https://labs.psych.ucsb.edu/roney/james/other%20pdf%20readings/Bem%25201996%2520Exotic%2520becomes%2520erotic.pdf
What does everyone think of this paper? Basically it's trying to show how homosexuality is only caused indirectly by biological factors, and is mainly caused by experiences in early childhood. Gender conforming children will feel different from opposite-sex children and will perceive the opposite sex as foreign and alien, while gender non-conforming children will feel different from the same sex rather than the opposite sex. These feelings of difference are eroticized during puberty and become sexual orientation. Key patterns are that gay men were likely to report not enjoying sports as children, instead preferring female-typical toys like dolls, and lesbians were more likely to be outgoing tomboys.
Gays and lesbians, does this match up with your experience? As a child, did you show temperamental and behavioral preferences that were more consistent with the opposite sex rather than the same sex?
The paper doesn't cover transsexuality, just cisgendered homosexuality.
Pic unrelated.
>>6207275
sounds like bullshit. But hey, im not a neurological scientist. I could spout my personal opinion on the matter, but i have no experience studying. Though, they could be mixing up the cause and effects of the brain.
>ucsb
>psych
kek kek go take a fem studies class op
>>6207308
The file is hosted at ucsb.edu but the author was a professor from Cornell.
I took a women's studies class my freshman year if that makes you happy?
>>6207356
sorry friend just taking a jab at my school's psych dept. i'm reading the paper rn because i'm not so presumptuous as to comment on an article without reading it over but my immediate thought is "what about people who aren't straight or gay" and unless the author thinks bi folks are aliens or don't otherwise exist then i don't see how their framework accommodates that.
(and yes it does)
also i don't know when this was written but i find the supposed causal link between exotic and erotic to be kind of [spoiler]problematic[/spoiler]
I felt different from both sexes and now I'm bisexual. Maybe he's onto something.
>>6207402
The author mentions bisexuality in passing a couple of times, but it's not given a full analysis (that I saw, kind of started skimming towards the end).
I think his framework is pretty well equipped to handle bisexuality though. Bisexuals are simply children who felt isolated from both stereotypically masculine children and stereotypically feminine children, perhaps due to certain personality quirks, and thus developed significant feelings of difference from both groups. This might actually explain some of the negative stereotypes that people have about bisexuals.
The biggest challenge to the author's framework is the small number of heterosexual people who reported significant gender non-conformity in childhood, but, you know. There's always a bit of randomness in everything.
>>6207436
1996.
His theory might be false, but describing it as "problematic" really has no place in science. We're trying to determine the objective truth, even if the truth makes us uncomfortable.
(And in case anyone thinks this is some fringe "now we can cure the gays" theory, the author makes it quite explicit that once one's erotic orientation is set, it's essentially permanent throughout life.)
>>6207465
that seems inadequately descriptive to me (why arent socially ostracized people more likely to be bisexual then?) and many of his assumptions are staked in a presumed naturality of binary gender difference
i don't buy it
>>6207463
Yeah, I feel like this sort of explains a lot about me. I've always felt pretty androgynous, a mix of masculine and feminine traits. Now I think androgyny is sexually boring, but I'm attracted to very feminine women and very masculine men.
>>6207485
newtonian gravity is problematic
you don't actually know what the word problematic means
>>6207498
>naturality of binary gender difference
He talks at the end about the possibility of transcending the gender binary.
His entire goal is to provide a theory that is thoroughly socially constructivist. The gender binary is presented to children, they (roughly, obviously there are edge cases) either conform to their target group or fail to conform, producing either out-group attraction or in-group attraction. If different types of choices were presented to children, then we would observe different patterns of adult sexuality.
Even the most radically constructivist theory of sexual orientation has to make some sort of reference to a gender binary, because the social fact to be explained is that people organize their sexuality around a gender binary.
>>6207529
Sorry, I assumed you were making an ethical judgement. "Problematic" is the main tumblr word for "this is morally bad".
>>6207546
my main issues with this are a) assuming binary gender difference instead of polarization across a spectrum (you can participate in a mixture of "typically" masculine and "typically" feminine childhood activities without being an edge case, and what's considered typical changes with time and culture) and b) assuming a fixedness of orientation, attraction, and self-identification
>>6207555
i'm an academic, not a tumblr user
>>6207595
>you can participate in a mixture of "typically" masculine and "typically" feminine childhood activities without being an edge case
Table 1 on page 3 of the PDF groups people under the categories "had not enjoyed sex-typical activities" and "had enjoyed sex-atypical activities". It's not clear what criteria was used to make these assignments (is one instance of sex-atypical behavior enough? Two?) I agree that this may be a methodological of the study from which the author pulled the data.
>what's considered typical changes with time and culture
The author is aware of this and his theory is designed to account for this. In a culture where sex-typical childhood activities were different, we would expect those activities to be the determiners of sexual orientation, rather than the ones that we have in our culture. In a culture where childhood activity wasn't organized around sex differences at all, we would expect adult sexual orientation to be organized around different criteria than sex.
>assuming a fixedness of orientation, attraction, and self-identification
He doesn't talk about sexual fluidity, no. His main goal is to establish how the "imprinted" orientation is usually stable throughout life, and according to everything I know, that's true as a general rule. Understanding sexual fluidity would require a greater understanding of the biological mechanisms at work in this phase of development, and it's not the author's purpose to go into those details here.
having read further, i conclude that it's a decent paper
>>6207275
Bullshit, I remember being a fag from early childhood, looking at a hot guy and feeling my heart flutter while looking a girls and not feeling anything, actually wondering WHAT I should be feeling.
At any rate they used heavy stereotypes, you don't have ONLY boys that like cars and boys that like dolls. What about nerd boys that liked watching Discovery (when it was still good) or NGC? What about boys that liked playing video game? What about boys that like all of the above, including cooking and dolls? The fact that they think there are so few variables shows how ignorant they are.
Lastly unless they start showing how feminine or masculine the subjects they are interviewing are, because 9 out of 10 feminine flaming faggots are repressed trannies.
