[LINK] "New Evidence Sexuality Is Innate: Study Finds Gay Men Respond to Male Pheromones"

[rfmcdonald]

Via Towleroad's Daniel Villarreal I came across Vice's report of a Chinese study on the biology of sexual orientation.

Wen Zhou of the Chinese Academy of Sciences set up an experiment in which participants looked at a video in which human figures rendered in a connect-the-dots style [. . .] were shown walking. Participants were then asked to guess whether the figures were masculine or feminine. When exposed to androstadienone, heterosexual women were more likely to suggest that the wire figure was a man—but the pheromone had no effect on heterosexual men.

Perhaps most importantly, homosexual men also responded to that pheromone, suggesting that gay men innately perceive (and are perhaps affected by) male pheromones.

Straight men, meanwhile, were more likely to perceive the figure as feminine when exposed to estratetraenol. Straight women showed no effect, while lesbian and bisexual women showed a response somewhere in between. To keep everything on the straight and narrow, the pheromones were masked with the smell of cloves in all cases.

“We were able to demonstrate qualitatively that androstadienone signals masculinity to heterosexual males and homosexual males, whereas estratetraenol signals femininity to heterosexual males, without the recipients being aware of the odors,” Zhou wrote in a study about his findings, published in Cell. “Importantly, the specific sexual information conveyed by androstadienone and estratetraenol strongly supports them as human sex pheromones.”

Essentially, the findings suggest that humans can "perceive" someone's biological sex based on these pheromones, but that the effect only works with those people a person might be attracted to.