Do you agree with the Kinsey scale of human sexuality?

[LiamMcConville]

Do you agree that every human can be ranked at a different number based on certain experiences/feelings during a certain period of one's life? Or do you think sexuality is more black and white?

I believe that the extremes on this scale: exclusively heterosexual & exclusively homosexual are based on "nature"/science, while the numbers in between are based on "nurture"/environment one was raised in.

<a href="http://photobucket.com/images/kinsey%20scale" target="_blank"><img src="http://i220.photobucket.com/albums/dd208/AngryGirlfriend/kenseyscale.jpg" border="0" alt="kinsey scale Pictures, Images and Photos"/></a>

[carrie721]

i haven't done enough research (take that as you will) to figure it all out.

i'm not quite sure what you mean by this:

I believe that the extremes on this scale: exclusively heterosexual & exclusively homosexual are based on "nature"/science, while the numbers in between are based on "nurture"/environment one was raised in.

do you mean that people are born either totally straight or totally gay and then start "experimenting" later on?

i don't know. the problem is so much happens with a child between conception and toddlerhood that who knows what causes these things to happen? kids pick up on so many social cues before they are aware of these things that it may be impossible to figure out.

[LikeAWillow]

Liam, I'm curious, do you believe bisexuality is a societal construct? If so, do you believe the majority of those who identify as bisexual are born straight or gay?

[carrie721]

Liam, I'm curious, do you believe bisexuality is a societal construct? If so, do you believe the majority of those who identify as bisexual are born straight or gay?

you didn't ask me, but i'm a blowhard. :lol:

that is how i read what he said. IDK that i agree, as i said above. what are your thoughts? also, do you identify as lez or bi?

ultimately i think labels are pointless but i'm always interested in how they perceive themselves & others.

[LiamMcConville]

do you mean that people are born either totally straight or totally gay and then start "experimenting" later on?



Yes. But not "experimenting", per say. I think that you are either born straight or gay, and the way you were raised and the environment you were raised in has a great effect on how you view your sexuality consciously or subconsciously.

Liam, I'm curious, do you believe bisexuality is a societal construct? If so, do you believe the majority of those who identify as bisexual are born straight or gay?

I have no idea, as I haven't really thought into this. :shrug:

[carrie721]

Yes. But not "experimenting", per say. I think that you are either born straight or gay, and the way you were raised and the environment you were raised in has a great effect on how you view your sexuality consciously or subconsciously.

i gotcha.

if people are born gay, i guess i don't understand what the biological imperative is. within our current society, one in which the species' survival is not correlative to fecundity, homosexuality isn't a bizarre thing. but in the millenia before modern times, how did homosexuality fit into the big picture? i have no idea.

[LikeAWillow]

you didn't ask me, but i'm a blowhard. :lol:

that is how i read what he said. IDK that i agree, as i said above. what are your thoughts? also, do you identify as lez or bi?

ultimately i think labels are pointless but i'm always interested in how they perceive themselves & others.

I'm not big on labels either. I've done relationships with men and women, and I tend to say I'm whatever label best fits with the relationship I'm in at the time.

[LikeAWillow]

I have no idea, as I haven't really thought into this. :shrug:

I'm going to keep picking on you anyway because you said I sound like Sharon Celani, and as much as I love her, I know your feelings about the long, cool woman in a black dress :eek:

the way you were raised and the environment you were raised in has a great effect on how you view your sexuality consciously or subconsciously

Nature vs. Nuture is such a tough thing for me to grapple with. Studies have shown (I'll try to track down the one in particular I'm thinking of if anyone is interested) that most women have some degree of physical attraction to other women, even if that attraction isn't emotional. So in that case, does nature decide the physical dimension and nurture determines whether or not you're willing to act on that attraction, or, is that attraction based on the fact that women are sexualized in almost every aspect of our society?

[carrie721]

I'm not big on labels either. I've done relationships with men and women, and I tend to say I'm whatever label best fits with the relationship I'm in at the time.

cool. fwiw, i have been with guys and girls and consider myself lez.

Nature vs. Nuture is such a tough thing for me to grapple with. Studies have shown (I'll try to track down the one in particular I'm thinking of if anyone is interested) that most women have some degree of physical attraction to other women, even if that attraction isn't emotional. So in that case, does nature decide the physical dimension and nurture determines whether or not you're willing to act on that attraction, or, is that attraction based on the fact that women are sexualized in almost every aspect of our society?

i know the studies you're talking about. i have no idea what to make of them, though. :lol: i think it was NYT that ran a big piece about it some years back.

i don't think it's about women being sexualized in society, though. i think everyone is sexualized - it's all part of being an animal. women are just more circumspect about sexualizing men.

[LikeAWillow]

i don't think it's about women being sexualized in society, though. i think everyone is sexualized - it's all part of being an animal. .

Jean Kilbourne hates you. :mad:

Haha, I have seen her documentaries way too many times, but I promise, if you have a spare 35 minutes, Killing Us Softly 3 (I'm not sure if it's intended to sound like a porn or not, but I like to think it us) is worth a watch.

www.jeankilbourne.com

I know the video is available to watch streaming free somewhere online. I'll edit this post if I find it. Apparently hinting at media I don't actually have at my fingertips is my thing tonight.

Edit:

Google is my best friend.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1993368502337678412

[carrie721]

Jean Kilbourne hates you. :mad:

Haha, I have seen her documentaries way too many times, but I promise, if you have a spare 35 minutes, Killing Us Softly 3 (I'm not sure if it's intended to sound like a porn or not, but I like to think it us) is worth a watch.

www.jeankilbourne.com

I know the video is available to watch streaming free somewhere online. I'll edit this post if I find it. Apparently hinting at media I don't actually have at my fingertips is my thing tonight.

Edit:

Google is my best friend.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1993368502337678412

ha! you beat me to it. i just found it.

thanks for the tip. i will watch it.

[LikeAWillow]

ha! you beat me to it. i just found it.

thanks for the tip. i will watch it.

And you will discuss it with me afterwards, I hope :xoxo:

[carrie721]

And you will discuss it with me afterwards, I hope :xoxo:

of course! :D

[carrie721]

okay, i watched the doco and then had a bottle of wine.

i think i need to watch it one more time to hammer out my thoughts. but my initial reaction is this: she has some good points about the pervasiveness of advertising and consumerism in everyday life. but i don't agree with her underlying theory which appears to be that gender roles are societal constructs.

will do some more thinking on this at a later, more sober, date. :lol:

[louielouie2000]

I don't know if I buy that gender roles are entirely social constructs. I can just look to the animal kingdom at mine, my friends, and families dogs, and see that gender roles are absolutely innate. My dog is a male, and I just laugh every day at how very feminine my friends dogs are who are females. Yes, dogs and other animals are social creatures just like people, but they don't have conscious social hang ups like we do. That being said, I absolutely agree that there are enormous societal pressures to fit your gender role. I see men and women, gay and straight, struggle with this constantly. Children especially seem to be much more fluid with their gender identity. Different cultures around the world also have vastly different ideas of what's feminine and masculine. But I still believe we're born with certain gender characteristics. My brother has both a daughter and an son, both young toddlers. Way before either could walk, talk, or even crawl, they had mannerisms distinct to their gender. That being said, as a gay male I absolutely have feminine qualities and sensibilities most straight men lack. There have even been studies proving that gay men and straight women's brains operate in the same fashion (same goes for lesbians and straight men). Even so, I'm distinctly and thoroughly male... I just have the good fortune of having female traits and sensibilities to compliment my masculine ones! :D

I definitely agree with the Kinsey scale. I think human sexuality is way more fluid than the majority of the population will confess to. Admittedly, most people fall into the extreme ends of the scales (exclusively hetero or homo), but I think sexuality is much more complex than just hetero and homo (or even hetero, homo, and bi). Bisexuality however, is a bit of a cloudy subject in my mind. I dated a guy who was bi for a couple of years in college. I think he was bisexual in the most basic sense... he could pleasurably have sex with both men and women. But I think he was only capable of having relationships with men. One of my Mother's friends dates only women, but he will occasionally have sex with men. The women I've known who have had bisexual tendencies have been much the same way. I keep thinking about what Carrie Bradshaw said about bisexuality in Sex And The City: "it's just a layover on the way to gaytown." I hate to say it, but I pretty much agree with that. I think bisexuality is absolutely a healthy part of human sexuality and experimentation during adolescence and early adulthood, but I've yet to encounter someone who I can truly call 100% textbook bisexual (meaning they can both have sex AND relationships with either men or women, at any stage in their life). I know you can argue that society doesn't accept bisexuality, and eventually the said person feels pressured to fit into a box, but I just don't buy that 100% either. I think much like gender, we are born with a strong leaning of whether we are gay or straight, masculine or feminine).

[greendaze5]

Has Kinsey’s research been updated? Being that he did his studies some 50 years, would more straight people admit to having bi/gay tendencies if asked today (in a 'generally more tolerant and accepting time)?

Was watching the Ted and Gayle Haggard interviews with Larry King and Oprah last week. Ted is now a self confessed ‘straight male with homosexual tendencies’ and is apparently more or less finally ‘cured’ to being exclusively hetero now.

If he’s happy with his life that’s great, but I can’t help but think he’s still a repressed bi/gay man, and wish he would just openly embrace that other part of himself. But coming from his strong religious background, that he’s married, and that he associates his former life with negative behaviour and events (the lying, the drug use, and alleged sexual abuse as a kid), that just doesn’t seem possible.

In one of the interviews, Ted Haggard didn’t say it out right (though his wife sort of did) but it sounds like he’s still in that ‘hate the sin, love the sinner’ frame of mind.

Roland

[jaycee]

I'll just offer some evolutionary biology I'm familiar with. Of course, being a physics student, I'm not a specialist, so I'll avoid conjecture where possible.
Obviously the purpose of sexual attraction is that it leads to procreation. After all, animals without desire to procreate won't produce offspring, thus removing asexuality from the gene pool (although that's not to say it never appears, as many asexual humans will testify... anyway, perhaps genes promoting asexuality reappear through a mutation?)
Homosexuality is an occurrence of genes "misfiring" - genes promoting a behaviour that won't actually promote the survival of the individual's genes. So in that sense it should be clear cut heterosexuality or homosexuality, as you (presumably) won't have genes that promote behaviour somewhere in between (although there could perhaps be genes that basically say "be attracted to any member of your species").
Now, for nature vs. nurture... the best way to understand this is to say that genes "react" to the environment they are in. Or, put another way, some genes "turn on" and others "turn off" depending on how we're treated and what we experience while we're growing up and well into our adult life. So ultimately "nature" puts all the bits in place, and "nuture" influences which bits are used and which aren't (needless to say the majority of bits are used).
As I said in my brief disclaimer, I'm not a biologist, so I'm not the best person to ask. The best options are to read the likes of Richard Dawkins or ask other evolutionary biologists, particularly sexual selectionists (i.e. specialists in things such as gender roles in animals).
The most important thing to remember is that all variation ultimately comes back to genes (I mean, the existence of life must necessarily come before any culture, and it's the genetic variation across the various geographic regions that gives rise to said culture), whether or not they are influenced by their environment.
Anyway, I hope what little I said was at least somewhat insightful... :)

[Brad]

Homosexuality is an occurrence of genes "misfiring" - genes promoting a behaviour that won't actually promote the survival of the individual's genes. So in that sense it should be clear cut heterosexuality or homosexuality, as you (presumably) won't have genes that promote behaviour somewhere in between (although there could perhaps be genes that basically say "be attracted to any member of your species").

But not all genes are inherited as discrete units (e.g. blue vs brown eyes) but instead exist on a spectrum. The most common example of this is height. There is no single gene where allele A stands for "tall" and allele B for "short." (And how would you define "short" and "tall" anyway?) You don't end up with either a short or tall kid or even one with the average of the parents' heights. Instead height exists on a continuous spectrum, with over 50 genes contributing to its outcome, a very complex process that is still little understood. You could, factoring in outliers, have a child of basically any height. And while environment can influence height, the role it plays varies greatly. For example, 2 boys (not identical twins) born from the same parents, raised in the same environment, fed the same diet, could still grow up with great differences in height.

I say all that to say...perhaps human sexuality functions the same way as height. It's probably not a matter of A or B like eye color. Instead of a "gay gene," multiple genes may contribute varying degrees of influence into a person's final sexuality. And it's what type of information from one gene and how it interacts with the information from all the other genes that ultimately determines the final outcome, and perhaps that is how you end up with varying degrees of bisexuality. And if that is the case, then perhaps as in the example of height, environment actually plays a much smaller role than we may have once thought.

Eh, just my 2 cents on a Sunday morning.

Brad

[jaycee]

But not all genes are inherited as discrete units (e.g. blue vs brown eyes) but instead exist on a spectrum. The most common example of this is height. There is no single gene where allele A stands for "tall" and allele B for "short." (And how would you define "short" and "tall" anyway?) You don't end up with either a short or tall kid or even one with the average of the parents' heights. Instead height exists on a continuous spectrum, with over 50 genes contributing to its outcome, a very complex process that is still little understood. You could, factoring in outliers, have a child of basically any height. And while environment can influence height, the role it plays varies greatly. For example, 2 boys (not identical twins) born from the same parents, raised in the same environment, fed the same diet, could still grow up with great differences in height.

I say all that to say...perhaps human sexuality functions the same way as height. It's probably not a matter of A or B like eye color. Instead of a "gay gene," multiple genes may contribute varying degrees of influence into a person's final sexuality. And it's what type of information from one gene and how it interacts with the information from all the other genes that ultimately determines the final outcome, and perhaps that is how you end up with varying degrees of bisexuality. And if that is the case, then perhaps as in the example of height, environment actually plays a much smaller role than we may have once thought.

Eh, just my 2 cents on a Sunday morning.

Brad

You've raised a good point which I often forget to mention (although my last post was already very long anyway) - different genes can give different phenotypes, but that doesn't mean that gene alone is responsible for the outcome. Think of it like a cake recipe - you can substitute yeast with salt, for example, which will result in a very different cake, but that doesn't mean the salt alone will generate the different cake! Only in the presence of the other ingredients can it produce a flat salty cake! So it's only meaningful to talk about phenotypic differences.
As for height and sexual orientation being analogous... I wouldn't favour this view so much, as with height it's seems embryologically easier to have various height differences. Basically height differences can be attributed to genes saying "this much of more of the same here" (it's more intuitive with, say, discrete sections of a millipede, where you could have genes saying "100 copies of the same here" in one millipede, and different genes saying "110 copies of the same here", but it's basically the same thing). To my knowledge there doesn't seem to be anything like genes saying "this much heterosexuality here" and "this much homosexuality there".
Of course you'll have to forgive my potential for being wrong about the second paragraph - as I keep disclaiming, I'm not a biologist. I just have a keen interest in evolutionary biology.

[Brad]

To my knowledge there doesn't seem to be anything like genes saying "this much heterosexuality here" and "this much homosexuality there".
Of course you'll have to forgive my potential for being wrong about the second paragraph - as I keep disclaiming, I'm not a biologist. I just have a keen interest in evolutionary biology.

Yeah, I really have no idea. I was just throwing it out there as a possibility, but I have nothing to support the hypothesis at all. Interesting discussion nonetheless.

And I was a biology major, but that was 8 years ago when I graduated, and I have since moved into a more specialized field of practice. So I'd certainly never claim to be a biologist either!

Brad

[seekerj]

Liam, I'm curious, do you believe bisexuality is a societal construct? If so, do you believe the majority of those who identify as bisexual are born straight or gay?

Doesn't the fact that animals engage in this behavior rule out the possibility that it has something to do with human society?

[LikeAWillow]

Doesn't the fact that animals engage in this behavior rule out the possibility that it has something to do with human society?

What animals engage in bisexual behavior? I'm curious. I didn't say that I believed in bisexuality as a construct, though, I asked Liam if he did.

[seekerj]

What animals engage in bisexual behavior? I'm curious. I didn't say that I believed in bisexuality as a construct, though, I asked Liam if he did.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to address that part of it, and I know you were asking Liam specifically; what I wrote was just a thought I had as I read your question to Liam. It really was just a thought, nothing more.

There are many species who randomly, or out of boredom, or for whatever reason, practice this behavior. There are too many to list. It might be easier to list those that do not.

[jaycee]

What animals engage in bisexual behavior? I'm curious. I didn't say that I believed in bisexuality as a construct, though, I asked Liam if he did.

I know Bonobos, an ape species, regularly engage in various sexual practices, including bisexuality and, of all things, paedophilia. :shocked: To quote the primatologist Frans de Waal:
"Paedophilia is not a hang-up with bonobos; all kinds of philia seem fine to them."
"The Ancestor's Tale", Richard Dawkins, pg. 110.
Beyond advising humans not to suddenly start behaving like bonobos (I doubt most people would want to anyway...), I don't know what to say... :shrug:

[ButterCookie]

I'm not sure wether I agree with the scaleor not, but I'm straight, and I find Debbie Harry attractive in more than a 'she's pretty' way. But I know I'm not Bi :shrug:

There's another user who I know feels the same way but I think she's too Chicken **** to post it :p :cool:

[DefDumbandBlond]

Georgie are you talking about us debsexuals? :cool:

[ButterCookie]

Georgie are you talking about us debsexuals? :cool:

You know I am :D

[jaycee]

I'm not sure wether I agree with the scaleor not, but I'm straight, and I find Debbie Harry attractive in more than a 'she's pretty' way. But I know I'm not Bi :shrug:

There's another user who I know feels the same way but I think she's too Chicken **** to post it :p :cool:

The question on everyone's minds now is "Do you want to kiss 'Debbie'?" :xoxo:
:D

[ButterCookie]

The question on everyone's minds now is "Do you want to kiss 'Debbie'?" :xoxo:
:D

I'd do more than kiss her :lol:

[jaycee]

I'd do more than kiss her :lol:

Fair enough. :D
In any case...
:xoxo:
Do I get a kiss now? :)

[ButterCookie]

Fair enough. :D
In any case...
:xoxo:
Do I get a kiss now? :)

:D :xoxo: Of course!

[jaycee]

:D :xoxo: Of course!

:o You made me blush! :laugh:

[DefDumbandBlond]

I'd do more than kiss her :lol:

:lol: ahh yesssss

[TrueFaith77]

I would think if bisexuality existed that I would have met a bisexual person by now. And that's counting all the straight men I've slept with.

[jaycee]

I would think if bisexuality existed that I would have met a bisexual person by now. And that's counting all the straight men I've slept with.

How would you know if someone's bisexual without enquiring? Or do you actually do that? If so, it seems a little too personal, but perhaps that's just me... :shrug:
I'm sure if you go to the right forums on the internet (everything's on the net, so I'll assume there is one concerning bisexuality), I imagine you'll find many a genuine bisexual person...

[HejiraNYC]

I would think if bisexuality existed that I would have met a bisexual person by now. And that's counting all the straight men I've slept with.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9c/AndyDickpinata.jpg/448px-AndyDickpinata.jpg

:shrug: I'm not saying you slept with Andy Dick, but he's as close to bi as a man has been in public life. Oh... but there was Freddie Mercury too... but I'm not sure if he later admitted to actually being gay vs. bi. :shrug: