The recent flap over Ben Carson’s comments about homosexuality being a “choice” led me to think about a thought experiment.
Most of us acknowledge that sexual orientation is NOT a choice. It’s something you’re either born with, or it develops extremely early in life.
But what would happen if you were born into a Truman Show-style environment, where information about the opposite sex (if you’re genetically/biologically straight) or the same sex (if you’re genetically/biologically gay) were kept from you? You never get to see or meet someone of the gender you would normally be attracted to.
What would happen with your sexual attractions? Would your sexual orientation “switch” gradually?
While this may be out of fashion, I still stand by the notion that sexual orientation is mutable, although that doesn’t mean it’s a choice. By which I mean, I have been straight, bi and very nearly gay, but not all at once. Different times in my life saw me with attractions/romantic feelings/horniness for different genders. “Well, then, aren’t you just bi?” some people have asked. And I’d have to say no, because, right now, I don’t feel any attraction to women at all. None. They’re kind of oogy, actually. That’s not always been the case. And I didn’t do a damn thing to change or choose it, it’s just what’s happened. Maybe my hormones changed, maybe my Venus transited Pluto or something, I don’t know. But I do know that I haven’t chosen any of my sexual orientations, even though I’ve had more than one.
It’s entirely possible, and has happened, that girls in all girls schools will gay, that they will be attracted to and have meaningful sexual and romantic relationships with other girls, only to later find themselves happy with a male husband and with no further attraction to women. And the same for men.
HOWEVER, where Ben Carsons goes wrong is by thinking that men having sex with men in prison are necessarily gay, even while they’re having sex with other men. While I’m sure some are, others are just looking for a warm moist hole to relieve their erections, and can overcome their indifference or even aversion to the body attached to it. Sex is used for many things in prison - power, commodity, companionship - and may have nothing to do with sexual orientation as we recognize it outside of prison.
For a gay male, it would be pretty weird being the only male in a world of females. I don’t think the experiment would work at all.
But to speculate about my own case (gay male): I would have been able to have intercourse with women, because as an adolescent and young man I was just horny, period; but I would not have been enthusiastic about it, and would have probably tapered off to nearly none at all fairly early in life*. I don’t know what I would have fantasized about when masturbating either, which leads me to suspect that I would have done a lot less of that too. That’s my opinion about myself, in any case.
*Another possibility occurs, which is that if I had paired up with a fairly aggressive and sexually adventurous woman, she might have found ways of stimulating my interest that would have kept things going somewhat longer.
My very, very rough guess is that I (a straight male) would be most attracted to males who have the most feminine qualities of appearance. The young Jon Voight comes to mind – I’m straight, and yet I did have a (minor) attraction to him, back in the 70’s.
Without knowing what women were, I’d (likely) still look for that kind of softness and cuteness.
I though about this in terms of a generational interplanetary journey. There may not be any reason to bring male members of the crew along, nor have any male children till a suitable planet is reached. All that is really needed from males is the sperm to restart a normal human population which can be brought along in some cryogenic state. Besides relationship issues, it would make a very interesting societal structure, expecially when males are reintroduced.
I’m a perfect Kinsey 6, meaning my sexual attractions are exclusively toward males. If I lived in a world of women, I’d have lots of great friends, but my sex life would be damn lonely. Conceivably, this could drive me to be with a certain type of woman - boyish, not manly - as long as I could actually convince myself that she’s male. In fact I once knew a couple like that. He was a closeted gay man, and she was a very boyish-looking anorexic woman. It worked for them, at least in the few years I knew them.
But if I were the only man I’d ever seen, I’d have a very strange idea of what a man is like. I’m not attracted to my own “type,” so fantasy would play a huge role in my life.
Sexuality is affected by both genetics and culture. There are plenty of examples of increased homosexual behavior in circumstances where there’s limited access to members of the opposite sex (sailors, prisoners), or in cultures with no/reduced/different taboos (ancient Greece).
So, I think someone raised in such a society would be more willing to have sex with people of the same sex (on average).
I don’t think sexual orientation is built-in so much as I think something is built-in and that that something interacts with the matrix of social concepts and notions and ideas, and in the cultural environment we are familiar with, the outcomes of the interaction tend to fall into certain identifiable orientation “slots”. And that the people in the same categories tend to have the same built-in components.
But both “being straight” and “being gay” are social constructs, they aren’t just biological predispositions unalloyed by culture and social notions.
If you are living in a world in which, except for you, everyone is of the same gender . . . wouldn’t everyone else be *de facto *gay or lesbian?
If I’m living in a world of women, what are their sex lives like? If they’re not lesbians, do they just masturbate? And if they do, what do they think of, if the only man they know about is me?
Obviously, I’m using “sex” in a very narrow sense of the term. But for many if not most people, it’s a necessary part of their sexuality.
I agree. There’s a popular notion that sexuality is completely and utterly ‘baked in’ at birth. This has to be a gross oversimplification, given what is known about formative development of behaviours, personality, intellect etc, both on an individual level and within the social/development context.
It may be ‘baked in’, but the baking isn’t finished at birth. Why would it be?
Well, we’re told in the OP that this isn’t a “natural” world but a Truman Show style experiment, so the other inhabitants of this world are actors who are pretending to be unaware that the opposite sex exists. What the OP doesn’t specify – and it seems a glaring omission to me – is whether these actors (or at least the characters they’re playing) are all gay, whether they’re all apparently asexual, or whether this artificial world has some characters who are asexual and others who engage in sexual relationships with each other.
The experiment involving a gay person who’s the only man or woman in an otherwise opposite-sex world would be even more complicated. Do the other inhabitants of this world behave as if they’re asexual, attracted to others of the same sex, or attracted to the sole person of the opposite sex? And how is the lone man or woman kept in the dark about the existence of two human sexes when they have different genitals and secondary sexual characteristics than everyone else? Are they led to believe that they’re deformed or something? The experiences of a lone gay man or lesbian in an otherwise opposite-sex world full of people who act as though this individual is not only sexual unattractive but freakshow material would be very different then the same person in a world where they’re considered highly desirable by the opposite-sex majority.
I wonder if there’s a difference between homosexuals who are homosexual because of the sort of social experiment described in this thread (that is, there aren’t any people of the opposite gender around) and the homosexuals of our society, in which there are plenty of people of the opposite gender around, but they aren’t interested in them. In other words, the former category, if homosexual, might arguably be classified as “homosexual by necessity.”
So, if that’s the case, then if such a man or woman was suddenly put into a society where there were plenty of the opposite gender around, might it be that their homosexuality would go away and they would quickly be attracted to the opposite gender? That they’d quickly go from being gay to straight?
There have certainly been cases of orphans and foundlings who were brought up in Convents and Monasteries. Those brought up in a convent I suppose would have had at least occasional contact with male priests, but hopefully not in such a way as to make them aware of the full physical differences.
In the case of the Monastery, he might indeed never have encountered a female. The child would have been surrounded by sexualities that were either asexual, closeted gay, or suppressed heterosexuals. In all cases, any hint of sexuality would have been carefully concealed. So I think the most likely answer is that the burgeoning hormones would have produced very guilty and qualmy masturbation, with very little visual fantasy.
My guess: It would produce a person convinced that they were somehow sick or perverted, and hoping for deliverance from extremely uncomfortable condition.
Extrapolating from the experience of a gay friend who was brought up (and homeschooled) in a very strict religious community, I’d say that the eventual exposure to “normal” society would be a great gust of fresh air, and huge relief. Discovering that he was not alone and sick, but normal and lovable and that his desires are, in fact, perfectly healthy was a time of incredible joy for him.
Then, of course, came the pain of livid anger and resentment against the family he wanted to love and who had convinced him he was sick.