Where straight men come from

This essay germinated when I caught a few minutes of a sitcom on television a few weeks ago. I don't even know the title of it; I didn't sit till the end. Anyway, the scene was one in which an advertising man, what is called a 'creative director', hired a photo-shoot crew, to take some sexy pictures (for a brochure, I think). The cameraman and his assistant simply assumed "sexy" meant they'd have a female model. They got all excited about doing the shoot. When the model arrived at the location, and he was clearly a he, the camera crew freaked out, and refused to carry out the assignment. No way, man, we're not doing it. Money's not the issue. This is too far out.

Canned laughter in the soundtrack. It was all supposed to be very funny.

To keep the story going, the creative director persuaded the crew to stay and be professional about it. OK, they agreed, turned around and set up their lights and equipment. Then the model stripped, completely, and the crew freaked out and packed up again. More laughter.

Once again, the director of the shoot had to appeal to their professional integrity to carry on.

A few shots into the sequence, they felt the pictures weren't coming out right. The model was not posing seductively enough. So they asked him to think of nude babes or Baywatch -- that kind of thing -- and flow with it. Well, he thought the thought and had an erection. Major freak-out all around. Oh gawd, can't look! For the audience, it was supposed to be side-splitting funny.

This is how boys are taught to be averse to the male body, especially a male body in a sexually excited state. Through such role models, boys are taught to be heterosexual.

Taught to be heterosexual?

Before we go further and piece the jigsaw puzzle together, I need to establish four facts.

Fact 1. Sexuality is a spectrum

Sexuality is not an either/or thing. In other words, people aren't simply heterosexual or homosexual. They lie on a spectrum between two poles, as in this diagram: 

 

Fact 2. Two kinds of heterosexual men

There are roughly two kinds of heterosexual men in terms of their reaction to the male nude and male eroticism. One kind is completely indifferent to it; there is hardly a flutter. The other kind displays an adverse reaction to it. There is a sense of shock and panic, as if they feel threatened by it. This is illustrated by the sitcom scene I related above. When asked to describe their own reaction, though, they don't say "panic"; they tend to say "disgusted". (I am not really referring to homophobia; I am being specific to their reaction to male nudity and arousal, though of course they are related.)

I've always found this very intriguing, because I don't the see the parallel "disgust", except in jest, among homosexual men when they encounter the female nude, or female eroticism. The exclusive homosexuals are generally indifferent to it, just like the first set of heterosexual men's reaction to the male nude. "It does nothing for me", is how they'd dismiss it. You don't see among the gay ones a subset that react involuntarily against it. Furthermore, we don't talk of heterophobia.

Partly this has to do with the prevalence of female images all over our media in various degrees of undress and sultry poses. People get totally inured to it. Yes, but we still rarely come across in everyday life, completely nude women, dripping with sexual arousal. It takes a fair accident to meet one. But even so, I have observed that homosexual men don't react adversely to the encounter. They may say, "oops, sorry, this is not my scene", or they may even be interested in what happens next as a matter of childlike curiosity. "So that's what a female orgasm looks like!"

Fact 3. The Henry Adams Study

In 1996, researcher Henry Adams studied 64 American men who said they were heterosexual. Through a preliminary questionnaire about attitudes towards homosexuals, Adams divided them into 2 groups: 35 were homophobic, and 29 non-homophobic. They then put on penile gauges, and watched pornographic videos, showing heterosexual, gay male and lesbian sex. While watching gay male sex, 80% of the subjects who had homophobic attitudes, but only 34% of the non-homophobic group, had at least moderate penile erection.

There are interesting implications from this study to the psychological origins of homophobia (the homophobic guys were more aroused from seeing male-to-male sex), but it is tangential to this article to go into that. The only point I wish to make is that a lot of men who classify themselves as heterosexual, homophobic or not, are aroused by male-to-male sex, even though they may not admit it.

For more details of the Henry Adams study, see footnote 2 below.

Fact 4. Bisexual behaviour among Indians

There are plenty of reports that bisexual behaviour among men in the Indian subcontinent is very common. Indications are that about 30-50% of men occasionally have male-to-male sex.

What are the implications of this?

One could be to say that Indians are genetically different from everybody else in the world. Just as they are genetically programmed to be of a certain skin colour, hair texture, nose proportions, etc, so the gene pool in the Indian population is for a greater tendency to bisexuality. But wait a minute: this is to say that sexual preference is genetic.

I have serious doubts about such a simplistic answer. While there is scientific evidence that there is a genetic basis to homosexuality, I think it is multifactorial. I do not think it is entirely genetic -- the patterning of homosexuality in families and different societies is just too complex to support such a simple explanation. In any case, we're not talking about homosexuality, but of bisexuality.

It is more plausible to explain the prevalence of bisexuality among Indians from the angle of culture and social attitudes  [The article Homosexual, but not gay expands on this]. One can also draw a parallel from the fact that in so many other ways, it has been demonstrated how our identities are social constructs. We are sports-loving men; emotionally distant, breadwinning husbands; homely wives; doting and forgetful grandfathers; and so on, because we model ourselves on these roles.

But then, how is it that one society has socially constructed so many bisexual men, and others so few?

So here's the theory:

(Before I go on, I need to say this is nothing new. Sigmund Freud conceived of a similar theory.)

Perhaps in terms of our innate orientation (whatever "innate" means, and I am fully aware that that is another huge debate), human males may be more evenly spread out in the sexuality spectrum, than grouped at the two extreme ends of 'exclusively heterosexual' and 'exclusively homosexual'. In other words, if our societies did not pressurise people to be either heterosexual or homosexual, we might find our male populations distributed something like this:

Possible sexuality distribution
in the absence of acculturation

However, many societies -- not all -- apply strong pressure to be heterosexual. Boys are taught to abjure any interest in the same sex. They are taught to be extremely uncomfortable at the sight of nude men, to recoil from seeing an erect penis on another. They are conditioned to feel very threatened when faced with a sexual situation with another male.

Not all males need to be so taught. Some males are naturally (again, whatever that word means) exclusively heterosexual. They have absolutely no interest in other males. The thought of a sexual connection doesn't occur to them. Their reaction of indifference is enough. They don't have to recoil.

But for the rest, they are not naturally indifferent. They are not at the extreme heterosexual end of the spectrum. They can be aroused by other males. But their society does not allow that. Instead, what their society does is to herd them, through the socialisation process as they grow up, towards the heterosexual end in terms of adopted attitudes and behaviour.

Sexuality distribution after acculturation

Perhaps traditional Indian culture, unlike western culture, does not apply the same pressure to become exclusively heterosexual. This would mean that more males would be free to act on their impulses. If so, then it suggests that as a general rule through all populations, some 50% of males may be innately bisexual, going by the Indian ratio. (Note also that Adams found 34-80% were aroused, at least moderately). Yet in westernised societies, we often find that under 10% of adults think and act as bisexuals. Does this mean that some 40% of males are remade by their culture to be horrified at their own partial-homosexual interest, and to take on the identity of exclusively heterosexual males?

Is this why a panic-like reaction, as in the sitcom, is so common among males?

But in real life, it is not always funny. Very often, people unconsciously redirect outwards their self-hate - in this case, their acquired loathing of their own homo-erotic instincts. Homosexual persons thus become objects of hate, and from there it's a small step to ostracism, legal proscriptions, bullying, beating and killing.

© Yawning Bread 

Footnotes

1. There is an interesting implication from the theory discussed in the article. Why do so many people think that homosexuality is learned behaviour? Because for many straights, their heterosexuality was acquired that way! 

    

2. Here's a brief of the Adams study I found from the internet:

   Adams studied a group of white heterosexual men, 35 of whom were classified as homophobic and 29, as nonhomophobic. Homophobia was defined as a negative emotional reaction (e.g., fear, anxiety, anger, discomfort) to homosexuality and was measured by a self-report scale called the Index of Homophobia (a sample item is, "I would feel nervous being in a group of homosexuals"). All the men reported being entirely heterosexual in both arousal and experience.

   Each participant was shown how to put on a penile strain gauge, which measures the circumference of the penis. After the gauge was in place, each man was shown three 4-minute videotapes depicting heterosexual activity, male homosexual activity, and lesbian activity. (The latter tape was included because, interestingly, heterosexual men find lesbian sex highly arousing; it distinguishes better between heterosexual and homosexual men than do other stimuli.)

   The researchers found that the homophobic men showed a significant increase in penile circumference to the male homosexual video whereas the non-homophobic men did not. "In the homophobic group, 20% showed no significant tumescence, 26% showed moderate tumescence, and 54% showed definite tumescence to the homosexual video; the corresponding percentages in the nonhomophobic group were 66%, 10%, and 24%, respectively" (p. 443).

   [moderate tumescence defined as increase in penile circumference of 6-12 mm; definite tumescence defined as more than 12 mm increase.]

   There are several possible explanations. One is that homophobia is an attempt to repress or deny one's own homosexual impulses. Another is that homosexual stimuli cause anxiety in nonhomophobic men, and anxiety enhances arousal and erection. Further research is needed to clarify the results and to answer questions such as whether these results would generalize to homophobic women and whether homophobic men have poorer heterosexual adjustment than do nonhomophobic men.

   Adams, H. E., Wright, L. W., & Lohr, B. A, (1996). Is homophobia associated with homosexual arousal? Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 105, 440-445.

Addenda

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