But, the one overriding fact here is that by far, the vast majority of child molestations are perpetrated by heterosexuals. And, that is true most of the time when children of the same sex are molested as well.

Being a man yourself, Richard, have a few questions based on your line of thinking.

1.How many women have to be present to “moderate” YOUR sexual impulses? And are these average women, or say, female bodybuilders?

2. On the off chance that you are some sort of exception to the rule, that your sexual impulses aren’t an overwhelming force of nature compelling you to rape anything and everything in sight — how do you know you’re an exception and not the norm?

I’m grateful for Dick Wood (I won’t honor in calling him Mr. Wood since it’s obviously a pseudonym intended to mock and deride gays.) He has given me an opportunity to see the sordid mindset and the evil that lurks in some people.

Thank you Mr. Burroway for taking the time to respond to this and thanks to everyone who contributed to this discourse. This is exactly what makes this blog so worthwhile.

Jim, you realize Wood is only going to offer up the claim that the author of the study is politically compromised, right?

to paraphrase monty python.

“No one expects the homosexual agenda!!”

Unfortunately, this study makes no such claim. Nor does it claim that gay men are more likely to be attracted to underage men. It doesn’t even address underage subjects at all. But Mr. Wood and others like him would have him “extrapolate” the data in this study toward areas for which there is no data. No serious scientist would do that, and neither should anyone else who take science seriously.

In fact, there are many areas in which Mr. Wood and others like him would seek to extrapolate the data from this study. The study consisted of 192 participants, divided into equal groups of heterosexual men, heterosexual women, lesbians, and gay men. The gay men were recruited from weekly meetings of a gay bowling league, while hetero men were recruited from two coffee shops. All groups were from Kingston, Ontario. Mr. Wood would have us believe that the 48 gay bowlers from Canada are representative of all gay men across the United States, a most extraordinary claim that no one in their right mind would ever argue. Which leaves only Mr. Wood and other anti-gay activists making precisely that argument by implication.

He would also have you “extrapolate” the charts shown in the study, identified as figure 1, to imply that gay male attraction for underage kids would be off the charts. But he doesn’t explain why it is that for the females photos, there was a sharp drop-off from the 25-year-old subject to the 19-year-old subject. Clearly there are limits to extrapolation.

In fact, it’s that 25-year-old female photo that presents the greatest problem in the whole study. The photos aren’t reproduced in the article, but she must have been damn hot. Everyone (except for the lesbian subjects) thought she was the most attractive of all the females, and the heterosexual males thought so by a huge margin. That’s why the study authors cautioned:

The difference between male heterosexuals’ ratings of 25-year-old female faces and those of 18 and 28 year olds was in the expected direction but much larger than expected. The size of this difference suggests that the 25-year-old female faces may have been artifactually attractive in that more attractive individuals may have been sampled by chance in the 25-year-old category. Future research could eliminate this possible confounding of age category and attractiveness either by using the same individuals photographed at different ages or by employing large random samples of faces from different age categories

And that is probably the single greatest weakness of the study. What did the 25-year-old female look like? What did the 18-year-old male look like? Were they of “average” attractiveness for their age? The authors thought so until they saw the results for the 25-year-old female.

That study was in 2000. No one else has attempted to replicate it or attempt a similar one. I suspect it’s because the methodology itself is fraught with problems. (What is attractive for each age group? How does one construct a set of photos of “equal attractiveness” across age when that is one of the factors you’re trying to measure?)

When Tim Dailey of the Family “Research” Council tried to use this study to claim that gay men were more likely to like underage children — just as Mr. Wood does — Dr. Vernon L. Quinsey, one of the two authors, essentially yelled “Not so fast!”

The problem is, I called Quinsey to see what he thought of Dailey’s interpretation of his findings. And Quinsey emphasized that his study made use of groups of photographs representing ranges of ages to test attraction, that the mean age for their youngest category was 18, and that “the only statistically valid conclusions that could be drawn concern these average ages.” Moreover, he noted that “we wondered in the paper whether the heterosexual men’s very high ratings of the 25-year female faces were an artifact of unusually attractive pictures in that category (there were some very pretty models) on the similar grounds that–data from a better controlled study show age preference gradients for homosexual males viewing men and heterosexual males viewing women.” That’s significant because Dailey’s avowed reason for preferring the Silverthorne-Quinsey study is his concern that selection bias had provided Freund with an unrepresentative sample skewed toward gay men with older age preferences. But what distinguishes the Quinsey-Silverthorne study and accounts for the age-preference gap it finds, Quinsey told me, is the unexpected (and, he suspects, perhaps idiosyncratic) “spike” in attraction to older women among heterosexual men. In other words, Dailey is trying to base his conclusion that homosexual preferences tend unusually young by relying on a study where there’s an unusual difference—but the difference is accounted for by how uncommonly old the women picked by heterosexuals were.

So you see, Mr. Wood, I’m not asking you to take my word for it. I suggest you actually pay attention to what the study’s author actually said when confronted by the thesis you propose. Pay attention to the guy who designed the study, recruited the participants, executed the study, analyzed the data, and published the results. If you don’t want to pay attention to him, then I can’t help you.

And that last point, I think, is where all this comes to. You’re not here to engage in a discussion or get to know anyone or participate in the give-and-take of examining the facts, aren’t you? No, you’re here for one purpose, and one purpose only, and that’s to tell us who we are attracted to, in essence. You purpose is to continue to put forward the idea that we gay men are child molesters. Okay, you didn’t say all of us. Okay, you didn’t say most of us. You didn’t actually say how many of us are. But you did come in here expecting one criminal from Virginia to be representative of all of us, and you’ve brought along a study that does not say so to say that it does.

Your motives are clear.

The benefit of running a web site is that the web site’s owner gets to set the parameters of debate. We tolerate all sorts of differing opinions here. We tolerated 18 of yours, including 8 on this thread alone, which is much, much more than any anti-gay web site would tolerate of mine. But I think this line of discussion has come to an end. I’m placing you on moderation. When you have a different line of discussion, those comments will be published.

Then Mr. Burroway does everything he can to move away from that fact, the central one in the study that I noted.

Constant prevarication, obfuscation, denial, equivocation. Hallmarks of ‘debate’ by the gay activist crowd.”

You seem to refuse to understand the study involved LEGAL ADULTS. You have no reason to suggest that if a 16 year old were included, that the gay men would go ga ga. As 28 seems to be the line in the sand for straight men in that study, without further study, one would not actually know what the low end line would be fore gays. Perhaps 18 is the limit, perhaps not. Your attempt to suggest that “reason” dictates that as the ages get younger, gay men would be more attracted is pure speculation with 5th-grade logic to boot. As Timothy rightly points out, by the same logic you use — fetuses would be the ultimate sexually attractive person…or perhaps it’s the zygote, or sperm and egg just before conception. hot hot hot. You’re using a weak argument (the slippery slope) and trying to apply it to a legit scientific study. it’s amazing what mental gymanstics you’ll put yourself through to prove an invalid point.

We get it, Richard, you don’t like, trust, or believe gay men. You will use whatever skewed logic and “wink wink, nudge nudge” reasoning you have your disposal. No wonder Cameron appeals to you, you’ve the same mindset. You come from the perspective that there is something wrong with gays, thus you find no problem grasping at straws to prove your point and dismissing legit research to the contrary as politically biased.

Given the clear slope of the graphic, reasonable people can draw reasonable conclusions about how homosexual men would score if photos of 15 year old boys were included in the sample

And just imagine what would happen if they included picture of fetuses. Gay men wouldn’t be able to control themselves. OH MY!!!

Sometimes arguments are so blatantly downright stupid that you can only laugh (and mock, of course).