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Author Topic:   Why Do Gay Men Sound Gay?
Blue Jay
Member (Idle past 2697 days)
Posts: 2843
From: You couldn't pronounce it with your mouthparts
Joined: 02-04-2008


(3)
Message 28 of 165 (779261)
03-02-2016 10:34 AM
Reply to: Message 13 by Theodoric
03-01-2016 8:21 PM


Hi, Theodoric.
Theodoric writes:
What is amazing is that your bigotry seems to know no bounds. What possessed you to think this was a topic worth discussing?
You have a vile stereotype for everyone that is different than you. Crawl back under your rock.
What possessed you to think that this response was proportionate to the offense?
I thought we wanted to encourage asking questions as part of the process of tearing down walls and building bridges, and all that.
We all harbor suspicions that Faith's question may be more than just innocent, idle curiosity; but letting yourself get all rankled at the very outset of a thread is only going to make it worse.
Other posters seem to have been able to start a fruitful discussion on the topic, despite the potential undertone of bigotry in the opening post. Why not try that approach for once?

-Blue Jay, Ph.D.*
*Yeah, it's real
Darwin loves you.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 13 by Theodoric, posted 03-01-2016 8:21 PM Theodoric has not replied

  
Blue Jay
Member (Idle past 2697 days)
Posts: 2843
From: You couldn't pronounce it with your mouthparts
Joined: 02-04-2008


Message 70 of 165 (779447)
03-04-2016 12:02 PM
Reply to: Message 42 by coffee_addict
03-02-2016 8:38 PM


Re: some odds and ends
Hi, Lammy.
Lammy writes:
To further clarify, the reason you (and probably most other people) recognize this "gay" accent is because of the few that speak this way.
In your experience, about what proportion of gay men would you say speak with the classical "gay accent"?
Edited by Blue Jay, : No reason given.

-Blue Jay, Ph.D.*
*Yeah, it's real
Darwin loves you.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 42 by coffee_addict, posted 03-02-2016 8:38 PM coffee_addict has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 71 by coffee_addict, posted 03-04-2016 1:34 PM Blue Jay has replied

  
Blue Jay
Member (Idle past 2697 days)
Posts: 2843
From: You couldn't pronounce it with your mouthparts
Joined: 02-04-2008


Message 73 of 165 (779476)
03-04-2016 3:12 PM
Reply to: Message 71 by coffee_addict
03-04-2016 1:34 PM


Re: some odds and ends
Hi, Lammy.
Lammy writes:
I don't think there is anything wrong with the campy gay voice.
For sure, there's not anything wrong with it. I just came in with the preconception that it was a really common thing, but I was basing that on a small sample size (I can only think of about a dozen openly gay men that I know). It sounds like I need to recalibrate my worldview.
Lammy writes:
So... let's leave the attempts at coming up with explanations to the experts who do studies, shall we?
Well, let's rely on the high-quality information they provide to inform our opinions, but let's not use that as a reason to avoid trying to understand it on our own.
I think Faith is an intelligent person who's genuinely trying to understand. But I also think she's bringing a lot of philosophical baggage into the discussion, and I think it will ultimately prevent her from reaching a conclusion that I find reliable. Still, I believe there's value in the effort, so we should try to recognize her good qualities.
(Easy for me to say, right? I don't really have a horse in this race: I'm just here out of idle curiosity.)
Lammy writes:
I'm not sure why homophobes like Faith feel the need to explain everything...
Well, I understand it. I'm a scientist: my main motivation in life is understanding how and why things are the way they are. I sometimes get frustrated with social and political pressures that inhibit my drive to learn what I want to know.
On the other hand, I can also understand why the scrutiny could become incredibly fatiguing to a gay person.
Lammy writes:
...and I'm of the opinion that being gay can both be a choice and born this say.
Heterogeneity is the general rule for everything, I think.

-Blue Jay, Ph.D.*
*Yeah, it's real
Darwin loves you.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 71 by coffee_addict, posted 03-04-2016 1:34 PM coffee_addict has not replied

  
Blue Jay
Member (Idle past 2697 days)
Posts: 2843
From: You couldn't pronounce it with your mouthparts
Joined: 02-04-2008


(2)
Message 91 of 165 (779538)
03-05-2016 12:49 PM
Reply to: Message 81 by jar
03-04-2016 7:59 PM


Re: 'taint none of my business
Hi, Jar.
jar writes:
I'm continually amazed that such questions and issues even come up. When peoples acts or beliefs or behavior or dress or intonation has absolutely no effect on my beliefs, behavior, dress or intonation why would or should I care whether it is a matter of choice, genetics or some combination of both.
You're right, who needs knowledge when you can have ignorance instead?

-Blue Jay, Ph.D.*
*Yeah, it's real
Darwin loves you.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 81 by jar, posted 03-04-2016 7:59 PM jar has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 92 by coffee_addict, posted 03-05-2016 1:06 PM Blue Jay has replied

  
Blue Jay
Member (Idle past 2697 days)
Posts: 2843
From: You couldn't pronounce it with your mouthparts
Joined: 02-04-2008


Message 95 of 165 (779546)
03-05-2016 2:14 PM
Reply to: Message 92 by coffee_addict
03-05-2016 1:06 PM


Re: 'taint none of my business
Hi, Lammy.
Lammy writes:
It depends on how you want to acquire the knowledge.
My dad, for example, make a guess with no basis in reality and believe it for all time.
For sure: one certainly has to complete the investigative process. Otherwise, I'm not sure on what basis they could be calling their conclusion "knowledge."
And this is certainly a criticism of Faith that's fully justified. She doesn't finish the investigative process: she just reasons to a comfortable conclusion, then digs in her heels.

-Blue Jay, Ph.D.*
*Yeah, it's real
Darwin loves you.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 92 by coffee_addict, posted 03-05-2016 1:06 PM coffee_addict has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 105 by Faith, posted 03-05-2016 5:20 PM Blue Jay has replied

  
Blue Jay
Member (Idle past 2697 days)
Posts: 2843
From: You couldn't pronounce it with your mouthparts
Joined: 02-04-2008


Message 122 of 165 (779612)
03-06-2016 1:13 PM
Reply to: Message 105 by Faith
03-05-2016 5:20 PM


Re: explaining things
Hi, Faith.
Faith writes:
Blue Jay writes:
And this is certainly a criticism of Faith that's fully justified. She doesn't finish the investigative process: she just reasons to a comfortable conclusion, then digs in her heels.
People psychoanalyzing or otherwise explaining me around here are something I just have to shrug off all the time as it is.
While I was writing that post, I had this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I have been too psychoanalytical recently, and your comments just confirmed that for me.
I had originally included an "I think" in that sentence, but I thought it made me sound to wishy-washy, so I deleted it. In retrospect, it would have been more appropriate, because it was a tentative hypothesis, not a conclusion.
Faith writes:
I have NOT said anything I treat as fixed in concrete, you are reading anything like that into very brief remarks I've made.
Well, technically, I'm reading that conclusion into your 23 posts from this thread, 171 posts from Oh No, The New Awesome Primary Thread, and 43 posts from our old Great Debate thread, Reduction of Alleles by Natural Selection (Faith and ZenMonkey Only); as examples that are particularly prominent in my mind.
I felt comfortable presenting my hypothesis for your behavior because I feel like I've seen enough data over the years. I suppose it's up to everybody else to decide whether or not they think I'm right.
But, as for myself, I think you tend to transition too quickly to the "conclusion" step and don't spend enough time at the "careful consideration" step.
Faith writes:
And where are you getting "comfortable conclusion?" "Comfortable?" Do you impute that motive to everybody who tries to understand something, or just me? I may offer my reasoning in general terms because it makes sense to me.
It's a very normal, pragmatic human process of thinking: people tend to think about something until they come up with a solution that satisfies them, and then stop looking for solutions. My argument is that your criterion for "satisfaction" with an argument is less rigorous than I think it should be.
You usually start out with what I believe is an honest and sincere question ("Why do gay men sound gay?" or "Why do people think Trump is racist?"), you listen to what other people say for a couple pages, you consider it for awhile, then you make a decision that almost inevitably goes completely against what everybody else is saying, and defend it against all comers, which attracts a dog-pile.
That said, I don't think I want to keep pushing this, because it's not really on topic.
I think gay men sound gay for a variety of reasons, and that there's a very wide bell curve around the average "gayness" of a gay man's voice, such that it's really hard to see clear patterns. That's why people there's such a wide range of opinions on the topic.

-Blue Jay, Ph.D.*
*Yeah, it's real
Darwin loves you.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 105 by Faith, posted 03-05-2016 5:20 PM Faith has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 125 by Faith, posted 03-06-2016 3:45 PM Blue Jay has not replied

  
Blue Jay
Member (Idle past 2697 days)
Posts: 2843
From: You couldn't pronounce it with your mouthparts
Joined: 02-04-2008


(2)
Message 123 of 165 (779622)
03-06-2016 1:43 PM
Reply to: Message 74 by Theodoric
03-04-2016 3:42 PM


Re: The harm of stereotypes
Hi, Theo.
My institution has access to the actual study your source referred to and Modulous linked to, so I took some time to read it this weekend. Here's the abstract.
In a nutshell, the authors recorded 25 men reading several passages (a technical passage, a dramatic passage, and a personal anecdote), and tried to see how accurately people could rate how "gay" the men's voices sounded.
Here are some snippets:
quote:
The main effect of Speaker’s Sexual Orientation (.55 for the gay speakers and
.28 for the straight speakers) was also significant: F(1,43)5165.42, P , .0001.
For people who don't speak statistics, this means the sexual orientation of the man speaking had a real effect on whether or not listeners thought he "sounded gay," even though the listeners did not know the man's sexual orientation. In other words, men who were actually gay were more likely to have voices that listeners identified as "sounding gay" than men who were actually straight.
That said, it also appears that it's uncommon for somebody of any sexual orientation to "sound gay": only 10 of the 25 voices were classified as "sounding gay" by more than half of the listeners. Interestingly, 9 of those 10 men actually were gay.
Now, putting the snippet into context, here's the entire paragraph:
quote:
The main effect of Speaker’s Sexual Orientation (.55 for the gay speakers and
.28 for the straight speakers) was also significant: F(1,43)5165.42, P , .0001.
This is hardly surprising given that the speakers were not randomly selected. Some
of the men were invited to be recorded precisely because we hoped that they would
be judged to have gay-sounding voices.
This recruitment strategy was successful,
as we now have a varied sample for our database, including a sufficient number
of gay-sounding voices for future acoustic analysis. It is likely that a random
sample would have yielded a much smaller proportion of gay men, which in turn
would have resulted in an even smaller proportion of gay-sounding voices.
So, the study sample is not representative of the gay community: it was specifically chosen to allow an analysis of the acoustic properties of the "gay voice," and not to allow an analysis of whether gay men actually talk that way.
There's also another section called "Gaydar Analysis" (awesome, isn't it?). Here's an interesting quote:
quote:
The main effect of Speaker’s Sexual Orientation was highly significant
(F(1,43) 5 28.75, P , .00001): the straight talkers were more accurately identified
than the gay talkers (.72 vs. .55).
Modulous's source said this:
quote:
In 62 per cent of the cases, the listeners correctly identified the speakers as gay.
...which isn't accurate. The 62% was the percentage of men whose sexual orientation was accurately identified by their voice. Identification was more accurate for straight men than for gay men: the listener only correctly identified a gay man by his voice in 55% of trials, which is not much better than coin-flipping.
Note, I didn't say "not much better than random guessing," because randomness is defined by a preconceived hypothesis, not necessarily a 50-50 choice. Most people's preconceived hypothesis is probably that gay men are comparatively less common than straight men (so, not 50-50), so they are more likely to guess "straight" than "gay" if they aren't sure. So, 55% accuracy is probably considerably better than random guessing. Of course, also note that the sample was intentionally biased toward men who would likely "sound gay," so it's hard to make that judgment.
In my mind, perhaps it would be more accurate to argue from this data set that there's an identifiable "straight voice," and that gay men are less likely to conform to it than are straight men.

-Blue Jay, Ph.D.*
*Yeah, it's real
Darwin loves you.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 74 by Theodoric, posted 03-04-2016 3:42 PM Theodoric has not replied

  
Blue Jay
Member (Idle past 2697 days)
Posts: 2843
From: You couldn't pronounce it with your mouthparts
Joined: 02-04-2008


(2)
Message 146 of 165 (780045)
03-10-2016 1:49 PM
Reply to: Message 141 by Theodoric
03-09-2016 8:38 PM


Re: Yay science
Hi, Theo.
You have to be really careful with this stuff. Once again, the paper you linked to can't really support the broad claim that "gaydar is a myth." The problem is that they isolated a few specific components of the "gay" archetype, and discovered that people couldn't use those specific components, in isolation, to reliably identify gay people.
Here's a link to the abstract.
Basically, they found public-domain photographs of people who self-identified as "gay" or "straight," cropped them so only the face or face-and-hair were visible, and paired them randomly with a single profile statement of varying "gay-stereotypicality": for example, "he plays football" or "he is a hairdresser" or "he likes to travel." They saw no consistent trends in the effect of facial or hairstyle cues on gaydar results, but the statements did influence people's gaydar judgments.
This is a far cry from what happens when people actually attempt to use their gaydar in real-life situations. Speech, mannerisms, clothing style and other factors also play a role; and it's the aggregate of many different factors that likely serve as the basis for the claimed "gaydar" ability. So, isolating one component and saying "this doesn't tell you whether a person is gay" is not debunking the overall myth.
That said, I tend to roll my eyes at anybody who claims to be able to make this type of snap-judgment with any kind of accuracy. Most likely, they are suffering from confirmation bias, and even if they are accurate, they've likely misidentified the reason why (e.g., in the previous paper, listeners claimed that "gay-sounding" voices are "high-pitched," but the voices they identified as "gay-sounding" were not actually high-pitched voices).
Then again, some computer algorithms can identify gay people with 88% accuracy based only on innocuous Facebook likes, so perhaps gaydar is a more plausible idea than we think it is.
-----
One thing that I've not seen is a comparison between different stereotypes. For example, has anyone ever tried to compare the accuracy of "gaydar" to the accuracy of "gamer-dar" or "pedophile-dar" or "liberal-dar" or anything else like that?
Because, so far, all the evidence seems to take the form of "well, that wasn't very accurate, so you must not have that ability." But, what is the expected accuracy for something like this? Isn't it entirely possible that 55% accuracy (or whatever) is abnormally good for "stereotype-dar"? How would we know?

-Blue Jay, Ph.D.*
*Yeah, it's real
Darwin loves you.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 141 by Theodoric, posted 03-09-2016 8:38 PM Theodoric has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 147 by Theodoric, posted 03-10-2016 1:54 PM Blue Jay has replied

  
Blue Jay
Member (Idle past 2697 days)
Posts: 2843
From: You couldn't pronounce it with your mouthparts
Joined: 02-04-2008


(1)
Message 150 of 165 (780065)
03-10-2016 4:11 PM
Reply to: Message 147 by Theodoric
03-10-2016 1:54 PM


Re: Yay science
Hi, Theo.
Theodoric writes:
If it is no more accurate than chance it isn't accurate.
Well, I agree with you. The problem is that none of these studies provides an estimate for what results "chance" would yield. To do that, you would need a way of truly randomly sampling people, like picking every nth person who passes to be "gay."
So, if 10% of people actually are gay, then I would expect that about 10% of any random sample would be gay. If I instead pick people based on my gaydar, and 30% of the people I picked actually are gay, what does that mean? Clearly, the gaydar "works," doesn't it? I mean, it improves my odds of identifying a gay person. It's still wrong most of the time, but from the perspective of an individual making decisions on the fly, it sure seems to help some.
This is kind of the double-edged sword of the stereotype: just because it's usually wrong doesn't mean it doesn't work. Calling it a "myth" because of it's inaccuracy is misrepresenting the function that a stereotype serves to the individual. We didn't evolve our cognitive mechanisms to accurately organize global information into appropriate categories: we evolved our cognitive mechanisms to improve our chances of making useful local decisions on a case-by-case basis.
That's my take anyway. But, I'm not a psychologist, so I may be way off.

-Blue Jay, Ph.D.*
*Yeah, it's real
Darwin loves you.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 147 by Theodoric, posted 03-10-2016 1:54 PM Theodoric has not replied

  
Blue Jay
Member (Idle past 2697 days)
Posts: 2843
From: You couldn't pronounce it with your mouthparts
Joined: 02-04-2008


Message 154 of 165 (780120)
03-11-2016 9:44 AM
Reply to: Message 149 by caffeine
03-10-2016 3:04 PM


Re: Yay science
Hi, Caffeine.
caffeine writes:
...the square root of fuck all...
You got my 'cheer' because of this phrase alone.

-Blue Jay, Ph.D.*
*Yeah, it's real
Darwin loves you.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 149 by caffeine, posted 03-10-2016 3:04 PM caffeine has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 161 by caffeine, posted 03-11-2016 12:22 PM Blue Jay has replied

  
Blue Jay
Member (Idle past 2697 days)
Posts: 2843
From: You couldn't pronounce it with your mouthparts
Joined: 02-04-2008


(1)
Message 162 of 165 (780152)
03-11-2016 12:25 PM
Reply to: Message 158 by Theodoric
03-11-2016 11:37 AM


Re: Yay maths!
Hi, Theodoric.
Theodoric writes:
You are pulling #'s out of the air and expecting them to be some how evidence for your argument. How could being wrong 50% of the time be better than random guessing?
This is the question Modulous and I both just answered. The made-up numbers were specifically used to illustrate of how 50-50 can be better than random guessing.
You're assuming that, because there are two choices, the odds of guessing right are 50-50. But, that's only right when the two choices are qual. It's usually estimated that less than 10% of people are gay. So, the odds for random guessing are really 9-to-1. That means, if you randomly guess that a given person is gay, you'll be wrong 90% of the time.
Compared to that, being wrong 50% of the time doesn't seem all that bad, does it?
We don't know what the numbers actually are, because none of the studies we've discussed really tried to determine those numbers; but you can't just assume that a binary choice gives you 50-50 odds.
Edited by Blue Jay, : No reason given.

-Blue Jay, Ph.D.*
*Yeah, it's real
Darwin loves you.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 158 by Theodoric, posted 03-11-2016 11:37 AM Theodoric has not replied

  
Blue Jay
Member (Idle past 2697 days)
Posts: 2843
From: You couldn't pronounce it with your mouthparts
Joined: 02-04-2008


(1)
Message 163 of 165 (780153)
03-11-2016 12:26 PM
Reply to: Message 161 by caffeine
03-11-2016 12:22 PM


Re: Yay science
Hi, Caffeine.
caffeine writes:
I'd love to clam credit, but it's quite a common saying in the UK.
Well fine, then. See if I ever try to 'cheer' you again.

-Blue Jay, Ph.D.*
*Yeah, it's real
Darwin loves you.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 161 by caffeine, posted 03-11-2016 12:22 PM caffeine has seen this message but not replied

  
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