baseball99, thanks for the study information. It seems the three studies are all the same work of that lab in Sweden. I thought it was interesting, although what conclusions you draw from it, I'm not sure - that sexual orientation is at least in part biological, I guess? It would be interesting to see the study done among bisexuals. I hope we'll hear from fortiesfun about this. :wink:
Sorry, Matthew, for being so slow to respond to your call. I've been so preoccupied with the
Is Triple Penetration Possible? and
Crotchrot: Badge of honor, or potentially fatal disease threads that I had not visited this one for a while.
The debate on this thread is a largely a product of different disciplinary perspectives. In one camp we have the strict medical researchers, and in the other the gender studies folks. My bias is with the latter, so I am far from objective but I can say a couple of things here:
First, I am sympathetic to Baseball99's complaint about endlessly backing up assertions. It takes a lot of time and effort and often elicits little more than a few nods. The free nature of this place almost assures that the next post will be someone making ridiculous assertions based on purely anecdotal evidence, or misplacing a "Fictitious Stories" post.
Still, to the degree we want to have a real conversation we have to do what we can to show the evidence, because without it we can't be sure how the conclusions were reached, what assumptions lies behind them, and if the conclusions logically follow from the data.
The big difference between the two disciplinary perspectives in my observation is that medical researchers, though meticulous about their data, are less critical about the assumptions that underlie their conclusions. The most questionable conclusion of all, counterintuitively, is that gay and straight are pure enough categories to be able to draw comparisons and contrasts.
From the gender studies perspective, much of the medical research program into sexual orientation is built on somewhat circular logic. Experiments which try to determine if there are physical differences between gay and straight men often start by making the most outrageous generalizations about the category to which their test subjects belong. (The famous experiment by Simon LeVay that JBT cites above, for example, compared the neuroanatomy of about a dozen men who died of AIDS contracted through male-male sexual contact with that of about another dozen men who died of AIDS which they contacted through drug use or by unknown means (In San Francisco, in the mid 80’s.) Lots and lots of people have cast doubt if those two categories are the equivalent of gay and straight. About he latter group, especially, the knowledge that they were IV drug users automatically meant that they were
not also gay seems extremely dubious.)
Medical research also tends to accept the "inversion" theory of sexuality, that homosexuals are pathologically inverted versions of heterosexuals. (To his credit, Baseball99 explicitly rejects this premise early in this thread, but the always illuminating Capt. Nemo has shown how some of the linguistic constructions preserve it in the Swedish studies cited above.) There is no medical evidence of which I am aware for this assumption at all, but it recurs constantly.
The Swedish experiments into metabolism are among those that don't define gay and straight very well, so it is almost impossible to tell the validity of the test pools.
So, finally, to Matthew's question for me about bisexuals. This kind of research relies on a dimorphic model of sexual orientation, and so it sorts bisexual men into one of the two "major" categories based on their slight propensity for one gender over another and ignores their mixed nature. What a surprise: Bisexuals are one again the excluded middle. By definition they are excluded from the research, not by asking them not to participate, but by lumping their data into whichever group they most closely resemble. This raises the circularity problem, again, and gets us back to the concerns expressed throughout this thread. The only thing that can be confidently said about bi men is that they actually have the largest dicks of any group, not because of genetics, but because constant exercise causes growth.
