aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

On Gaydar & female sexual orientation

New York Magazine ran a major look at Gaydar, the Science of Sexual Orientation last week.

Among the findings - gay men are more likely than straight men to have a counterclockwise “hair whorl” at the back of the head, an increased density of fingerprint ridges on the thumb and pinkie of the left hand, and an index finger longer than their ring finger.

Such differences are less distinct in women:

In many other studies, though, lesbians have appeared less unique than gay men, leading some people to wonder if their sexual orientation is innate. Michael Bailey-who, as a heterosexual researcher, is a minority in this field-even doubts the existence of female sexual orientation, if by orientation we mean a fundamental drive that defies our conscious choices. He bases this provocative gambit on a sexual-arousal study he and his students conducted. When shown pornographic videos, men have an undeniable response either to gay or straight images but not both, according to sensitive gauges attached to their genitals-it’s that binary. Female sexual response is more democratic, opaque, and unpredictable: Arousal itself is harder to track, and there is evidence that it defies easy categorization. “I don’t yet understand female partner choices very well, and neither does anyone else,” Bailey wrote me in an e-mail. “What I do think it’s time to do is admit that female sexuality looks in some ways very different from male sexuality, and that there is no clear analog in women of men’s directed sexual-arousal pattern, which I think is their sexual orientation. I am not sure that women don’t have a sexual orientation, but it is certainly unclear that they do.”

He contends that what they have instead is sexual preference-they might prefer sex with women, but something in their brains can still sizzle at the thought of men. Many feminist scholars agree with this assessment, and consider sexuality more of a fluid than an either-or proposition, but some don’t. “I think women do have orientations, but they don’t circumscribe the range of desires that women can experience to the same degree as men,” says Lisa Diamond, a psychology professor at the University of Utah, who is writing a book on the subject. “For women, there’s more wiggle room. You can think of orientation as defining a range of possible responses, and for women, it’s much broader.”

Bailey is a controversial figure in the LGBT community. He “has notoriously declared that true male bisexuality doesn’t exist and dismissed many transgender people as peculiar sexual fetishists.” The female sexual orientation observation is an intriguing one nonetheless.

RELATED: Can you tell whether someone’s gay just by the way he or she walks?