A number of weeks ago I made a post to this blog (of recycled material), expressing why I am opposed to the hasty use of the term homophobia ("Opposed to ‘Homophobia’"). In short, I said I felt is was a simplistic and perhaps unjust way to discount behavior and beliefs we may strongly disagree with. Whether or not our dislike of that behavior is for good reason, I felt and still largely feel that the use of pathologizing language is without good reason.
Why not diagnose as phobic all aversive and oppositional behavior? Because the underlying reasoning is defective, and because a term as serious as phobia should not be used to categorize a person or people with reckless abandon....
Language is a powerful tool. Sure, it would be nice if we could classify all behavior and persons we didn’t like as pathological, hence undeserving a legitimate place in the world. But it just isn’t that simple. Furthermore, by doing so we undermine a better understanding.
It is my belief that anti-homosexual behavior and belief has a number of causes, most of them cultural -- ignorance/inexperience and an acquired prejudice chief among these. An aversion to "strange" behavior may be part of it as well. Observations of chimpanzees have found that the will merciless attack one of their own that becomes partially paralyzed due to illness. Children in our own species will be verbally attacked, and worse, for so much as looking and dressing 'funny.'
I also speculate that there may be a "deeper," innately psychological element involved. It has been noted that men are much averse to the idea of homosexual men than they are to homosexual women. Why? Men are attracted to women (whether or not they recognize the women may "play for the other team"). Blame our genes. It makes good sense. Two women being frisky with one another -- well, what man would be put off by women behaving sexually? There's a chance a man could join in. Or so a part of the brain hopes. Better, yet, in such a scenario, there is no competition from another male.
But two guys getting frisky?! The heterosexual man's genes 'say,' "Hey, that ain't no party you want to get involved in . . . there's absolutely no future in if for me!"
This is certainly conjecture on my part. A grain of salt is warranted.
For the same set of reasons that most men are hyper-attuned to physical signs of sexual maturity of the female variety, they are also attuned to behavioral signs of sexual receptivity, and are attracted to these.
A shapely sweater, a flirtatious smile . . . . be still thine beating heart.
But wait! What if the behavior and the body don't mix? What if a male body is giving of behavioral signs normally attributed to adult females -- individuals the male's selfish genes perceive as potentially mate-worthy? This could be disastrous, sexual-reproduction-wise.
I also speculate that the human primate, an intensely social species, is also finely attuned to detecting deceit. If you are suckered and used by others, your own prosperity will suffer.
So to me, part of the knee-jerk male aversion to homosexual males (that can be overcome by education and learning) is akin to their brain blaring out this signal: "Warning, warning! Beware, something is wrong with that individual -- it looks like a male but is not behaving as one!"
Is that the case, or part of if? I wonder. Yet until I see supporting research, I'm not going to take it too seriously.
Meanwhile, other students and teachers of psychology have attributed an aversion to male homosexuality as Freud might. The claim that these men are actually afraid of something within themselves.
Could that be? Is there any good evidence for it? Because so many Freudian ideas have been found wanting (schizophrenia being caused by detached mothering, etc.), I have never given the idea much credit. But maybe I should change my tune. New research seems to suggest there may be something to the idea. Was I wrong to dismiss is?
In the news release,Is Some Homophobia Self-Phobia? I read these words by co-author Richard Ryan, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester:
The findings provide new empirical evidence to support the psychoanalytic theory that the fear, anxiety, and aversion that some seemingly heterosexual people hold toward gays and lesbians can grow out of their own repressed same-sex desires.
Wow. Could it be? As a vigilant skeptic, I wondered what type of data the conclusion was based upon.
Here are a few brief paragraphs detailing the methods and outcome:
To explore participants' explicit and implicit sexual attraction, the researchers measured the discrepancies between what people say about their sexual orientation and how they react during a split-second timed task. Students were shown words and pictures on a computer screen and asked to put these in "gay" or "straight" categories. Before each of the 50 trials, participants were subliminally primed with either the word "me" or "others" flashed on the screen for 35 milliseconds. They were then shown the words "gay," "straight," "homosexual," and "heterosexual" as well as pictures of straight and gay couples, and the computer tracked precisely their response times. A faster association of "me" with "gay" and a slower association of "me" with "straight" indicated an implicit gay orientation.
A second experiment, in which subjects were free to browse same-sex or opposite-sex photos, provided an additional measure of implicit sexual attraction.
Through a series of questionnaires, participants also reported on the type of parenting they experienced growing up, from authoritarian to democratic. Students were asked to agree or disagree with statements like: "I felt controlled and pressured in certain ways," and "I felt free to be who I am." For gauging the level of homophobia in a household, subjects responded to items like: "It would be upsetting for my mom to find out she was alone with a lesbian" or "My dad avoids gay men whenever possible."
Finally, the researcher measured participants' level of homophobia -- both overt, as expressed in questionnaires on social policy and beliefs, and implicit, as revealed in word-completion tasks. In the latter, students wrote down the first three words that came to mind, for example for the prompt "k i _ _." The study tracked the increase in the amount of aggressive words elicited after subliminally priming subjects with the word "gay" for 35 milliseconds....
[We discovered that] participants who reported themselves to be more heterosexual than their performance on the reaction time task indicated were most likely to react with hostility to gay others, the studies showed. That incongruence between implicit and explicit measures of sexual orientation predicted a variety of homophobic behaviors, including self-reported anti-gay attitudes, implicit hostility towards gays, endorsement of anti-gay policies, and discriminatory bias such as the assignment of harsher punishments for homosexuals, the authors conclude.
Now that's interesting. But while the experiment design was fairly ingenious, and may be telling us something about human 'psychodynamics,' I'm hesitant to accept that it provides solid evidence for the hypothesis that a repressed sexuality may underlie anti-homosexual attitudes and behavior.
Why? First, I don't know what the number of subjects was and how large the effect was. Crucial information. I'm also wary of verbal self-reports, such as in "my parents did this" [when I was a child]. They are are notoriously unreliable. No person is a perfect witness, even and perhaps especially when it comes to the events of their own life.
Second, the meaning of word associations via reaction time also strikes me as a bit of a reach. Is it not possible, for example, that a person could be aroused by tabooed behavior? Studies have shown, for example, that the vast majority of adolescents that get excited by violent video games never go on to commit violent crimes Is it possible that a significant number of the most enthusiastic game players score lower than average on their self-ratings of love of these games? Would we then conclude that they are repressing a desire? Or is it more complicated than that?
My guess is that the whole matter is more complicated than we care to admit. Does a repressed homosexuality play a role in antipathy displayed toward homosexuals? It might. But until I find more and better evidence supporting the hypothesis, my belief remains that the more salient variables include ignorance coupled with an acquired prejudice (by way of family, peers, and community). In other words, the matter seems more cultural than personally psycho-pathological.
[recycled material - first appeared here]
Roughly twenty years after the birth of the term, I still don't like homophobia. The word. But before arguing against the use of this term, let me emphasize that by taking a position against the word I am by no means taking a position in support of any or all behavior the term is used to categorize. The issue I address here is solely the perceived misuse of language.
Why quibble over "homophobia"? First, as popularly employed, homophobia implies a diagnosis, and supports a perspective, that rests upon a tenet of pop-psychology. The tenet asserts that behind all aggression, anger, and resistance, exists the true causal emotion -- fear. But does fear underlie all aggression, all anger, all opposition?
As Andrew Ortony and Terence J. Turner, researchers specializing in the psychology of emotion, long ago outlined in the pages of Psychological Review, anger is a distinct emotion that has its developmental roots in the infant's experience of frustration. The infantile experience of frustration, especially that of restraint, develops into the adult emotion of anger. Furthermore, the expression of anger emerges prior to that of fear. Hence anger does not develop out of fear.
What underlies adult anger?
In a 1993 edition of another psychological journal, Cognition and Emotion, renown authority on human emotion Nico Frijda wrote, "As for anger: The most elementary elicitors...are acute goal interference."
For the above and other reasons, the fear-as-primary-motivator tenet of pop-psychology seems to me to be more than highly questionable. It is likely outright false.
Returning to the specific case of homophobia, opposition to the increasing presence and political clout of homosexuals cannot and should not be written off as a mere symptom of widespread phobia. It is more complicated than that.
If you think about it, the reasoning behind "homophobia," "homophobic," and "homophobe," is almost absurd. With similarly applied reasoning, one could diagnose anti-abortion activists as choice-phobic, environmentalists as development-phobic, and republicans as tax-phobic. As an even more ridiculous example, I myself could be called "creamed-corn-phobic," for I intensely dislike this canned vegetable and resolutely oppose its inclusion into my diet.
Why not diagnose as phobic all aversive and oppositional behavior? Because the underlying reasoning is defective, and because a term as serious as phobia should not be used to categorize a person or people with reckless abandon.
The second and perhaps primary reason why the popular use of homophobia concerns me is that behind this term lurks moral and political bullying. All too frequently individuals employ the term in an attempt to pathologize opposing perspectives. To force values. To close issues. By labeling and defining people as "homophobic" you easily discredit their concerns. Calling someone homophobic is equivalent to saying, "You are sick. Your feelings and beliefs have absolutely no place in this society."
True, the "other side" is frequently guilty of the above, but does that justify it?
The questions of homosexual rights (the extension of civil rights to people with differing sexual orientations), and how and to what degree society should accept and accommodate homosexuality, are controversial and complex. Personally, I'm for homosexual rights such as the right to marry and adopt children. However, using words that discredit the holders of opposing opinions and values, and thus, indirectly, the opinions and values themselves, is a strong-arm political tactic--a tactic that undermines the effort to make our communities and nation more free-thinking.
Language is a powerful tool. Sure, it would be nice if we could classify all behavior and persons we didn't like as pathological, hence undeserving a legitimate place in the world. But it just isn't that simple. Furthermore, by doing so we undermine a better understanding.
When in my early 20s I knew a particularly hippy-ish guy who believed in 'free love.' Remember Bagwan Shree Rashneesh? This guy was a follower. In fact, he even changed his name to something Hindi-and-thus-enlightened-ish-sounding. This young man believed that marriage and monogamy were reflective of worldly attachment and neurosis, of the pathological need to 'own' someone.
Even back then, when in my more Buddhist days, I couldn't fully embrace that idea. I knew that people are basically more animal than spiritual, no matter how hard we try to transcend the fact. And so I could see a benefit in limiting things like jealousy.
New research of the cultural-anthropology sort supports the idea that there may be benefits to the practice of monogamy -- beyond limited the spread of STDs.
In cultures that permit men to take multiple wives, the intra-sexual competition that occurs causes greater levels of crime, violence, poverty and gender inequality than in societies that institutionalize and practice monogamous marriage.
Hmm. The skeptic in me wonders whether there could also be a downside to monogamy. Certainly becoming stuck in a coupling can be bad. Are there other drawbacks?
A recent news release posted at Eurakalert has supported what psychologists have known for awhile: our conscious mind is not all-knowing. And I don't mean about the world, I mean about oneself.
In research that highlights the limitations of data generated by self-reports, it was found that while human beings may say they are most attracted to, say, intelligence or a sense of humor, their behavior indicates otherwise. In You say you don't care about dating a hottie?, the use of a new methodology (one that measures implicit attraction vs. explicitly stated preference) reveals a mis-match in "the talk and the walk" of individuals in the arena of attraction to members of the opposite sex.
This echoes several findings on racism and other psychological phenomena. We can think one thing while perceiving/feeling/behaving another way. Sometimes we can even believe two, contradictory things. We just try not to recognize both thoughts at the same time. Maybe one is held by our 'social self' the other by our 'private self.' So to speak. And maybe that private belief is so private, we don't even know it's there.
So when you or someone else says, "I am X" about some social preference, we should probably remember to insert "as far as I am aware."
Let's face it, grandmothers and grandfathers have sex. We may find that fact disturbing if we visualize the act with one or both of our own grandparents playing a leading role. Or maybe if we aren't elderly ourselves, so have yet to have the personal experience of perceiving an aged member of the opposite sex as sexy. We may also find the image somewhat distasteful because our "lets-make-babies" genetic tendencies would prefer a real shot at procreation. Of course, grandfathers can still become fathers. Their sperm remain viable, though counts go down.
Why would post-menapausal women have sex? After all, they can no longer procreate. As I see it, there are two reasons. First, that sexual interest and activity persists beyond menapause may simply mean there have been no selective pressures to eliminate it. Or, in other words, it doesn't bear a cost, so hasn't been trimmed away by the need to survive. Second, we must consider potential non-procreative benefits to sex.
What got me thinking about this? A new study, of course. In Sexual satisfaction in women increases with age, I read of data gathered from 800+ women over 40 years. Researcher Elizabeth Barrett-Connor reports:
"Despite a correlation between sexual desire and other sexual function domains, only 1 in 5 sexually active women reported high sexual desire. Approximately half of the women aged 80 years or more reported arousal, lubrication, and orgasm most of the time, but rarely reported sexual desire. In contrast with traditional linear model in which desire precedes sex, these results suggest that women engage in sexual activity for multiple reasons, which may include affirmation or sustenance of a relationship."
Interesting. The above seems to suggest a strong relationship component to elderly female sexuality. And maybe an identity-slash-self-esteem component. And for elderly males? It seems logical that they are likely the ones initiating much of the late-life sex. In their case, are their genetic procreative instincts behind the continued interest in sex? There is likely a relationship/identity/self-esteem element to it as well. But maybe not as much. Maybe. I think.
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