doi: 10.1037//0021-843x.105.3.440
I’ve always assumed this (and assumed that other people assumed this), because if you talk to homophobes they’ll eventually say something like “it’s a choice!” because it’s a choice for them. It’s not a choice for me because gay porn doesn’t turn me on – and if it did I wouldn’t care anyway because that’s how I was raised. But it DOES turns them on, AND they were raised in an environment where this is THE WORST THING EVER, so it upsets them and they get all irrational and punchy (lesson learned: DO NOT discuss this theory with a homophobe.)
TLDR; IMHO Homophobes who think orientation is a choice are closeted gays because logic.
It would be nice to see a better study. Interesting if one hasn’t been done in all this time…
It’s always important in science to do the experiment or study, even if you’re pretty sure you already know the answer.
Sometimes, the result will be surprisingly counter-intuitive. And other times, like in this study, it confirms what seems blatantly obvious.
What could it possibly mean when a man who identifies as heterosexual feels threatened by the mere existence of homosexual men? What could it mean???
And then they’re like "huh… that’s weird“ and discover time travel by accident.
“Turns out all we needed to travel forwards in time is to burn homophobes!”
“1.21 GIGAHOMOPHOBES?!”
And more proof is always useful. Science runs on it.
And sometimes, just sometimes, studies are framed to find what the experimenter wants them to find.
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I always assumed that homophobia is about a subconscious fear of spreading diseases and stuff, as that’s more common in gay people by a lot.
Don’t conflate promiscuity with homosexuality. There are plenty of gay people who are monogamous and who are no more likely to spread disease than anybody else. And there are plenty of promiscuous heterosexual people who are spreading diseases.
Also, you shouldn’t apologize for this bigotry by saying it’s subconscious. This is learned behavior.
you’re right, i should have been more careful about this.
i just contacted an old friend of mine who had that view, and he too says that he’s changed his mind about this and no longer sees it that way.
Homophobes: resist those evil urges, don’t give it to the gay sex, you can do it just say no…
The rest of us: uh, who’s gonna tell them
If you’re scared enough, even wiping your ass is gay.
That’s outright disgusting.
If you need to regularly scratch your anus, go see a doctor.
Also, even if you do need to scratch your anus, why wouldn’t you be able to eat with your hands? SURELY you sanitize them properly RIGHT? RIGHT?!
Eat with the right, touch anus with the left and always wash hands before you eat. Developed cultures have done this for ages. And they have clean bumholes because they wash instead of only smearing with toilet paper. That shit is disgusting.
Washing can also help against the itchiness. As well as non-synthetic underwear. If those don’t help, do indeed see a doctor.
If you need to regularly scratch your anus, you probably have parasites. That’s one of the prime ways for some species of parasites (roundworms, I think?, probably tapeworms too?) to spread.
If you have a tenia, you are never alone.
People who think like this don’t wash their hands after going to the toilet, so of course it’s disgusting for them.
If you need to regularly scratch your anus get a bidet and some ivermectin
Oh I didn’t realise COVID made your anus itchy! Is it a new variant? 😂 Edits for spelling cos I can’t apparently.
This is fake right. Please tell me this is fake
Eating food with your hands is unsanitary?
Has this man never eaten a sandwich? Pizza? French Fries? Tacos? What is this nonsense?
Homophobes: “We can’t legalize gay marriage! The birth rate would collapse! If men could marry men, then what reasonable man would ever choose to marry a disgusting, weak, woman over a strong, virile, muscular, sweaty, musky, oily, maaaannnnnn…”
The rest of us: Dude. Bro. Dude.
So interesting thing here: both groups were aroused at heterosexual and lesbian stimuli.
The homophobic ones responded to the homosexual stimuli.
The guys were bi. Sort of explains why they argue “everyone chooses to be gay or straight.” Because they have decided they have to.
This also explains the more-frequent-than-i-enjoy conversation about how “no, there really isn’t a celebrity I’d go gay for.”
I feel like bisexuality is way more common than what we see. And if anything, I feel like the reason why so many women are more likely bi or willing to experiment vs men is literally just the bullshit stigma against being seen as gay.
And this may just be my experience, but being bisexual isn’t as easy as just choosing one or the other. The problem is that if you repress that much of your sexuality it only grows more… Intense. And sometimes more depraved, which is never a good thing. And I feel like that’s why a lot of those men end up getting caught doing “gay” things but it’s never just normal stuff. It’s always super crazy shit they get caught doing because it’s been repressed for so long that they make awful impulse decisions on feelings they’ve been ignoring for years. Like holding in your anger for 30 years and then going absolutely fucking mental when your coworker takes your parking spot.
I think a lot of these men are bisexual but heteroromantic, thus why suppressing their sexual desires are easier.
Just go on Grindr and you’ll be proven right. I’m in a tiny blue collar town. One that does burnouts on the rainbow crosswalk. 3/4 of everyone on Grindr are “DL bicurious guy” or “straight but like dicks”.
The amount of “straight but curious” guys I’ve found out in the world is a little too high for that to be the case.
It’s just them not accepting their sexuality fully. Like you can be bi and married to the opposite gender and be just fine.
I think it’s the denial that causes the issues
And that’s how I used to be back in the day and that shit destroys your mental health. And when you do “slip” it’s always worse and more exaggerated because of the repressed feelings. I would think that there was something wrong with me and I hated that part of me. I wished that I was completely straight and would internally shame myself whenever I had “gay thoughts” because I thought it made me less of a man. But at the end of the day, nobody cares about how manly you are except for people that want to feel like they are better than you or people that want something from you.
I know in my case I was open to relationships with women but dating men was so much easier it just never happened. On the outside it seems I’m hetero because that’s all anyone would see.
That’s kinda the situation I’m in too. Dating women has always been easier for me so according to everyone that knows me I’m hetero even though I’ve told them that I’m bi. They just can’t see it.
They could have experienced attraction towards women because of compulsory heterosexuality. Basically they grew up being told they can only be attracted to women so they forced their attraction.
Similar thing happened to me except I’m not homophobic. Didn’t realize I am attracted to men until after I transitioned. I’m not sure yet, but I may actually be more attracted to men now than I ever was to women.
I’m not denying that they could be bi, but I’m wondering if maybe some are just forcing attraction.
I’ve long suspected that most people are at a 1 on the Kinsey scale. Plenty of yall are 0s, but I’d guess you’re probably the second or third most common group
TIL about the Kinsey scale. It would appear that yeah, I’m definitely a 0 by the description.
But thinking about it, it makes sense. I’ve heard people say they “always knew they were gay” and “they were born in the wrong body.” And it was things that were just natural.
That’s the only way I can describe it. I’m attracted to women. I’ve always known that, and no matter how hard I try, it’s impossible to imagine non-women to be sexually (and romantically) attractive.
Like there’s just something there that stops it going any further. Like, hell, a woman that visually has a body that can indisputably only be a woman but then talks with a baritone voice it’s instant off (there’s several comedies where this sort of character is used).
What’s cool though is that if I’m that sure about myself, there is no doubt in my mind that other people know what their attractions are, and there is no reason for anyone to doubt a person’s (honest) attractions.
Most of what I learned about LGBTQ came from homophobes. The ones who would not shut up about it.
For example when I didn’t know that rainbows were associated with the community. I had friend school over one time. He saw a blanket with a rainbow stripe pattern. He basically had a gay panic meltdown. He was so certain we were a family of closeted gays.
So anyways later on he got a degree from a bible college or something. And he joined an evangelical church. One where they travel around to city streets around preaching from megaphones. Kind of like that Westboro Baptist thing.
In our early 20s he sexually assault me. I found out later from another guy we went to school with that he also forced himself on that guy too.
He’s not the only person I’ve known like this but certainly the most crazy one.
If there’s any true to the saying that gays rub their identity in everyone’s face. Then it’s the homophobe ones. It’s got to be a massive projection. It’s like they’re trying to tell the world but it manifests as some kind of self-hate in denial or something.
The rubbing it in your face bit always got me. It sounds like something a jealous person would say. Like why do they get to suck dick and I can’t!
I really don’t like the idea of citing this study. It’s always this same one from the 90s, and if it were acurate I expect the results would have been reproduced more. It’s also not clear that the results indicate what the paper says. There’s other reasons than sexual arousal that could explain the results. It could be they’re imagining the scenario and are axious or disgusted by it. There’s this paper that indicates homophobia is usually caused by fear or hate.
I don’t like the idea of putting the blame for homophobia on closeted queer people. It’s seems extremely likely to me that most homophobic people are straight, since most people are straight. Also we should respect other people’s own identification instead of trying to force labels on people, even if they’re bigots.
I always felt like that study from the 90s is missing part of the picture. Like, it’s less ‘closeted gay people’ that are the problem, and it’s more the people who are closeted because it was beaten into them at a young age that being gay means they deserve the worst of the worst.
I think you’re spot on with fear being the root cause, and we really have done a good job at making people afraid of their own sexuality.
If you disagree with the science, perhaps you should do your own study?
Nah, nope, nuh-uh, that’s not how science works. A person’s concerns about the methodology or conclusions of a particular study are not invalid just because they haven’t run their own experiments.
It’s pretty easy for even a layperson to question this particular study, for a few reasons:
- The sample sizes are very small
- Some men can get erections/aroused if the wind blows the wrong way, or even for no reason at all - putting porn in front of someone and expecting them not to become aroused is a dubious assumption at best
- Using some external test to determine someone’s sexuality, instead of using the person’s self-identification, goes against the last 30 years of progress we’ve made in gender and sexuality studies
- The conclusion of the study may indicate some level of homophobic or anti-homosexual bias
Don’t gatekeep good critical thinking. Good critical thinking is the only thing you ever need to question any scientific study.
Point 2 is covered by having a control group and point 3 seems to be missing the point: well yeah, don’t take the conclusion too far, but that doesn’t mean measuring arousal is bad science.
Bigger issues are low sample size (as you mentioned) and the fact that it’s a correlational study that hasn’t done any work to causally link them.
I think that you make some good points. But I take issue with your third point. People lie about things to researchers (or simply don’t know have some sort of self-knowledge) all the time. This is the whole concept of “revealed preference” in economics. Someone can say that they care about sweatshop labor, but do they actually make any effort to avoid buying products produced in sweatshops?
Not questioning the experiment subjects’ stated sexual identity just neuters the whole point of the study: is homophobia driven by repressed homosexual desire. If it is repressed, we should expect subjects to say they are straight even if they aren’t. Could the methodology be flawed? Sure! But there is nothing wrong with trying to actually measure the homosexual attraction of someone who says they are not so attracted.
Someone should repeat the study. That’s all I’m saying. If the criticism is that the study was too small or done too long ago, or whatever. The anti-science crowd are the ones who reason away the results of science with no basis of fact. If you disagree with the facts, it is your responsibility to disprove them.
No, what you said was “if you disagree with the science, perhaps you should do your own study”.
“Disagree with the science” is a disingenuous oversimplification bordering on nonsensical. People are calling into question the methods of the study, and the conclusions reached by the scientists interpreting the data. All of which can be accomplished with good critical thinking, and all of which is part of the scientific process. We’re not “disagreeing with the science”. We don’t need to repeat this experiment or run our own to be able to point out that it looks like there are flaws in this study - we just need to have good critical thinking skills.
If you disagree with the facts, it is your responsibility to disprove them.
What facts? Are you implying that the content of a scientific study becomes “fact” simply because a scientist publishes it? Because that’s wrong, and any published scientist will tell you as much.
Ah, thank you for quoting my words back to me. Now kindly fuck off.
No u
Critique and analysis of a study or experiment is the default. It isn’t a religion; science thrives on repeat analysis.
Which is why someone should repeat the study to confirm or contradict it.
Yeah gimme a bunch of money lol
Do you know what peer review means?
IIRC, this hasn’t been debunked per se, but it was a very small, very limited study, and doesn’t really do a great job of explaining homophobia in a broader population. (I mean, you’re talking about 64 people in total; depending on your inclusion criteria, that could be a meaningless sample size.) Penile plethysmography is a proxy for sexual arousal; it’s useful in some instances–like predicting whether or not someone will commit more sexual offenses in the future–but isn’t even that great in those instances. If I remember correctly, there’s strong evidence that disgust is a trait strongly associated with conservatism, and homophobia is a an extreme disgust reaction.
FWIW, I was casually–but quite virulently–homophobic when I was younger. I’d been raised in a very conservative, evangelical religious group, and I believed all the bullshit that I’d heard about gay people. That changed once I lost religion, and actually met people that were gay. That, of course, is only anecdotal evidence, and does assume that I’m neither gay nor bisexual (and I don’t believe that I am), but it fits with what I’ve seen from conservative thought.
Is this why Republican senators keep getting caught kissin’ with other men in public restrooms?
I mean grindr always reports an increase in traffic around the republican conventions.
Shit, you could go through the political news and find more than 35.
Uuh that’s a very difficult thing.
It’s like wearing agressive perfume full of hormomes. It might cause somebody to get an erection but it’s still hella uncomfortable and annoying. Not really consensual and i see why it pisses people off.
TIL people get erections from perfume.
People will spend a lot of money if a marketer lies to them enough. It should be noted that scientists don’t recognize any human-arousal pheromones. Only shady websites that wanna sell you overpriced perfume.
Right here. Maybe not full blown blue steel, but I get chubby if a woman’s smell hits me right.
Yeah, that’s really weird. I’ve never heard of this. But I guess if you just make an association in you brain, then it can be a turn on.
Aight thats really fair
1996 sub 100 participants
Data quality is shit, and should be discarded.
That aside, I feel bad for my extremely closested buddy. We went to a rather homophobic highschool, and a mildly homophobic college, and he always tried too hard for ladies for how dedicated he was to his certain type of looks.
Attraction to women doesn’t make people not misogynist.
So everyone who calls me the F word wants to fuck me? Gross.
they mad cuz they cant
How did they measure “penile circumference” over time? Is there a guy standing next to them with a tape measure?
Elastic ring that can measure how much it streched.
Makes sense. Albeit I find the idea of someone holding a tape measure more funny.
That’s likely how it used to be done
really hot male lab assitant measures it closely
installing a glory hole in the lab for double-blind studies
Probably some sort of pressure cuff that they measured changes in air pressure, or something similar?
It’s basically the same thing as a ring fit adventure, a strain gauge, though research ones are far more sensitive
These things are used in really sketchy therapy like conversion therapy. They were also used in pedophilia treatment in the 90s which was basically conversion therapy to track outcomes, basically exactly as what’s written here (though they wouldn’t present actual illegal material, just risqué material like pictures of kids at the beach or something). Penile plethysmography is the area and it’s still practiced in some places, though it’s pretty controversial because they’re evaluating sex offenders for risk of recidivism and viability of release which is always inherently controversial and other more obvious reasons
It is also controversial because sexual arousal is far from the only reason men have erections.
This study is an example, there’s an alternate interpretation that affirms homophobia is actually the result of repressed sexuality, in general. Thus any sexual stimuli would be arousing. Thus causing an erection, regardless of the gender displayed, and irrespective of the person’s sexual orientation.
This tracks with the fact that almost all homophobes are politically conservative, tend to be highly religious, or are very young and immature. They all coincide with environments prone to sexual repression.
The other variation is that anger also causes arousing.
This study was too small to control for those kind of factors.
That’s what I was wondering for quite some time for developing a recreationa… aaaaah medical device using an esp32 that can control other hardware over Bluetooth. A sttetch sensor or pressure cuff might work, but it might be nicer not to have it work like a blood pressure measurement machine.
Based study
