Would this invention work as a gay-o-meter?

Factual Questions
21

Well, firstly you might explain exactly what you mean by “100% heterosexual.” The idea that you can place sexual orientation on some sort of sliding scale presupposes an objective measure of what constitutes “100% heterosexuality” and “100% homosexuality.” I just don’t think we have such a yardstick.

For example, would you consider me 100% heterosexual if i told you that i look at straight porn and have only ever had sex with women?

What if i then told you that i had some gay male friends, and that we sometimes kiss each other on the lips instead of shaking hands as a greeting? I have no desire to have a sexual relationship with these guys. To be honest, the idea of fucking a guy kind of grosses me out. But i also have no problem kissing one as a greeting, and i don’t feel that doing so makes me less “heterosexual” than i might otherwise be.

And this leads to the whole question of whether ones sexuality is determined purely by who one’s sexual partners are. There are guys, for example, who fuck other guys yet who self-identify as straight. And this is by no means a new phenomenon–it’s been going on for ages. For a discussion of how this sort of thing played out in relatively recent history, i highly recommend the book Gay New York by George Chauncey. A very recent manifestation of this type of thing is the so-called “down low,” a term used to describe (usually African-American) men who are married and consider themselves straight, but who seek out other “straight” men for sex.

And what about the inverse–someone who has a close emotional attachment to someone of the same sex, but who doesn’t have sex with that person? Is physical contact required in order to determine someone’s sexuality? And if so, are people who remain llifelong celibates then, by definition, without sexuality?

And what if you have sex for money? If the magazines and the gossip is to be believed, many of the male actors who make money doing gay porn consider themselves “straight.” Where would you put them on your scale?

In short, the variables and the multiplicity of possible definitions make a project such as your inherently problematic. And even if they didn’t, i think a more important question is: Why does it matter? Why do we need to place people on a scale or in a box, especially over an issue that is, essentially, no-one else’s business?

22

And Chronos, which female a subject might look at is kind of a sideshow, irrelevant to my main point, and something I probably should have just left out.

23

So by your argument that self-reported sexual persuasion is unobjective and often unreliable, you could be a flaming queen. True? Given your Ivy League scholastic background, could you refer me to the wealth of documented cases of heterosexual men identifying as homosexual?

If you have no idea why or how the eyes scan things on a page, you might want to do a little research on that before filling out your Gay-O-Meter patent application.

Baseline of what? Okay, let’s say I’m confused about my sexual orientation. For me to be in this situation it would already be pretty obvious that I don’t identify as “purely” homosexual or “purely” heterosexual. Of what use would it be to take a test to learn that I am 35% heterosexual and 65% homosexual instead of 19% heterosexual and 81% homosexual? How do bi-sexuals factor into your invention?

How can you even prove the results of such a test? In the end you are still required to interview your test subjects for their self-reported (and by your measure) unreliable responses.

My negative response to your ideas may be colored a bit because I’ve just finished reading a thread that collected a bunch of SHAKES’ anti-gay remarks and I’m getting sick of people treating homosexuality like it is a disease or something that needs to profiled and tagged. So if I am misinterpreting your intentions and am being overly critical, I apologize.

And, just out of curiosity, is correct spelling not a big priority in the Dartmouth PhD program?

24

See, you are being obtuse. I am not talking about two movie stars presented with one with front billing on a poster. I am talking about two images presented equally on a screen. My personal experience and that of most heterosexual males that I have talked to is to look at the female. In this case, it is obvious, my wife looks just like Vivian Leigh. I don’t even look at Clark Gable because he is a persona non grata. My case may be extreme but I want you to consider the case where both are shown side-by-side as equals. Does that apply to you or are you attracted to the person equally be it male or female to you?

25

I already told you that I had some gay male friends. Most people say that but what if I told you that I went out with gay men my age age and 20 + my senior until this day. I like them because they are kind, affulent, and they always treat me extremely well. I am proud to be around them but only in a platonic way. They have taken care of me in ways that I never imagined.

26

And, just out of curiosity, is correct spelling not a big priority in the Dartmouth PhD program?
[/QUOTE]

I don’t preview. No, they do not teach spelling in a Dartmouth Ph.D. program. It is all about statistics and research. That is what spell-check is for and I don’t always use it here including this time.

27

Wow, i missed this little gem.

Firstly, what the hell is a “partial Ph.D.”? Either you have one or you don’t. I’m working towards a Ph.D. right now, but i don’t say that i have a “partial Ph.D.”

More importantly, you claim to have undertaken graduate study in sexual differentiation at an Ivy League school, and yet your arguments show a complete lack of sophistication about how such differentiation might be defined.

You still haven’t told us exactly what it is your test might measure. Sure, it would tell us whether the test subject looked at a man or a woman first, but to take such sketchy data and draw broad conclusions about sexuality is extremely difficult. You would have to make wild assumptions about the very thing you claim to be seeking: people’s reasons for (consciously or subconsciously) chosing to look at one sex over another.

Do you see what i’m saying? You say that you’re seeking to help people “believe that sexual orientiation is biological,” but the very test that you’ve devised to do this has no way of determining the causes behind a person’s predisposition to look at one gender or another. At best, it is simply a measure of subconscious reactions, with no basis for assessing whether those reactions are the result of biological, psychological, social, or cultural predispositions.

Your whole experiment rests on the notion of an objective, biological “baseline” of sexuality. But assuming this baseline in your experimental design is inconsistent with actually trying to determine whether such a baseline actually exists. It ends up as a circular argument.

So, is this a study of differences in sexuality, or differences in sex, or differences in gender? You can’t begin a study seeking the innate, biological bases of homosexuality and then immediately make the assumption that men and women will manifest their homosexuality differently. This is something that needs to be studied and assessed, not simply assumed.

Again, this begs the question. What does it mean to like someone “only in a platoinc way”? Are platonic relationships any reflection of the biological bases of sexuality that you claim to be seeking? You still haven’t explained exactly what it is that constitutes sexuality. Is it just a function of who we want to fuck? Or is it more complex than that?

28

Well golly, I wasn’t talking about “extended viewing or ‘porno’” either.

29

I admit that this is a complicated problem that no one has yet to master. Please tell me what is wrong with my experiment as a STARING point. And yes, I have an ABD (All but Dissertation) from a very good university. This isn’t about me. It is about whether this is a good starting point for further research and so far I gather that it is. I want your INTELLIGENT contributions, NOT ABOUT ME, but about how the experiment might work and how it might be refined, in WILLING SUBJECTS.

30

Well, it’d sure work well for that, wouldn’t it?

If you could show that this works effectively (and clearly that’s an open question), don’t you think bigoted employers would make use of it? US Military, Coors Beer, Cracker Barrel, your local police dept, etc. And your local life insurance underwriter, etc.

So the victims of your ‘gay-o-meter’ wouldn’t actually find themselves in a concentration camp – just unemployed, uninsurable, etc. Won’t that make you proud of your invention!
:mad:

31

For people in General Questions, I am very disappointed in most of you. This is strictly for research purposes and for my Ph.D. dissertation. Do you think developing an AIDS test was a horrible thing? That could cause discrimination too. Please don’t be an idiot and respond intelligently to the question. Could this work or not? If not, why not and how could you improve it?

32

(Reference to the OP):

It has been done. I recall a small snippet in a 1974 (or so) issue of Scientific American on the use of measuring pupil dilation to measure the attraction to one gender or another. Nothing much came of it.

Well, one thing came of it. The article had small photos of a male and a female nude. The male looked just like our gym teacher. The magazine got a lot of milage around homeroom before the teacher confiscated it.

33

It won’t work. It’s not an objective test. First, it’s easily fooled. An perceptive test subject will realise the purpose of the test (even if you interpersed red herring images to disguise the test). An unwilling subject will then react to images according to will, not some innate measure of sexuality. And you may as well simply ask a willing subject to describe their sexuality without aid of pictures: if they’re going to lie to you, they’re also going to cheat the test once they figure it out.

Second, a test subject’s eyes will flicker towards the image they’ve been conditioned to respond to. A closeted man, for example, may be well-trained at concentrating on attractive women rather than attractive men. He will be able to suppress any urge to look at images of men over images of women.

If I may offer myself as an example, I can say that when I lived as a straight man, I did not have any real perception of physically attractive men around me. The bonds and urges I formed lead me to eventually conclude I was gay, but before then I didn’t really notice men. I would have “passed” the test. (OTOH, now that I’m out (and loving it), I trip over my feet noticing attractive men on the street; now I’d flunk the test with flying rainbow colours.)

Third, the test supposes a binary model of sexuality: attracted to men or attracted to women. This does not take into account the numerous shades of attraction exhibited by people.

34

Before you leap to conclusions about my background (or lack thereof) in academia or research and accuse me of calling you a bigot, please note that nowhere does your OP say that you are proposing a research project. You only explained your putative intent after my post. For all we knew, you were contemplating a “concentration camp screening” or a method for outing gays for a corporate client, or any number of other unethical purposes.

Furthermore, note that I merely asked a polite question. Any bigotry was in your inference, not in my post.

35

I think there is a basic problem with a poll on involuntary behaviour. It might work, but probably your chances are better if people are not fully aware of their behaviour in this situation. I just doubt that you will get a realistic prediction of their own eye-movements from people.
Unfortunately I think the only way how you can be sure is getting access do an eye-tracker and check at least a tiny sample. If that looks promising than you can proceed and see if there is a significant effect.

Are you sure about that? I have to admit that my knowledge of eye-tracking is very limited, but according to our psycho-linguists they are relatively hard to cheat. When we asked them whether one could manipulate one of their experiments on sentence comprehension they were pretty confident that they would notice this looking at the data. Of course you can stare at one point, but I doubt that will achieve a convincing pattern (which consists of far more short involuntary jumps than it seems at first) Even a few milliseconds could give you away.
Of course this does not mean that a specific experiment will give the desired results, but eye-tracking of involuntary movements is used scientifically for other questions.

36

What about blind gay fellows?

heh heh. Seriously, one of my own thesis ideas was to find out how male sexuality is experience and interpreted in an environment where eyesight is not commonly possessed (i.e., a High School for blind students), insofar as so much of male sexuality (and how it’s thought of and reacted to) is tied up with visual appearance.

37

So, what your saying is that you’re not, exactly, 100%, heterosexual, but that if you can come up with a pop psychology test that proves you are because you always look the girly pics first you feel a whole lot better about yourself, and you can tell your mom to get off your back about your sugar daddies because you have proof that you really like girls.
Cuz that’s what I’m reading into this. I must be wooshing myself.
:dubious:

38

If you’re serious about this, I recommend doing a web search on “eye tracking” or possibly “gaze tracking.” You’ll find that there are several companies that manufacture systems for tracking where a person is looking. Some of the systems are head-mounted and quite bulky, though. I recommend that you contact these companies and talk to them. You might tell them that you want to see what part of an image on a computer screen users look at and for how long, to see if they can provide the necessary hardware and software. (For whatever reason, I don’t think you should reveal what you’re actually interested in researching.)

These sort of systems are used in research to determine the effectiveness of web or magazine pages. So you might do a search through the appropriate journals to see what’s been concluded so far; are people drawn to the center of a page regardless of content, or do they start from the top and work down?

If and when you do the actual study, are the test subjects going to know that you’re trying to determine their sexual orientation?

39

I’ve been wondering what ever happened to Roland Deschain. :smiley:

40

Forgive me if I’m wrong, but it doesn’t sound to me like you have even done a basic literature search, otherwise you would have more knowledge on the research already conducted in this area ie. the sexual arousal of subjects looking at various pictures of men and women and the multitude of research on sexual preference and orientation. In my experience, a master’s thesis should have already given you this information on which to base a Phd thesis. I think you may have a very different system at your university?