the world in which we live, so, of course, we change.
[quote]
If something so genetically and biologically central exists, it is empirically measurable!
And, again - Kinsey, Kinsey, Kinsey.
Agreed, and the closest thing we have is the Kinsey Scale (at least psychologically speaking).
If the closest thing we have is the Kinsey Scale, we might as well have nothing. Kinsey’s scale fails to adequately represent bisexuals: all bisexuals are lumped into the “3” pigeonhole. Asexuals and exclusive fetishists fail to be classifiable at all. Individuals of ambiguous gender confound the Kinsey scale (either when they are the subject or the object of attraction). Kinsey’s scale is androcentric. And it is difficult to apply because it confuses ideation, behavior, and “preference”, which means most people don’t fit cleanly into any of the seven provided pigeonholes.
The Kinsey scale is little more than the bipolar straight/gay categorization with with some grayscale thrown in to cope with the discordance between ideation and behavior. It does not even come close to covering the entire field. And in my opinion it should not be used at all because it marginalizes everyone who isn’t vanilla straight or vanilla gay.
