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On science and suspicion
July 08, 2005
I think I’m going to dicontinue the Ask Audacia Fridays, at least in a formal way, because I’m not sure I can promise a post every Friday while I’m in the Europes, and because I’m not sure if I liked the format anyway. I do like that I’ve been getting more and varied questions, commentary and inquiries from my readers, so keep the questions coming if you have them. I’ll still use your questions as blog fodder, but probably not in the standard Q&A format, it’ll be more of an integrated kind of approach.
That said - this week two peculiar studies were released - actually, hold on a sec. The studies weren’t released; brief articles about the studies were released. This is pretty damn unethical; a health study and its correspnding mainstream news article is usually published on the same day. But not this week, for whatever dubious reasons.
The first one to come across my desktop was an article in the New York Times, entitled: Straight, Gay or Lying? Bisexuality Revisited, about bisexuality in men. The article basically says that there is a new study pending completion that shows that bisexuality in men may not exist.
There are a few very problemmatic bits of the study, of course (other than the fact that it isn’t fully published yet); the findings are based on evaluations of dubious scientific validity. Self identified bisexual men were shown erotic images of men and erotic images of women and their dick response was measured with a penile plethysmograph, basically a rubber band connected to a machine that measures penis engorgement.
The study assumes that the way to a man’s dick is through his eyes - erotic images are being used as the stimulus in this study. But what kind of images are they? What kind of bodies are they showing? What kind of sex acts? Are fetishes included? To say that they are “erotic” says basically nothing about the images, except that there are probably naked people in them. Other than the fact that some images show men and some show women, I’d bet that a lot of them are totally irrelevant to the sexualities of the people in the study, who by the way are being evaluated alone in a room in a medical facility.
There is a larger thing that needs to be addressed, though, something the article touches on in a brief turn of phrase as “[t]he discrepancy between what is happening in people’s minds and what is going on in their bodies.” This is no small part of the picture; to my humanitiesmind, it is the picture. Desire, identity and physical manifestations of arousal and sex are all very complex things, things that probably can’t be studied by a machine hooked up to the cock of a man watching porn. The reality is that the whole sex thing will probably never be understood, by science or otherwise - that’s what makes it so damn awesome.
The second study that my attention was directed to this week is a study on HIV and male circumcision that’s happening in South Africa - actually, the study isn’t happening, because it was stopped early due to the fact that researchers believe that enough data has been collected to make conclusions. The conclusion is basically that uncircumcised men have a higher rate of infection with HIV; risk can be lowered by adult circumcision. An important thing to note here is that these rates of infection are for unprotected sex - condoms offer the same amount of protection to both circumcised and uncircumcised men.
So - is there any validity in this claim? There might be. Let’s talk HIV transmission for a minute here. HIV needs three things to be transmitted - the presence of the virus in a person’s body, a fluid of transmission and a site of transmission. The fluids are blood, semen, pre-cum, and vaginal secretions including menstrual blood (and to be technically accurate, I have to add mother’s milk, but only mom to baby, an adult can’t get HIV by drinking breast milk, unless its a whole whole lot). Sites of transmission are open wounds anywhere on the body and any place with mucuous membranes - urethra in men or women, vagina, mouth, eyes, inside of the nose. The foreskin is a double-layered fold of skin and mucous membrane - so I guess technically since there is an increase surface area of mucous membrane, there is a higher possibility of infection. The other possibility is that during intense sessions that aren’t lubricated enough, there can be microtears in the foreskin that are inperceptible to the cock-bearer but penetrable by the virus. The likelihood of microtears are the explanation for transmission during anal sex, also.
In the context of the South African study, the idea is that adult circumsion may become more widespread as a method of reducing the spread of HIV, because “circumcision reduced the risk of contracting HIV by 70 percent — a level of protection far better than the 30 percent risk reduction set as a target for an AIDS vaccine.” It will be interesting to see how this develops.
Posted by Dacia at July 8, 2005 06:24 PM
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So it’s Friday, happy hour is over and it’s raining so I decided to surf for a bit to find my second wind…and here are my thoughts on both of those topics…
The whole circumcision = reduced risk…hooey: I’m guessing (very uneducatedly with no backing what-so-ever) that this is more of a religious and social issue than a physical attributes issue. Yes, in a lab, one with foreskin might be more at risk than one without, but sex doesn’t happen in a lab…and it doesn’t happen once. It’s a lifestyle and education issue if you ask me and it might just be that that they’re correlated.
And as far as the whole ‘no bi guys’ thing…hooey. What would I pick off the shelf if I was in a bar? A woman…yes, yes yes. What will I do when I’m turned on? Pretty much anything. It’s that simple. Honest.
Posted by: heath at July 8, 2005 06:06 PM
Here’s a great debunking of the bisexuality study: http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/07/bisexuality-study-nyt-gives-prominence.html
The researcher is under investigation for (a)ethics problems and (b)sleeping with the subjects of another study on transsexualism.
Posted by: sinboy at July 8, 2005 09:03 PM
Dacia, I get a lot of queries about this New York Times article. I think my response is more appropriate to your site than mine. Mind it I hijack you for a moment?
First of all, the newspaper of record is sloppy for publishing a report about unpublished findings. If this were about something of any significance—say, breast cancer or Viagra—we would have to wait until the New England Journal of Medicine weighed in.
Here, though, we are just dealing with male bisexuality. Apparently, no reason to worry about jumping to conclusions.
This study rushes to discount pretty much everything we know about male bisexuality. (The report notes, in passing, that women are as bisexual as ever. Hot damn, porn aficionados!)
The findings are truly radical, flying in the face of a few decades of evidence to the contrary—a point largely overlooked by Times.
Psychologists win this round. Here’s how.
Subjects were recruited from gay and alternative newspapers in Toronto. Their genitals were wired to gauge responses to lesbian and gay porn. Get hard to lezzie action, and subjects were straight. Get hard to gay porn and Mary, you are a queen.
I am not a psychologist. I assume all professional protocols were observed.
Still, a few questions nag.
Who are the subjects?
The subject group was bisexuals in Toronto, primarily culled from gay newspapers. Do self-identified straight, married and bi-curious Canadian men have a history of responding to advertisements for studies in gay newspapers in Toronto? Do they read these ads? How do we know this?
If you like lesbians, you are straight. If you like gays, you are gay. Right?
Umm, so the gay boys they recruited in Toronto weren’t excited by the lesbian porn chosen for the study. Was this run-of-the-mill straight lesbian fantasy stuff? Women faking it for the camera?
Because heck yeah, I fast forward through that nonsense. I like real sex.
Was the gay sex more or less “real?”
And—to be obvious—why didn’t the subjects see straight porn if they self-identified as bisexual? They were shown lesbian porn, yet they did not identify as lesbian. Why was it assumed they would be more “straight” for preferring lesbian porn to gay porn?
Is genital response to visual stimuli really the best basis for judging sexual identity?
Every weeknight, I watch World News Tonight on ABC. Every time, I get hard. Why? Am I hard for Peter Jennings, or images of violence? I don’t think so. I am relaxing for the first time each evening. I relax. My dick gets hard. Pretty simple.
And get this: sometimes I am having sex with someone I am hot about and I am not immediately hard! What is that about? Am I not really excited, no matter what I may think to the contrary?
Or (sorry to say, doctors) is genital response really not a reliable determinant of sexual reaction?
This study will get quoted to death. It is most out to lunch in assuming that men who identify as bisexual are really gay, but don’t know it.
Because, you know, bisexuals are too damn stupid to know their own “true” sexuality.
When so-called “studies” confirm what we wish we knew, at the expense of real-world experience, they should get kicked back.
Too bad that gay men in Toronto don’t like lesbian porn. But that doesn’t disprove male bisexuality.
Keep at it, I suppose.
Posted by: Jefferson at July 9, 2005 01:36 AM
I read that NYT article and that study did not escape my admittedly unscientific mind’s bullshit detector.
If they really want to find out if bi-sexulaity exists in men, they should hook me up to a penile plethysmograph and have Dave Navarro make out with me.
Oh, the sacrifices I’m willing to make in the name of science…
Posted by: davidwraith at July 10, 2005 06:31 AM
