Given the upsurge in discussions around homosexuality and the number of posters floating around who are homosexual (openly or closeted..) I thought it would be interesting to look at the nature versus nurture side of things.
Basically are people born gay? or are they nurtured into being gay? Or some combination thereof?
On the nature side there are arguments around a 'gay gene' or a mothers hormone levels through the pregnancy. On the nurture side theres a bit of psychology/sociology. And of course for post-modernists who view gender as a social construct the obvious corollary of that is that sexuality is a social construct.
If it is a case of being born gay then why would sexuality of some people seem to fluctuate? If you follow a Kinsey kind of school.
I don't know or really have an opinion but I think it makes for an interesting question - especially if the answer is partially or wholly a result of socialisation.
After all if sexuality is partially or wholly a social construct then it opens a whole range of issues. If we can identify what socialisation makes someone gay and what makes them straight what do we do with that information? Reprogram gays into being straight? Make sure we raise children to be straight?
The idea of reprogramming or 'nurturing out' gayness seems to touch upon a kind of social eugenics and all the ethical issues which go along with that.
Wondering where people stand on this issue?
I don't really qualify as an upsurge.
The Post-modernist/construction point:
I actually think the post-modernists have it partly right here but in order to examine the issue in a lucid manner you need to consider that femineity/masculinity, gender identity, biological gender, sexual orientation and sexual practice are entirely different things. Femineity and masculinity are completely constructed which can be extrapolated to say that our notions of what it means to be male and female in our society are constructed but it is taking it too far, and I feel it's a misinterpretation, to say that gender in its entirety is a construct.
I also don't think saying gender is a construct at all leads to an argument that sexuality exists only as social conditioning because that equates gender roles and sexual orientation which is not at all correct. I think instead that acknowledging the construction of femineity and masculinity allows us to debunk the myth that certain gendered behaviours are inherent in one orientation or another (see femme queens and butch dykes). People, including the post-modernists themselves, often misrepresent an accurate post-modern stance on the issue.
Biological point:
As for the biological discussion, I feel it is a bunch of hogwash. Scientists aren't sociologists and they often go in to prove slightly different perceptions of sexual orientation. An example that I often cite is a couple of case studies I researched for a paper the other year; the first was a study using rodents where they castrated male mice and pumped them with estrogen to see how many of these castrated mice would permit themselves to be mounted in an effort to determine to what degree hormones played a part. This is obviously ridiculous because what they did was effectively manufacture tranny mice and only recorded "bottom" mice as gay because of misconceptions about gender roles. Similarly, a one with female guinea pigs tried to analyse the statistics of female guinea pigs who mounted other guinea pigs, conflating lesbians with men.
Other studies for the purpose of statistics, even some I've read in the last decade, have idiotic things like 'the assumed homosexual' where they include men who live alone with their mothers as gay, by default, or married men as straight by default (because bisexuals don't exist, somehow). There are also an incredible amount of studies using brain scans which are just lol, bad, like only testing corpses of men who have HIV or the intense slew of studies which completely ignores bisexuality and again mixes up gender roles and sexual orientation.
It's gotten to the point where, really, I role my eyes at any study that pops up because no matter how honest and precise, both socially and scientifically, a study on sexuality is now, it still stands on the shoulders of and is measured against a load of utter shit which is still remarkably stone age. I really really really don't care about the scientific side anymore and I don't even see why it's a point for debate in the civil rights arena, either.
Fluctuation point:
I think the problem is that any given sexual orientation is still a very generalised thing and every person's sexuality is different. When it comes down to it you really just like who you like until you don't and just because one person shifts and has a fluid sexuality doesn't mean that's how things 'work' so to speak. I suppose a better way to put it as that each person isn't an exception to or an example of some kind of rule, there is no 'rule', there's a rule for each and every person.
I do think the Kinsey report blew things way out of proportion though and was more useful as a piece for activism than as salient literature. Just thinking about sex with someone of a certain gender, once, was enough for him to label it as some form of bisexuality and I just think that is not only taking things too far but, like statistics often does, it lacks a certain context to it that would validate or debunk a variety of assumptions leading from each piece of data.
I do think, however, that the Kinsey report was right in that most people fall under a broader spectrum of sexuality than they might think and I suspect we're socially conditioned to not explore or be aware of our entire sexual capacity. We only have to have a look at Classical Greece to see that when sexual orientation is entirely re-contextualised that we get a very different result so I have no doubt that there is a
much larger amount of latents out there than people suspect. This isn't to say that people are socially conditioned to 'turn' into any given orientation but that instead the way we recognise ourselves as and act as sexual beings has been socially conditioned.
Ethics of reprogramming:
The suicide rate of ex-gay persons, especially Mormons, is significant enough that it kind of speaks for this point on its own.
