> more than 70 percent of the self-reported adolescent nonheterosexuals had somehow gone “straight” as older teens and young adults.
Sexual orientation isn't a fixed value that stays the same forever. Especially during teenage years, a lot of people are still unsure of their preferences and may identify a in a certain way at a certain point in time that they won't down the line.
And yes, of course teenagers are likely to check random boxes as well - either to be silly, or because they fear that their results may be identified and used against them by parents/teachers.
None of those 2 things should be shocking for anyone who's ever worked with teenagers.
Say that to some gay rights activists and they will get VERY upset (usually those that defend that gays are born gay, and thus this is why gays must have several rights, and why the religions should not consider it wrong).
I had a particularly heated discussion once, with a hetero woman that was sympathizer of gay rights, she was VERY convinced that sexual orientation was fixed, she told me that there is no such thing as "ex-gay", and all "ex-gay" are just closeted homosexuals and will become gay again given enough time.
I gave her some articles about ex-gays complaining about receiving MORE flak after becoming ex-gay than when they were gays (including there is a existance of... closeted hetero, people that were gay, and do not assume to be hetero because both hetero and homosexuals then attack them, assuming he is still a sort of traitor gay), this still did not convinced her.
Then I showed a discourse by Luiz Mott (leading gay rights activist in Brazil), where he claims that he was hetero, and now is gay by his own choice, and that he was NOT born gay.
This STILL did not convinced her, she told me that Luiz Mott was a liar, but only in that case (and that everything else he says is true).
"Then I showed a discourse by Luiz Mott (leading gay rights activist in Brazil), where he claims that he was hetero, and now is gay by his own choice, and that he was NOT born gay."
That is a truly remarkable claim that a person with one sexual orientation could choose to change it and become a different orientation.
"Although Mott attributed change to people who were "not 100% homosexual," he made it clear ... that he believes that "all human beings have, as Freud said it, a bisexual desire," and that sexual preference is something fluid and changeable."
The claim that people are by default bisexual and choose between two preferences is very much different from the claim that people with one well-defined sexual orientation may arbitrarily change it. The latter doesn't hold up.
When I was coming out, uniformly the response from mature members of the LGBT community was that defining myself was not useful, and that it wasn't important to stress out over whether I self identified as straight, bisexual, gay, queer, or whatever. What's important is that you're happy, that you're not preventing yourself from forming romantic and sexual relationships with people you want to do so with, and that you're not facing discrimination for those relationships.
I've personally had probably a dozen friends who thought they might be bisexual later decide that they were straight (and many who decided they weren't). I applauded them for their open mindedness in seriously considering it, and experimenting to see the truth of the matter (we were all scientists and engineers, after all). After that process, I am certainly more confident that they are actually straight than if they'd just assumed it to be the case without evidence.
So yeah, in my experience people are "born gay" "born straight" or "born flexible". Some people "born straight" experiment with bisexuality, and end up the better for it. Some people "born gay" experiment with heterosexuality, and end up the better for it. And unlike some, I do believe in bisexuality, or being attracted to someone based on personality alone. It's much more rare than a fixed sexuality, but I've definitely met people who very legitimately are interested in both men and women.
Real people don't fit neatly into one of the three 'gay', 'bi' or 'hetero' boxes. At certain times, ages, around certain people, in certain situations, anybody might feel more or less attracted to someone than they would in other situations for a whole range of reasons.
Trying to pigeonhole people as 'ex-gay' or 'gay by choice' doesn't seem like a useful exercise.
Using a throwaway as I am not out yet and If I am out, I would be disowned at best or killed at worst.
Sexuality is fluid. That is 100% true. Though I'd never been attracted to women, sexually, I had fooled with a friend in Uni, who is bi. He says that he started liking guys only after he was 20. He never thought about having sex with guys before and asked why he wanted to have now, he said initially he was curious and now he likes it after trying for the first time.
The concept of sexuality being fluid can be a touchy topic to gay activists and also some gay people is because of the religious people. If everyone starts to think that sexuality can be changed, the bigots and crazy religious people will put more effort into the conversion therapy. In the current state of the world, that will do more harm than good.
I suspect there are degrees of fluidity: that some people have a flexible orientation largely driven by choice and experience (I know at least one person who reports this is how it is for her), but for others, orientation is largely fixed and even significant conditioning efforts don't make much of a difference.
> The concept of sexuality being fluid can be a touchy topic ...
I sometime wonder if sexuality is fixed and if a gene is found for it (and hence a "cure" is available) that the bigots and crazies would be even more vocal.
The woman you were talking to was an idiot. For proof look no farther than identical twin studies that show that while sexuality has a large genetic component, there is an environmental component as well. Furthermore people can be confused over their sexuality - either way - for a very long time. And other people don't have an easily classified sexuality.
To give an interesting example, how would you classify a male who is mentally a woman (had not yet had the operation) and into BDSM with both genders? (For the record, I don't do hypothetical examples ...I know enough interesting people that I don't have to.)
In general, if you have a simple model of how people work, it is almost certainly wrong. And if it is both simple and in accord with your personal politics, the likelihood of it being wrong goes way up.
Anecdotes, particularly those pertaining to a subjective experience, are almost by definition not-particularly-credible.
I'm sure there's no shortage of people who will swear quite convincingly that faith healing ceremonies are legit. Doesn't mean I would accept their testimony as evidence, though.
> Data is mismeasured, misinterpreted, misremembered, or simply made up in studies all the time.
Scale matters. You're basically arguing that because evidentiary errors occur in scientific studies, that all evidence from all sources is therefore equivalent. That's simply not the case.
However, if you insist on maintaining this stance - we'll just have to agree to disagree.
I am simply saying that a single counterexample is sufficient to disprove a universal statement. That is logically unassailable.
The only discussion then is around the credibility of the example. Scale is completely irrelevant to disproving a universal statement with a counter example.
I'm just stunned their data is as good as it is. In high-school I never answered a single survey like that honestly. Nobody I knew did. The idea that adults would be shocked to learn that all teenagers had unprotected sex with hundreds of random partners a month was too amusing.
In retrospect, there may have been a reason we had to go to so many educational 'assemblies'...
I'm on the reverse end of the spectrum. When researchers came in to ask questions about violence and weapons in schools, I truthfully tried to help them as best I could. It was only later that I understood that, when they asked if I'd seen a student fire a weapon at school in the past month, they hadn't meant for me to include the latin club's trebuchet.
Even if you have honest answers, it's a minefield to phrase questions so that you get the data that you think you are getting.
For example, there's a statistically significant amount of men that have sex with other men, but who self-identify as heterosexual. That group might end up in either camp if the survey isn't aware of the issue and phrases the questions badly, which makes quantitative studies much harder to do.
Being in this demographic (I graduated high school in 1996), right away this reminded me of a friend of mine who was so not gay but claimed bisexuality in this time period. I don't think it was in any way a prank, I just think there was a certain trendiness about it. Looking back, a sort of aggressive tolerance of GLBTs feels like a defining factor for my generation from the kids who came up in the late 80s.
After my generation it just seems to be taken for granted a bit more, and thus uninteresting to youth culture. I realize this is just anecdotal, but suffice it to say that this result does not surprise me in the least and I think researchers are bit out of their depth when they try to ascribe logic to the phenomenon ex post facto. The "data" they have does not reflect the dominant cultural psychology of the time which is paramount in any youth study.
I think the assumption that self-reported data can be trusted makes a mockery out of every field of study that relies on it.
Setting aside the fact that it's hard enough to design a double (triple?) blind study of mice, setting aside the fact that people will lie and joke around for pleasure, how can you ever get past the fact that 'who we are' and 'who we want to be' are inextricably linked?
According to some accounts, Margaret Mead, the most celebrated anthropologist of her generation, was similarly trolled by Samoan girls:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Trashing-Margaret-Mead-Anthropolog...
At the very least, the controversy around that study should have led these researchers to be more circumspect with their data.
I'm a little ashamed to admit that you had me googling for that. ;)
Seriously though, the idea that mice might have a placebo effect is fascinating. I would have thought that the placebo effect would require some high-level form of self-awareness (which perhaps mice do have, I don't really know) and an understanding of at least the purpose of medicine. Maybe not though...
Mice are the most intelligent species on Earth. In fact, they are so smart that they are immune to placebo effects. However, they act like they aren't because our reactions provide them much entertainment - http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Mice
I don't know what you or the OP are thinking of, but it's worth pointing out that the placebo effect is not just a phenomenon in the patients' minds; it can also be a phenomenon in doctors' minds.
In brief, any time you have a subjective measurement (for instance, the experimenter assigns a number from 1 to 5 based on how "distressed" the mice -- or human patients -- look), that subjective measurement can be subtly biased. So if the experimenter doesn't blind his experiments properly, you can see a placebo effect in animal studies.
It is appropriate to refer to these studies as double or triple blind because the single blind usually refers to the patient.
Single blind: patients do not know which group they are in
Double blind: experimenters do not know the group identities
Triple blind: overseeing committees do not know the group identities
So animal studies can be assumed to be single blind by default, and become double-blind when the experimenters do not know the group identities.
My understanding is that the "placebo effect" doesn't refer to biased numbers or reporting, but exists when everything is measured correctly. It is objectively there, not a screwy result.
"Biased" is probably a loaded word. I think I may have implied intent without meaning to.
But basically, the placebo effect only exists for subjective measurements. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo#Mechanism_of_the_effect) If something exists only in subjective measurements and not objective measurements... I'll let you draw your own inference.
My favourite part is from a related study where the youngsters "miraculously grew back missing limbs".
I think we are all getting better at noticing badly designed studies. A while back some study in the UK was publicised saying that nearly a 1/2 of 12 year olds had committed a crime, and 1/4 a violent crime. Yes. 12 year olds. The expected out cry was muted. I assume most people did what i did and imagined a study like this
* researcher walks into playground and asks group of kids if any have ever committed a crime.
- I might have taken a mars bar from the corner shop once.
- Well I take a mars bar every week
- That's nothing, I take the cash out the till while he is watching you take the mars bars.
- yeah well last week he saw me do that so i stabbed the cashier.
- Only stabbed him, I took a shotgun the last time and had to reload while the blood was pumping out of his twitching body and I slipped on his guts on the way out of the shop.
1) Adolescents are well known to be more confused about sexuality than adults, often conflate friendship and charisma with sexual attraction, and often experiment with sexuality and later decide what's for them. It's not surprising at all that the number of bisexuals would drop.
2) As I read this, they changed the question from "romantic attraction" to "sexual attraction" between the two surveys. Seriously???
> “We should have known something was amiss,” says Savin-Williams. “One clue was that most of the kids who first claimed to have artificial limbs (in the physical-health assessment) miraculously regrew arms and legs when researchers came back to interview them.”
“We should have known something was amiss,” says Savin-Williams. “One clue was that most of the kids who first claimed to have artificial limbs...miraculously regrew arms and legs when researchers came back to interview them.”
...You can't pay for better monologue material than this.
The actual percentage of homosexuality or bisexuality in adolescents is probably much higher. I am sure that there are many that answered as hetero out of fear, confusion, or peer pressure. 5 to 7 percent seems like a ridiculously low number.
One reason we gather data is because our opinions of what "seems like" reality are likely biased in significant ways based on our experiences, philosophies, and wishful thinking.
Generally speaking, surveys from various western countries seem to indicate 1-5% of adults identify as LGBT, with a slightly higher percentage of adults reporting either some same-sex attraction or same-sex sexual experience at some point in their lives. It came as a surprise when surveys revealed a higher incidence of homosexuality among teens (5-7%), who are generally more reluctant to self-identify as LGBT and less likely to be sure of their sexuality; it now appears that those answers were unreliable.
I wonder if there are also straight people who answer gay not as a joke but to try to cancel out scared homosexuals. I wouldn't be against doing such a thing... though my gay answer would be an honest one.
“One clue was that most of the kids who first claimed to have artificial limbs (in the physical-health assessment) miraculously regrew arms and legs when researchers came back to interview them.”
Assessing sexual tendencies and their occurrence in the population clearly is difficult. But is it really that hard to figure out rates of prosthetic limbs? I'd have thought there was sound data about that. And if those numbers looked funny, why would you trust the rest of the data?
I must say, I don't see the potential for confusion in "have you ever had a romantic attraction to a man/woman?". I mean, there is definitely a difference between romance and sex, but the question still seems pretty clear in what it asks. Maybe they should have asked about both.
Back in college there was a Gay, Bi and Lesbian group. My mate and I decided to gatecrash it (he even took his girlfriend). This was considered typical college behaviour, to explore the universe ...
... although I tended to prefer the local fetish club. One night I managed to survive until eight in the morning, and heard all this action coming from the third floor.
"What's going on?", I said...
"Some gay porn mate."
"Hardcore?"
"I presume so."
Sexual orientation isn't a fixed value that stays the same forever. Especially during teenage years, a lot of people are still unsure of their preferences and may identify a in a certain way at a certain point in time that they won't down the line.
And yes, of course teenagers are likely to check random boxes as well - either to be silly, or because they fear that their results may be identified and used against them by parents/teachers.
None of those 2 things should be shocking for anyone who's ever worked with teenagers.