Body of evidence
She's measuring.
My hair is currently– for the first time ever– short enough to easily determine which direction the whorl goes. It opens up a whole world of possibilities. Like, I can finally figure out whether I’m a gay man or not.
In the early to mid aughts we started hearing about research that suggested that more gay men had counterclockwise hair whorls (about 23%) than one finds in the general population (about 8%). This accompanied other modern-day phrenology like relative finger lengths, thumbprint ring density, left-handedness, that all seemed to correlate (according to some studies) in varying degrees with gayness.
But it seems like the finger length and whorl things are trotted out most often, probably because you can compare them more easily in a social setting, but they’re subtler than left-hand dominance. Can you imagine saying, “Oh, you’re left handed! Surely you’re gay!” It would be absurd! But I’ve heard people say that a counterclockwise whorl means someone’s gay, having a longer index than ring finger means that you like guys, or having a longer ring finger means you’re attracted to women.
I don’t know about you, but by varying the pitch of my fingers slightly I can make either one look longer, although I think my index finger is slightly longer, which means OH GOD I’M NOT REALLY A BISEXUAL! I also have a clockwise whorl and I’m right-handed. Oh, god. But actually, no one seems to study the physical differences in the bisexual population. I guess they’re just waiting for us to make up our minds.
I feel like things get dangerous when the public gets a hold of data from (more or less) scientific studies or surveys. Holly’s post on Monday points out a perfect example of this phenomenon, discussing some article that dimly justifies tired gender stereotypes with the decrees of some monolithic entity call science, which doesn’t appear to function quite like any actual scientific community I’ve ever heard of.
Take the whorl thing. The only study I’m aware of that examines the population of counterclockwise whorls on homosexual heads occurred at a Pride Festival in Southern California. Its sample size was about 50 men, which isn’t large enough to “prove” much of anything. We could say that the study suggests that gay men may be more apt to have counterclockwise whorls, but without actually knowing if there was adequate control we could also say that counterclockwise whorls could be disproportionately represented in Southern Californians, or in extroverts, who might be more liable to attend an outdoor festival, or maybe there are more counterclockwise whorls in men who are out, but closeted men have the standard 8% of whorls. We don’t know. We didn’t do the study, and unless we have access to all the information we might just be parroting piffle.
There are reasons it would be cool if we could prove that homosexuality was genetic. All that talk about “choice” might melt away, and maybe people would stop being jerks, right? Right? Maybe. But finding a “cause” for gayness is pretty damn close to protesting that it’s “not their fault”, isn’t it? And there’s no fault anywhere, so we definitely don’t have to go looking for whom to blame. At this time in history, isolating a “gay gene”, or the non-simplistic form of the same concept, would invariably spawn a movement to cure it. Same-sex attraction existing is awesome. It adds to the rich tapestry of human experience, and I personally don’t want to be cured of it because chicks are hot.
The thing is, it makes a good story to say that there are physical “symptoms” of gayness, but as far as I’m concerned the only reliable tell is the whole “sleeping with someone of the same gender” thing, and even that can sometimes steer you wrong.
Ugh. My mom totally subscribes to this belief, which is probably why she had such a hard time believing bisexuals existed, let alone that I was one and happy with it. She wanted me to watch a “documentary” with her on the fingerlength thing which, of course, completely focused on a hetero/homosexual dichotomy. Thanks, mom!
My theory is that these people are actually supplicants to a god called “Psyence” that is represented in my head as something of a cross between an Easter Island statue and the floating Moses dreidel from South Park.
Psyence makes regular pronouncements with great gravitas and authority and this is why his word is so often repeated.
What if someone doesn’t have the Gay Gene but they feel attracted to the same gender–are they, um, wrong?
How about vice versa?
@artsynomad Yeah, I don’t know where bisexuals are meant to fit into this whole picture, but sometimes people get irritated when you pretend they don’t exist.
@LabRat I like this theory. If only people would stop misspelling this mysterious god’s name! It would avoid so much confusion.
@Holly Pervocracy No clue whatsoever! I guess we should ask Psyence. Surely he’ll know the answer.
Psyence says: “RESPECT MAH AUTHORITAAAAAAAAAAAH!”
@Christina LMT Ah, yes, the fallacy of appealing to authoritaaaaaah! :D
Several other commenters already mentioned that these Psyentifical studies seem to ignore bisexuals.
I find puzzling the conflation of bisexuality with homosexuality; the don’t seem like closely related phenomena to me. Being attracted to the opposite sex makes one a bisexual not a homosexual; a sexual aversion to the opposite sex stronger than the aversion to the same sex makes one a homosexual.
In my limited personal acquaintance with homosexuals (all lesbians), homosexuals were not marked by their attraction to the same sex, which wasn’t particularly pronounced, but by their sexual aversion to the opposite sex. Every one of them that I knew well had significant past abuse by the opposite sex (the ones I didn’t know well might or might not). The sample size here is so small as to be meaningless (three) but it still makes me extremely suspicious of genetic causes.
From one male point of view, I’ve also sometimes found men to start looking attractive when feeling particularly abused by women; that has followed a feeling of sexual aversion to women.
@LabRat
I love Psyence as the name of a god.
Poor Darwin, co-opted posthumously as chief Prophet of Psyence! His simple, logical, well-proven theory, (of changes in populations of organisms which survive and reproduce disporportionately based on inheritable and infrequently mutable survival traits), attracts more Psyence than any other theory. Moral improvement as an inevitable result of evolution, evolution as origin of life rather than origin of species, even evolution as origin of matter. And then that feeds the creationists. Science: ur doin it rong.
Mousie00, that’s a rather negative definition of homosexuality. And in any case, it’s anecdotal. I know plenty of gay men and women who haven’t been abused – they just are attracted to the same sex. They still maintain friendships with people of the opposite sex, too, which wouldn’t make sense if they had an aversion to the whole sex. I also know some bisexuals (and heterosexual women) who have been abused by men and continue to be attracted to other men. People can recognize that just because one man or woman is abusive does not mean that all men or women are. I’m not saying no one is gay for that reason, I’m just doubting the prevalence of it.
Yeah, I’m going to have to second “your sample is biased”. Of all the gay people I know, both male and female, they have no particular animosity to the opposite sex- and no abuse- but also have no attraction to the opposite sex whatsoever. Most poignant in the case of the gay guy who I met when he was still in the closet and whom I pegged as gay years before he came out because I had never heard a straight guy insist he was straight because he “wanted a traditional family” rather than because he thought boobs and pussy were awesome.
As a side note, I’ll second “poor Darwin”. He was an excellent scientist of his era, but he was wrong about a lot of things (just not things most people who aren’t evolutionary biologists themselves are aware of), and far from any sort of prophet.
Watching creationists try to discredit evolution by discrediting him makes me giggle, though. It’s like trying to disprove physics by demonstrating that Newton believed in alchemy.
@Mousie00 As a bisexual, I prefer not to conflate bisexuality with homosexuality anymore than I want to conflate it with straightness. It does warrant juxtaposition, though. Being gay and being bi both deal with same sex attraction, so naturally when you’re talking about one the other often comes up. Also, bi people often date gay people and/or identify with the gay community. They’re not the same thing, but they’re related.
If you find someone who has never been abused or hurt by any member of the opposite sex, let me know. If we find more than four of these fantastical creatures in the known universe, maybe we’ll have a control to test your theory against.