What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [77]
Layer II: Sexual Orientation: Do You Love Men or Women?
Sexologists use the term object choice to denote how we come to love what we love. Gay activist groups, on the other hand, say we have no choice at all. I think the truth is in between, although much closer to the gay activists than to the sexologists. I therefore call this layer sexual orientation rather than sexual object choice. The basic sexual orientations are homosexual and heterosexual.8 When does a person become heterosexual or homosexual? How does it happen? Once sexually active, can he or she change?
Exclusive homosexuality. We must distinguish between exclusive homosexuals on the one hand and bisexuals (optional homosexuals) on the other. Most men who have sex with other men are bisexuals. About 15 percent of American men report that they have had orgasms with members of both sexes, but the figure may now be lower in the wake of AIDS. A large minority of men who are homosexual, in contrast to bisexuals, are exclusively homosexual. They number between 1 and 5 percent of all men. As far back as they can remember, they have been erotically interested only in males. They have sexual fantasies only about males. They fall in love only with males. When they masturbate or have wet dreams, the objects are always males. The orientation of the exclusive homosexual—and that of the exclusive heterosexual—are firmly made and deep.
Sexual orientation may even have its origin in the anatomy of the brain. In a highly publicized and technically well done study, brain researcher Simon Levay looked at the brains of newly dead homosexual men, heterosexual men, and heterosexual women. Most had died of AIDS. He focused his autopsies on one small area, the middle of the anterior hypothalamus, which is implicated in male sexual behavior and where men have more tissue than do women. He found a remarkably large difference in tissue: Heterosexual men have twice as much as homosexual men, who have about the same small amount of tissue as women. This is fascinating because this is just the area that controls male sexual behavior in rats; this area develops when the brains of male rats are hormonally masculinized before birth.9
So it is possible to speculate that exclusive homosexuality in males is an attenuated form of MF transsexuality, which is in turn an attenuated form of AIS. In this theory, the sexual organs, sexual identity, and sexual orientation for the 46XY male may each have its own separate masculinizer, and so three separate levels of hormonal failure can occur.10 It might be three different hormones, or it might be a matter of how much hormone. So, for example, with complete hormonal failure, no masculinization occurs: The baby is a chromosomal male with external female organs, female identity, and whose sexual orientation will be toward men—AIS. With grossly insufficient masculinizing hormone, the baby is a chromosomal male, with male organs, but whose sexual orientation will be toward men and whose sexual identity will be female as well—an MF transsexual. With somewhat insufficient hormone, a chromosomal male results, with male organs and male identity but whose sexual orientation will be toward men—an exclusively homosexual male.
In this speculation, the subsequent hormonal events (as yet undiscovered) occur commonly during gestation: A 46XY (normal) male is insufficiently masculinized. He is masculinized enough, however, to have a male identity and to have male external organs. The main effect is to prevent the growth of the medial anterior hypothalamus and so to change just one aspect of erotic life: Sexual orientation is prevented from ever being toward women.
It is important to note that identical twins are more concordant for homosexuality than fraternal male twins, and that male fraternal twins are more concordant than nontwin brothers: Out of fifty-six pairs of identical twins in which one was established as homosexual, 52 percent turned out both to be homosexual, as opposed to 22 percent of male fraternal twins. Only 9 percent