Disputed Mutability
Disputed Mutability is the name of a post-ex-gay blogger who’s one of my favorites in the “trying to handle any gay and lesbian attractions you have in conformity with traditional Christian teaching set”; though she’s no longer regularly blogging, when she was, I appreciated her for her honesty about her life, and the friendly way she interacted with ex-ex-gay-because-it-really-really-didn’t-work-out like Peterson Toscano. In this case, though, I’m just stealing her nom de blog for a post title, because it seems apt for a post responding to Hugo’s post, The plasticity of desire: new and comforting research.
It’s sometimes said that conservatives think that all the accepted sexual differences are inborn, while variations like homosexuality and lesbianism can’t possibly have anything to do with biology, while liberals think the reverse. I actually think that there’s some unknown and perhaps never fully knowable mix of environment and genetics shaping both those of us who fit gender stereotypes better and those of us who don’t. But at any rate, Hugo isn’t one of those liberals who does this; he embraces belief in plasticity for pretty much everything.
In many of my posts (most recently, here), I’ve made the case that sexual desire is more malleable than we think it is. I tend to argue against reparative therapy (the pseudo-science of helping gays become straight, repudiated by every serious professional body of psychologists and psychiatrists) not on grounds of inevitable ineffectiveness but on grounds that it attempts to fix something that isn’t broken. I do think we can shift our desires, and that to a far greater degree than we realize, our desires are less inherent in our make-up and more a response to external influences.
I’m not so sure. Here are my thoughts on mutability and malleability.
- I doubt that all parts of our sexuality are equally mutable or equally fixed. Martin Seligman, former head of the American Psychological Association, once wrote a book called What You Can Change and What You Can’t: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement. In that book, he put way over on the really, really difficult to change side of the spectrum transexuality (which he believed might have a biological basis in, if I remember right, some prenatal hormonal influence on brain development). Sexual orientation he put only slightly further along toward the easy to change side of the spectrum – still one of the least likely things to be capable of being changed. But he placed other aspects of sexuality somewhere in the middle. It’s become popular, since gay and lesbian people have gained more acceptance as people have become more convinced that it’s not a choice, for people to describe any sexual preference that others disapprove of as something that’s fixed or wired in them, but as I look around me, I think Seligman may be more right. I see people shifting much more often in some preferences than others. For instance, it seems to me that people pretty often shift between being attracted overwhelmingly more to people of one race to preferring a difference race (and, given that there’s no ethical difference between dating someone of any one race and dating someone of any other race, why not). I also suspect (based both on cross-cultural differences and shifts I see people making over their lifetimes) that monogamy/polygamy is a fairly fluid preference; if I come down hard on the more utopian this-can-work-for-everyone varieties of polyamory, it’s not because I think we’re all fixed in our wiring here, but because I think we’re partly but incompletely malleable, and that, in this area in particular, it’s easy to kid ourselves about how far we can change (precisely because so many people can change to some degree, but not everyone to every degree). But sexual orientation seems to me a less often fluid thing than some of these other preferences.
- Mutable and malleable aren’t the same thing. One of the reasons that the APA removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses was that reparative therapy, despite repeated efforts, really did have a super lousy track record (the other reason was, of course, that psychiatrists became less willing to believe that homosexuality was particularly broken). It still does. But people do sometimes shift along the Kinsey scale. Not generally from one end to the complete opposite, but still enough to be significant. Sexual orientation is sometimes mutable, but does not appear to be as malleable as it is mutable; no one has found a way of consciously changing it that works with any regularity at all. And those people who do experience shifts appear to experience them in unpredictable ways, that you can’t bottle up and use to get the same result in someone else.
- Different people are mutable to different degrees (just as, to take an example more obviously tied to physiology, one person may have a one octave singing range and another a three octave range).
- “Not malleable” isn’t necessarily the same thing as genetic. It’s at least theoretically possible that something could have a genetic basis, but enough environmental factors that could be influenced later that it would still be fairly malleable. It’s also possible that something could not be genetic at all, but be imprinted so early that you can’t readily change it later (how many of us can learn foreign languages later in life as well as the languages we learn when young?).
- Obviously, “malleable” isn’t the same thing as “should be changed.” If something’s actually hurtful to others, you’re obliged to do what you can to control your behavior, however not malleable your inclinations may be. And if there’s nothing at all wrong with something (as, say, with the old bugaboo of “miscegenation”), then it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference that you could have made a different choice.
- It’s sometimes said that women are more mutable in sexual orientation than men. Well, maybe. But I’d be a bit cautious with this generalization, because, first of all, there are major differences in the social pressures applied to men and women here, and, second, even if it should be true, it would probably be one of those “on average this is true, but there are gobs of individual exceptions” differences between the sexes, rather than men and women being in almost completely non-overlapping categories. (A lot of differences between men and women are like this; some sort of statistical difference in large groups is found, and then it gets described in the popular press as if men and women were opposites, and barely overlapped at all.)
In summary, I’m not about to say solidly that we are or aren’t plastic in our desires; probably the truth is that we’re plastic in some ways and not so plastic in others.
February 13th, 2010 at 4:25 pm
I commented a bit in Hugo’s post, but I think my main point is “What you said, Sappho.”
Just two little things:
1. The Kinsey scale is a bipolar continuum. Some folks have suggested using separate unipolar continua for same-sex and opposite-sex attractions.* The argument there is that, like the Bem type of M/F scales, you could be high on both or low on both. It doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, where “more gay” = “less hetero”. This is an interesting theoretical point but not well studied, since mostly we continue to assess sexual orientation with the single “Do you identify as: check one: L / G / B / Het” question.**
2. The effects showing differences between men and women are fairly large. I myself have a dataset with just ID’d heterosexual mostly white college students where about twice as many women as men endorsed sexual attraction, fantasy, and/or behavior in the nonheterosexual direction. FWIW. That’s not to say the reasons aren’t social, just that the effects are large.
*e.g., Shively, M. G., & DeCecco, J. P. (1977). Components of sexual identity. Journal of Homosexuality, 3(1), 41–48. This is just the first major article to bring up the question.
**e.g., Sell, R. L. (2007). Defining and measuring sexual orientation for research. In I. H. Meyer & M. E. Northridge (Eds.), The health of sexual minorities (pp. 355–374). New York: Springer. This is actually a hardly changed update from a 1997 version. None of the issues Sell had raised in 1997 had really been addressed in those 10 years, as far as I can tell.
February 14th, 2010 at 12:17 am
It’d be pretty surprising if there weren’t large differences in men and women endorsing nonhetero attraction, given the heavy encouragement on women to ‘experiment’ for men’s entertainment and the heavy discouragement placed on men in the opposite direction.
I dislike the term “shift” because it implies that any mutability is a zero-sum game; people stop liking A and start liking B. That leaves out people who never stopped liking A, or maybe stopped liking A as much as they now like B, or who don’t mind A but for various reasons prefer to go with B. (In the latter category, I’ve known a number of self-identified lesbians who had been partnered with men and could, in theory, be attracted to/sexual with men, but who saw themselves in the category ‘lesbian’ rather than ‘bisexual’ – they were choosing not to direct their energy toward potentially having a relationship with men.)
Given that our closest living primate ancestors show no gender gap in ’sexual orientation’ it would be surprising if we did.
February 14th, 2010 at 1:44 pm
mythago, given that our closest living primate ancestors do not have speech, it would be surprising if we did. Right?
Still, in support of your point, the data I’m familiar with suggest that the male/female SS attraction gap is bigger in Western countries and much bigger among younger people — suggests some kind of social-historical influence. Not enough data from non-Western countries to be sure. Also the degree to which “sexual orientation” is culturally constructed fogs things up quite a bit, particularly in retrospective studies, something that’s been noted since at least the 1980s.
Have a look at the following:
Kinnish, K.K., Strassberg, D.S., & Turner, C.M. (2005). Sex differences in the flexibility of sexual orientation: A multidimensional retrospective assessment. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 35, 173-183.
Savin-Williams, R. C. (2006). Who’s gay? Does it matter? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15, 40–44.
There’s another good one by Dickson et al in I think 2002 that has the words “birth cohort” in the title. Can’t dig up the ref handily.
February 15th, 2010 at 11:57 am
@mythago: Yeah, I suppose “shift” may not be the best word.
@Luis: The fantasy role playing group I used to play with, before I moved, worked out a system of rolling for sexual orientation where we had one dimension for straight and one for gay, so that your character could wind up high on both or low on both.
On gender differences and overlap, here’s how I see it. To simplify a bit, there are two kinds of gender differences that show up in research.
There’s the kind that’s very small, but may get magnified in the press to be much larger; an example is when, a while ago, there was a survey of Internet use that got reported in terms of differences in how men and women used chat and web browsing, but when the blogger Echidne of the Snakes went and looked at the actual study, she found that it showed overhwhelming similarity in how men and women used the net (in broad categories, such as time spent browsing for information, time spent in chat, etc.), with small differences in only a couple of categories. So that the overlap between the sexes, in this case, would have been somewhere over 90%.
And then there’s the kind where there really is a sharp difference, but there’s still a significant overlap. Here the distortion isn’t saying that men and women differ, but talking as if the men and women who are on the same side of the continuum of the opposite sex are really, really rare outliers, when they are, instead, at least a substantial minority. An example of this would be visual porn, where it’s pretty clear that on average men like it more than women (whether that’s because of biology, or social influence, or because visual porn is written more to men’s tastes), but if you put up a blog post saying that women just don’t like porn, you’re likely to get a bunch of comments saying, hey, I’m a woman and I like it (not that I’m personally one of them).
Now, in principle both the bigger differences and the smaller ones could be mostly cultural (given enough different cultural pressure on the sexes – and there’s plenty of that). And the bigger ones, and, who knows, even the smaller ones could be partly biological. But both differences do have overlap, and not freakishly rare overlap; neither involves one sex really being “the opposite sex” from the other.
So, even if it’s both true that women are more fluid in sexual orientation than men, and that a large part of that difference is biological, there could still be rather a lot of individual women who are less fluid than rather a lot of individual men.
February 15th, 2010 at 1:23 pm
I just wanted to point out that it’s really cissexist to but “transsexuality” on one side instead of gender identity. People who identify with their assigned sex aren’t likely to experience a shift of gender identity, either. (I don’t know whether this has its source in this post or in the text your referencing, Lynn.)
Otherwise, really good post. Your point about the difference between mutable and malleable is especially apt.
February 15th, 2010 at 1:51 pm
I actually thought for a minute, before I wrote that, about whether I should say “transsexuality” or “gender identity,” given that not everyone who identifies with the other gender is transsexual. And deliberately wrote “transsexuality” because that’s what I remembered Seligman as having said (I don’t think he addressed in the book at all, other than that, how changeable gender identity is). But take that with a grain of salt, because I read the book years ago, and so it’s possible that he actually did say gender identity, and my memory’s wrong.
February 15th, 2010 at 2:46 pm
Right — my point is that people have stable identities no matter what the relationship is between their identity and their assigned sex. Saying “transsexual” instead of “gender identity” is like having a marker for “gay” instead of “sexual orientation,” which is, of course, something these kinds of discussions often do (i.e. “is being gay a choice” gets asked preposterously more often than “is it a choice to be straight”… obviously if one were a choice, the other would be, too).
February 15th, 2010 at 3:28 pm
Fair point, Bond.
(I’m pretty sure the book, whether it talked about transsexuality or transgender, did single out the trans identity as stable, but probably more because words for the cis end of the spectrum, or the whole spectrum, aren’t in as widespread use than because Seligman, if questioned, would actually believe that only one end of the spectrum is stable.)
February 16th, 2010 at 4:56 pm
Luis – no, actually, not right. Our closest living primate ancestors don’t talk, as we do, but they do have sex, as we do. They’re also bisexual. So if we’re looking for evolutionary reasons that modern humans have sexual orientations that are affected by gender we’d have to look at some reason there would be a gendered component – rather than assuming women are more bisexual/fluid/whatever than men and working out a plausible narrative to why that happened.
And of course, as you note, there’s the cultural component; it’s very difficult to state that women “really are” more fluid than men in a culture that places a very high cost on men for being openly sexual with men, but encourages women to be “fluid” primarily to entertain men.
Sappho, even porn is suspect as a ’sharp difference,’ because when we talk about ‘porn’ what we really mean is mainstream pornography intended for a heterosexual male audience. Unsurprisingly, men tend to like this porn more than women do; but in the filter from what science we have to the popular imagination this turns into “men are more visual than women so men like porn and women don’t”, fitting conveniently into the cultural narrative that women are there to be looked at and judged on sexual attractiveness, whereas we’re not supposed to treat men that way because it would be gay or something plus men are ugly.
February 16th, 2010 at 10:44 pm
@mythago: Sure, but by “sharp difference,” I meant, “sharp, but still possibly more cultural than innate” difference (i.e. some claimed gender differences are barely there at all if you actually look at the data closely, and others are there, but still both have lots of actual people on the other end of the spectrum from where you’d expect people of their sex to fall, and also aren’t necessarily innate just because they’re large).
And it’s certainly the case that the “men are more visual” that gets inferred from differences in consumption of mainstream porn sometimes gets stretched to lengths at odds with, say, women’s actual level of interest in hot movie stars and rock stars.