differenceblog, posts by tag: heterosexuality - LiveJournal

The Daily Mail (UK, 2007) reports on research (publication pending) by Lynda Boothroyd of the University of Durham (UK) that indicates that women are attracted to men who resemble their fathers, mediated by their relationship with their father. Girls who like their fathers are more likely to be attracted to men who resemble them. Boothroyd was also a contributor on Cornwell (2006), which suggested that rate of sexual development played a role in the assortative mating choices.

The idea that people are attracted to mates who are like their parents is hardly a new one, going back at least to Sigmund Freud. However, most modern research has focused on the ways that people are attracted to mates that behave like their parents, rather than physically resemble them. For example, Olivetti et al (2002) found that men whose mothers had worked or were educated were more likely to marry educated, working women themselves.

[edit, 11:18am: See also Perrett et al (2002), who found that children born to older parents were less impressed by youth in rating attractiveness in potential mates.]

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Obviously I have been using the wrong keywords, because despite all of the times I've heard people say that men marry their mothers or women marry their fathers (metaphorically speaking), finding any research that addresses this issue from a non-Freudian perspective is proving nearly impossible, and there's only so much castration theory I can read before breakfast. This is another case where I'm putting it out to you folks. If you're aware of any other sources discussing physical resemblance between parents and mates, I'd love to see them.

Judy Skatssoon (6/4/2007), writing for news.com.au, says that the University of Warwick has "dealt heterosexual women a final indignity." Skatssoon is referring to research by Michael Tlauka that found differences in mental rotation ability, with straight men scoring the highest while straight women scored the lowest. However, although the news articles attribute this work to Tlauka, the paper published in April's Archives of Sexual Behavior was published by Maylor et al (2007).

Tlauka et al (2005) tested men and women with paper and computer maps in a virtual store, and found that men required less time and made fewer mistakes than their female counterparts. Martin et al's 2007 review of the effect of testosterone and estrogen finds that gender differences in spatial ability are "large and robust."

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Mental rotation tasks (MRT) are probably one of my favorite topics because they really do seem to consistently break down by gender. The fact that Maylor et al found that ability appeared to vary by sexuality (determined by self-identification, on an internet survey) continues to tie sexuality and gender together in a way that I politically deny and inwardly fear may be true. Research that classifies by sexuality often seems to suggest that lesbians are more "manly" and gay men more "womanly" than their straight counterparts. I don't know what to make of it, but it feels to me as if they are asking the wrong questions.

Gregory Herek (2002) surveyed attitudes toward bisexuality in 1997 and 1999 and found an interesting sex difference: men felt differently about gay and bisexual women than about gay and bisexual men, but women felt differently about bisexual men and women than gay men and women. On one measure, Herek reports "feelings toward bisexuals were colder (less favorable) than toward any other group except injecting drug users." (Only responses from heterosexuals were included in this study, but less than 4% of the sample reported any other sexuality).

Richard Lippa (2006) found that higher sex drive was connected to greater desire for both men and women in women only; men appeared to have increased desire for one sex or the other. However, the self-report measures Lippa used were highly subjective, and reporting bias is likely to have occurred. Roy Baumeister's review (2000) suggests that women have a more flexible and socially influenced sex drive than men, varying their amount and type of sexual activity widely over the course of their lifetimes.

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This topic leads to entirely too many chances for authors to be cute. Levine (2003) says: "In both the clinician's and the researcher's hands, sexual desire is a slippery concept."

Yes, I have known a lot more women who say they're bisexual than men. But I really think that's a reporting bias more than a difference in the way men's and women's sex drive is programmed. Even without the socialization of childhood, I still find it socially harder to say I'm bisexual now than it was a decade ago, and my social environment isn't more restrictive -- except in as much as I'm read and treated as male.

Gender roles in heterosexual dating have been extensively studied. For example, Karl Grammer (1990) suggests that males use body language to signal dominance, whereas women's body language indicates both submission and "bodily self-presentation." Grammer (2000) points out ten years later that women seem to be in control of opposite-sex interactions, despite this role-play of submission.

Studies of gender roles in same-sex dating are rarer. Klinkenberg and Rose (1994) studied "dating scripts" for lesbians vs. gays, and found that "talk/laugh/joke" was an item mentioned by almost all participants, with no gender differences. However, the men's scripts mentioned only "self-initiated actions", whereas the several of the women's scripts mentioned "partner-initiated actions (e.g. 'partner picked me up')." Sergios and Cody (1985) found that "social assertiveness" had no effect on how likely a gay man was to request a subsequent date; only "physical attractiveness" influenced how much the subject "liked" their partner in this experiment.

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It is tempting to use gay and lesbian experiences to confirm stereotypes about gendered behavior in dating. This weekend a friend told me about the concept of "lesbian sheep": "if you are a female sheep, what you do to solicit sex is stand still". This has led to "lesbian sheep" being a term to refer to any potentially sexual relationship where both parties wait for the other to act. This term is overwhelmingly used for female-female relationships, but not exclusively so. In my personal (and therefore meaningless) experience, I'd like to say that not all men know how to make the first move either (and I don't just mean me).

Jiang et al (2006) tested the effect of "invisible" erotic pictures on the attention of gay/bisexual and heterosexual males and females. After comparing attraction/repulsion to male or female erotic stumuli, Jiang et al found that while gay men responded like heterosexual women to the suppressed images, gay/bisexual women responded in between this group and the heterosexual men. Lykins et al (2006) found that both men and women focused less on faces and more on bodies in response to normally presented erotic (vs. non-erotic) stimuli, and the results suggested that women's attentional patterns may be more affected than men's by the erotica context. However, Lykins et al point out that because their study showed different pictures to the male and female groups (heterosexually delineated) comparison between groups is not valid.

Neither of these studies report the menstrual cycle stage of female participants, which may be an issue. Gizewski et al (2006) studied fMRI results of 25 women during mid-luteal phase (post ovulation) and during menses. Self-reported arousal in women was similar to men's at the mid-luteal test, but significantly lower at menses. Some activation differences between mid-luteal and menstrual phases were reported (e.g. reduced in the left thalamus at menses). However, between-sex differences were more robust than menstrual phase differences.

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One big concern I have with studies using "erotic stimuli" is the source of the images. Lykins et al wrote that they got their images of females from Playboy's website, and images of males from Falcon Studio's website. Both of these websites design their erotic content for men. Unfortunately, I can't think of any source for erotic images of men by women that would match Playboy on production values. Obviously, more women-driven erotica needs to be produced, in the name of science!

As early as John Corso (1959), it has been documented that women tend to have more sensitive hearing than men, and have less variability in hearing sensitivity than men do. McFadden (1998) notes that not only are women more sensitive to noise, but that they also have stronger evoked otoacoustic emissions (EOAEs) (sounds produced by the inner ear, and a measure of ear health). McFadden suggests that the differences may be due to hormonal effects, based on twin studies (pre-natally) and menstrual cycle studies (post-natally).

Here's where McFadden gets very interesting. McFadden and Pasanen (1998) examined differences EAOEs between heterosexuals and non-heterosexuals (both male and female). McFadden found that homosexual and bisexual women's EAOEs fell in between heterosexual women's and heterosexual men's. Bisexual and homosexual men did not show any significant difference from heterosexual men. McFadden feels that this suggests hormonal -- and possibly structural brain -- differences between homosexual and heterosexual women.

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Well, I obviously can't offer any personal experience on this one. I didn't even know you could make your ears make noise, so I haven't gone around clicking into people's ears. I believe that
McFadden found the results he reported, but his extrapolation seems a little enthusiastic. I was particularly interested in this study because it's the first one I've seen using women as the comparison group in a heterosexual/homosexual group. I have read so many arguments suggesting that women's sexuality is largely socially based (e.g. Roy Baumeister's 2000 review) that these findings struck me as unusual.

Abbey and Melby (1986) found that males perceived more sexual intent than females in both ambiguous and nonambiguous nonverbal situations. Levesque et al (2006) also found that men attributed more sexual interest after brief interaction than women, but that women tended to generalize attraction to positive personality characteristics more than men. Levesque et al also found that masculine women tended to sexualize opposite-sex interactions more than feminine women, but there were no differences between "masculine" and "feminine" men (rated using the BSRI).

Levesque et al did not provide the ages or recruitment methods of their participants, nor was I able to find this information about Abbey and Melby's experiments, although later studies by Abbey (e.g. 1987, 1995) use college student samples. Also, no studies seem to have been done to assess the level of sexual intent inferred by gay men and lesbians in same or opposite sex pairings.

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In my experience, men assume no one is hitting on them, and women assume everyone is hitting on them. Obviously, this is an oversimplification. I've known and dated guys who were supremely arrogant and women who were painfully self-conscious. However, I still found that the arrogance in men tended to translate to thinking they would get a positive response to flirtation, and the self-deprecating women assumed that the flirtation was non-serious, or sexual only. It's a self-fulfilling observation in my case. I tend to assume that no one is flirting with me because they see me as male, and wonder if they're seeing me as something else if they make their intentions known.