Can sexuality be influenced?

Originally posted by Esau Cairn
Scenario 1: I knew of a person, now in his mid-30's, openly gay & works as a professional, full-time gay escort. As a child, he was abused & molested by several priests at his boarding school. He ran away from home (as his parents didn't believe his accusations) & turned to drugs & living on the streets as a rent-boy.
Suffice to say, in his own words, he never developed a heterosexual relationship (& hardly had sex with women). He went further to say, that the irony of being a rent-boy was that most of his clients were the same priests that abused/influenced his sexuality & that now they had to pay him for the act.
So, that's a yes that sexuality can be influenced.

What about the women (I don't think I know of any I must point out) who have a similar childhood, abused by uncles, etc, who don't turn to prostitution and have relationships with women? Both scenarios are the same, in that you could assume that their past experiences have influenced their sexual preference, but what would send one person to continue to have sex with people of the same gender as their abuser and one to turn away from that gender and into the arms of the opposite gender?

Originally posted by inimalist
I don't think Halle Berry is attractive at all...

like really, I'd say a 4 or 5 maybe

EDIT: aside from that, you are all over the place, most of your points are inconsistent with the idea that there is some universal "attractiveness", and I've learned in the past that I have little patience to try and explain statistical concepts to people looking to just argue...

I'm not all over the place., and I'm not the one looking to argue. You responded to me first. I feel like I'm being antagonized by you to some extent. I have seen no statistics provided. You are of course welcome to disagree with me. I'm fine with that.

In conclusion my point was there are certain features that are seen as more "attractive" consistently, these features are sought after and passed down. Symmetry being one of them. Not that everybody has the same preference in a person, or that they all want the same person. Just that people subconsciously pick traits that are consistently attractive, it doesn't just wildly vary in those areas. Did you ever read about the golden ratio?

There are other areas that are influenced, like culture and society, that people pick convenient cues from. So like I said it is a mixture of many factors.
.

Originally posted by Robtard
Do you have a link to this data?

Because if it's what I am thinking of, it was some online thing. Hardly "scientific".

Let me see if I can find at least a portion of the video for you.

discovery channel also has shows about aliens building the pyramids

Originally posted by inimalist
discovery channel also has shows about aliens building the pyramids

Madness, good sir.

Originally posted by Omega Vision
Wait are you saying that didn't happen? That through huge amounts of slave power and human ingenuity the Pyramids were constructed over human lifetimes?

Madness, good sir.

jeez, now that I read it aloud, I see how dumb that sounds

Originally posted by inimalist
discovery channel also has shows about aliens building the pyramids

I'm trying to think of who the other celeb is from years previous.

Here is my old thread. Which is more on this side topic:

http://www.killermovies.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=388963&highlight=aesthetic+beauty+forumid%3A11

Originally posted by Tha C-Master
Beauty is subjective on some levels. Not entirely. There are proportions and features that are hardwired into attraction

This is a contradiction. Had you referenced your earlier point about culture it might have worked. However, you did not.

Originally posted by inimalist
sure, a person is more likely to say a person with a symmetrical face is more attractive than someone without...

He does not realize a fat person can still be symetrical.

Originally posted by Dr Mystery
What about the women (I don't think I know of any I must point out) who have a similar childhood, abused by uncles, etc, who don't turn to prostitution and have relationships with women? Both scenarios are the same, in that you could assume that their past experiences have influenced their sexual preference, but what would send one person to continue to have sex with people of the same gender as their abuser and one to turn away from that gender and into the arms of the opposite gender?

I've never been clear on what "choice" is supposed to mean in the context of sexuality. I can say for certain that I've never deliberated on which sex I want to be attracted to. Obviously I'm not a statistically significant sample of the population, though. Do other people do that?

Originally posted by inimalist
yes

this doesn't mean that, to a particular individual, a person with a symmetric face will be perceived as more attractive. biologically motivated or not, it isn't an absolute or universal quality that people see as attractive

That pretty much sums up the discussion or where it should have ended.

It's just a probability, not an absolute. We can name a million different "strange things" that individuals like...we can also come up with biological motivations for some of the commonly sought after traits.

Here's an interesting thing that is relevant: there was a study done that seemed to almost normalize the "fringe" people when they viewed images of almost random people. Basically, they had people write down stuff they found attractive in people, then they "plotted" or measured it. Then they had them take a test while looking at thousands of people. The written attractiveness and the visually measured attractiveness did not nicely match-up. The "fringe" people seemed to "normalize" to the population despite being "separate" samples (meaning, they didn't know what others selected or wrote down.)

I don't know what that study shows. We claim something we disagree with? We are conditioned to react (sexually motivated) a certain way to those around us? Did we measure society (trends) rather than the average of people's thinking (this has to be at least partially true)? I don't know. But the only thing I took away from that is people who claim to have a particular fringe taste seem to still agree with (but not universally) everyone else on what is attractive. I don't think the study addressed social standing, either. Some people find power and money (rightly so) quite attractive and how can you directly measure that with just an image?

Oddly enough, there was a similar study done that measured JUST that. It was almost laughable, really. They measured people's ratings of images of people (pre-established ratings were measured on those images to control). They then measured the same set of images with a small bio that listed their occupation, income, and maybe a couple of other "red herring" items. Apparently, women will find ugly men attractive if they make a lot of money. For men, it's almost exclusive the appearance they care about. Is that social conditioning or biological motivation (or both)? That seems like such a disconnection between low-level and high-level processing that I cannot really reconcile the two. Do low-level biological functions REALLY propagate up that far into higher-level thinking (they do, but I'm referring to the processing of a very high-level thinking, it dropping down to low-level functions, and then low-level functions "dictating" all the way back up into high-level thought on what to think or at least being part of a complex system of what influences the final "conclusion" on that.)

[Forgive me for being all over the place and unclear with my thoughts. I have a difficult time articulating what I want to "say" about these studies. I almost want to put "studies" in quotes to show what I think about them being useful or even significantly scientific.]

Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
I've never been clear on what "choice" is supposed to mean in the context of sexuality. I can say for certain that I've never deliberated on which sex I want to be attracted to. Obviously I'm not a statistically significant sample of the population, though. Do other people do that?

I mean I would think that you would be choosing who you want to be attracted to. But then I would think that would be based on who you find attractive...

Originally posted by dadudemon
That pretty much sums up the discussion or where it should have ended.

It's just a probability, not an absolute. We can name a million different "strange things" that individuals like...we can also come up with biological motivations for some of the commonly sought after traits.

Here's an interesting thing that is relevant: there was a study done that seemed to almost normalize the "fringe" people when they viewed images of almost random people. Basically, they had people write down stuff they found attractive in people, then they "plotted" or measured it. Then they had them take a test while looking at thousands of people. The written attractiveness and the visually measured attractiveness did not nicely match-up. The "fringe" people seemed to "normalize" to the population despite being "separate" samples (meaning, they didn't know what others selected or wrote down.)

I don't know what that study shows. We claim something we disagree with? We are conditioned to react (sexually motivated) a certain way to those around us? Did we measure society (trends) rather than the average of people's thinking (this has to be at least partially true)? I don't know. But the only thing I took away from that is people who claim to have a particular fringe taste seem to still agree with (but not universally) everyone else on what is attractive. I don't think the study addressed social standing, either. Some people find power and money (rightly so) quite attractive and how can you directly measure that with just an image?

Oddly enough, there was a similar study done that measured JUST that. It was almost laughable, really. They measured people's ratings of images of people (pre-established ratings were measured on those images to control). They then measured the same set of images with a small bio that listed their occupation, income, and maybe a couple of other "red herring" items. Apparently, women will find ugly men attractive if they make a lot of money. For men, it's almost exclusive the appearance they care about. Is that social conditioning or biological motivation (or both)? That seems like such a disconnection between low-level and high-level processing that I cannot really reconcile the two. Do low-level biological functions REALLY propagate up that far into higher-level thinking (they do, but I'm referring to the processing of a very high-level thinking, it dropping down to low-level functions, and then low-level functions "dictating" all the way back up into high-level thought on what to think or at least being part of a complex system of what influences the final "conclusion" on that.)

[Forgive me for being all over the place and unclear with my thoughts. I have a difficult time articulating what I want to "say" about these studies. I almost want to put "studies" in quotes to show what I think about them being useful or even significantly scientific.]

the short answer is that, yes, many bottom-up processes can be incredibly influential on our behaviour, yet we might have no clue about them, and our declarative mind may even say the opposite.

Its the same way that people follow some moral paradigms which they can't articulate. There is something hard wired there, and because our behaviour isn't all determined by top-down processes, there is no reason the motivation behind such action would ever make it into our declarative mind.

Originally posted by inimalist
the short answer is that, yes, many bottom-up processes can be incredibly influential on our behaviour, yet we might have no clue about them, and our declarative mind may even say the opposite.

Its the same way that people follow some moral paradigms which they can't articulate. There is something hard wired there, and because our behaviour isn't all determined by top-down processes, there is no reason the motivation behind such action would ever make it into our declarative mind.

Ahhhh. Thanks for the clarification. I did not realize how heavily influenced higher thought processes were by lower ones (not the obvious ones, but more subtle abstract ones like conceptual attractivness versus purely biological traits.)

The visual cortex psychologist pulls through for me. pained

Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
I've never been clear on what "choice" is supposed to mean in the context of sexuality. I can say for certain that I've never deliberated on which sex I want to be attracted to. Obviously I'm not a statistically significant sample of the population, though. Do other people do that?

It is hard to believe, given my experiences, that people are not sometimes over-whelmed by their own stupidity, need for acceptance and/or lack of personal identity that they have found themselves in situations, sexual or otherwise, where they are more than willing to be what ever someone else wants them to be at that given moment. This is where orientation v sexuality was expertly illustrated by inimalist, earlier. Perhaps you have a stable and confident perspective on yourself, but there are many people who do not. It is hard to place yourself in their shoes and equate behavior, sexual or otherwise, with how they respond to the expectations they assume are being placed on them by their peers.

Sexuality(orientation) is not subjective to situation, but behavior absolutely is.

I have more than one friend who has multiple homosexual experiences under their belt - no pun intended.

Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
I've never been clear on what "choice" is supposed to mean in the context of sexuality. I can say for certain that I've never deliberated on which sex I want to be attracted to. Obviously I'm not a statistically significant sample of the population, though. Do other people do that?

Originally posted by King Kandy
It's right up there in conservatives' minds with all the people who "choose to be homeless". Now I do know some people who genuinely choose to be homeless (hippies, mainly), but i'm pretty sure its not a very sensible description of our unemployment problem.

When political conservatives (or anyone else) refers to things in such terms, they're communicating that the choice is simply for the [homosexual/homeless/atheist/insert adjective here] person to change his or her ways.

Biological or sociological, it's not that simple.

Originally posted by Existere
You're comparing a gay guy that was abused by priests at an early age to straight females abused by uncles at early ages. I'm confused as to who is 'turning away from the gender of their abuser and into the arms of the opposite gender.'

No, I was comparing a boy, abused by men as a child, who as an adult chose men as his sexual partners, to a theoretical girl, also abused by men as a child, who as an adult chose women as her sexual parners. I made no assumptions about their (Potential) sexual orientation as children. I was merely looking at it from a different perspective.

Originally posted by skekUng
This is a contradiction. Had you referenced your earlier point about culture it might have worked. However, you did not.

Originally posted by Dr Mystery
No, I was comparing a boy, abused by men as a child, who as an adult chose men as his sexual partners, to a theoretical girl, also abused by men as a child, who as an adult chose women as her sexual parners. I made no assumptions about their (Potential) sexual orientation as children. I was merely looking at it from a different perspective.

Fair enough. I hadn't actually considered (or, really, heard of) cases where women who were abused as children grew up to realize a homosexual (or bisexual, pansexual etc) identity.