My suspicion regarding male interest in female homosexuality is that it’s at least partially rooted in an aversion to male homosexuality. It allows men to watch female sexuality without having to watch another man.

Crap. I just realized that you said you don’t want any more comments on male homosexuality. My bad.

This was from your Twitter in relation to the Guardian article on ‘Born that Way’:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10743878

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9625997&fulltextType=RA&fileId=S0033291714002451

This is the newest one that points Xq28 as the cause for same-sex attraction in men.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7581447?dopt=Abstract

What I noticed in that Guardian article is that, for one, most of the studies were old or had conflicting results, and the newest one, from May, measures only 900 gay men.

It reminds me of a gay scientist that was overjoyed with the ‘presence’ of a gay gene, yet he said that they hadn’t actually found it yet. He said that they needed more money. I wouldn’t say science for the gay gene is ‘on the right track’. Hell, they dropped it in 2005 and again in 2009.

I have a hard time believing that such a dangerous and unhealthy lifestyle could be /that/ heritable. Homophobia is more present than homosexuality. Obviously, one is celebrated, the other condemned.

Thoughts?

Might this big news also have relevance to atypical orientations, pathogens, immune responses?

http://neurosciencenews.com/lymphatic-system-brain-neurobiology-2080/

Conservatives are more r typed.

I remember reading something of yours about how liberals aren’t breeding but conservatives are.

Here is a questions for you.

Are SJW’s (social-justice warriors) breeding?

I probably should post this on a male homosexuality thread, but it’ll do here. You can pass it along to those who snicker at or are dismissive of the pathogen theory. Many such people claim we’d *know by now* if it were the result of a bug, many want an other-than-Cochran source. It’s not about homosexuality, but it’s a good, quick read for those who should be thinking about all kinds of behavioral outcomes caused by viruses.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2782954/

“They found that both are highly heritable (primarily driven by additive genetic factors), but what’s more, high facial masculinity in men led to high facial masculinity in their sisters, decreasing these women’s attractiveness.”
thats probably the same mechanism which makes that men / women of some races are on average more or less attractive than men / women of other races

It’ll be interesting to see how those research programs address allegations of publication bias (etc.). Having said that, there was a recent response to various criticisms, including publication bias:

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/comm/haselton/unify_uploads/files/Gildersleeve,%20Haselton,%20Fales%20(2014)%20reply%20to%20Wood%20et%20al.,%20Harris%20et%20al.%20psych%20bull%20.pdf

Ever noticed how artists draw female villains? They are given long noses and chiseled features with long pointed jaws. Witches are a great example. Similarly male villains are often drawn with smaller jaws and more feminine features. The goatee is often worn as compensation for a weak chin and has become a short hand for evil. Humans have long known intuitively that we differ, that some men are less physical and more emotional and some women are less emotional and more physical. Of course it’s also natural that the more common forms treat their counter parts with contempt. Nothing is more predictable than the cerebral young male with a small chin, an even digit ratio and a burning hatred for those knuckle dragging philistines who pick on him. But I do wonder why the masculine females tend to blame men for their problems rather than the other girls who made them feel bad for not caring about makeup and getting a boyfriend.

The notion that male celebrities viewed as most attractive by women are particularly masculine is quite debatable. I just looked at one such list, and by my lights only a small number of the top 25 on the list seemed masculine (e.g., Hugh Jackman, George Clooney).

At any rate, there’s a lot of evidence that masculinized men with testosterone-laden bodily and facial features, and inter-sexually competitive, socially dominant personalities, become attractive to women in the fertile (follicular) phase of the menstrual cycle. This effect is strongest among women with boyfriends/husbands who are especially lacking in such masculine traits (what the manosphere guys would call ‘beta males’), and it dissipates or disappears completely when they are in their infertile, luteal phase, where they instead prefer more feminized, ‘good dad’/’good provider’ men. Also, more attractive women tend to be most attracted on average to masculine men throughout their ovulatory cycle.

These kinds of phenomena have the hallmarks of being a psychological adaptation in women, namely for selective sire choice (viz., good genes for offspring) in certain contexts. In other words, a strong case can be made that the systematic, multi-layered empirical patterns observed are best explained as the result of a cognitive adaptation in women. Granted, such fantasies about and desires for men with good genes traits should be put in proper context: it’s not to say that all women suddenly become obligate raging whores during their fertile window and seek out men with good genes for intercourse; this is more of an ‘at-the-margins’ phenomenon. And supposedly many factors play into the cost-benefit analysis of whether a particular woman actually ends up acting on those desires. Another thing to keep in mind is that, by hypothesis, less attractive women are less able to secure long-term commitment from good genes males; so such women might instead opt to secure commitment from a man of lesser genetic quality, then cuckold him and secure better genes via a dalliance with a man in possession of good genes.

The general empirical patterns have also been found in at least a couple of traditional small-scale societies – so it does not appear to be merely an artefact of the evolved human cognitive architecture interfacing with modern ‘WEIRD’ conditions.

This stuff is pretty well documented in the evolutionary psychology literature on mating.

A short overview can be found here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2394562/pdf/rspb20071425.pdf

This book is a longer, in-depth analysis:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-evolutionary-biology-of-human-female-sexuality-9780195340990?cc=ca&lang=en&

“Why are men regarded as being attractive also fairly masculine in appearance (I know people are can think of counter-examples like Bieber and Di Caprio)? Is it just a byproduct of higher testosterone, some kind of signal of fighting abilities”

Imagine a standing start where women were attracted to male traits on a purely random basis then the male traits that would be selected for would be those that led to higher reproduction and survival of the various females. So in a violent environment women randomly attracted to those male traits which signaled a high capacity for violence might have more surviving kids so attraction to those traits would spread.

If the environment changed and other traits began to confer that advantage then over time women attracted to those other traits would be selected for instead so the weighted basket of traits that women were attracted to would change over time with the environment e.g. from being attracted to 80% thug to only being attracted to 20% thug.

Say there were two broad categories of sexual attraction 1) visual and 2) behavioral and they were weighted differently between men and women such that

men: 2/3 visual, 1/3 behavioral
woman: 1/3 visual, 2/3 behavioral

then something that only effected the visual component would have a differential effect, for the sake of argument say

men: 2/3 gay, 1/3 bisexual
women: 1/3 lesbian, 2/3 bisexual

(and vice versa for the behavioral component)

if there were two components (visual and behavioral) and they could be misaligned independently the four categories created would be

visually female, behaviorally female
visually female, behaviorally male
visually male, behaviorally female
visually male, behaviorally male

Michael said, “It just means human sexual attraction is complex and it is easy for nature to ‘get it wrong’ — unlike insects that use pheromones.”

Sounds as if you haven’t been following the decades’ worth of work on mice and olfaction.

[…] Female Same-Sex Attraction Revisited – from jayman. […]

@ Staffan

Most of them were pretty chiseled at one point or another except for Johnny Depp (arguably) and Jude Law.

“…most of the male celebrities considered most attractive by females (adult ones at least) have stereotypically chiseled jaws and muscled physiques.”

http://www.people.com/people/package/gallery/0,,20315920_20154495,00.html#30229116

Suppose we were studying female left-hander-sexual behaviour (females who have had sex with someone who is left handed). If we looked at a table of their number of sexual partners we would notice that they were quite promiscuous. For example, we would expect that females with 2 lifetime sexual partners would be a little less than twice as likely to have had a left-hander-sexual experience than those with 1 lifetime sexual partner.

To what extent does the apparent promiscuity of females who have had sex with females reflect a similar, more hits on random humans therefore more likely to hit (on) a female, situation.

http://www.genengnews.com/gen-news-highlights/brain-gender-altered-by-lifting-epigenetic-repression/81251103/

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-03-female-mammalian-phenotype-results-repression.html

Jayman, we’ve known for several years that the rodent brain has two functional circuits, male/female, and that pheromonal cues are processed differently by the female and male brains, resulting in all kinds of different behaviors, all the way from parental behaviors to reproductive behaviors but not until recently have we understood how the brain became either female or male.

The latest research is pretty exciting. The male-female differentiation of the pre-optic area doesn’t take place as early as was once thought. In fact, it happens pretty late in gestation, perinatally, and evidently continues post-natally as well. The area is heavily methlylated in the undifferentiated POA until a hormone release from the gonads masculinizes the male brain by removing the methyl groups from many genes, allowing expression resulting in typical male reproductive behaviors. Repressing this unsilencing maintains the default female brain.

Perhaps this gets us closer to understanding how male homosexuality (and even female homosexuality) might come about. Maybe it can even explain why some male homosexuals are so much more effeminate than others, with a low number of unsilenced genes resulting in a less feminine gay male and a high number of unsilenced genes resulting in a more effeminate gay male.

Especially interesting to me in light of our many discussions of the likelihood of a pathogenic cause is the following observation by the research team:

“Intriguingly, the latest study also found that inflammatory immune cells known as microglia appear to play a role in masculinization, in part through their production of prostaglandins, a neurochemical normally associated with illness. In recent years, scientists have increasingly realized that the immune system is integral to the development of the brain;”

Very interesting. (Isn’t it also true that the male immune system is not quite as effective as the female’s? Perhaps that explains the higher prevalence of male homosexuality.)

Scientists have conducted experiments with serotonin receptor-knockout mice. If I recall correctly they became hypersexual and indiscriminately mounted other mice of both sexes. I don’t whether such a mechanism has any bearing on bisexuality in humans, female or male. But I do wonder whether there is some kind of link between bisexuality and hypersexuality, promiscuity, and very high sex drive in humans.

More masculine women => higher sex drives => being less picky
or
More masculine women => higher sex drive and attraction to females ?

Socially, “bisexual” may be a more acceptable way of signalling or thinking about “promiscuous”.

I recall from my college days a great deal of anger directed by “true lesbians” and “true bisexuals” against “cuddle girls” and the like who “claim” to be gay or bi in social situations in order to pick up men. There were even accusations of “cultural appropriation”–yes, of “straights appropriating gay culture”, to which I very confusedly responded that I thought gay was an orientation, not a culture. The ultimate irony was that the “true lesbians” and “true bisexuals” making these claims were themselves primarily engaged in hetero-relationships during the time I knew them.

As someone who has only ever had two significant relationships in her life, the idea of trying to suss out such tiny variations in attraction seems rather pointless.

Being left-handed has very little impact on the number of children one has.

Being unattracted to the opposite sex can have a big impact on the number of children one has.

Ergo, one of these things is likely to be strongly selected against.

Looking at the data, it looks like SSA is just a side effect of promiscuity. Promiscuous people just aren’t all that picky.

Women who aren’t seeking out dozens of partners simply pick the partner they like best and stick with them. Such women might find other women just as attractive as “non-hetero” women do, but not bother mentioning it because they have no need for more partners.

“Doesn’t matter. The only way for them to be preserved in this scenario is a complete lack of additive effect (which is implausible). All such alleles would quickly go to zero over evolutionary time.”

Lots of genes have slight negative effects. They haven’t all vanished.

“The difference here is that long distance migration is inherently difficult and dangerous. F$, not so much. ”

A million articles on game blogs would beg to differ. These blogs would not exist if it were that easy.

Jayman — great to get you in real time!

“What do you think happens to any such genes that cause such malfunction in attraction in humans? Iterate it over time. ”

Obviously if there were just one gene or two genes involved, their rate of incidence would go toward zero quickly. On the other hand, if it is a complex behavior that involves many genes, this would not necessarily be so.

Failing to migrate is highly maladaptive and leads to death, nature can never completely select it out. Every generation, a substantial portion of birds screw it up.

“The low heritability and evolutionary contradiction of male homosexuality necessitates the pathogenic explanation. ”

Not true. It just means human sexual attraction is complex and it is easy for nature to ‘get it wrong’ — unlike insects that use pheromones.

If 10% of birds get confused and don’t migrate to where they are supposed to each year, it does not mean that there is a pathogen. It just means that migration has a high failure rate because it is a complex behavior. Lots of things can go wrong.

Ah, I’d read the discussion over at Cochran’s but failed to read your much more illuminating post and comments discussion. Interesting stuff.

Why does homosexuality have to be anything more than a variety of minor developmental errors that are inevitable with something as ludicrously complex as the human brain and sexual/reproductive behavior in particular? About 10% of people are left-handed and my understanding is that it’s pretty much just an error in development. Everyone is supposed to be right handed but sometimes something goes wrong. Can’t homosexuality be something similar? There’s fewer homosexuals than left-handers but then homosexuality is more harmful to your reproductive chances so there’d be selection to make it less common — but no amount of selection can completely eliminate simple developmental error, can it?

Great post Jayman, thanks. Good to have you back.

“A British survey (Mercer et al, 2013) finds that among the youngest cohorts of women (ages 16-34), as much as 19% claim to have sexual contact with another woman”

But according to that data, less than 50% of these actually involved ‘genital contact’. I would class those as the genuine lesbians. The rest might be just ‘bi-curious’, or might have kissed and fondled a female friend in a nightclub to attract some male attention?

Hey Jayman,

I have a newb question here. Why are men regarded as being attractive also fairly masculine in appearance (I know people are can think of counter-examples like Bieber and Di Caprio)? Is it just a byproduct of higher testosterone, some kind of signal of fighting abilities, or did masculine traits actively evolve through sexual selection? You claim in this post that masculine looks are mostly orthogonal to male attractiveness but this doesn’t make sense to me since most of the male celebrities considered most attractive by females (adult ones at least) have stereotypically chiseled jaws and muscled physiques.

WHOA! First on the first Jayman post in a long time.

Haven’t read it yet, but will do soon. Especially since it’s about lesbians, what a great topic.