Tobias writes:
I don’t like the way you scale homosexuality and heterosexuality, even though I know what you mean and it isn’t wrong, but I wouldn’t scale as a ratio of the two orientations, but rather an absolute ratio, which makes in my opinion more sense, since not everyone has the same sex drive.For example imagine a scale of 1 to 100, 1 for minimal sexual attraction and 100 for maximum sexual attraction. Someone could theoretically have a number of 90 for both females and males, while someone else has 20 for males and 80 for females. In your scale the first guy would have 50% for female and 50% for males, while the other one would have 20% male and 80% female and thus it could look like the second guy is more attracted to women, even though the first guy is actually more attracted to women.
First of all I would like to thank my good friend Tobias for his excellent comment. I use this scale a lot in therapy with my clients and everyone likes it a lot.
Here is the scale once again. I got the idea for it from a book on sexology by a sex therapist.
100-0: Maximum heterosexual, minimum homosexual
90-10: Maximum heterosexual, incidental homosexual
80-20: Maximum heterosexual, significant homosexual
70-30: Maximum heterosexual, strong homosexual
60-40: Maximum heterosexual, very strong strong homosexual
50-50: Maximum heterosexual, maximal homosexual
40-60: Maximum homosexual, very strong heterosexual
30-70: Maximum homosexual, strong heterosexual
20-80: Maximum homosexual, significant heterosexual
10-90: Maximum homosexual, incidental heterosexual
0-100: Maximum homosexual, minimal heterosexual
Maximum would mean maximum for that person.
First of all, I think we ought to accept that males who are:
50-50: Maximum heterosexual, maximal homosexual
40-60: Maximum homosexual, very strong heterosexual
30-70: Maximum homosexual, strong heterosexual
20-80: Maximum homosexual, significant heterosexual
10-90: Maximum homosexual, incidental heterosexual
0-100: Maximum homosexual, minimal heterosexual
have a biologically set drive, fixed by age 15, that is maximally homosexual. They are turned on more by males than by females, except for the 50-50’s. I think we should be kind to these men because I do not think they chose these orientations.
The data I have shows that 0-100’s seem to ~3% of the male population. However, if you include all men from 0-100 to 40-60, it seemed like that included up to ~7% of all males. I estimate these because it was a bar graph and you had to estimate values. So there may be more than a bit of truth to the 10% are gay chestnut.
When we test heterosexuals with gay and straight stimuli in the lab, they come out like this: maximum heterosexual, minimum homosexual.
For homosexuals, it is typically maximum homosexual, minimum heterosexual.
For a while, bisexual men were consistently testing maximum homosexual, minimum heterosexual, exactly the same as gay men, and there were debates in the sexology community about whether bisexual men even existed or whether they were all just gay men who were lying.
However, recently a number of men were found who claimed to be bisexual and scored something like maximum heterosexual, maximum homosexual, so the conclusion in the field now is that true male bisexuals do indeed exist.
Your scale is not bad. You are going on the basis that some folks have different sex drives. On my scale, keep in mind that each higher number including the 50-50’s, means maximum.
The thing about my scale is it does nothing for intensity. All it points out is the ratio of homosexual to heterosexual attraction in any given individual.
To tell the truth, all of those numbers in my scale are fixed by age 15. Sex therapists have tried to change males from gay to straight, and not only can they not do so, but they can’t even move them around on the scale. They have also had some 90-10 and 80-20 straight guys come in who had a bit of homosexual attraction which bothered them and they wanted to be rid of it, but he was not able to move them on the scale either.
After a while he stopped taking new male patients who wanted to change their sexual orientation as he said he could not take their money in good conscience. He then patiently explained to them how he felt that these ratios were fixed early in life, possibly at birth, and could not be altered by any known therapeutic method.
He thought that the ratios must be biological and must have been fixed early in life somehow. He suspected since birth but I am not so sure. Whether those values are fixed before age 15 is not certain because in the study I read, the youngest male was age 15. In order to study younger males, we are now studying the sexuality of young male teenagers and pubertal boys, and it might be hard to get funding for that or legal problems may arise.
This same therapist also found that there was a correlation between his scale and masculinity and femininity in males. That is to say that on the scale, the stronger the homosexual attraction was in the man, the more feminine he was. And conversely, the stronger the heterosexual attraction was, the more masculine the man was.
Now that is not to say that there are not rather feminine heterosexual men and some very masculine homosexual men, but there does seem to be a trend whereby males act more masculine the stronger their heterosexual drive is and more feminine the stronger their homosexual drive is. The sexologist felt that masculinity-femininity ratios in men were set very early in life just like their sexual orientation and perhaps in tandem with it, and he had the feeling that their degree of masculinity or femininity was biological.
I am not sure if that is true, but it is interesting to think about.