Why Men Don’t Iron: The New Reality of Gender Differences. Anne Moir
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do with each other is their own business, and they have the right to privacy.’
‘Privacy, yes, but I don’t want them anywhere near my private space. My private space is you and I, and I don’t want a third person in there telling me that with a little gender-bending I could enjoy lifting his shirt.’
‘Bill!’
‘Do what they want – unto themselves – but to camp on my ground is to test the limits of tolerance.’
To tolerate something is to put up with what you do not like and gays, of course, want more than toleration: they want acceptance, and believe that the rest of us must give that acceptance. They think we will do so more easily once we recognize that we are all gay – or at least, that all of us are bisexual and so have the capacity for gayness within us. But are we bisexual? Freud certainly believed as much, but it was Alfred Kinsey’s studies in the 1940s and 1950s that seemed to set the seal of academic approval on the bisexual theory. When Kinsey’s famous study was first published it caused shock, for he claimed that 37% of all males had experienced (or were experiencing) homosexual relationships, and that a further 13% had homosexual urges even though they did nothing to satisfy those desires.12 Here was startling proof that fully 50% of males were actively or potentially gay, and Kinsey did not conclude that the other 50% were free of homosexual urges. He postulated a scale of male sexuality which ranged from wholly heterosexual to exclusively gay, and he concluded:
Males do not represent two distinct populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separate pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum of each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this regarding human sexual behaviour the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.13
Kinsey’s influence was tremendous. His survey was the first to offer an estimate of gayness as a proportion of the population and his estimate shocked, but so it should for Kinsey used a very odd group of people to arrive at his figures. Instead of finding a representative sample from the general population, he essentially used a self-selected sample. Not only that, but his concerns about his own sexuality – although married he was probably homosexual – biased his choice of subject.14 No modern academic would recognize Kinsey’s survey as reliable, yet its influence persists, mainly because his results reinforce the fashionable bisexual theory. So Kinsey keeps his place in the pantheon despite the fact that study after study has demonstrated how utterly wrong his results were.15 Later research, as we shall see, demonstrates again and again that the incidence of homosexuality is much lower than Kinsey stated.
The gay lobby ignores the new research, preferring to claim that homosexuality is widespread. There is, after all, strength in numbers, so the more gays, the more clout the gay lobby wields. The usual figure quoted in the newspapers is that 10% of all men are exclusively homosexual and up to 33% have experienced some homosexual activity. The gay lobby publicizes these figures despite the fact that survey after survey has shown them to be wild exaggerations. The truth appears to be that between 1% and 4% of men are homosexual, and even fewer women are lesbians. An examination of the many post-Kinsey studies concludes that ‘it is unreasonable to consider the often-used figure of 10% of the male population as more or less regularly engaging in same-sex activities. The figure is closer to half that. And the figure for the lesbian population is even smaller. Further, routinely exclusive or predominantly exclusive homosexual activities are more common than bisexual activities.’16 Milton Diamond, the author of the survey, goes on to say that 10% is a political figure. In fact not one post-Kinsey survey has ever yielded an estimate as high as that. An NOP poll in America in 1989 suggested that homosexuals were 3.3% of the male population. A 1988 survey by America’s National Opinion Research Center (NORC) yielded a figure of 2.4%.17 A survey conducted for the USA’s Centers for Disease Control in 1989 suggested that the total number of men who had ever experienced male to male sexual conduct, as either exclusively or occasional homosexuals, was 7.3%.18 A survey of several polls, published in 1991, derived a figure of 5–7% for men who had had homosexual experience,19 while Milton Diamond’s own study in Hawaii suggests that only 3% of males ever engage in same-sex activity. Another extensive review concluded that exclusive homosexuality was practised by no more than 5%.20 Even a telephone survey conducted in San Francisco, surely the gay capital of the world, did not reach the oft-quoted figure of 33% of males as exclusively homosexual. Only 10% of respondents admitted to some homosexual experiences.21
The most comprehensive study to date surveyed 34,000 high school students in America and reported that, by the age of 18, 99.2% of males were exclusively heterosexual.22 Just 2.8% of the 18-year-olds had experienced homosexual acts, but less than 1% were exclusively gay. That low figure is reinforced by the findings of the National Survey of Men, considered to be the most representative study of American males, which suggested that only 1.1% of all men were exclusively homosexual and only 2.3% (which includes the previous 1.1%) had ever experienced homosexuality.23
So survey after survey suggests that the real figure of exclusively homosexual men is in the region of 1–4%. The percentage of bisexuals is so small as to count in that range. Which means that 96–99% of men are heterosexual, and almost certainly exclusively heterosexual, for the surveys also indicate that sexual preferences are overwhelmingly one way or the other. Very few men are bisexual. The vast majority of men are either gay or straight, and most men are straight.24 It is time to forget Kinsey’s extraordinary figures and time to abandon the much touted 10%.
The gay lobby’s response to that low figure is either to quote old surveys that used unreliable samples, or else to allege that the more recent results are misleading because most men are unwilling to admit to homosexual experience. ‘Homophobia’, in other words, makes men lie to researchers and thus all the surveys are flawed because people won’t be honest about their sex lives. So it is reassuring to hear about the work of Kurt Freud who investigated male sexual orientation with a machine which measured the smallest changes of penile engorgement. Erections, as any man will testify, are hard to fake and if a man has no homosexual feelings then lubricious pictures of naked boys will leave him limp, just as the most luscious centrefold will fail to arouse a gay man. Kurt Freud’s findings demonstrated almost beyond doubt that the vast majority of men were either exclusively heterosexual or exclusively homosexual. There is no sliding scale, no continuum, no latent gayness and no universal bisexuality. There is no scary gay in the straight man’s closet.25
The unisex ideal, which melds our male and female components, is beginning to look a little out of reach, yet some people still refuse to abandon the notion of bisexuality for they believe it is the route to universal toleration. Perversely, the argument that men with anti-gay attitudes are themselves gays in denial exacerbates the very thing it sets out to defeat. ‘Common sense’ suggests that most men and women are comfortable within their sexual orientation, and to suggest otherwise will irritate them. The non-gay male is being told that he is partly female, thus calling into question his masculinity, and if this annoys him he is accused of protesting too much. Thus he is twice impugned. He is annoyed – and small wonder. The attempt to dissolve stereotypes by imposing a unisex world can only reinforce prejudice. The explanation that we are all bisexual promotes the very reaction it means to abate.
But suppose there were another way to counter the average heterosexual’s aversion to homosexuality? First we need to understand what is meant by ‘homophobia’, and it is our contention that it has nothing to do with fear. Gays, as a group, are not fearsome – indeed their popular reputation is the very opposite – and because the vast majority of men experience no secret homosexual longings it seems perverse to insist that they live in constant dread of such desires. Instead the prejudice against gays appears to spring from a vague feeling that homosexual behaviour is ‘unnatural’, and not so very long ago that was also the opinion of orthodox medicine. No wonder many ordinary folk persist in thinking of gayness as a deviant condition, a perversion, something immoral, even a sin.
Before gays lose patience with the apparent intransigence