Careful
You mentioned the word Lesbian. You know what happens to your image when you do that.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/06/indy_reg/
Women's gaydar (for men) improves when ovulating
Researchers in Canada have found that women become much better at telling whether a man is gay – based merely on looking at a photo of his face – when they are ovulating and fertile. In the course of determining this, the psychology profs revealed that they possess highly effective scientifically-verified texts, the mere reading …
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Thursday 23rd June 2011 11:42 GMT Marvin the Martian
"hot-from-the-dept-of-the-bleedin-obvious"
Rubbish.
Is it obvious that a fertile or aroused woman is more able to tell from a picture whether men are gay or straight? No.
If it's that obvious to you, please answer if primed males are similarly better able to tell apart lesbians from heterosexual women; if so explain mechanism and similarly if not. No coherent story? Thought not.
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Thursday 23rd June 2011 12:02 GMT TheOtherHobbbes
Actually
the implication is that according to this study, gay men and straight men have different facial features.
So you could code an auto-gaydar, and build it into an app or an HTML5 site.
People who worry about such things could upload a photo, and get an instant accurate and scientific gay/not gay score.
I for one support such a venture - if only because the results might surprise some of El Reg's regular writers.
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Friday 24th June 2011 08:31 GMT Scorchio!!
Re: Actually
"the implication is that according to this study, 'gay' men and straight men have different facial features."
I've not read the article but, from my reading during my psychology B.Sc. way back that would be right. There are neural differences between straight men and 'gay' men/straight females and 'gay' females, and these involve neurohormonal releases from the womb onward. The differences are clearly measurable (in spite of past claims of 'gay' people), in the form of the preoptic bulb of the anterior hypothalamus, for example; in females the nuclei are (IIRC) larger and less numerous. This sort of finding occurs in the brains of 'gay' (I hate neologisms, especially when they abuse the language so) people Gunther Dörner did a lot of work on this kind of thing, and withstood a great deal of abuse from 'gay' people who short sightedly did not realise or accept that his work helped to substantiate something they often claimed; they simply were homosexual, not by choice, but because it was in their nature.
Returning to the (cough) entry point, hormones affect the way facial bone structures are formed, among many other things, including hairline.
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Thursday 23rd June 2011 12:08 GMT Vladimir Plouzhnikov
What's not obvious to you?
"if primed males are similarly better able to tell apart lesbians from heterosexual women"
Primed males attracted to all women, whether lesbian or not. They don't need to tell them apart.
And, also from the same department, an indirect almost-scientific confirmation:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/27/relationship_research_dept_of_bleedin_obvious/
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Thursday 23rd June 2011 13:37 GMT Markie Dussard
and another thing ...
Far from being 'bleedin-obvious' it actually suggests that this is a naturally selected skill that females have developed to avoid mating mismatches with the hordes of prehistoric gays that must have been mincing around on the African savannah. Gives more of the lie to those religious bigots who constantly flaunt their ignorance of biology by restating the mistaken assertion that homosexuality is 'unnatural'.
I really think The Reg should start distancing itself from the Daily Heil, because some of its readers aren't quite that simple-minded.
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Thursday 23rd June 2011 14:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
'Gay' is a recent term
The concept of gayness is a relatively recent term, and somewhat inaccurate, since it imposes a near triplicate state (gay or straight or bi) on what is actually a range of sexuality. Or to put it simply. Many gay guys (by present day definition) are married and have kids.
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Thursday 23rd June 2011 14:50 GMT dit-dit-dit-dah
Causation / Correlation
Only if you assume that women are recognising gay features and rejecting them.
The other alternative is that women are simply rejecting men with features that indicate they're not prime mates and as a consequence, at least a proportion of those rejected men are turning to homosexuality instead.
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Thursday 23rd June 2011 18:43 GMT dit-dit-dit-dah
Arguing for the sake of it...
Bleh. It was just a thought.
The research shows that ovulating women can identify gay men from a photo; presumably it's not so they can chase after them to get fashion tips, so I guess you can say they find you less sexually attractive. What do you care?
I still think that what's been shown is not an ability to identify gayness, but just the already known preference that ovulating women have for heavily masculine features associated with status and health.
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Friday 24th June 2011 09:22 GMT Scorchio!!
Re: Causation / Correlation
Oh Francis Galton and the early Italian criminologists (Cesare Lombroso) would *love* this bit. It means that the early criminologists' claim that criminals can be detected by dint of physiognomy is valid and true. Only it is not. Particularities (e.g., truthfulness, honesty, criminality) do not manifest themselves in physiology, but generalities (e.g. sexuality) do. One of the reasons is that criminality, lying and so on are not biological constructs. Similarly the polygraph is *not* a lie detector, substantially because lies are not (yet, you might argue; just as there is no one to one correspondence between sensory stimuli, how they impinge on nerves and are sent to the brain, there's no general machine code for cognitions, such as deception, criminality and, furthermore, CNS development, both genetically and phenotypically, differs across individuals, leading to the term 'individual differences') accessible in biological form; the polygraph detects dissimulation in the form of neurobiological correlates, that is, elevated pulse, HR, skin conductance, and so on.
In addition, there are a number of different reproductive strategies, including fecundity, accuracy and so on; these rely on sexual fitness, intelligence, and so on. As with the 'criminal face' I've seen no demonstration of an 'intelligent face, no 'sexually fit' face, consistent with the debunking of Lombroso. Since human males are always in season it is hard to think of a reason why and how (hormonal cycles) their faces would show it, though this does occur in females; lips puffed out by elevated blood pressure indicate sexual readiness/receptiveness, a blush on the cheeks, in fact the very sorts of things that women pay a lot of money to have implanted/surgically altered by cosmetic surgeons.
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Friday 24th June 2011 12:39 GMT Scorchio!!
Re: I just read that...
"as Castration / Correlation
which might or might not be relevant. I really don't want to find out."
...and thank you for reminding me of other parts of my training. For example, it was thought by fluffy headed politicians that castration of sex offenders would solve a problem. It did not. The reason is that whereas humans, unlike for example rats, undergo sex differentiation inside the womb, and the process of sensitisation by circulating hormones (which the sharp eyed will note can demasculinise or defeminise a brain), the process cannot be reversed by orchidectomy. The foundations have already been (cough) laid.
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Friday 24th June 2011 10:16 GMT Scorchio!!
Re: Causation / Correlation
"The other alternative is that women are simply rejecting men with features that indicate they're not prime mates and as a consequence, at least a proportion of those rejected men are turning to homosexuality instead."
That, roughly speaking, is the Germaine Greer argument in her nonsensical 'female eunuch'. She says words to the effect that homosexuals are men who cannot live up to their sexual role. I'll be home tonight and will pull that out for a quote if desired.
It is of course pure unsubstantiated bullshit, of the sort that you would expect from an arts graduate making claims in the empirical realm. How that thing was ever believed defeats me. If a man had made half of the misandrist comments that she had, except in misogynist form, he would probably have been prosecuted under one of the yuman rights/equal rights 'laws' [1] passed by the Blair government.
[1] Much of the welter of Blairite legislation was in fact their personal preferences in legal form.
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Saturday 25th June 2011 14:31 GMT Scorchio!!
Re: Causation / Correlation
"The other alternative is that women are simply rejecting men with features that indicate they're not prime mates and as a consequence, at least a proportion of those rejected men are turning to homosexuality instead."
...and here is the quote from Greer, the unscientific:
"Most homosexuality results from the inability of the person to adapt to his given sex role, and ought not to be treated as genetic and pathological, but the prejudiced language of abnormality offers the homosexual no way of expressing this rejection, so he must consider himself a freak. The ‘normal’ sex roles that we learn to play from our infancy are no more natural than the antics of a transvestite. In order to approximate those shapes and attitudes which are considered normal and desirable, both sexes deform themselves, justifying the process by referring to the primary, genetic difference between the sexes. But of forty-eight chromosomes only one is different: on this difference we base a complete separation of male and female, pretending as it were that all forty-eight were different. Frenchmen may well cry ‘Vive la différence’, for it is cultivated unceasingly in all aspects of life. It is easiest and most obvious to consider that deliberately induced deformity as it is manifested in the body and our concepts of it, for whatever else we are or may pretend to be, we are certainly our bodies."
The Female Eunuch, pp33-34, Harper perennial modern classics (1970)
Greer seems to have a bee in her bonnet about homosexuality, mentioning it several times. Today I found myself wondering if she hates homosexuals because they have escaped women!
She has to the best of my knowledge never offered any data in support of her argument, and this is typical of the empirical claims made by arts graduates. I've concluded that this woman is a charlatan.
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Saturday 25th June 2011 17:31 GMT skeptical i
Agree that Greer's ideas about homosexuality are bogus, but ...
... this bit -- "In order to approximate those shapes and attitudes which are considered normal and desirable, both sexes deform themselves, justifying the process by referring to the primary, genetic difference between the sexes" -- sounds spot on. Obviously, data and empiracal studies would be nice, but I think even a cursory glance across history and across any playground would indicate that if kids could just "be themselves" and pursue their interests regardless of whether they are "for boys" or "for girls" we'd all be better off. Honestly, life is too short to be limiting kids' potential for reasons as irrelevant as genitals.
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Sunday 26th June 2011 11:59 GMT Scorchio!!
@skeptical i
Well the neurobiological data are overwhelming had she but read a little, though obviously it's not her field, which is literature. Attempts to make boys like girl's toys and vice versa seem, statistically speaking, significantly [1] doomed to failure, because the boys - again, statistically speaking - begin to pick up the toys their feminist mothers train them to ignore. I have data somewhere and can, if prodded hard, produce them.
The conformity issues, well.... ....there are things known as sexually dimorphic behaviours (both non sexual and sexual) that are hard wired, including the lordosis position in rats [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lordosis_behavior ], cocking in dogs, squatting in bitches, and further up the phylogenetic scale these become ever more subtle and elegant. For example blush indicating sexual arousal/readiness, frequently used as a flirting tool. It goes deeper; in game theory tests of female and male aggression revealed that, whilst men are more ready to adopt an early aggressive strategy, women wait until the last line (or near) is crossed and then flare up into a far more aggressive posture. That would be consistent with defense of the young. Another specimen of sexually specific differences includes the emission of a hormone in late lactation which causes stomach aches in the offspring. It happens around the year six, and is a suitable device for weaning off children who have persisted for so long at the teat. Motherly feelings or not, ejection is the name of the game, and on with the next brat.
As to your last sentence, meheh; the irony is that Greer's failed marriages included one which fell apart due to her multiple infidelities in the **first three weeks**; not only would that logically make her unfit to preach on the matter of marriage, but she is clearly obsessed with her genitalia and their functions. I'm trying to build up a life history on the woman, because her behavioural history seems to be the source of her problems. I kid you not. Anyhow, I think that much of her views on anything is coloured by her experiences. True to form she does seem to have a tendency to generalise from the particular, in this case the stories she's concocted about the aetiology of homosexuality, about which she clearly knows foxtrot alpha.
On an ironic note, in checking a couple of things for this response to you, I discovered a small cutlet of information. Greer stood against the transsexual, Rachel Padman, for a fellowship at Newnam College Oxford (a woman's college) on the feminist grounds that Padman was born a man, but later resigned (1996) on account of the obloquoy she experienced. It is indeed nice to know that spiteful, silly ideologues can be given a beating. Somewhat ironically she was more recently taken hostage by a student, who avowed ever lasting daughterly love for her. This could not have happened to a better <Irony>"Person"</Irony>. How appropriate that her sister (owing to the age difference that would be daughter I suppose) gave her an idea of how it feels to be on the end of a wedge of BS. An exercise in empathy? Not hardly; more recently the fool made remarks about the probability that British soldiers will rape innocent civilians, thereby earning her yet more ire. She does not learn it would seem. Normally I would suggest an impairment of the frontal lobe (prefrontal area), but that might lead to litigation, as the Wikipedia article suggests [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germaine_Greer particularly see passage on litigation on the matter of the Padperson case]. So I won't, and I must emphasise that I won't. Doubly.
[1] Statistical significance is set during the design phase of experiments (important point that) according to strict criteria that are publicly set in the appropriate methodology for a given discipline. It means that one or two exceptions do not a summer make, either way; given Gunther Dörner's work from quite early on, data have been on record showing why homosexual males have neuroanatomical similarities (correlated with behavioural ones) with females, and there is no excuse for her ignorance on the matter.
Right. Pub.
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Thursday 23rd June 2011 12:02 GMT serviceWithASmile
thanks el reg
you've perked up my drooping thursday morning with this story.
i thought i could make more puns when i started typing this but i just can't keep it up.
tomorrow night at the pub, cue: "i'll prime *your* mating condition"
etc
by the way, exactly how does one become a trick cyclist? it seems like an easy day's work to me, and apparently *someone* must give them money.
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Thursday 23rd June 2011 12:33 GMT peyton?
Mildly interesting
Not the research mind you - that sounds complete bollocks to me. But I found myself thinking - if they could train a machine (neural net/whatever) to do the same, then I might agree that they've discovered something. That would be sort of a reversal from the norm, where we use computers to mine data and verify it with humans.
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Thursday 23rd June 2011 15:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
Peer Review?
I bet after this is reviewed it will show there was flaw in the way the experiment was carried out. It could be as simple of the clothing they wore or the grooming of the men in the pictures. Why are they doing these experiments and who funded it? Reminds me of experiments done to measuring people heads to prove that white people were smarter then black people. If you can tell if someone is gay by their looks, will we make them wear pink triangle arm bands? Will we put them in camps? Will we gas them? Do you want to live in that kind of world, again?
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Friday 24th June 2011 11:00 GMT HFoster
title
Everyone's on a sliding-scale continuum of sexuality, with the minority of the species at the hard extremes. And it doesn't matter, except to people who feel threatened by homosexual activity.
So why study whether or not women can spot gay men from photographs, and when this phenomenon is most prominent?
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This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
