Bad Lieutenant
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Pronounced rationel right? Totally different to rational though, certainly :smirk:
The understating of the fluidity of sexual orientation
- Thread starter Bad Lieutenant
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diabolical globalist
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Not in the western world. I've been out for 30 years, I'm LEGALLY married in the United States. It's a thousand times better. Yeah, of course much needs to be done but in no way, shape or form is there more homophobia today...again, in the western world.
Pronounce ration Al, like Big Al.
Watch it!
Soapy's sexual orientation has been as constant as true north as long as I can remember. I've seen no evidence whatever of "fluidity" beyond the fact I find all women attractive to varying degrees.
On one of those "conceptualise the solar system" scales, while the least attractive woman I ever met might be out beyond Pluto, the most attractive man I ever met would be way past Alpha Centaurii on my scale of interest. In other words, total lack of interest.
This is not a scial feature, it's hard wired. I was madly in love with my first primary school teacher. She was awfully pretty and I was five. That's not conditioning, that's wiring.
Or possibly plumbing.
I would challenge the validity of this assessment.
You act like "man" and "woman" is a strict biological designation. Unless you're attracted entirely by genitals (and considering that you likely didn't see your primary school teacher's, that seems unlikely), there are some characteristics that you find attractive. Some people may exhibit those characteristics even if they have the wrong genitals.
Are you saying, for example, that you would immediately and instinctually reject a very convincing transgender individual because of her male genitals, even if you didn't know she was transgender? If so, I think we can set up an MDC test and make you a rich man.
But if what you really mean is that some of the characteristics our society associates with women are attractive to you, and yet those characteristics are not attractive to you when exhibited by someone you believe to be "a man", then you should recognize that this is probably due to psychological conditioning and not biology.
To put it another way, I show you a stunning woman and you're attracted. I then say "actually, he's a man," and all attraction goes away. I then say, "no, I lied, she's a woman," and the attraction returns (assuming you believe me). Wouldn't you agree that something more than basic hormones and plumbing is at work here?
Antiquehunter
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What factors would those be? And what evidence suggests to you that this is a 'definite truth'?
I think you may have misread my statement. Could you re-state what you think I said in your own terms, please? I want to avoid us talking past each other.
Bad Lieutenant
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They didn't say they had an idea what factors they might be.
A strong piece of evidence which leads me to conclude that it is the environment which overwhelmingly directs sexual orientation is that there is only a 20% concordance for monozygotic twins and homosexuality. The study was conducted in 2000 using the Australian twins registry, in order to avoid selection bias. No surprises that this study is not detailed on the primary researcher's wikipedia page as it is not compatible with the prevailing, politically motivated zeitgeist that homosexuality is not determined through environmental forces. An earlier, biased study which found a 50% concordance is detailed on the wikipedia page instead. Disgraceful really.
~Bailey, Michael J., Michael P. Dunne and Nicholas G. Martin (2000). Genetic and environmental influences on sexual orientation and its correlates in an Australian twin sample. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 3, 524-536.
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That's correct, and I don't.
By the way, feel free to pick gendered pronoun. Either is fine.
Bad Lieutenant
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heh, well I was going to call you a he because of your fighty avatar...but then realised I didn't know. On some other forums they have a symbol for the gender...for some reason...but not the current sexual orientation however.
Then, with respect, you would be wrong, because there is no assessment: There is a statement of personal experience. Mine. I suspect I know it rather better than anyone else.
Unless they repealed the laws of genetics, I think I'd be right to do that. These are discrete states. There may be intermediates. I don't think there is a continuous spectrum of such intermediates. I don't think natural selection works that way.
Accepted. But see below. I think we are talking about subtly different things. There's immediate beauty and there's attraction. Not at all the same.
I'm pretty sure I never mentioned the word "transgender". Nor do I actually know precisely what it means, if indeed it means anything precisely.
I described my experience- which is one of persistent and consistent attraction to women. And not equally to all women. I don't recall - and I don't see in my previous post- any mention of immediacy. Immediate attraction is cultural. Eyes meet across a crowded room. Hollywood at it's worst. I assume this thread is about reality, not the movies.
Instant pleasure in physical beauty certainly exists, but I might feel that for a dog, a horse, a painting, a statue. I assume that's not what this thread is about. I assume it's about sexual attraction that might (but does not have to) lead to a pair bond of some duration.
With humans it's always hard to know where nature gives way to nurture- and it may differ for every individual.
If that happened, I surely would. In my experience it has not happened.
I do agree that "more than basic hormones and plumbing" are at work in most human relationships, but I think in the case of long term sexual relationships, natural selection shapes the plumbing to work one way in the first place. If it doesn't work that way, it's because something has gone wrong. I can't find men attractive any more than (they assure me) homosexual men can find women attractive. We just lack the circuitry.
There's no doubt we can mentally override some of the hardwiring, though again some people will find this easier than others and there is assuredly a cultural element in that- but overriding the plumbing is trickier. I can masturbate while fantasising about the sort of wild and exotic women I really find profoundly tedious in real life, with exactly the same result as if I fantasise about a woman I truly like - but attempts to fantasise about men (and yes I have tried the experiment) invariably result in a total switch off. Now again, you may feel this is cultural and you may be right.
I dunno how you would test for this though.
It's certainly possible that at some point I have experienced an erection looking at someone I believed to be female who actually was not. I'm not aware of it ever happening, but I don't deny the possibility.
But I do deny the possibility that I would have any interest in pursuing a sexual relationship with him. That would be like having a relationship with a lawn mower- not horrifying or disgusting, just so inherently uninteresting as to seem like a concept failure. Like using a chocolate biscuit to telephone someone- daft.
Antiquehunter
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I didn't see the 'If' in the original statement, which changes the context of the statement. My bad.
No, "male" and "female" are discrete states. "Man" and "woman" are cultural constructions.
My point is this -- many/most of the elements in our culture that make up masculinity/femininity are culturally constructed rather than biologically determined. Even the choice to emphasize or de-emphasize certain sex-linked traits and secondary sexual characteristics is a culturally-linked choice, and varies widely among past and present human societies.
What I'm hearing from you is that you're not interested in male genitals, and the presence of male genitals would disqualify someone as a candidate for "pair bonding of some duration", as you put it. Fine, but can you acknowledge that, when you discovered attraction to women at age five, genitals had nothing to do with it, as I assume you were similar to most five-year-olds and were not evaluating your teacher's genitals at the time?
In our society, we are taught to think about gender in a strongly bifurcated way, and I think the reason why most people claim to be as heterosexual or homosexual as they do is because they see all the elements of behavior and appearance that we have put on "men" and on "women" in our cultural archetypes, and have patterned after many of those elements. Just note that most of those elements don't have anything to do with your genetics or your plumbing; we put them there to strongly differentiate genders, and we have succeeded.
Au contraire- I have a long and close relationship with one set thereof!
I don't think it's quite that simple. I agree it wasn't my teacher's genitalia I was in love with, but that rather makes my point. It's not about genitals. It's about people. You are attracted to a particular type of person- and that type may be a social construct to some extent, but it's also (and I think far more) innate. I'm still primarily attracted to women who look nd sound and move very much like that teacher. That may be because she "set" my ideal model, or because she conformed to a model which was (long pre puberty) already programmed in. I don't know which is closer to the truth, but I know which I suspect. YMMV, of course. We are different people with different genomes and different life experience separating nature from nurture is a perennial problem for humans.
I'd both agree and cavil- It's NOT that simple. Evidence of gender behavioural difference goes back long before Homo sapiens sapiens. Hell, it's perfectly evident in non-human , even non-mammalian animals. Why would we be different.
Men and women ARE different. Vive la difference!
That doesn't mean I see no space for people who sre neither. Or , occasionally, both.
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Pup
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You mean a male youth that resembles a female youth as much as possible?
I think that's the whole point of those who say that sexual desire is more hardwired than fluid.
Why would the youth need to seem feminine, for a straight man to find him attractive, if the straight man wasn't hardwired to be attracted to a fairly narrow range of people, i.e. feminine-seeming ones?
Caper
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I was wondering before, but never wanted to start a separate topic.
I ask this just out of sheer curiosity. Has there ever been a case where an open homosexual male, lost his attraction to males and became straight?
I'm not talking about gay men that went to some christian course and then lived in denial and married a woman. I'm talking flamboyantly gay male all of a sudden just changing his sexuality......say through maybe a stroke or brain tumor or something that could alter brain chemistry.
I read Dan Savage, so it seems to me I read everything. I'm just wondered if there ever was a documented case of what I wondered about above.
I ask this just out of sheer curiosity. Has there ever been a case where an open homosexual male, lost his attraction to males and became straight?
I'm not talking about gay men that went to some christian course and then lived in denial and married a woman. I'm talking flamboyantly gay male all of a sudden just changing his sexuality......say through maybe a stroke or brain tumor or something that could alter brain chemistry.
I read Dan Savage, so it seems to me I read everything. I'm just wondered if there ever was a documented case of what I wondered about above.
Alan
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I don't think Dan Savage is a good source for the topic.
But there are reports of people changing their sexuality as a result of a stroke. I heard of one recently, although it was from straight to gay. It was discussed a few episodes ago on the SGU podcast.
http://theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=1&pid=330
http://www.edgenewengland.com/index.php?id=126577
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Caper
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Sorry, I wasn't trying to say Dan Savage was a source for the topic. What I meant by bringing him up was that I now think I read just about every weird thing there is about human sexuality.