ddbmma
Apr 7, 2006, 11:03 AM
Article Summary: I, big fancy doc, say there are no bisexual men, but there is a large gray area of sexuality.
Pardon a bit of unformally educated ignorance. "Duh. Tell us something new?"
It reminds me of a quick speech given by my wife once about writing.
"What do you eat, breathe, sleep, dream, wake to do each day?"
"Write?"
"Yep, so you're a writer damn it! Write."
In the end everyone winds up dead, banners do not matter then. I'm a human being that enjoys sexual realations with men and women equally. There's also love in that picture. Should I worry about a fancy doc saying men bisexuals don't exist? Probably not.
If I look at it from one point of view, that doc spent over 80k to get nice butt wipe paper to hang on his wall. I can pay four bucks and get four double rolls. Who has better sense? Gray area, indeed. It's like me walking up to him and saying, "why do you call yourself a doc?"
I better scoot before pulling out the Invisible Pink Unicorn argument.
i don't know where this bailey guy comes from, but there is research showing a continuum in sexual attraction in men. i think the research says that women fall on a more even curve and that men do tend to peak at the "gay" and "straight" ends but that there are a number who fall "in the middle." it's that "middle" part that people keep trying to ignore!
in some ways he is on the right track in saying that sexual attraction is less changeable than sexual behavior and sexual identification. people can try to control who they actually have sex with, or try to be "on the down low" about it, and people can also call themselves many different things, but the underlying desire is always there. i just don't know about the conclusions of his research and using porn and a penis-measuring device as the method.
also, the end of the interview is very interesting. they seem to get into a battle about feminism. it's like bailey is saying that "i'm studying femininity in gay men because there's nothing wrong with it and i value the feminine equal to the masculine." and the interviewer is saying, "why do we always stigmatize feminine things and there are masculine gay men as well as feminine gay men." funny enough, i think they're both on the same side. but the interviewer does seem to get very emotional.
mimi :flag1:
Driver 8
Apr 7, 2006, 2:02 PM
it's like bailey is saying that "i'm studying femininity in gay men because there's nothing wrong with it and i value the feminine equal to the masculine." and the interviewer is saying, "why do we always stigmatize feminine things and there are masculine gay men as well as feminine gay men."
Bailey has claimed elsewhere that MTF women and gay men have the same condition, and that MTF women just have a more extreme case of it. For him, sexual orientation pretty much is gender identity. In that larger context, I really don't think that Bailey values the feminine as much as he's holding on to an ideal of "real" manhood that gay men don't measure up to.
rumple4skin
Apr 7, 2006, 2:27 PM
We identified a group of men who claimed strong bisexual feelings and measured their erections to male and female, and we had precise predictions on what we should find under the hypothesis that true bisexuality exists as an orientation.
I do not claim to be a scientist but doesn't having "precise predictions" kind of close his mind to what the findings will be?
If I am thinking of the same study he is referring to he discarded a significant percentage of the results from "straight" men who did not react to any of the stimuli they were shown. If I had a theory about something and found data that did not fit into my theory I would have to reconsider my theory not just disregard the data. It is easy to use the statistics that will only support your theory. I would not call that objective research. I would call that deceptive.
I am bisexual, but that does not mean that every piece of female porn or male porn arouses me. I do not think the results of his study should be given 60 seconds let alone 60 minutes. Not because he makes a claim I do not agree with but because I think his methods are suspect.
If “true” bisexuality does not exist then I will be very happy to continue being a pretend bisexual. Maybe I suffer from multiple personality disorder and I have a straight personality and a gay personality. Oh wait - I got it... Maybe I just do not need to fit into his narrow little view of the world.
He said he likes to hang out with "fem" guys and would prefer to hang out a gay bar. Does that mean that he is insecure around masculine men? Maybe he has some deep issues there. LOL
:soapbox:
*Climbs down off his soap box and throws it at the quack*
Was that too aggressive for a bisexual male (who really must be gay and therefore feminine?) ;)
Gotta go - I have to run and put some nice flowers on my motorcycle.
Long Duck Dong
Apr 7, 2006, 11:49 PM
sounds to me like this guy is being objective in his study, rather than being subjective
I would love to see his research.....
in a nutshell, saying gay male are feminine, bisexual men doesn't exist and that men are either gay or straight, requires totally objective and biased opinions in research
personally, I believe that gayness / bisexuality, can be a personality/ genetic / society conditioned way of life, and I put it that way, cos I am no expert of all of mankind, but I beleive we decide how we live, and if we act upon our sexual desires, urges and attractions
we have people that cover the ranges of masucline, feminine, gay, straight, bi etc and also decide what is acceptable in the way of sexuality and profession
in new zealand we had the worlds first transgender MP ( member of parliament and city mayor ) geogina beyer, and the current female prime minister ( helen clark ) stated her marriage is a sham, she only got married cos soceity dictated the PM mus be married as its good in the public eye... she was the PM behing the civil union bill being introduced into legal law in new zleand
yet, gayness is still classed as a *condition that needs a cure *
APMountianMan
Apr 8, 2006, 11:49 AM
I am not sure why so many are getting upset with what J. Michael Bailey has to say. My own Q&A with Mr. Bailey revealed some interesting insights. Let’s examine them, shall we?
I noted that you categorized who was gay and who was straight along the lines of arousal. Is that correct?
Why, yes. As I have said before, you’ve got to be precise. Sexual orientation for men is a directed sexual arousal pattern. If they’re strongly aroused by men, they’re homosexual in respect to their sexual orientation. Much more strongly aroused to men than to women—they’re homosexual. If they’re much more strongly aroused to women than to men, they’re heterosexual. If they got strongly aroused to both sexes, they’re bisexual, but that’s what we found no evidence for. Even men who claim bisexual feelings in the lab are aroused to one sex more than the other.
Of course I am interested in your findings in regards to bisexuality, but let me stay with the arousal principal for a minute. What I am wondering is, in your research, when you looked at the groups of men aroused by men but also by women, which group had the larger percentage? Was the group aroused more strongly by women larger or the one more strongly by men?
That is an interesting question. We identified a group of men who claimed strong bisexual feelings and measured their erections to male and female, and we had precise predictions on what we should find under the hypothesis that true bisexuality exists as an orientation.
I understand that, but that is not what I asked. Let me phrase the question this way: when you look at the general population, is there a correlation between sexual orientation of the groups observed in your study?
Of course we found correlations between the established beliefs toward orientation in the general populations of heterosexuality to homosexuality in our study.
What was that correlation?
We could say between seven and thirteen percent of the general population could truly be classified as homosexual.
That would be the combined percentage of men that are strongly aroused by men or more strongly aroused to men than to women?
That would be the percentage that is strongly aroused by men.
I’m confused. I thought that you classified as homosexual those men who are strongly aroused by men or more strongly aroused to men than to women?
Well, we’re talking about sexual orientation. So, for example, if a hypothetical man is married to a woman and only has sex with her, but in order to do so fantasizes about men, and all his sexual fantasies are about men, but he thinks of himself as a heterosexual man, what’s his sexual orientation?
According to your definition, he would be gay. That’s brings up another interesting question, if you combined the number of men that are much more strongly aroused to men than to women and much more strongly aroused to women than to men into one group, and those that are strongly aroused by men into a group of their own, and the men that are strongly aroused by women into a group of their own, what would the research tell us.
I see where you are going with this, but we identified a group of men who claimed strong bisexual feelings and measured their erections to male and female, and we had precise predictions on what we should find under the hypothesis that true bisexuality exists as an orientation.
Maybe your predictions and hypothesis are incorrect.
The general population bears out our findings.
You mean that there are more heterosexuals in the general population than homosexuals?
Precisely.
But that isn’t what your findings tell us at all is it? Truly doctor, if we combine the men that are much more strongly aroused to men than to women, the men much more strongly aroused to women than to men, and those that are strongly aroused by men into a group, don’t we find that the men that are strongly aroused by women are in the minority in the general population?
What are you trying to say?
Simply that the world is far more queer than straight.
That is not what the research shows at all. You are trying to change the predictions and hypothesis to prove your assumptions.
No, I am looking at the research and allowing it to produce its own conclusions. You’ve made it so clear to me. It's a queer world after all! Any final comments? Dr. Bailey? Dr. Bailey? Dr. Bailey, are you still there? Seems we were somehow disconnected.
:cool:
JohnnyV
Apr 18, 2006, 10:16 PM
Bailey could only be right if an erection meant the same thing in every man, and if an erection as a response to one kind of visual stimuli also predicted love, companionship, compatibility, friendship, domestic happiness, etc. The problem is that in the modern world we've come to link all these things to sex, and then one bizarrely penis-obsessed scientist tried to define sex entirely according to erections.
Below is a NEW YORK TIMES article that's a lot better.
J
------------------------
March 7, 2006
Many Couples Must Negotiate Terms of 'Brokeback' Marriages
By KATY BUTLER
One hour into "Brokeback Mountain," Amy Jo Remmele began to cry, and not just for the woman on-screen, standing in a doorway in Riverton, Wyo., watching her husband embrace a man.
"When I saw that look in her eyes, I thought, 'Oh, yeah.' Even though I never saw my husband with another man, I knew exactly how that woman would have felt," said Mrs. Remmele, a respiratory therapist in rural Minnesota.
On June 1, 2000, Mrs. Remmele, then 31, discovered her husband's profile on the Web site gay.com. The couple stayed up all that night weeping and talking. Soon afterward, 10 days before she gave birth to her second child, Mrs. Remmele's husband went off to spend a couple of nights with his new boyfriend. "I tried to talk him out of it, and he left anyway," Mrs. Remmele said. "I was devastated." Three months later the couple divorced.
Mrs. Remmele — now married to a farmer who raises cattle, corn and soybeans — is one of an estimated 1.7 million to 3.4 million American women who once were or are now married to men who have sex with men.
The estimate derives from "The Social Organization of Sexuality," a 1990 study, that found that 3.9 percent of American men who had ever been married had had sex with men in the previous five years. The lead author, Edward O. Laumann, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, estimated that 2 to 4 percent of ever-married American women had knowingly or unknowingly been in what are now called mixed-orientation marriages.
Such marriages are not just artifacts of the closeted 1950's. In the 16th century, Queen Anne of Denmark had eight children with King James I of England, known not only for the King James Bible, but also for his devotion to male favorites, one of whom he called "my sweet child and wife."
Other women include Constance Wilde, Phyllis Gates, Linda Porter, Renata Blauel and Dina Matos McGreevey, wed respectively to Oscar Wilde, Rock Hudson, Cole Porter, Elton John and James E. McGreevey, the former governor of New Jersey.
Although precise numbers are impossible to come by, 10,000 to 20,000 such wives have contacted online support groups, and increasing numbers of them are women in their 20's or 30's.
On the whole these are not marriages of convenience or cynical efforts to create cover. Gay and bisexual men continue to marry for complex reasons, many impelled not only by discrimination, but also by wishful thinking, the layered ambiguities of sexual love and authentic affection.
"These men genuinely love their wives," said Joe Kort, a clinical social worker in Royal Oak, Mich., who has counseled hundreds of gay married men, including a minority who stay in their marriages. Many, he said, considered themselves heterosexual men with homosexual urges that they hoped to confine to private fantasy life.
"They fall in love with their wives, they have children, they're on a chemical, romantic high, and then after about seven years, the high falls away and their gay identity starts emerging," Mr. Kort said. "They don't mean any harm."
Helen Fisher, a research anthropologist at Rutgers University, said in an interview that human partnerships are shaped by three independent neurochemical brain-body systems, responsible respectively for sexual attraction, romantic yearning and long-term attachment.
"The three systems are very fickle. They can act together, or they can act separately," Dr. Fisher said. This, she said, helps explain why people can be wildly sexually attracted to those they have no romantic interest in, and romantically drawn to — or permanently attached to — people who hold no sexual interest.
"Once the system is triggered, it's so chemically powerful that you can easily overlook everything about that person that doesn't work for you," Dr. Fisher said. "Even straight people have fallen in love with people they could never make a life with," she said.
This is cold comfort to women who lose not only the men they love, but also their faith in how to parse reality. "A lot of women feel that they were just used as covers, but I know in my heart of hearts he loved me," Mrs. Remmele said. "You can't fake the way he used to look at me.
"I had no suspicions whatsoever. He's very masculine looking. It's not like he had Barbra Streisand or show tunes on."
Mr. Kort, however, said that women should look deeper. "Straight people rarely marry gay people accidentally," he wrote in a case study of a mixed-orientation marriage published last September in Psychotherapy Networker, a magazine for which this reporter is the features editor.
Some women, Mr. Kort said, find gay men less judgmental and more flexible, while others unconsciously seek partnerships that are not sexually passionate.
But that sort of speculation infuriated Michele Weiner-Davis, a marriage therapist and author. "That's psychobabble," Ms. Wiener-Davis said. "A lot of gay people don't know they're gay. So how in the world are their spouses supposed to have some sort of gaydar?"
She continued, "Therapists should deal with the real issues — the shock to her system, that her husband wasn't who she thought he was and the impact on her own identity."
In the months after the discovery, Mrs. Remmele said, her husband left her alone with the baby on many evenings as he explored desires he had never dared to acknowledge. "So many of the gay spouses, they've denied themselves for so long, and it's like they're going through teenage-hood," Mrs. Remmele said. "I don't know if they really realize how much they're hurting their spouse."
At first, Mrs. Remmele told nobody. "We live in a small rural community, and people just aren't openly gay here," she said. "I didn't want people making fun of him."
About two-thirds of the women who contact the International Straight Spouse Network in El Cerrito, Calif., eventually divorce, said Amity Pierce Buxton, 77, a retired school administrator who founded the group in 1992 and has been researching the topic since 1986.
Despite their shock and their anger, many women, especially those criticized by gay husbands for being too sexually demanding, are relieved to understand what was wrong.
The remaining third of those she has studied try to preserve their marriages, Dr. Buxton said. Half of those stay married for three years or more. More than 600 such couples belong to online support groups.
In a 2001 study, published in The Journal of Bisexuality, of 137 still-married gay and bisexual men and their wives, Dr. Buxton found that most lived in suburbs and medium-size cities and had been married for 11 to 30 years. Only tiny percentages lived in rural areas, where family privacy may be harder to maintain.
The survival of even a small minority of these marriages calls into question the conceptual shoe boxes into which human partnerships, affection, attraction, commitment and sexuality are often jammed. Describing their permutations and combinations turns out to be much more complicated than checking a box on a form labeled "gay," "bisexual" or "straight."
One woman in her 50's, who asked to be identified only as Trillian, out of concern for her husband's privacy, said that she and her husband formally divorced after she discovered his secret sexual life seven years ago, but they quickly decided to stay together. She has a satisfying monogamous sexual relationship with him, while he also has sex with men.
"He tried to go back in the closet, but the more research I did on the subject, the more I realized this is an integral part of the person," she said. "You can't just turn it off like a light switch. My husband is the man of my dreams, and I could not face the rest of my life with the man of my dreams being miserable and guilt ridden over being gay."
She and her husband, together for 24 years, live in Ohio and work in manufacturing plants.
Paulette Cormack, a teacher who lives in Napa, Calif., has been married to her husband, Jerry, a retired city planner, for 36 years. For 34 years, Mrs. Cormack said in an interview, she has known that although she and her husband are sexually active together, his erotic desires otherwise focus almost exclusively on men. "It's not easy, but I truly do love him," Mrs. Cormack said.
Mr. Cormack is now involved with another married gay man, and Mrs. Cormack has had extramarital relationships. Neither has explicitly discussed this with their son, who is 25.
They remain intensely committed to each other. Last year Mr. Cormack nursed Mrs. Cormack through four months of treatments for cancer of the fallopian tubes. She eventually made a fully recovery.
"What is intimacy?" pondered Mr. Cormack, as the couple sat in a coffeehouse in Berkeley, Calif., after watching "Brokeback Mountain" with others in similar situations.
He added: "I am totally committed on all levels to Paulette. I felt so intimate with her when I was caring for her during her cancer treatments — to me, that's a stronger expression of love than whether I'm having anonymous sex with a man."
Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
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