Presumably the masculinization of the brain shapes some neural circuit that
makes women desirable. If so, this circuitry is wired differently in gay men.
In experiments in which subjects are shown photographs of desirable men or
women, straight men are aroused by women, gay men by men.
Such experiments do not show the same clear divide with women. Whether women
describe themselves as straight or lesbian, "Their sexual arousal seems to be
relatively indiscriminate - they get aroused by both male and female images,"
Dr. Bailey said. "I'm not even sure females have a sexual orientation. But they
have sexual preferences. Women are very picky, and most choose to have sex with
men."
It's clear that Dr. Bailey (who is something of a controversial figure in his
field) isn't much of a social constructionist (as that term applies to gender).
But I'm curious how he can completely discount the influence of society's
sanctioning of some types of behaviors and not others on the outcome of the
experiments in question--which are, I'm supposing, tests of arousal in the
presence of provocative images of either men or women, conducted on adult human
beings who have already experienced a lifetime of cultural indoctrination.
Later in the piece, in a passage that seems to muddy the waters more than it
boosts Dr. Bailey's hypothesis, we get:
Sexual orientation, at least for men, seems to be settled before birth. "I
think most of the scientists working on these questions are convinced that the
antecedents of sexual orientation in males are happening early in life,
probably before birth," Dr. Breedlove said, "whereas for females, some are
probably born to become gay, but clearly some get there quite late in life."
Leaving aside women for a moment, whose gender identities are no doubt every
bit as complicated to construct as those of men, when we consider that the
construction of the male gender is dependent on quite a few developmental
events, any one of which can turn out differently than it usually does and lead
to an alternate gender identity (e.g., chromosomal abnormalities, problems at
the onset of puberty that result from a malfunction of hormonal systems,
masculinization / feminization of the brain in the womb due to maternal
effects) I wonder how well (in the absence of controlled experiments on humans
which, thankfully, aren't allowed in civil society) we can make claims like
"women have a sexual preference, but only men have a sexual orientation."
(And that's all before we get to the even-more-endlessly-debatable questions
that arise when we start to talk about culture's influence on gender.)
