I just don’t see how this follows. If I think Brad Pitt is cool for the fact that he’s doing it with Angelina Jolie, does that mean (by your definition) that I’m attracted to him? I say no, I’m attracted to Angelina Jolie. It seems to me you’re depending on an expanded definition of attraction (liking/admiring/emulating) but the original definition of sexual preference (wishing to engage sexually with a person of a certain gender) to make your point.
Agreed, but what’s the relevance to sexuality? Another explanation is that it’s an aesthetic issue, not a sexual one.
Regardless of the fact that you’re slighting psychology out of hand and yet apparently are relying on psychological evidence to make your point, and without touching on the fact that your definition of “hardcore” pornography is arguable, so what? Straight guys watch porn with dicks in it, therefore they’re attracted to men? I don’t see how that follows. Perhaps a more logical inference is that guy-on-girl pornography is arousing to straight men because they’re projecting themselves onto the male porn star, not that they are attracted to the male porn star. Absent any other same-sex behavior, doesn’t that make more sense?
ok, I swear this is my last word on the issue, but big hard cock existed on vases, pre-historic stone statues, anything that can be made to look like big, hard cock, really, at some point was. In those crazy anthropological circles it’s instead known as “big, hard phallus.”
This is a pretty blatant conflation of correlation and causation.
It is one thing to note that there is some scientific basis for the notion that homophobia is the result of (probable) reactions to societal pressures on some homosexuals.
It is something else, again, to turn that whole concept on its head and claim that homophobia causes homosexuality.
Pay attention to what was actually analyzed. They did not find that all homosexual men were homophobic. They found some preliminary test results that suggested that some smaller subset of homosexual men pass as heterosexual and then cover their homosexual feelings with expressions of homophobia. If not backward, you have certainly turned the results of the study upside down.
i’m sorry, this is the last word: my point is that if men didn’t like looking at it in their films, wouldn’t they instead like to watching something that DIDN’T put them to shame? It’s not that there’s phallus, it’s the type of phallus universally depicted.
The key here is that this is still a quasi-experimental study. Another interpretation of this data is that homophobic beliefs are a reaction to same-sex attraction, not that homophobic beliefs make you attracted to members of the same sex.
Read the discussion of the paper for surprises!
(bolding mine)
So the authors have two models to explain the results, neither of which involves homophobic beliefs causing homosexual arousal. I find them both plausible.
I am not denying the presence (or even prevalence) of engorged penes in pornography. However, you made a claim for its universal presence that is simply not supportable. And you have presented a very murky and unpersuasive claim that purports tolink heterosexual pornography to homosexuality.
Your premise is obscure. Your evidence is lacking. Your apparent conclusion is silly.
Correlation is what studies provide. Causality is what’s debated and theorized and inferred. Some people have inferred that homosexual feelings induce a person to “cover those up” and act homophobic. I say something pretty different. I say that homophobic people take feelings that everyone has, and then dwell on them in their heads. The more they think about it, the more they notice it, the more they notice it, the more real it gets and also the more homophobic they might get,* and this cycle spirals up eventually leading, for some people, to considerable emotional distress. Many others, though, may quit well before that and say, “eh, it’s ok, i’m gay.” Even more might have had the beginning to such an episode, but then diffused it and stayed straight .
In any case: there’s a conflict between reality, and the belief that dominates in our society that “straight men only notice beauty in women.” This conflict I think has a profound impact on many men.
One prediction of this theory is that if I think about being gay enough (perhaps I must also be really anxious about it as well), I will become gay. Do you agree? Conversely, it might follow that if I think about being straight enough (again, being in a sufficiently anxious state of mind), I will become straight. Do you agree? If not, why is the gay to straight conversion different from the straight to gay conversion?
To put it simply, most people can differentiate between a purebred collie and a mangy flea-ridden mutt. To most the purebred collie would look more “attractive” than the mutt. That does not mean that someone who can call the difference is sexually attracted to dogs.
I think the OP is on to something, even if it’s not being communicated very effectively. Let me try and attack it from a different angle.
Humans are social animals. We form tight bonds and cooperate in ways that few other animals would. But attraction to other people can’t necessarily be compartmentalized. We like people and become close friends with members of our gender, and we fall in love (usually) with members of the opposite gender. But isn’t it reasonable to suppose that the basis for attraction to other people has the same source, at least in part, regardless of whether the other person is the same or the opposite gender?
I think we’re much more likely to trust an attractive person. A jury is more likely to be sympathetic to someone who looks good. An employer is more likely to hire the better looking candidate (all other things being equal). So we appear to be hardwired (at some point in our development) to gravitate towards attractive people. It seems reasonable to assume that we derive this attraction response, whether sexual or just social, from a few basic elements that overlap considerably.
However… Humans are more complex than that. Sure, we’re attracted to good looking people, but we’re also attracted to people with “good” personalities. We’re attracted to people with high social standing (or high social/political power), as well. And if someone has the right look, but all the wrong moves, he/she can quickly become unattractive in the same way that a so-so looking person can suddenly become attractive if he/she has a great personality or high social/political standing.
We’re very complex emotional creatures, but evolution has a way of making new biological features out of existing ones. I would not be at all surprised if our unusual ability to form friendships was derived from the same biological mechanism that compels us to form sexual unions. It would not be too much of a stretch, then, to see that sometimes these emotions get muddled differently than the norm. Or that we’re all, at some level, a complex mixture of hetero- and homosexual beings who, under certain biological/environmental conditions, can slide along the scale of hetero- and homosexuality.
Now this is all conjecture, and we’re far from understanding the complex nature of sexual attraction as well as that of other social bonds, but it does seem reasonable to me to expect that these different social bonds we do form are not based on entirely different biological processes. And if they’re not, then seeing these social bonding processes manifest themselves in different ways should not be at all surprising.
I think your whole argument seems to fall down when it comes to women, though. Women probably notice beauty in other women just as much, if not more than, straight men. Many straight women will get “dressed up” not just for straight men, but to be noticed by other women. How often do men not notice things like hair styles, make up application, or when a woman gets her nails done? And men and women’s magazines are often different in content/style, but both of them feature attractive women–granted, in different poses.
There was, along these lines, an article in Bitch magazine on this topic–on women, not men, suggesting that maybe women’s envy of each other’s looks is less about wanting to look differently, and more about attraction to each other.
I’m not sure if this means anything, and I’m kind of doubting that homophobia is a root cause of homosexuality (as another poster pointed out, many gay people know they’re gay from a young age), but it’s something.
And, as I have already pointed out in earlier posts, your theory fails at every point:
People who are homosexual rarely experience homophobia as children, so they are unlikely to be reacting to, (much less “dwelling on”), an experience they never had. It makes no sense to claim that a guy became gay by dwelling on a feeling or a belief when he is unaware that any such belief exists.
Homosexuals cannot gravitate toward a (nonexistent) homosexual “community” before they are even aware that there may be such a thing–and in many locations, there is no such thing.
And your idea that men are suppressing some sort of acknowledgment of male beauty only works for a limited number of true homophobes, as most men are quite aware that other men can be attractive. I have no idea where you get the idea that “straight men only notice beauty in women,” but it sounds like the sort of silly thing one would hear in a bar full of homophobes. (Making crude comments about another guy’s attractiveness would probably invoke some ridicule, but simply noting that Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, Tom Selleck, or Cary Grant were good looking would hardly raise an eyebrow in most groups of which I have been a member.)
Further, you have avoided addressing the issue that many people recognize their homosexual (or, for that matter, heterosexual) feelings long before puberty and years before they would normally be aware of what those feelings meant.
Beyond that, your whole idea rests on human social interactions, but homosexual orientation has been widely reported in non-human species where such elaborate little dramas could not occur. I would be interested to know just what errant thoughts are dwelt upon by species as diverse at giraffes, porcupines, and house cats.
I commend you for a thoughtful attempt at analyzing a difficult topic, but I disagree with a number of your premises. For example, the most popular guys at my high school weren’t necessarily the best looking. One particular fellow, beloved by all, was a fat, sweaty pig with an amazing sense of humor and great personality. There are others I disagree with as well, but a single counterexample is all that is necessary to refute the generality.
Probably not. At least not based on the study written about in the link below. Heterosexual men do identify other men as attractive, but are not sexually attracted to them.
Trying to figure out why people are homosexual is kind of like trying to figure out why some people prefer strawberries to raspberries.
It would be hard to say that homophobia has anything to do with causing homosexuality. While I believe that many homophobes are “in the closet,” it is their aggression that is caused by the homophobia vs. homosexuality conflict. Homosexuality is probable, but is not the effect. I often wonder if this also happens on a smaller scale as well. Excessively agressive men who abuse their wives, for instance. Basically anything that our culture describes as compensating for a small penis may instead be compensating for a hidden attraction to other men. That makes sense to me, though it is just a theory.
Any time people discuss the cause of homosexuality, I have to wonder if we are really discussing methods to seek out a prevention. And I don’t like the implication of that. If a baby boy chooses a pink and fluffy doll over a toy car, most dads recoil and try to “correct” them. And there are millions of culturally equivalent variations of that same response.
I am more intrigued by the varying levels of homophobia and I wonder what causes it.
When I was 12 or so I saw a movie about pirates and noticed that the male lead was an attractive man, then worried that I might be gay for a few days after that. Today I recognize that some men are attractive to me (i.e. Taye Diggs) yet I don’t have sexual feelings towards them. I think there’s a difference between being attracted to someone and wanting to have sex with them.
Which preference, incidentally, is another clear indicator of homosexual tendencies: the strawberry being a clear representation of an engorged glans penis, it is only preferred by straight women and male homosexuals. Meanwhile the raspberry, which resembles the clitoris in an aroused state, is the natural preference of heterosexual males and lesbians.
Fascinating stuff, and I think it goes to support the OP’s premise. I’ll provide a link to the relevant study as soon as I finish writing it and uploading it to MySpace, which I promise to do right after I finish this peculiarly-flavored cigarette.