|
gay: genetic or behavioral?
StoreTags: gay, homosexual, sociology
Viewed 6382 times. 3 people liked this blog. You can rate it below if you haven't already.
-->
lately i've been studying various surveys and experiments and articles about human sexuality. Before Kinsey's studies, this topic was generally regarded as trivial by most social scientists ... but it seems like we (as a society) are still just as confused on the topic as we were 100 years ago. i recently had a discussion with someone about this and it led to nowhere but insults. so i figure i'll try it with smarter people at EM411. the person (he was gay) mistook me for an "ignorant homphobe" because i was straight and I disagreed with him, ugh. i don't hate gay people, and the sad thing was i was on his side until that whole business of me being ignorant ...
so the question is: do you guys think that being gay is (a)genetic or instinctual - inherited through our parents from birth or (b)social - inherited from our social interactions with people and culture?
basically, is it nature or nurture? what's your thoughts?
i'll save my answer for a little later, i'd like to hear y'alls opinion on this.
| |
Comments
edited: Sep 29 2006
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
Matti
[edit]
i wrote a rant but changed my mind - who am i to enforce my mindset on anyone?
suffice to say i think labels are the root of dissent. so there.
edited: Sep 29 2006
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
mlbot
Matti said: "a few counter-questions: is gender a genetic or a cultural/social thing? is dna what makes you a wo/man? are we simply biochemical machinery?
all rhetorical questions, perhaps, at least to me."
Its totally NOT a rhetorical question.
But first a caveat: gender and sexuality are definitely connected.. somehow...
BUT
I think part of the root of homophobia is the myth that being gay means you are less masculine...
So let me digress entirely to the topic of what makes boys boys and girls girls and pelase dont assume I mean homosexual or heterosexual.
extreme examples:
link (side note: the 5alpha reductase deficiency entry)
many kids are born every day whom the doctors can't tell if they are boys or girls. They most often undergo gentical reconstructive surgery to become externally female, and in the case of those with (undescended) testes are given hormone therapy to develop as girls. BUT the brain seems to get patterened as a boy brain or a girl brain long before the rest of the body catches up. Many of these kids grow up with serious gender identity issues.
Is a genetic boy who externally looks female who is sexually attracted to girls a lesbian? If so, then are lesbians just boys in girls bodies? No, of course not.
I brought up Jamie Lee Curtis earlier because 1) it was ironic she was licenses' apex of heterosexuality, and yet rumor has it shehas a Y chromosome with a defective TDF gene, the very first gene that gets turned on to make boys boys.... aside from the Y chromosome, she is 100% female.
You can't always trust genetics. Should Jamie Lee Curtis been given a genetic test at birth and given hormone therapy and raised as a boy? For those of us who enjoyed True Lies, we say no.
See, us boys have every gene necessary to develop a uterus, grow breasts (ever see men on anti prostate cancer drugs?) etcc etcc.
And women have almost every gene necessary to grow a penis (minus TDF and maybe a few others).
It's really just a matter of turning these genes on at the right time and place.
Back OT. We probably all have the genes necessary to make us straight, gay, bi, and yet we probably all only identify with one of those categories.
09/29/06
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
astroid
2 things about true lies:
jamie lee curtis used a body double for the ass stuff. her knockers are hers. trading places.
jamie lee curtis is a total herm
09/29/06
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
mlbot
Did she hire lowlifi's chin?
09/29/06
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
quicks
Zanf said: " flies said: "Early childhood experiences have been shown again and again to have a strong impact on adult sexuality in general (easily proven in extreme cases such as abuse), ......"
This has intrigued me...care to explain further?"
From listening to hours and hours of "loveline with Dr. Drew" on the radio, I understand that for some reason abuse victims tend tend to want (on a subconscious level) to relive their abusive past over and over. A girl who had an abusive father for instance, have a tendency to be attracted to men who are abusive in the same way their fathers were. Similarly, young boys who are sexually abused by men seem to have a tendency to become gay.
As an interesting aside, Dr. Drew is able to identify callers who are abuse victims by the sound of their voice, and even accurately determine the age at which they were abused. If an older female calls into the show, and sounds like a 10-year-old girl, chances are good that they were abused at around age 10. On some level they are still dealing with the abuse, and it comes out in the way they sound- almost like it stunted their emotional growth, and stopped the clock at that point in their development.
09/29/06
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
astroid
quicks said: "
As an interesting aside, Dr. Drew is able to identify callers who are abuse victims by the sound of their voice, and even accurately determine the age at which they were abused. If an older female calls into the show, and sounds like a 10-year-old girl, chances are good that they were abused at around age 10. On some level they are still dealing with the abuse, and it comes out in the way they sound- almost like it stunted their emotional growth, and stopped the clock at that point in their development."
call screening works wonders, too.
09/29/06
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
quicks
yeah, but Drew and Adam always made a point to say before and after they made their predictions, that there was no information about abuse on their computer screens given to them by the call screeners. The callers were always calling about some other question.
edited: Sep 29 2006
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
Zanf
quicks said: " Zanf said: " flies said: "Early childhood experiences have been shown again and again to have a strong impact on adult sexuality in general (easily proven in extreme cases such as abuse), ......"
This has intrigued me...care to explain further?"
From listening to hours and hours of "loveline with Dr. Drew" on the radio, I understand that for some reason abuse victims tend tend to want (on a subconscious level) to relive their abusive past over and over. A girl who had an abusive father for instance, have a tendency to be attracted to men who are abusive in the same way their fathers were. Similarly, young boys who are sexually abused by men seem to have a tendency to become gay."
this just sounds like co-dependency where poeple get into abusive relationships because they are still reliving the situation and see that if they can resolve that relationship/situation then they will somehow heal themselves. I call this 'monofault' - constantly repeating the same error and yet almost being completely conscious that you are doing it - like constantly hitting the net when trying to serve an 'ace' in tennis but not being able to stop making the error.
As for the girl thing, I was told that the vast majority of girls, at some point, masturbate and fantasise about a detatched hand caressing their body which is representative of their father but their morality refuses to visualise anything beyond the wrist/arm.
Im not sure if I quite buy into the 'abused as a boy, grow into a gay man' theory - I cant quite verbalise why but I just dont.
edited: Sep 29 2006
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
datathinner
Wow i love the way this discussion has gone so far. all great answers.
I knew Mlbot, being into biology, would have a lot to add. thanks. for the record, i don't regard being gay as abnormal, i'm merely curious why it is considered by greater society to be abnormal. Yes, i'm sorry, i can be insensitive sometimes ... but please nobody take take it personally, i'm just a very curious fellow and i love everything about people and what makes them individual from society.
also, that's the only time i've been called a homophobe, and it was over the internet so ... meh. I grew up here in texas, in a small town, and i knew kids that were gay that absolutely had the worst childhood trying to fit in, because the atmosphere here is so supressive. This more that its a "bad" thing to be gay fascinates me to no end, as does religion, as does the nature of what is considered "deviance" and what is not. I could never be scared or hate anyone simply becasue they think differently than me. it's not like they're hurting anybody (i've seen people say otherwise with a completely straight face-no shit), and it's their business what they do with their body, totally.
i find myself asking a lot of questions like this: is dissention genetic? if so, why do straight-laced families raise kids that completely opposite? is there any evidence to support that? are we born to dissent from society-at-large?
I'm very interested in harry Harlow's study of rhesus monkeys. He raised monkeys in complete isolation, devoid of any real contact, as a behavioral study. The monkeys ended up hostile when introduced to other monkeys, had extreme trouble mating and usually could not be taught to do so, and were completely unable to effectively raise children. this says a lot about the nature/nurture argument. certainly, with any animal study, great caution should be used when applying them to humanity, but since we as humans rely on learning much more than monkeys do, we can assume from this study that social, sexual, and maternal behavors are at least not entirely instinctual. as for being "born" gay - this study doesn't necessarily disprove that.
another interesting study came from Simon LeVay in which he studied brains for physiologoical differences between straight and gay people, and found that 10% of the "gay" brains were physiologically different. however he also states:
Simon LeVay said: "It's important to stress what I didn't find. I did not prove that homosexuality was genetic, or find a genetic cause for being gay. I didn't show that gay men are born that way, the most common mistake people make in interpreting my work. Nor did I locate a gay center in the brain. INAH-3 is less likely to be the sole gay nucleus of the brain than a part of a chain of nuclei engaged in men and women's sexual behavior...Since I looked at adult brains we don't know if the differences I found were there at birth, or if they appeared later"
I'm not insinuating that homosexuality is not genetic, i'm merely saying that we have very little evidence to prove it. research found that the majority of the population is bisexual, adhereing to a scale rather than simply conforming to a certain category, so frnortnr was essentially right about the certain amount of "male and female". as to whether we're born with it, well that remains to be seen.
i will say that social intercations in our environment definitely shape who we are as a person, especially as a child. i think people are mislead into thinking that "behavioral" means choosing to be gay. this is the wrong idea. I didn't choose to be heterosexual, i ended up that way. Many gay people i know are the same, they didn't choose to be that way, it's a feeling they have - but this doesn't necessarily mean it is genetic - because there are many other social factors which we are shaped by and have no definite "choice" about it.
09/29/06
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
datathinner
this however is pretty abnormal.
09/30/06
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
aero
Im sure the 'physical modelled' genetics of my AN1x is Gay 'for sure' (it is certainly a camp over expressively happy-chappy) but its Yammie CS5 grandfather aint Gay in the slightest- even though its 'genetically' related to the AN1x in that Yamaha CS and Prophet 5 'cloning' technology was spliced together to give birth to the AN1x. Yes , the CS5 sometimes could be described as a bit bi-sexual until its warmed to room temperature but thats just 'surface' obviousness. Am I in the right forum?
10/06/06
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
aero
The statement directly above I declared could be criticised as not being a serious enough unintelligent contibution to this ELECTRONIC (non 'doctor phil' type:/) MUSIC forum.
Apologies to those who are offended!
10/08/06
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
Dizzygotheca
djugle said: "I wondered if I was gay ... not because I was attracted to men.. but because I felt more comfortable being feminine..and the only sport I like to play is Volleyball. "
i had this exact conversation with a mate of mine.. he felt exactly the same way and asked me if he could possibly be gay too..
and the wisdom i departed to him was..
question:- do you masturbate/become arroused over the thought of having sex with a man?
yes = gay
no = straight
he answered no..
10/08/06
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
datathinner
my mom asked me if i was secretly gay today. lol.
my mom is teh stoopidz though, seriously.
10/08/06
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
Dizzygotheca
Register / login
|
^
EM411 is Copyright 2001-2008 EM411.com
All rights reserved. | Contact | RSS
|