On Tue, 24 Apr 2012 15:47:08 -0700 (PDT), denis
<
mrwilso...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>Why do most people dislike filthy faggots?
Why have some of the nation's most vehement anti-gay activists—Ted
Haggard, Larry Craig—had gay sex scandals of their own?
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/04/homophobic_maybe_you_re_gay_the_new_york_times_on_a_new_study_of_secret_sexuality_.html
Are homophobes secretly gay? A new study purports to prove it.
By Daniel Engber|Posted Monday, April 30, 2012, at 2:35 PM ET
Why have some of the nation's most vehement anti-gay activists—Ted
Haggard, Larry Craig—had gay sex scandals of their own? An op-ed in
the New York Times' Sunday Review section tries to explain. The
authors of the piece, two research psychologists, say they have
"empirical evidence that homophobia can result, at least in part, from
the suppression of same-sex desire." Their argument—summed up in the
Times headline as "Homophobic? Maybe You're Gay"—promises to resolve a
long-running debate in the field. For at least 15 years, scientists
have been trying to use objective laboratory measures to prove the
he-who-smelt-it-dealt-it theory of human sexuality. Has a research
team based at the University of Rochester finally done it?
The new study works like an elaborate game of "homo say what?":
Evidence of private, homosexual urges is elicited by subtle verbal
cues. The researchers start by asking college freshmen, mostly women,
to rate their sexual orientation on a scale from 1 to 10 (1 means
completely straight; 5 means bisexual; 10 means totally gay) and then
to say how much they agree with politically charged statements like,
"Gay people make me nervous" and "I would feel uncomfortable having a
gay roommate." Once the students have been characterized according to
their relative degrees of gayness and homophobia, they're shown a
series of icons or photos of wedding-cake figurines on a computer
monitor—two women, two men, or a man with a woman—and told to label
each one as being "gay" or "straight." In a final twist, some of the
"gay" and "straight" images are preceded on the screen by a subliminal
verbal cue—a word flashed quickly on the screen that reads either me
or others. If seeing the word me shortens a student's reaction time
for the gay-themed imagery, it's taken as a sign of her implicit
homosexuality. On a subconscious level, at least, she's associating
the word me with gayness.
Many researchers have used setups like this one—known as an "implicit
association test"—to dig up evidence of covert inclinations or even
racial prejudice. The idea is that it takes people less time to make
connections between words or images when those connections conform to
prior beliefs. A person might respond more quickly to the word blue if
she'd been cued with the word sky, or—more disturbing—she might be
faster on the word man after being cued with the word president. The
Rochester team adapted this idea for their measure of sexuality: A
student's secret gay identity could be revealed by testing whether she
responded more quickly to me-cued gay pictures than to me-cued
straight ones.
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Applying this logic, the researchers found that among the college
freshmen in their study, more than one-fifth of those who described
themselves as very straight showed signs of covert homosexuality on
the me-cued trials. And these "discrepant" (secretly gay) students
happened to be the ones most likely to have expressed anti-gay
sentiments on the pre-test survey.
Should we trust this interpretation of the data? In the Times op-ed,
the authors claim that the reaction-time task "reliably distinguishes
between self-identified straight individuals and those who
self-identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual." Their formal write-up of
the work for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is a bit
less sanguine on the method, citing just one other study that has used
this approach, and saying it "showed moderate correspondence with
participants’ self-reported sexual orientation."
Whatever the precedents, their homo-say-what task leaves itself open
to an easy, alternative interpretation. It could be that both gay
people and homophobic straight people responded more quickly to the
gay-themed imagery because they were all secretly gay. Or it could be
that both gay people and homophobic straight people are more keyed up
by gayness in general. A homosexual might be more attuned to a picture
of two men because it aligns with his personal interests—no surprise
there. But a homophobe would be more attuned to it for the opposite
reason: It runs counter to his personal interests; it makes him
nervous. The sociologist Michael Kimmel has argued that some men are
less afraid of gay people than they are of being labeled as gay (and
thus emasculated) themselves. By that logic, me-gay pairings would be
particularly nerve-racking to true homophobes. And it's well-known
that these two factors—salience and anxiety—tend to shrink reaction
times. People get a little speedy when something upsets them, or turns
them on.
The Rochester team might have tried to rule out this interpretation by
comparing the me-cued trials with the others-cued trials. If the
homosexuals and homophobes had changed their response times only when
they were cued to think about themselves (and not when cued to think
about other people), it would strengthen the case that personal
identification with the imagery drove the effect. But even that would
leave open some questions. After all, it makes sense that a me-cued,
gay trial would cause a homophobe more anxiety than one innocuously
cued for others. In any case, either the paper's authors neglected to
make this me-others comparison, or they chose not to report its
results in the paper. (I reached out to several of them by phone and
email, but no one could provide more details.)
Another question arises from the use of icons and wedding-cake figures
to signify gayness and straightness. In the Times op-ed, the authors
promise evidence of suppressed "same-sex desire." But as sexuality
stigma expert Gregory Herek points out, these chaste and abstracted
images are several steps removed from real or even imagined erotic
behavior. Other studies of the same phenomenon, he says, have used
images or video clips of couples embracing, or half-dressed.
Without more compelling laboratory data or more explicitly sexual test
stimuli, it's hard to argue that the Rochester study demonstrates
anything about secret homosexual urges. There's a much simpler
interpretation at hand: College freshmen who claim to be nervous
around gay people are probably a little nervous around gay people. And
college freshmen who call themselves gay are probably somewhat gay.
If the reaction-time tests can't provide a satisfying proof, is there
any hope left for the he-who-smelt-it-dealt-it theory of sexuality?
Could scientists ever demonstrate that, as Freud suggested, homophobes
are reacting to subconscious, gay urges? Maybe if there were some more
direct way to measure a man's private sexual desires, we'd be able to
tell for sure whether he was a closet homo. Imagine if you put a bunch
of homophobes and more tolerant straight people into a room and forced
them to watch man-on-man sex films while measuring the size of their
erections with some kind of circumferential strain gauge. Would the
gay-haters be revealed by the size of their boners?
Good news: This exact study was carried out in the mid-1990s at the
University of Georgia. Using penile plethysmography, researchers
compared the erectile responses of 35 homophobes and 29 non-homophobes
to pornographic films in various gender configurations. All the men
were clearly aroused by the lesbian and straight porn, but their
sexual responses differed when it came to the gay clips. Around
three-quarters of the guys in the homophobic group experienced some
engorgement—not nearly as much as they'd had watching other clips, but
enough to be labeled as either "moderately" or "definitely tumescent"
by the researchers. In the non-homophobic group, the proportion was
just one-third.
But even these penis-based findings won't tell us very much about
human nature. The results haven't been formally replicated by another
lab since they were published, and as the Georgia team concedes in its
original paper, there's a long history of research demonstrating that
anxiety itself can produce sexual arousal. A 1977 study, for example,
measured vaginal blood volume in women as they watched erotic film
clips, some after having viewed a graphic depiction of an auto
accident. Women in the crash group became aroused more rapidly than
the others. More recent work from a group at the University of Texas,
Austin, finds that moderately anxious women have a much higher sexual
response than either low-anxiety or high-anxiety women. The UT
researchers propose that activation of the sympathetic nervous system
(the one we use for fight-or-flight responses) plays into our erotic
behaviors.
Similar research has shown that men develop larger erections when
they're afraid of receiving an electric shock. And a classic study
from 1943 confirmed the rather unsurprising fact that at least half of
all adolescent boys can develop erections from nonsexual experiences,
especially when those experiences inspire excitement, fear, or another
strong emotion. (Among the examples given in that paper: "Being late
to school," "Fast elevator rides," "Finding money," and "Long flight
of stairs.")
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So the gay-versus-straight porn plethysmography study suffers from the
same problem as the one that was just written up in the Times: The
self-proclaimed homophobes might have been showing their anxiety, as
opposed to their lust.
The irony to all this is that we don't need penile circumference and
reaction-time measures to tell us what we already know: Of course some
homophobes are gay! The folk wisdom about people who protest too much
comes out of a massive data set of social experiences and communal
observations. (As the Times op-ed point outs, Ted Haggard has
acknowledged that his denunciations of homosexuality may have had
something to do with his own yearnings.) What’s interesting is the
enthusiasm with which this seemingly self-evident news has been
received. The Times op-ed is one of the newspaper's most emailed and
most viewed pages since it was posted online. Why? Because Times
readers want to spread the word: If you're campaigning against the gay
“lifestyle,” then you're probably pretty gay yourself. I bet they have
a secret urge to scare the homophobes into shutting up. Give me a
stopwatch and some wedding-cake figurines, and I’ll prove it.
+
Pucker your lips for the Apocalypse!
Johnny Asia, Guitarist from the Future
http://johnnyasia.com