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rfmcdonaldDaniel Engben's Slate article makes the necessary point that the recent University of Rochester study suggesting a strong linkage between homophobia and one's own homoerotic impulses isn't the end-all of the story.
In fairness to the University of Rochester, its coverage of the report was subtle and not nearly as overblown as the popular spin would hold: the press release was titled "Is Some Homophobia Self-phobia?", and the author went on to suggest that "[t]he findings provide new empirical evidence to support the psychoanalytic theory that the fear, anxiety, and aversion that some seemingly heterosexual people hold toward gays and lesbians can grow out of their own repressed same-sex desires" (emphasis mine). The authors of that study certainly didn't exclude the possibility that someone could be homophobia and not experience any homoerotic impulses at all. An honest homophobia is possible.
Engben makes the further point that even this connection isn't confirmed by the study on its own terms. Freudian slips may well exist, but the mechanisms used by these researchers--and by others, too--don't distinguish sufficiently between different emotional states.
In fairness to the University of Rochester, its coverage of the report was subtle and not nearly as overblown as the popular spin would hold: the press release was titled "Is Some Homophobia Self-phobia?", and the author went on to suggest that "[t]he findings provide new empirical evidence to support the psychoanalytic theory that the fear, anxiety, and aversion that some seemingly heterosexual people hold toward gays and lesbians can grow out of their own repressed same-sex desires" (emphasis mine). The authors of that study certainly didn't exclude the possibility that someone could be homophobia and not experience any homoerotic impulses at all. An honest homophobia is possible.
Engben makes the further point that even this connection isn't confirmed by the study on its own terms. Freudian slips may well exist, but the mechanisms used by these researchers--and by others, too--don't distinguish sufficiently between different emotional states.
The new study works like an elaborate game of "homo say what?": Evidence of private, homosexual urges is elicited by subtle verbal cues. The researchers start by asking college freshmen, mostly women, to rate their sexual orientation on a scale from 1 to 10 (1 means completely straight; 5 means bisexual; 10 means totally gay) and then to say how much they agree with politically charged statements like, "Gay people make me nervous" and "I would feel uncomfortable having a gay roommate." Once the students have been characterized according to their relative degrees of gayness and homophobia, they're shown a series of icons or photos of wedding-cake figurines on a computer monitor—two women, two men, or a man with a woman—and told to label each one as being "gay" or "straight." In a final twist, some of the "gay" and "straight" images are preceded on the screen by a subliminal verbal cue—a word flashed quickly on the screen that reads either me or others. If seeing the word me shortens a student's reaction time for the gay-themed imagery, it's taken as a sign of her implicit homosexuality. On a subconscious level, at least, she's associating the word me with gayness.
[. . .]
Whatever the precedents, their homo-say-what task leaves itself open to an easy, alternative interpretation. It could be that both gay people and homophobic straight people responded more quickly to the gay-themed imagery because they were all secretly gay. Or it could be that both gay people and homophobic straight people are more keyed up by gayness in general. A homosexual might be more attuned to a picture of two men because it aligns with his personal interests—no surprise there. But a homophobe would be more attuned to it for the opposite reason: It runs counter to his personal interests; it makes him nervous. The sociologist Michael Kimmel has argued that some men are less afraid of gay people than they are of being labeled as gay (and thus emasculated) themselves. By that logic, me-gay pairings would be particularly nerve-racking to true homophobes. And it's well-known that these two factors—salience and anxiety—tend to shrink reaction times. People get a little speedy when something upsets them, or turns them on.
[. . .]
If the reaction-time tests can't provide a satisfying proof, is there any hope left for the he-who-smelt-it-dealt-it theory of sexuality? Could scientists ever demonstrate that, as Freud suggested, homophobes are reacting to subconscious, gay urges? Maybe if there were some more direct way to measure a man's private sexual desires, we'd be able to tell for sure whether he was a closet homo. Imagine if you put a bunch of homophobes and more tolerant straight people into a room and forced them to watch man-on-man sex films while measuring the size of their erections with some kind of circumferential strain gauge. Would the gay-haters be revealed by the size of their boners?
Good news: This exact study was carried out in the mid-1990s at the University of Georgia. Using penile plethysmography, researchers compared the erectile responses of 35 homophobes and 29 non-homophobes to pornographic films in various gender configurations. All the men were clearly aroused by the lesbian and straight porn, but their sexual responses differed when it came to the gay clips. Around three-quarters of the guys in the homophobic group experienced some engorgement—not nearly as much as they'd had watching other clips, but enough to be labeled as either "moderately" or "definitely tumescent" by the researchers. In the non-homophobic group, the proportion was just one-third.
But even these penis-based findings won't tell us very much about human nature. The results haven't been formally replicated by another lab since they were published, and as the Georgia team concedes in its original paper, there's a long history of research demonstrating that anxiety itself can produce sexual arousal. A 1977 study, for example, measured vaginal blood volume in women as they watched erotic film clips, some after having viewed a graphic depiction of an auto accident. Women in the crash group became aroused more rapidly than the others. More recent work from a group at the University of Texas, Austin, finds that moderately anxious women have a much higher sexual response than either low-anxiety or high-anxiety women. The UT researchers propose that activation of the sympathetic nervous system (the one we use for fight-or-flight responses) plays into our erotic behaviors.
