First Gay marriage, then Polygamy (its happening!)

Ok, this may just be me being pedantic, but from a genetic point of view, anything non-genetic is environmental. This is one of the things that people often get confused about on this issue. If a geneticist talks about "environmental factors" that pretty much means everything excluding genes. For instance, finger length ratios are correlated with hormone exposure in utero, which is an environmental factor. Now, those hormone levels may be influenced by the mother's genes, and the effect those levels have will depend on genetic factors in the embryo. But it seems that a lot of people, when they hear "environment" automatically think of those old stereotypes of child-abuse, absent or "effeminate" father, or overbearing mother.

True, but I believe that more recently opinion has changed somewhat. There are several studies suggesting that, with men at least, sexual orientation is largely bimodal - ie. most men self-report as exclusively hetero or homosexual. Further, a recent study has suggested that even when men do report as bisexual on the Kinsey scale, the majority of the time they are still only physically aroused by one gender or the other. This study makes several important points: First, even for heterosexual or homosexual individuals their level of arousal was greater for images of the non-arousing sex than for the arousing sex. However, their arousal in response to the arousing sex was significantly greater. Second, self-reported bisexuality did not correlate with a bisexual pattern of arousal. NB: This study used a measure of genital arousal - this may be different from subjective arousal.I also think the distincions used in this study may be useful:
Sexual orientation - the degree of sexual attraction or arousal.
Sexual behaviour - this can be quite different from orientation.
Sexual identity - labels such as "heterosexual", "bisexual" or "homosexual" individuals give themselves. Again, this can differ from sexual orientation.

Thanks for that. That's weird, when I edit the post, the URL does show up correctly. Help, anyone? Here's the URL anyway: Shorthened a long sucker link. Use peek to learn how.Whoops, yeah, that's a misstatement. It should have been "their level of arousal was greater for images of the non-arousing sex than for neutral images." So a heterosexual male is aroused more by images of other males than images of, say, kittens. Not really surprising. That is of course true. However I would argue that self-reported orientation is going to be much more fluid and influenced by cultural norms than physical arousal. I mean, many homosexual individuals initially identified as heterosexual - but that doesn't mean that they were actually aroused by the opposite sex more than the same sex. Similarly, I bet you'd have a hard time finding anyone willing to refer to themselves as homosexual in countries where that carries the death penalty, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.My main point here was that sexual behaviour and sexual attraction are two different things, and that I believe sexual behaviour would be far more susceptible to cultural influence than attraction is. If you are going to define sexual orientation as who a person has sex with, then yes it is very dependent on culture and other factors. Exactly. Physical arousal is separate from actual sexual behaviour. If you are going to limit the term "sexual orientation" to sexual behaviour, then strictly speaking people would be born asexual. They would become hetero- homo- or bisexual when they become sexually active. However, I don't think this is really a very useful definition.This message has been edited by AdminJar, 10-20-2005 03:29 PM