by pretzelboy » 27 Jan 2008, 13:12
I read the article about bisexuality and have decided that the instrument they used is not reliable at all. There is a correlation with self-reported sexual orientation and genital response in males, but it isn't a very good one--not nearly good enough to reliably predict/find out someone's sexual orientation. And some people did have bisexual response, but the article ignored them because they had self-reported Kinsey scores of 0 and 6. So now I'm back on board with the 2-Dimensional scale for sexual orientation. While we're talking about it, I'll make another really long post (sorry).
Because I want asexuality to be more widely acknowledged as a sexual orientation, I would like to get to see a model of sexual orientation that includes asexuality to be more widely used (i.e. that of Storms.) However, I am aware of only three studies that have attempted to use it, and one more of less ignored asexuality. I would like to get to see this model used more (and I think it is a better model than the Kinsey scale) but I can’t do anything about it, so I emailed Tony Bogaert about it since he’s published about asexuality (and I thought his papers were better than the other one I’ve seen.) I felt really pretentious doing so given that he is a well respected researcher in the field and I’m a first year grad student in an unrelated field. But, whatever. Anyway, my email was about 8 pages (he read all of it and responded, though I can’t tell if the response meant that he liked my ideas or was totally blowing me off, but he did say that he agrees that the Storms model is a good one that deserves more use.) Essentially, I was trying to say “I think someone should write publish a paper about this, but I’m unable to do so.” Anyway, I’ve excerpted from my email (lest I bore everyone too much by giving the whole thing.) I gave five reasons I think that the Storms model is better than something like the Kinsey or Klein scales:
[Of my five reasons] the first two are given in Storms 1979 & 1980. The last three are more or less my own (I’ve seen them before, but never in relation to this question.) Also, I will use the terms 2-dimensional scale (2DS) and 1-Dimensional Spectrum (1DS) despite the fact that I am aware of the fact that the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid is a multi-dimensional model.
Arguments supporting 2DS.
1.) It deals better with bisexuality. When hetero and homo-eroticism are placed on one continuum, bisexuals become half-breeds of sorts—half heterosexual, half homosexual, but not wholly anything. Furthermore, according to it, we should expect that the more homosexual desire one feels, the less heterosexual desire one feels. Likewise the more heterosexual desire one feels, the less homosexual desire one feels. In the 2DS, they are independent. This gives the following (testable) predictions: The 1DS expect bisexuals to experience less (on average) homosexual attraction than homosexuals and less heterosexual attraction that heterosexuals. The 2DS predicts that bisexuals will experience similar levels of heterosexual attraction as heterosexuals and similar amounts of homosexual attraction as homosexuals. This is (one of the) hypotheses that Storms tests in his paper, and his data shows that the latter of these turns out to be true.
2.) The 2DS explains asexuality and makes it different from the other categories. In the 1DS, asexuality is totally inexplicable. Given that there are some people who are not sexually attracted by people of either sex, having a model that accounts for this fact, is a lot better than having a model that can’t.
3.) There is no clear distinction between asexual and non-asexual. Both the 1DS and the 2DS predict that there will be no clear dividing line between heterosexual and bisexual and between homosexual and bisexual. People can experience some level of same sex attraction and still be considered (and self-identify) as heterosexual. Likewise with homosexual. The point at which there is enough same sex attraction to move from heterosexual to bisexual is not at all clear (and I think it’s largely a matter of self-identification). The same is true for the line between asexual and any of the other three sexual orientations. This comes from the fact that asexuality is defined as a sexual orientation describing people who experience “little or no sexual attraction.” This raises the question, “How little is little?” What if a person has never experienced homosexual attraction, but only rarely feels heterosexual attraction? What about a person who experiences sexual attraction once every 2 years, or once a year, or once a month or once day or several times a day, several times an hour? The point at which one moves from “asexual” to “sexual” is blurry. The 2DS predicts that we will find people in this range (in asexual lingo, they are sometimes called “gray A’s.”) This doesn’t necessarily contradict the 1DS, but the 2DS predicts and explains it, but the 1DS does not. Furthermore, the 1DS leads to some absurd conclusions.
4.) Sexual reorientation therapy provides an interesting piece of evidence. I don’t know much about this subject as I have only read a little about it. However, one thing I have found suggests the 2DS. Some of the older method of “curing” homosexuality involved methods from behaviorism that would associate homoerotic stimuli with icky fumes or some sort of highly unpleasant stimuli (offhand, I don’t recall). The idea was to create the connection of homoerotic stimuli=unpleasant and thus eliminate homosexual desires. Some of the people who underwent this “treatment” report that they have become “asexual.” They were told that the treatment would get rid of homosexual desires and that heterosexual desires would eventually arise on their own. However, what happened for many people is that the homosexual desires did go away, but the heterosexual ones never came.
The belief that as homosexual desires decrease heterosexual ones should increase is in fact precisely what one should expect from the 1DS—as one becomes less homosexual, one becomes more heterosexual. However, the 2DS predicts that what actually did happen is what we should have expected. If a bisexual gets rid of homosexual desires, they become heterosexual. If a homosexual gets rid of homosexual desires, they become asexual. The 2DS predicts that decreasing homosexual desire and increasing heterosexual desire are two separate things, as this seems to indicate.
5.) Suppose that our 2DS homoeroticism ranges from 0 to 100 and the same is true for heteroeroticism. Homoeroticism is on the X axis, and heteroeroticism in on the Y axis (as it appears in the picture in Storms 1980), and let’s make the cutoff for asexuality lower than 10 on each. The 2DS tells us that some heterosexuals should be somewhere about (0, 40) and some should be around (0, 80). Intuitively, this feels right. The 1DS doesn’t contradict this point, but it doesn’t account for it either. However, this leads us to the biggest problem of this model, which is really one of the biggest problem of studying sexual orientation:
What are we measuring anyway?
It seems tempting at first to think that the difference between the (0,40) person and the (0,80) person are different because the latter has stronger sexual desires. After all, we all know that some people have much stronger sexual desires and some people have weaker sexual desires, and these can fluctuate within the same person throughout their life. So it makes sense to account for this fact with the 2DS. I see two problems with this, however. The first is that it would mean that if a person were to have sexual desires decrease a lot (from a thyroid problem, depression, stress, etc.) their sexual orientation would change, not just level of desire. But if that problem were resolved (I think) the sexual desires should go to about what they were before the problem. The 1DS might predict this better than the 2DS (if the 2DS has to do with level of sexual desire.) To solve this, I’m going to propose that we are only wanting to measure frequency of attraction. Even doing this, the problem of changing “sexual orientation” with decreasing of desire still bothers me (if desire goes down, I would imagine that frequency of sexual attraction may well go down as well. Another point I don’t have any data on.) Technically, there is no a priori reason to have problems with this. We could propose an “underlying” sexual orientation that could temporarily be different from present sexual orientation based on changes in level of sexual desire. And then we have the problem of to what extent sexual orientation is static and to what extent it is fluid (which, it is my understanding is still somewhat of an open question, and might also vary among the sexes.)
The 1DS doesn’t have this problem with differing levels of sexual desire and different rates of frequency of sexual desire and what their relationship might be. However, I don’t see this as an advantage. Essentially, the 1DS gets around the problem by ignoring it. The 2DS doesn’t have that option, but I don’t think ignoring data is necessarily a theoretical advantage.
The second issue is another piece of evidence from asexuality. Assuming that a sort of felt need for sexual release (from masturbation, for example) is a sort of sexual desire (and intensity of sexual desire is what is being measured on our axes), we should expect that people who don’t experience sexual attraction would not masturbate. But this isn’t true. Thus, it seems that sexual desire (in terms of feeling a need for sexual release either from autoerotic or sociosexual behavior) is somehow independent of when on the 2DS scale one falls. (Which means that saying asexuals are just low desire sexuals isn’t true. Frequency of masturbation among many would seem to indicate they aren’t necessarily low desire at all—at least for some.) But I’m pretty sure that what we are wanting to measure is frequency of sexual attraction. This is definitely what we are measuring at the low numbers. (In the 1DS, relative frequency is measured. In the 2DS we may be doing something like absolute frequency.)
Anyway, in the email that I sent him I also argued why people with paraphilia shouldn’t necessarily be excluded from the category of asexual (which he did in the paper where he argued for asexuality as a sexual orientation) and I proposed a way of doing self-report of sexual orientation with this model. There was also a decent sized introduction explaining why I was writing the email.
