Why "Preference" should be used to describe sexuality - but isn't

Chris Crain has a long post about gender differences and that difference as it plays out in self-identified gay individuals.

This whole area of gender differences as they play out in behavior is often simplified to the point of becoming unrecognizable and horribly, horribly inaccurate. There have been long treatises on homosexuality for decades now - its causes and its effects.

Homosexual behavior is pervasive in higher animals, particularly mammals. Joan Roughgarden has done significant work in this area. A theoretical basis for the persistance of homosexuality being conserved through evolution has been addressed at some length by Richard Dawkins of The Selfish Gene. And there are alot of other variations on these themes.

From a evolutionary/population biology standpoint, Richard Dawkins has addressed, most directly, the persistance of homosexuality and evolution. Homosexuality clearly has some evolutionary benefit (I think the sterile worker idea in bees is a great place to found this arguement). The null hypothesis is that homosexuality should die out because these individuals do not pass on their genes to the subsequent generations. However, homosexuality still hangs around.

My pop psychology/pseudoscience thought is that homosexuality is certainly NOT an orientation for every person. In fact, preference is the correct term for most people and orientation is only for those who are statistical outliers (i.e. the tails of the distribution).

I think for many Kinsey 6 people, there is no choice. These Kinsey 6s talk exclusively about orientation - and that is probably an accurate interpretation of their sexuality. Fine - they can walk around and say that they are absolutely gay and that that gayness is not a choice and that they are good people who deserve equal rights....and so on and so forth. This is the 90s view and has been VERY useful (along with HIV/AIDS activism) to get some basic civil rights discussions going - it also allows the HRC-style approach to gay marriage and Gays in the Military. This approach is: "Gay people are no different that straight people and gay people deserve equal rights".


But viewing sexuality, and particularly homosexuality, as a bimodal distribution with two maxima around the Kinsey 0s (as the absolute maxima and straight) and the Kinsey 6 (as a local maxima representing the "not a choice" gay people) is (I think) very, very wrong. This bimodal distribution is really far fetched when you consider other distributions in nature. Occam's razor would state that this very unusual bimodal distribution is a unlikely explanation. I would argue that the term "preference" is far more accurate for most people than "orientation". Clearly "orientation" is an apt description for those extreme examples (e.g.Kinsey 6s), but these cases are a minority.

My feeling is that we need to think about sexuality as something much more fluid. The net sexuality of a person has a number of inputs: 1)genetics, 2)societal influence, 3)mental state of the person, 4)current conditions that the person is dealing with, etc etc etc.

A very blunt example of why preference might be a better term than orientation is for prisoners: "Gay for the stay".
Another very blunt example might be LUGs: "Lesbians until Graduation". Gay advocates using the 90s model might get very upset about these as extreme examples. But my point is that both of these cases are, in fact, legitimate phenotypes. The genotype and the environment combine to form the phenotype (what you see). And the phenotype is not static/constant/invariant/etc.

I would argue that people are constantly changing their position on the Kinsey scale based upon their genetics and the myraid of environmental forces. The discussion of a "gay gene" as the sole cause of homosexuality is at best silly and at the worst, a gross oversimplification. This sort of gay/not-gay bimodal idea is regularly transformed into a sensational stories and an excellent fund-raising causes. Ellen DeGeneres has worked this idea to death! This gay/not-gay debate can be used to sell papers and "inform" people about human rights by gay advocacy groups. But this conceptualization of gayness as an "orientation" has no real bearing on the true nature of homosexual activity or homosexuality. Discussions about orientation has been a useful phase in the drive towards equality for all in American culture - but the orientation discussion is probably becoming stale and definitely inaccurate.

There is a genetic component to homosexuality but, for most people, it gets DROWNED out by the environment. If you are young and experimenting, are you gay? What is your Kinsey scale when you are goofing off with the neighborhood kid or the Boy Scout camping trip? Later, what is the same person's Kinsey scale when you are getting married to a woman that he deeply loves and cherishes? A zero? How long do you have to average thoughts/acts/partners to come up with a Kinsey rating? Think about it - totally subjective!

What would the soldiers in ancient Sparta be - gay? Or ancient Athens? Or Rome?

I would argue that most people are swimming in the Kinsey 2 to Kinsey 4 range most of the time but are "identifying" as Kinsey 0 or Kinsey 6 based upon the pushing and shoving of environmental influences in our society.

How would people identify if society were not so bimodal in its approach (i.e. Gay on one side and Straight on the other)? How would people behave if they grew up in a sexuality neutral environment? The discussion would be almost always offered in terms of preference - orientation is far too fixed a term to handle the fluidity of sexuality. And orientation has such a fixed quality about it...which is why it has been so useful for the 90s style discussions about gay rights.

But "preference" presents a diffuse and nebulous view of sexuality that is difficult for many people to conceive. And certainly difficult for gay rights organizations to project as a "educational opportunity". This sort of "preference" concept implicit in people making choices based upon their genetics and environment requires people in a society that has a gay/straight mindset to begin thinking about something quite different. This mental conflict might be "How Gay am I?". Can you ask men and women to think about how they feel deeply in their own hearts and to go through laborious self-examination of where people are on the Kinsey scale?

In our culture, as it is now, this preference discussion is neither possible nor realistic. Our popular culture cannot handle soemthing as nuanced as "preference". Additionally our culture finds protracted discussion of complex issues anethma. However, because society cannot handle the level of nuance necessary for discussing sexuality in terms of "preference", does not make the idea of discussing sexuality in terms of "orientation" as either correct or accurate. Orientation is an idea that sexuality has been stuffed into because it is an easier sell and can be grasped by the population (to a degree). Preference is a far more difficult sell from a political standpoint and a non-starter when you think about Western religion and tradition.