Why Men Don’t Iron: The New Reality of Gender Differences. Anne Moir
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until very recently the same aversions were held about left-handed people. Left-handedness was sinister (from the Latin for ‘left’) while right-handers were dextrous (from the Latin for ‘right’), and many older people will remember the painful efforts made in schools to force left-handed children to write with their right hand. No one would promulgate that nonsense today, for science has demonstrated that left- or right-handedness is not a choice, is not a deviant condition and does not reflect the malignancy or benignity of fate; it is a simple natural variation. As a result the prejudice against southpaws has disappeared.
So would anti-gay feelings disappear if people believed that gayness was a natural biological variation and not an unnatural perversion? Some research suggests that it would.26 Yet despite evidence that abandonment of the bisexual theory would lead to greater public acceptance, much of the gay lobby still insists that 10% of the population is homosexual and, moreover, that the 10% is gay not because they were born that way, but because society and culture made them that way.
If gayness is promoted by cultural pressures then we could expect some cultures or microcultures to exert more pressure than others and that the incidence of homosexuality would thus be higher in those societies. Gays often claim that proof of this exists, and point to prisons and single-sex boarding schools as places where cultural pressures do produce much higher rates of homosexuality. This is true, but just because one extraordinary incidence of social pressure produces homosexual behaviour does not prove that all homosexuality is so caused. The ‘prison’ claim promotes a logical error; the common social science error of generalizing from the exceptional to the general. (Just because electrocution causes death, one can’t therefore assume that all deaths come from electrocution!) Nor is there any evidence that prison homosexuality is a ‘lifestyle’ choice. Indeed, it seems that the most sexually active males in prisons are usually the most dominant men who, as soon as they are released from jail, go back to heterosexual partners.27 Prison proves nothing.
If the gay lobby wishes us to believe that homosexuality is caused by societal pressure they need to point to cultures which are more ‘gay-friendly’ than others and thus produce more gays. Some research done in the 1960s did indeed suggest just that, but like much early sexual research, it suffered from skewed sampling and its results have been contradicted by later surveys. (Though that does not stop gay activists like Peter Tatchell from relying on the older figures to refute the idea that gayness is a biological phenomenon.28) The more recent research, so inconvenient to the gay lobby, demonstrates that the incidence of homosexuality stays the same across cultures and nations, and it stays at our baseline figure of 1% to 4%.29 The conclusions of one leading researcher leave no room for doubt:
The implication of a finding that the incidence of homosexuality is similar in all societies and that it remains stable over time is, of course, of considerable theoretical importance. In short, we are led away from social-structural interpretations toward the view that homosexuality is, for whatever reasons, a constant element in the spectrum of human sexuality.30
And:
Societies do not create homosexuality any more than they create heterosexuality: they simply react to the ubiquitous emergence of homosexuality. Cross cultural examination of homosexuality leads us to the notion that homosexuality is a sexual orientation not a pathological and incidental manifestation of a particular social structural arrangement. It is rather a natural, fundamental form of human sexuality … the most obvious implication is that behaviour which up to now has been regarded as highly variable culturally, and thus socially determined, is less variable than previously conceived by most social scientists and at least in some important respects has a biological basis.31
The gay lobby may not like it, but the evidence suggests that homosexuality is a ‘natural, fundamental form of human sexuality’, is not ‘socially determined’, and its incidence does not change from one culture to the next. Being gay is natural; not being gay is natural.
Men do not fall on a continuum of sexuality, their sexual orientation is one way or the other. Nor is the world full of men and women who are as happy to bed one of their own sex as someone of the other. That, like the widespread incidence of homosexuality, is a myth of the 1990s and can now be safely laid to rest.
If gayness is a natural variation of the human condition, as ineradicable and inevitable as left-handedness, what causes it? One suggestion is that homosexuality derives from genes, the ancestral building blocks handed down from parent to child. Left-handedness is a genetic trait, though the process is more complicated than pure inheritance because other biological factors influence whether the genes that cause left-handedness are switched on in the growing foetus or are left unactivated. This means that many people carry the genes that appear to cause left-handedness, but are not actually left-handed themselves. If you are an identical twin and left-handed there is only a 12% chance that your identical sibling will also be left-handed, even though he or she will carry the left-handed genes.32 Genes, by themselves, are not enough.
Is there a gene that causes homosexuality? In 1993 Dan Hamer and his colleagues announced the discovery of just such a gene,33 but its existence is still controversial and Hamer’s research has been under assault ever since the announcement. Some scientists complained that the sample from which he had drawn his genetic material was skewed because it comprised only self-proclaimed gays, while others believed he had over-simplified a horrendously complex process.34 The gay lobby disliked Hamer’s research because it suggested a frightening scenario: if gayness was indeed genetically induced then pregnant women might choose to abort a foetus if they discovered that it carried the homosexual gene.35
That concern is genuine. Parents regularly abort foetuses that carry the Down’s Syndrome gene, and that process could easily be extended to provide ‘designer’ babies, tested in the womb and guaranteed to be free of any unwanted genetic trait – whether of hair colour, sexual orientation or left-handedness. The danger is real, but some way off because the process of how genes are expressed is still not wholly understood. Dan Hamer’s ‘gay’ gene might not cause gayness at all, but merely predispose its possessor to the real causes of homosexuality. If that is true, then for the gay gene to be expressed requires further biological action, and that seems most likely because, confusingly, some homosexuals do not possess the so-called ‘gay’ gene at all. Something else, either an unidentified gene or a biological process, made them gay.
The most likely explanation is a biological process that occurs in the womb. Few scientists dispute the influence that is wielded on the developing foetus by hormones, and hormones are central to the process of sexual development. Hormones (among other things) are the ‘switches’ that activate genes, and in turn those genes instruct the growing foetus whether to be male or female. It is to that process, and to its effects on sexual orientation, that we must now turn.
It seems obvious that hormones will determine our gender, but, until very recently, the further assertion that the same hormones determined our brain structure into either a male or a female pattern was very controversial. The idea of a differently patterned brain was anathema to most hardline feminists, who wanted to assert their equality (by which they too often meant sameness) to men; if it could be proved that the brains of men and women were distinctly different in structure and function, then it was an alarmingly short step to believing they might be different in abilities as well. Their problem was that male and female brains did turn out to be distinctly different, and what was once a politically controversial theory quietly became the standard stuff of undergraduate textbooks.
Women might take some consolation from the fact that the basic human template is female. Every foetus begins as a female, but, at six weeks, boys begin to be made by a flood of hormones that drench the developing baby and so convert sugar and spice into slugs and snails. The male foetus is capable of making high levels of androgens – or male hormones such as testosterone. The male starts making the hormone at six weeks. It is not a one-off action: it goes on for months in the womb, each successive dose of hormones doing its bit to turn what was a female into a male. For our purposes, the crucial moment appears to come in the third month of pregnancy when a heavy dose of testosterone affects the developing boy’s brain. Among other effects this dose of testosterone sets his sexual orientation. Up until