Poll: Homosexuals natural or conditioned?

[Phoenix_Dragon]

*Originally posted by buck8998 *
But explain to me how two homosexuals could pass on their genetic material to the next generation. They can’t. Therefore it is a genetic end. If you can enlighten me otherwise, please answer back.

Homosexuals have passed on their genes throughout history. They continue to now. Look through history, you can find plenty of people who were gay and yet (Often due to social circumstances) were married and bore children with a member of the opposite sex. Or homosexual people now who still bear children for one reason or another. And the previously mentioned sperm-bank idea. Fact is, it happens, and I can’t understand how you would miss it.

By the way, do you have a degree in genetics?

This is, at most, basic high-school biology here. Mixed in with a bit of common sense. Pretty simple stuff.

[Esprix]

Originally posted by MrVisible

But this subject isn’t just a philosophical debate to me; it’s my life… Why is my direct experience with this less important than your uninformed opinion?

Go, MV! It’s your birthday! Go, go, go!

Esprix

[EyeballBoy]

What always strikes me as odd in most of these discussions is the radical dychotomy expressed in the idea that, if it’s not genetic, it’s a choice. Another thing is the common disregard for bisexuality. Frankly, I think it skews the debate.

Now, I’m a Kinsey 1, perhaps going on 2. My preferences are definitely starting to tend towards the center. While I’m still quite overwhelmingly attracted to women, I’ve abandoned my early distaste for all things homossexual (in spite of adolescent fantasies involving my best - same sex - friend), and have found myself saying…hey, you know, he’s sorta cute, and…mmmm…well…if I wasn’t in a commited relationship, you know…mmm… I don’t mean this purely in a sexual way either, since I’ve had my share of homossexual fantasies in the past, albeit somewhat fetishized (I’m guessing this would be the typical straight man that goes out for an occasional one-night stand romp with a member of the same sex), and today I’ve moved on to a far more casual view of it, beyond the strictly sexual arena.

I hope that made some sense, since I’ll be using myself as an example, next.

Was I born this way? Maybe. I don’t feel like I was born this way, really. I don’t feel like I was born any way. Personally, I don’t recall being attracted to anyone as a toddler. I do recall that, throughout the years, I’ve developped an attraction towards girls. I didn’t choose to be attracted towards girls, I just was. Does that mean that I’m genetically wired to be attracted to girls? Maybe (as you’ll see, I use maybe a lot, and parenthesis too). Maybe I’m predisposed to pick up on certain pheromones, facial structures, hips-to-waist ratios, etc. Maybe the constant social noise stating that boys go with girls has been imprinted into my easily impressionable mind, like so many other things have been. Commercials work, after all, and I think humans have been at this whole sexuality thing longer than marketing people have been at their jobs

(BTW, I had my mother buy me a ‘My Little Pony’ in secret when I was a kid, because I thought it was so cool how the girls could braid and do the pony’s hair in the commercials, and a Barbie would be way too much, but a horse now, cowboys have horses, right? Cowboys are very macho, right? Right? Suffice to say, none of my friends ever knew I had a ‘My Little Pony’, and I hid it away in the closet whenever they came to visit. I don’t know how I’m not a flaming gay hairdresser stereotype, with the closet metaphor going on there and everything.)

Back to the subject at hand, I don’t think of it as an either/or situation. I think there’s a lot of the two involved, plus a little bit of…hazard. It’s not genetics, it’s not just socialization, it’s genetics, plus socialization, and most importantly, the way the two interact within a given individual’s life history. Tiny events during one’s early formative years may have a disproportionate importance towards future preferences and behaviour, which is why these things aren’t ever deterministic.

Just look at the twin studies. (As it happens, are these studies done between separate twins? Because there is more to a relationship between identical twins than genetics, which means the difference between monozygotic twins and non-monozygotic twins may be less due to genetics than the raw statistics would indicate at a casual glance). If there is close to a 50% chance that a gay person’s identical twin will be gay as well, that means that the other 50% will not. That means that, given a same set of genes and conditions within the womb, you can go easily go either way. Example:

Bobby and Timmy are identical twins. Bobby is gay. Timmy is not.

Bobby, looking back at his life experience, says that he’s always been gay. He doesn’t really recall ever having been attracted to girls in a sexual or romantic way. He’s always been attracted to other men.

Timmy is happily married, and very straight. Looking back at his life, he doesn’t really recall ever having been attracted boys in a sexual or romantic way.

Were they born that way? You’ll have a hard time convincing me they were born that way. You may convince me that both Bobby and Timmy were perhaps more predisposed, however slightly, than the majority of the population, towards same-sex attraction, but that doesn’t explain the differences between the two. In fact, society doesn’t explain the differences between the two, either, assuming they were born and raised in the same household.

Does that mean either of them chose to be gay or straight? No. It’s a complex interaction of factors, and it happened, but I don’t see how claimining Bobby was born that way is going to help that faction of the gay right movements which brashly claims for a genetic origin of all sexuality, so much in fact, that mid-life changes originate the cry of “that person was gay all along”, or bisexuals are “in denial”.

I need not go into the opposite extreme. I find it even more ridiculous to believe that Bobby, analyzing his future, made a conscious decision to be gay and face the scorn and descrimination that regularly face gay people in even the most enlightened of modern communities. Since no man or woman is an island, having to leave the small niche one may have found where homosexuality is accepted may still mean prejudiced behaviour, and even death at the hands of neanderthal bigots in other parts of the world. (Which isn’t to say that, within some very small social groups, homosexuality, or at least bisexuality, may not be a plus. It’s not just heterosexuals who sleep their way up the ladder of success. However, opportunistic use of sexuality does not equal sexual orientation. No one decides they are going to be gay in order to get a job, though someone may decide to have homosexual sex for that purpose, and even live a gay lifestyle. While I understand that homosexuality is not a lifestyle, there are lifestyles, in the broad sense of cultural preferences and behaviours, commonly associated with homosexuality, or rather, with being gay. I keep having to put disclaimers in, in an attempt not to offend anyone.)

Getting back to me, I used to find the idea of homosexual sex disgusting, ignoring the fact that I actually fantasized about my best friend, with associated feelings of guilt. If asked at the time, I would have told you I was born heterosexual, and that was just a terrible perversion of mine. Today, life experience has taught me to be far more open-minded, and I’m slowly climbing up the Kinsey scale. I haven’t made a choice to be more bisexual, though I’ve certainly made a choice to allow myself to be more open to the possibility.

I had a point when I started writing this, but I suspect it’s long gone by now. I suppose my point is…the answer is somewhere in the middle. That’s usually my point, I guess, and no, that does not make me a moderate. I just try to abstain from partisanship.

[IzzyR]

*Originally posted by Hamish *
I would wonder why you would take the word of someone who had met an individual over the word of that individual themself.

In spite of psychology’s claim to science, this field of expertise really begins with certain unanswerable questions which must be answered before a psychologist or psychiatrist can proceed to apply their method. Take the controversial area of clinical depression – one psychologist will suggest it is the result of environmental factors, another, a chemical imbalance in the brain. The second psychiatrist has asserted an absolute answer to an unanswerable question – specifically whether mind is resident in brain – and that psychiatrist has proceeded from that basis.

This is why I’m so skeptical of psychology. As with all the social sciences, philosophical opinion, prescribed methods, and ideological viewpoint get heavily mixed together with observable fact. I would rather give more credence to the subject themself, than to the expert pondering said subject from a distance.

I just might be more skeptical of psychology than you are (some other debate ). But I am even more skeptical of people’s assertions about the basis for their feelings.

It’s not as if we’re talking about blind acceptance of some pointy-headed psychologist’s theory. We are discussing looking at studies that measure observable facts, and extrapolating from them. Worth a lot more than a guy insisting that his crush on a childhood friend proves a genetic origin to his feelings, IMHO. YMMV.

We’re getting into an epistemological debate here – what is the most valid source of knowledge? I hold research based on hearsay, even by trained experts, to be of less value that direct observation of a phenomenon. Ultimately, I consider it arrogance to explain to a person what they really feel, because it’s what they must feel to fit a certain psychological model.

No one is telling anyone what they really feel. What is at issue is the cause of those feelings.

Also, it was you who introduced the question of numbers – in my first post, I simply argued for the existence of homosexuality in every culture, not a far-fetched claim at all.

But you can’t use that to prove that it is solely genetic unless the prevalence does not vary between cultures. So I assumed that you meant that prevalence was the same.

I’ve been doing some pretty extensive reading on homosexuality outside the modern West lately (trying to escape my own eurocentricity), and I have yet to come across a culture where it didn’t exist.

This is not so relevant to this debate, as noted above. But FWIW, in the thread that I linked to in my first post I challenged the notion that homosexuality (as opposed to homosexual acts) existed at all in ancient cultures. Perhaps it might be worth a look.

Of course, if heterosexuality and homosexuality are both conditioned, that leaves two possibilities, both of which are troubling.

The first is that human beings are inherently bisexual – that is, that heterosexuals or homosexuals are simply people who have been conditioned – either partially or totally – by environmental factors. But here we have all the same problems we have in trying to prove that “human beings are wired for heterosexuality.” There are exclusive gay people (and exclusive heterosexuals) even in cultures, such as among the pre-Hellenistic Greeks, where bisexuality is the encouraged norm. There are animals which engage in exclusively homosexual behaviour, even when opposite-sex partners are available (and no one ever suggests it was the way they were raised…)

The second possibility is that human beings are inherently asexual. That is, our sexual desires are learned, not inborn. This is tremendously counter-intuitive, and the onus is on anyone making this point to prove it. It would imply an enormous difference between human beings and other animals, who have an obvious instinctive understanding of sex.

I wouldn’t assume either of these two possibilities. My assumption would be that everyone starts off with the genetic makeup that would – in the theoretical absence of any environmental conditioning – put them at some random point of the Kinsey scale. Any number of environmental factors have the capacity to push this number in one or another direction.

As for the possibility that environmental factors are partially, rather than totally, responsible, I have difficulty with this, though I can only speak anecdotally. I have yet to see any common factor in the lives of gays and lesbians I know.

You are assuming that every gay guy must have an environmental factor, and every one must have the same factor. But as outlined above, there are probably people who would be gay in the absence of any factor. And the number of possible influences could be large.

But if one wants to look hard enough for a “cause,” one will always find one. The assertion that environment plays a role always reminds of a scene in the movie But I’m a Cheerleader, where the inmates of an ex-gay camp debate the “root” of their homosexuality, and come up with things like “My mother wore pants to her wedding” and “I was born in France.”

Good point. I would be very cautious about assuming in any individual case that the cause is any specific cause. Or that there is no cause. We are talking about the general picture.

[Polycarp]

You know, I don’t much care what “causes” homosexual orientation or why. The reason I pursue the issue is that there is a never-ending supply of people who have their own pet theories about who, what, and why and how to “cure” them.

And, of course, the ministries that are convinced that people can change their sexual orientation by intense faith and prayer…

If you pray hard enough, you can make water run uphill. How hard? Why, hard enough to make water run uphill, of course! [Robert A. Heinlein, Expanded Universe]

[Fuel]

let me throw this IDEA out here. it is only an idea and you homosexuals (and heterosexuals) that have been through this debate before could analyze it much better than i. please read slowly and carefully!

there is a spectrum, for instance, of a man. the spectrum is cut into thirds to make two points in the middle. one end of the line is a heterosexual sex addict, the other end is homosexual sex addict. the two points in between are a healthy drive for females, not too intense and not too sheepish. the other point is healthy homosexual attraction for men, again not too intense or sheepish.

we all are born somewhere in the middle of these two healthy inner points. some men just seem to be intrigued with other men and vice versa. my proposition is, and keep in mind this is just an idea (i have no more opinions on this, just ideas at this point), that our life experiences, however discreet and subtle they might be, drag us to one side or the other. most of the time we end up on the side we were closest to, but there is no force that keeps someone tied to there starting side. us humans adapt keenly to our surroundings and not always consciously; this is just another way of doing it.

the thesis of this idea is that no one person comes out of the womb bound/predestined to be homosexual OR heterosexual… people who were born at the nearest point to homosexuality come over to the heterosexual side and stay happily all the time and people born nearest to the heterosexual point come over to the homosexual side too. the predisposition is merely a starting point, a natural inhibition. but we all make unnatural decisions everyday, because our life experiences wrought them.

lastly, to support this idea, (support is key word, this is not main point, just another IDEA). take a look at bisexuals. they were born with any type of predisposition, but they ended up neither, because, again, no one comes out of the womb bound to be homo or heterosexual.

another support could be the kinsey scale itself! the fact that people are generally not black and white on their preference means that it is a common occurrence for people to move around the spectrum throughout their life and are not born predestined to be one of the other.

(is this insane esprix?)

please point out any logical flaws i have made.

[Polycarp]

The Kinsey spectrum mentioned before (rating from 0-6 based on the degree of homosexual attraction, with 0 being “sex with another man (another woman for women) is inconceivable for me” and 6 being “the only people who are sexually attractive to me are other men (women for Lesbians)” is effectively what you’re talking about. Esprix has mentioned the two famous women whom he finds sexually attractive – that he is not drawn to women he encounters in real life (as opposed to two stars he will probably never meet) and is drawn to men he does meet, makes him “gay” for all practical purposes – but there is a heterosexual component to his psyche, albeit a very small one. More men than make it public do find another man attractive – our culture is so structured that any expression of such attraction is met, by and large, with repulsion. And yes, bisexual people do evidently shift in the degree of homo- and heterosexuality they feel (and engage in) over time. Remember that it’s not “all men” or “all women” of whom we speak – the most macho Kinsey 0 heterosexual man might be put off by sex with Roseanne Barr or Dr. Laura Schlesinger; I doubt many if any of our gay contingent here find Rush Limbaugh sexually attractive.

However, you mistake sexual addiction, a psychological condition having little or nothing to do with orientation (I’m personally acquainted with an exclusively straight and a Kinsey-5 gay man who admit to being sexual addicts), with the extremes of sexual orientation. A man who is Kinsey 0 or Kinsey 6 can be just as moral and upright in his sex life (he can even be celibate) – what it describes is whether his attraction is exclusively to women, exclusively to men, or mostly one or the other – or, I suppose 50:50 for a Kinsey 3 person. (And, of course, I’ve focused on men in this paragraph; exactly the same applies to women.)

“Intense” and “sheepish” are interesting words to describe the dichotomy you see; would you care to expound on how you envision them as describing opposites?

[Fuel]

too intense meaning negatively affecting your lifestyle. too sheepish meaning too shy or not driven enough sexually or emotionally to satisfy your mate. not really meant to be purely opposites, but worth contrasting to help my point of spectrum.

[Virgowitch]

So someone has a strong agenda for proving that they had no choice but to be a homosexual. “That’s right, there I was, straight as an arrow when, BANG, I was naked and fell over backwards onto a prone, also naked man. Million to one chance. Then the other day, I’m walking along and BANG AGAIN, I fell face forward onto another naked homosexual man and before I knew it was performing fellatio. God, fate is wierd. But I’m still straight at heart, don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I had a choice.”

Lame, lame. Be what you are, but accept responsibility for your actions and choices.“I’m deraved on account’a I’m deprived!” Yeah, right. Don’t try to pass it off on either Science or Religion:

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune–often the surfeits of our own behavior–we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves thieves and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the dragon?s tail and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows, I am rough and lecherous. Fut, I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.
Edmund, KING LEAR, I, ii

[MrVisible]

Fuel, why are you doing this?

What is the point of trying to come up with a hypothesis, all on your own and with no data to base it on, to try and explain the origin of homosexuality? When the same question has been addressed by hundreds of professional psychologists and psychiatrists worldwide, with few results?

It’s sort of like me trying to come up with a way to fly, without reading any of the literature on the subject, analyzing an actual airplane, or talking to anyone who’s ever flown. Reinventing, in other words, the wheel.

If the subject interests you, then I encourage you, urge you, to do the research on it. Find out what the thinking in the field is. Check the two APA websites, and read some of their position papers. Check the psychological journals for studies. Read what’s available online. Talk to gay people; ask questions, and listen to the answers before you formulate any theories.

Ask questions first, form theories later. That way, your theories will be based on actual data.

You can throw intellectual darts at this problem all you want; unless you do the research, even if you hit on the right answer, you won’t know it.

[MrVisible]

Virgowitch, I find it a great consolation that the people bent on the oppression of homosexuals are rarely any more coherent or well-informed than your last post.

[Phoenix_Dragon]

*Originally posted by MrVisible *
**Virgowitch, I find it a great consolation that the people bent on the oppression of homosexuals are rarely any more coherent or well-informed than your last post. **

giggles I -was- feeling like ranting, but this post just put me in such a good mood, I can’t. Thanks man

[Polycarp]

So someone has a strong agenda for proving that they had no choice but to be a homosexual. “That’s right, there I was, straight as an arrow when, BANG, I was naked and fell over backwards onto a prone, also naked man. Million to one chance. Then the other day, I’m walking along and BANG AGAIN, I fell face forward onto another naked homosexual man and before I knew it was performing fellatio. God, fate is wierd. But I’m still straight at heart, don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I had a choice.”

Just for the record, as far as I am concerned, you have a choice here. You’ve been back to this thread to spew your bile twice now, with no intent to debate the issues – which Fuel has been kind enough to do – just give some reaction. So here’s your choice: Either admit that you are making posts such as this in order to anger and irritate others, or provide, within the next three days, evidence of one man who was changed from a straight orientation to a gay one by the availability of gay sex. A website, quotation from a book (with title, author, and publisher cited), personal testimony from an acquaintance whose identity you are willing to provide by e-mail to a moderator if he or she requests it – whatever single shard of evidence you have to back up that paragraph. I have no right to demand this of you, but I have a right as another member of this board to expect you to back up a contention made in Great Debates with evidence. And I am exercising that right here and now.

Lame, lame. Be what you are, but accept responsibility for your actions and choices.“I’m deraved on account’a I’m deprived!” Yeah, right. Don’t try to pass it off on either Science or Religion:

I truly am sorry to hear that you’re deprived – but not at all surprised. And it’s my sincere opinion that the overwhelming majority of posters on this board, male and female, straight and gay, young and old, black and white, do accept responsibility for their actions and choices.

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune–often the surfeits of our own behavior–we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves thieves and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the dragon?s tail and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows, I am rough and lecherous. Fut, I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.
Edmund, KING LEAR, I, ii

It’s cliche, I know, but the quote that comes to mind to respond to this is also from Shakespeare, from Hamlet to be precise:

And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. But come.
Here, as before, never, so help you mercy,
How strange or odd some’er I bear myself
(As I perchance hereafter shall think meet
To put an antic disposition on)
That you, at such times seeing me, never shall,
With arms encumbered thus, or this headshake,
Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase,
As “Well, well, we know,” or “We could an if we would,”
Or “If we list to speak,” or “There be an if they might,”
Or such ambiguous giving-out, to note
That you know aught of me–this do swear,
So grace and mercy at your most need help you.

[ffabris]

I wonder how any person would go through something like this voluntarily, because they decided to be gay through conscious choice.

[aside]
I think the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy sucks big time! When will the US stop this “legalized discrimination”?
I recall back during the NATO involvement in Kosovo, there was a short news article on Italian TV that the Dutch contingent were being sent porn from home… straight and gay porn. Quite a contrast, isn’t it?
[/aside]

[Fuel]

i presented an idea to this board for analyzation. i specifically said that it was not a theory twice and also said i don’t have an opinion on this, and still i get flack. what is this crap??? you people are so ridiculous that you can’t even tell a sincere post from some ignorant moron bigot. you people (virgowitch & Mr. visible) are pathetic. did you not see that i revised my thinking since my OP? did you not see that i am begining to see things your way, but am still sorting out my thoughts? no because you are too defensive to think unemotionally.

i used bisexuals and the kinsey scale, logically, to support my claim.

[MrVisible]

What you posted was a theory, by definition. A set of statements designed to explain a phenomenon.

What I suggested was that, instead of coming up with theories out of whole cloth, that you do research on what the facts are, and what the current theories on the subjects are.

I suggest you reread my earlier post. It was urging you to do research first, and post your theories after you have some facts and some background on which to base them. It was also, I thought, very polite.

I’m glad you’re thinking about this subject. But thinking in the absence of facts is inefficient at best. I urge you, once again, to do the research. If the subject of the origins of sexual orientation is interesting enough to you to theorize about, doesn’t it make sense to spend some time researching it?

[Polycarp]

Well, I saw the difference between you and those who troll, Fuel. One thing you need to realize is that while for you it’s something of an academic question (as it generally is for me, save for the empathy I feel), for people like Mr Visible and Esprix it is quite literally a matter of life and death – do they deny their inner feelings or live an open life that may subject them to gay-bashing? It’s only been four years and a few months since Matthew Shepherd’s death, and several not-so-publicized killings of gay people have occurred in the interim. Of course they could pretend to be what they’re not, do a good imitation of lusting for the waitress when the guys at work go out for lunch together, etc. If you want any excuse for somewhat snarky behavior on their part, find it in the fact that people who are quite literally calling them the active agents of evil out to subvert the country are raising millions of dollars daily by lying about them and who they are. And imagine virgowitch sneering at your sex life and somebody trying to analyze why you ended up liking buxom blondes, or slender redheads, instead of the opposite, and decide if you wouldn’t feel threatened.

= = = = = = = = = =

Though it’s not strictly part of this debate, I’ve been challenged in the past to cite Scripture for my stance that gay people need not try to “change their orientation” on being Christians. And today’s Epistle at church gave me the passage I needed (and as an added bonus, it confirmed that the Tug-Ahoy is sinful! :D):

However that may be, let each of you lead the life that the Lord has assigned, to which God called you. This is my rule in all the churches. Was anyone at the time of his call already circumcised? Let him not seek to remove the marks of circumcision. Was anyone at the time of his call uncircumcised? Let him not seek circumcision. Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing; but obeying the commandments of God is everything. Let each of you remain in the condition in which you were called. Were you a slave when called? Do not be concerned about it. Even if you can gain your freedom, make use of your present condition now more than ever. For whoever was called in the Lord as a slave is a freed person belonging to the Lord, just as whoever was free when called is a slave of Christ. You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of human masters. In whatever condition you were called, brothers and sisters, there remain with God. (I Corinthians 7:17-24)

[ffabris]

Fuel, my post was not directed at you. In fact, I admire that you can here looking for answers. Perhaps some of us don’t much like the ideas you have presented, but you have shown an open mind, a willingness to learn - and that deserves respect. But MrVisible is also giving you sound advice: research the subject.

[Mothchunks]

but IMHO sexuality is not something determined by genes, it is a conscious choice. People try to justify almost anything nowadays by declaring “I had no choice, I’m genetically predisposed to X.”

[Polycarp]

but IMHO sexuality is not something determined by genes, it is a conscious choice. People try to justify almost anything nowadays by declaring “I had no choice, I’m genetically predisposed to X.”

I think we’ve already dealt with this in this particular thread – kindly state why your opinion is valid when extensive anecdotal evidence would tend to contradict it.

And, by the way, IMHO nobody is trying to “justify” anything to anyone else in this thread – what gay people are saying is that their orientation, who they are attracted to sexually, is unchosen. Quite obviously, they remain as competent as you or I to choose whether or not to act on that attraction.

What precisely did you have in mind in using “justify” – are you contending that gay people are somehow failing to take responsibility for their actions? If so, how?