Ewww! Its a gonna be a sumpthin good!

This person’s exoticness was too much, that person’s exoticness was too little, but the third person’s exoticness was just right.

Which is why that kid with the golden locks fell for the young bear.

Many Christian authors have posited that boys become gay when they are eroticized by any wacky notion such as viewing your own penis when masturbating (I really read a book that made that claim.)

Well then the solution is obvious. The church should issue porn to pubescent boys. :P

This person’s exoticness was too much, that person’s exoticness was too little, but the third person’s exoticness was just right.

This is a serious question as I see that you actually give some intelligent thought to the matter. So, why do we need to have theories about gayness?

I am content with myself and can’t see any benefit to understanding hetersexuality any more than homosexuality. What benefits are there to these studies?

Thanks for responding.

Many Christian authors have posited that boys become gay when they are eroticized by any wacky notion such as viewing your own penis when masturbating (I really read a book that made that claim.)

So tell me: what is this process of eroticization? There would be the potential for some real science; if you could define it. Instead, they sling the term around but never actually attempt to define it.

This study is another whack job. Do any of you need to know why you are gay? I don’t need to know why I am gay. So why the big search? What benefits will come from this research?

First, any of you out there care to tell me how you were eroticized from heter to homo? The article implies that the base line is hetero. The reason for the research is the implication that if eroticization can go from hetero to homo, then it stands to reason that we can manipulate the process or control the variables to that we can go to the other extreme: changing homo to hetero.

If this isn’t another poorly veiled Christian junk-science psuedo paper, then it is an example of over-exuberance from an under-achieving psychologist that shouldn’t be publishing. It smells of NARTH.

No, that presentation of Bem’s theory is an oversimplification. The social sciences (and Daryl Bem) are well aware that the dominant human tendency in matters of sexuality and otherwise is homogamy – sameness. At least in Western societies, the dominant pattern is for people to find those like them and who they spend time with more attractive, to date them (or whatever the kids are doing these days), and to partner with them. So what needs to be explained, actually, is why heterosexuality (a form of heterogamy) is the dominant pattern when we look at gender. Bem’s proposition is more specifically that exotic – but not too exotic – becomes erotic.

Bem’s EBE theory is one of the few that coherently brings together factors from biology, psychology, and sociology to try to explain the variations we observe in human sexual desires (and is not his only influential theory). Most academics who at least partially subscribe to a socially constructed viewpoint on sexuality use Bem as at least one starting point for understanding sexuality. He isn’t a NARTH guy and to imply such is the case is irresponsible reporting. Bem’s theory definitely has some weak points and I think fails to explain some particular sexual variants. But that’s how theory is built and developed – someone puts out some ideas that have some empirical support and other people test that set of ideas against further empirical evidence and suggest revisions to the theory. Eventually Bem’s theory might be proved totally wrong and/or replaced with a better theory and/or shown to only have explanatory power given a particular scope. But to date nobody has offered anything clearly better.

Thanks for clarifying.

Bem’s theory on the “exotic becomes erotic” was at one time a favorite among some who searched desperately for just any believable theory of non-biological etiology for homosexuality.

I really don’t know if it holds any value or truth, but I always thought it was a stretch. Now my opinion of Bem has dropped even further.

As far as I know, Daryl Bem is not a proponent of ex-gay therapy. In fact, articles like this one (http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_4644918) suggest the opposite. Judith Stacey’s empirical and theoretical work on same-sex parenting has been used by right-wing groups to promote their own points of view, but that doesn’t make her a right-winger. Nor does it make her work wrong.