Advertisement
If you have a new account but are having problems posting or verifying your account, please email us on hello@boards.ie for help. Thanks :)
Hello all! Please ensure that you are posting a new thread or question in the appropriate forum. The Feedback forum is overwhelmed with questions that are having to be moved elsewhere. If you need help to verify your account contact hello@boards.ie

Could you think yourself gay or straight?

Options
  • 22-02-2014 10:41am
    #1
    Says I To Bridey
    Closed Accounts Posts: 140 ✭✭


    Given the plasticity of the brain would this be possible, at least for a bisexual person? If we accept that sexuality is on a scale, could someone who was say 75% straight to begin with shift more towards homosexuality over time if they made their fantasies exclusively homosexual? If they watched almost exclusively gay porn, would this strengthen the connections in their brain associated with homosexual attraction and weaken the heterosexual side? Or is sexuality more set in stone that that?


Comments

  • Options
    #2
    macker33
    Registered Users Posts: 375 ✭✭macker33


    100% yes, gay is all in the head. Just look at transexuals etc. a woman trapped in a mans body etc etc.

    And transexuals are an extreme, you know there are milder versions of it.


  • Options
    #3
    Peregrinus
    Registered Users Posts: 26,056 ✭✭✭✭Peregrinus


    It depends on what you mean by "gay" and "straight".

    If you mean, can you alter your desires so that you experience more opposite-sex attraction and less same-sex attraction (or the reverse) I think the predominant view is no, you can't. This doesn't mean that sexuality is necessarily set in stone; the truth is that we don't know what determines sexual orientation and therefore we cannot say that it is immutable; just that we don't think the particular technique you describe is effective to change it.

    But if we understand "gay" not as a sexual orienation but as a gender identity, a cultural construct, then since it is a construct it can in principle be altered. Whether you can alter it by attempting to manipulate your fantasies, I rather doubt. But it seems to me that you can alter it by engaging critically with the gender identity roles offered to you be society and reshaping them according to your own views.


  • Options
    #4
    The Corinthian
    Closed Accounts Posts: 19,777 ✭✭✭✭The Corinthian


    The old nurture versus nature debate on sexual orientation.

    The number of guys who went to boarding school with me, especially those who did all their secondary education there, and who came out of the closet after leaving is well over the supposed 10% average of the population - and those are just the one's who came out. This would certainly, for me, point to an environmental determinant in sexual orientation as opposed to the current fashion to claim that one is 'born that way'.

    Given this, this is not to say that a genetic determinant is not also a factor, that makes one orientation more likely than another, and there's plenty of evidence that this exists, and this would naturally affect the ability for someone to 'think themselves' anything.

    However the largest caveat is probably that many traits imprinted during childhood and adolescence are not so easily reversed or altered in adulthood. The brain's plasticity may indeed be great, but this decreases as you grow older - as they say, you can't teach old dogs new tricks.

    So it may be possible, especially if the person is still quite young, but I would be very dubious about its viability in the vast majority of cases.
    macker33 wrote: »
    100% yes, gay is all in the head. Just look at transexuals etc. a woman trapped in a mans body etc etc.
    Of course it's all ultimately in the head, but that's not the question. What was asked was whether what's all in the head can be changed.
    Peregrinus wrote: »
    But if we understand "gay" not as a sexual orienation but as a gender identity, a cultural construct, then since it is a construct it can in principle be altered.
    Homo-(or hetro)-sexuality is a gender identity now? I'd be careful about confusing gender identity with sexual orientation. Transsexuals can be gay, straight or bisexual. I've known at least one who used to describe herself as having been a lesbian trapped in a man's body prior to reassignment.


Advertisement