Queer Smells
My niece sent me a link to interesting news about a new study (it's always a new study, isn't it?):
WASHINGTON — Scientists trying to sniff out biological differences between gay and straight men have found new evidence – in scent.
It turns out that sniffing a chemical from testosterone, the male sex hormone, causes a response in the sexual area of gay men's brains, just as it does in the brains of straight women, but not in the brains of straight men.
"It is one more piece of evidence … that is showing that sexual orientation is not all learned," said Sandra Witelson, an expert on brain anatomy and sexual orientation at the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada.
Witelson, who was not part of the research team that conducted the study, said the findings show a biological involvement in sexual orientation.
The study, published in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was done by researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.
["Study Finds Different Brain Response In Gay, Straight Men", 10 May 2005.]
I remain relatively disinterested in what some people feel is that burning question: is homosexuality a choice? I think the answer shouldn't matter, nor should it be a part of the political fight for equality. (One guy touches another guy's dick and civilization as we know it starts to crumble? Puhlease.)
However, I found the report interesting for a very non-scientific reason: it supports something that I've thought must be true about sexual attraction: that the sense of smell is intimately involved. Smells can be powerful reminders and aphrodesiacs, at least for me. This doesn't prove anything of course, but it makes me feel smarter.
Perhaps because of my own predisposition to believe it, it also seemed a rather easy conclusion to accept. Not so for everyone, it seems.
Steven Pinker ("a professor of cognitive science at Harvard"), writing in the New York Times ("Sniffing Out the Gay Gene"), evidently wasn't impressed, but I wasn't exactly bowled over by his Op/Ed piece myself.
Scientists and perfume marketers who believe that humans, like other mammals, respond sexually to chemical signals called pheromones were cheered by the news. But we are a long way from dogs in heat. The role of pheromones in our sexuality must be small at best. When people want to be titillated or to check out a prospective partner, most seek words or pictures, not dirty laundry.
"…a long way from dogs in heat"? Not usually the sort of rhetoric found in learned scientific discourse, it sounds more like unthinking Republican propaganda about homos. And such a facile dismissal with the dirty laundry example isn't going to convince me either: we may well find words and pictures stimulating, even more stimulating, or even more readily accessible than the dirty laundry of a suitable object de désire, but that says nothing about the role of smell in sexual attraction. I think Mr. Pinker is showing his prejudiced side more than his analytical side in that remark.
And yet, in his next breath (keyboard stroke?), he suggests that it's more likely that homosexuality is innate, but that this doesn't prove it. But then, one mustn't be too hasty:
Homosexuality is a puzzle for biology, not because homosexuality itself is evolutionarily maladaptive (though no more so than any other sexual act that does not result in conception), but because any genetic tendency to avoid heterosexual opportunities should have been selected out long ago.
He falls into the trap of believing that homosexuality is maladaptive just because no one has identified an adaptive reason for it, which also proves nothing. My contention anyway is that it is not selected against so long as it imposes no adaptive disadvantage. As Mr. Pinker observed earlier,
Gay men generally report that their homosexual attractions began as soon as they felt sexual stirrings before adolescence.
Often even earlier than sexual stirrings, many of us realized attractions of some sort towards members of the same gender. My sexual orientation feels as innate to me as anything I can think of. Of couse, that proves nothing.
More interesting to me in a political context is his observation:
Just as puzzling is the existence of homophobia. Why didn't evolution shape straight men to react to their gay fellows by thinking: "Great! More women for me!" Probably the answer lies in a cross-wiring between our senses of morality and disgust. People often confuse their own revulsion with objective sinfulness, as when they dehumanize people living in squalor or, in the other direction, engage in religious rituals of cleanliness and purification. An impulse to avoid homosexual contact may blur into an impulse to condemn homosexuality.
Is homophobia nature or nurture? I think his suggested reasons are on the silly side, although the observations are valid. It doesn't feel to me so much an impulse to avoid homosexuality as a conflict between societal disapprobation and personal longing. It's not just an old fag's tale that the most homophobic men are usually the biggest closet cases, which is about as far from an "impulse to avoid homosexual contact" as you can get: the most homophobic men are the ones who have developed the greatest revulsion for their own, intense homosexual longings.
Regardless of Pinker's somewhat confused message in this piece though, I won't complain about his concluding paragraph, with which I agree:
It may not be a coincidence that the new discovery came from researchers in Europe. In America, the biology of homosexuality is a politicized minefield that scares away scientists (and the universities and agencies that pay for their research). Which is a pity. Regardless of where homosexuality resides in the brain, the ethics of homosexuality is a no-brainer: what consenting adults do in private is nobody's business but their own. And the deterrents to research on homosexuality leave us in ignorance of one of the most fascinating sources of human diversity.