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The studies I'm aware of suggesting what you say are certainly widely accepted, but they have seemed to me to be very poorly supported by any actual evidence. It can sometimes be hard to see beyond the bubble of one's own culture and of what is permissible to say according to one's political environment. In the fight for gays to be treated as normal people they adopted the "born this way" position to combat those who wanted gays to "convert" to being straight. This set up the conditions for a culture to evolve where questioning the "born this way" message was tantamount to being homophobic (not to mention creating a gay culture that was hostile towards bisexuals whose existence made it seem like it could really be a "choice") and, of course, no one wants to do research that is homophobic. But if it really is caused by genetics and/or exposure to hormones during development, the connection to actual behavior seems difficult to envision especially since men and women don't really look as different as our cultures would have us believe. And am I supposed to think there's a gene or a hormone connected to shoe fetishes? Shoes are not even a part of our evolutionary history, so how could such an attraction be set up biologically at all? I tend to think that people may have different genetic dispositions to be moldable but that it is environment that fills in the specifics (and by "environment " I don't necessarily mean culture or trauma, though that may happen too). Some people, like straights and gays (and exclusive pedophiles), may have been born to be more rigid in their sexual orientations while others of us may have been born with varying degrees of flexibility. One thing we know about brain development is that after an infant's critical period of brain plasticity ends it later comes back during puberty. It could be that at that point the brain starts trying to figure out what to get turned on by and the most innocuous incidents could easily play a pivotal role. What happens if a boy is getting tied up while playing cowboys and injuns and then happens to become aware of his first erection? Will he then go on to associate bondage with sexual stimulation? Perhaps. Or maybe his proclivity to bondage was already biologically there and the experience just happened to be its first manifestation? ... but then I think the latter explanation to be unlikely since it would require a gene or a hormone exposure specifically predisposing him to bondage, which I also think unlikely. Additionally, I don't think that the brain's plasticity during puberty is the only opportunity to develop sexual orientation. The brain is always plastic; just not as much as it would be during its critical periods. In any case, any researcher trying to prove that sexuality is linked to random associations in their early lives would have a huge challenge to surmount because controlled experiments would be impossible to set up. That, and probing one's history for influences is more of an art than a science. We probably won't know until we find out how to get an AI's neural network to model the development of sexual orientation. |