I'm just casually glancing over the articles (being a psych major, I like to go over the "hard data") but this quote makes me cringe and reminds me why I like reading the original studies and not mucking about with newspaper's interpretations of the studies:
“If you can’t make a male attracted to other males by cutting off his penis, how strong could any psychosocial effect be?” said J. Michael Bailey, an expert on sexual orientation at Northwestern University.
Either the expert botched up his explanation and really did say that, or the quote (as newspapers are apt to do) take things largely out of context. I had to reread it to relate it to the previous study mentioned and cringe at how they present it. I know they meant to say "males raised to be heterosexual girls still desire women" as proof against psychosocial factors, but meh. That's not what was said.
Besides, the whole missing penis thing is irrelevant. It'd be if the testes are still present that would be most important. Which is still biology but it could be pumping along all the time. As far as I know from these studies, the feeling that something is "wrong" usually occurs around puberty, so that kind of supports that argument.
The problem with a lot of "nature versus nurture" studies is that they try to treat each in isolation, when you're NEVER going to have something in total isolation unless somehow you got a boy whose penis and testes were chopped off and he was exposed out in some abandoned mountain in Tibet. And if that were the case, odds are he wouldn't last long.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2007-04-11 01:26 am (UTC)“If you can’t make a male attracted to other males by cutting off his penis, how strong could any psychosocial effect be?” said J. Michael Bailey, an expert on sexual orientation at Northwestern University.
Either the expert botched up his explanation and really did say that, or the quote (as newspapers are apt to do) take things largely out of context. I had to reread it to relate it to the previous study mentioned and cringe at how they present it. I know they meant to say "males raised to be heterosexual girls still desire women" as proof against psychosocial factors, but meh. That's not what was said.
Besides, the whole missing penis thing is irrelevant. It'd be if the testes are still present that would be most important. Which is still biology but it could be pumping along all the time. As far as I know from these studies, the feeling that something is "wrong" usually occurs around puberty, so that kind of supports that argument.
The problem with a lot of "nature versus nurture" studies is that they try to treat each in isolation, when you're NEVER going to have something in total isolation unless somehow you got a boy whose penis and testes were chopped off and he was exposed out in some abandoned mountain in Tibet. And if that were the case, odds are he wouldn't last long.