I think the article does a pretty good job of grappling, throughout, with the complexity of the interplay between genetics, environment (in utero and otherwise), and culture--and it seemed to me that in many ways, that's the point of the article. The writer mentions on page 3 that most lgbtq people aren't "hungering" for this research, and that many are dubious of its value, and even deeply concerned that it will result in techniques to make sure that queer kids aren't born. Then he gives a pretty clear overview into the forces that drew the initial studies into queer identities, particularly gay male identities.
Furthermore, I'd note that he began discussing the complexities of interplay between genetics and environmental factors on page 2, and introduces the idea of a matrix--which is a more complex model than even a continuum or spectrum, earlier on that page: "Instead of picturing gender and orientation along a line, with straight men and women on either end and gay people in the middle, he [i.e., the Ontario-based psychological researcher named Anthony Bogaert who re-sorted Kinsey Institute data] suggests, a matrix might be a more accurate way to map the possibilities."
So, I don't think the article in any way indicates that either the writer or many of the scientists are approaching sexuality in such a simplistic way. However, in further answer to this question of xenoglaux's--
Even if you want to keep sexuality at its simplest level, you'd have to concede that there are bisexual people. Do they get lumped in with the gay people?
...part of the reason I said I think the writer may be too kind to J. Michael Bailey is due to this exact problem. Here' the part of the article that most caught my attention:
In many other studies, though, lesbians have appeared less unique than gay men, leading some people to wonder if their sexual orientation is innate. Michael Bailey—who, as a heterosexual researcher, is a minority in this field—even doubts the existence of female sexual orientation, if by orientation we mean a fundamental drive that defies our conscious choices. He bases this provocative gambit on a sexual-arousal study he and his students conducted. When shown pornographic videos, men have an undeniable response either to gay or straight images but not both, according to sensitive gauges attached to their genitals—it’s that binary. Female sexual response is more democratic, opaque, and unpredictable: Arousal itself is harder to track, and there is evidence that it defies easy categorization. “I don’t yet understand female partner choices very well, and neither does anyone else,” Bailey wrote me in an e-mail. “What I do think it’s time to do is admit that female sexuality looks in some ways very different from male sexuality, and that there is no clear analog in women of men’s directed sexual-arousal pattern, which I think is their sexual orientation. I am not sure that women don’t have a sexual orientation, but it is certainly unclear that they do.”
He contends that what they have instead is sexual preference—they might prefer sex with women, but something in their brains can still sizzle at the thought of men. Many feminist scholars agree with this assessment, and consider sexuality more of a fluid than an either-or proposition, but some don’t. “I think women do have orientations, but they don’t circumscribe the range of desires that women can experience to the same degree as men,” says Lisa Diamond, a psychology professor at the University of Utah, who is writing a book on the subject. “For women, there’s more wiggle room. You can think of orientation as defining a range of possible responses, and for women, it’s much broader.”
Bailey stops short of saying that lesbianism is a myth (although he has notoriously declared that true male bisexuality doesn’t exist and dismissed many transgender people as peculiar sexual fetishists, drawing lasting enmity from gay and trans groups). But it may be less hard-wired. And it appears to have separate triggers and correlates that haven’t been identified yet. In studies of twins, there is a lower correlation of sexual orientation between female siblings than male siblings, for instance. “We’re at a place,” agrees Diamond, “where everyone agrees that whatever is going on is quite distinct between the sexes.”
What especially annoys me, based on the reporting I've seen of Bailey's work, is that he uses pornographic videos to measure sexual response and ultimately as the basis for his sweeping claims about gender sexuality and orientation. He seems to have no qualms about judging people's ethics and morality based on their self-reported perceptions of their sexuality when it doesn't jibe with his research, and falls just short of calling people "deluded" whose experience doesn't fit his limited research.
For example, many women (and probably men, too) are really not primarily visually- oriented in their sexuality, probably for a whole slew of reasons. I, myself, really love being spoken to in the dark and fantasy narratives; sexual videos can be fun, but they're not my primary focus. And most of them are created by and for straight men. I would like to know more about J. Bailey's process for selecting videos for the viewers, but I am quite certain that responses to visual stimulation is not a universal index of human sexuality, as the reports of his work that I've read seem to suggest. But that seemingly doesn't stop him from asserting that female orientation probably doesn't exist, along with bisexual men and transgender people etc.
I wish he were more clearly taken to task in this article, and some others I've read, for asserting, even in "email conversations" such potentially damaging and sweeping conclusions based on such limited evidence that can not fully legitimate the scope of such claims. That's not how science is supposed to work, as far as i know.
(I'm also concerned Diamond's work as it is reported here--"For women there's more wiggle room." In general, I wish that psychologists would more carefully remember to qualify: "For most modern, Western women, there seems to be more wiggle room..." It's possible that in her work she makes it clear that her claims are limited to that group, but very often psychologists speak about human pscyhology as if it is universal, timeless.) |
