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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sexual Preference (book) | 12/14 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_Preference_(book) | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T08:55:27.778790+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Other evaluations, 1988–1989 === The psychoanalyst Richard C. Friedman maintained that despite the differing perspectives of their authors, the studies by Bell et al. and Bieber et al. were "in basic agreement with regard to childhood gender identity / gender role abnormalities in pre-homosexual children." He considered Bell et al.′s claim that path analysis made it possible to give each influence on homosexuality a particular weight at a particular time of childhood development unlikely, since retrospective methods cannot be converted to prospective methods. He wrote that the meaning of data depends on the models used to interpret them, and that Bell et al.′s models differ from those accepted by "psychodynamically oriented investigators." The sociologist Miriam M. Johnson described Bell et al.′s study as the "largest, best-designed, and one of the least heterosexist investigations" of the development of sexual preference. In her view, its only possible bias is that because of its nature and San Francisco location "activist" homosexuals were over-represented. Johnson argued that "this bias would probably work against finding support for any hypotheses concerning parental influences, because activist homosexuals have ordinarily been opposed to psychoanalytic speculations about parental involvements." Johnson concluded, however, that the study's credibility was enhanced by the fact that Bell et al. took into account whether their respondents had been exposed to books or articles about the etiology of homosexuality, and disregarded results when they could be explained by such exposure. Johnson credited Bell et al. with showing that "almost all the alleged causes of adult sexual orientation are either nonexistent or highly exaggerated", but considered their claim that they had refuted psychoanalytic theories that attribute homosexuality to an unresolved Oedipus complex only "half true", given the father findings. Ruse observed that Bell et al.′s findings about the parental backgrounds of heterosexuals and homosexuals were "slanted in the way a Freudian would expect", adding that many other studies have pointed to very similar conclusions. Ruse argued that there is much to support Bell et al.′s conclusion that Freudian explanations of homosexuality confuse the direction of cause and effect and that the cold and distant relationships gay men report having with their fathers are a result of parental reactions to effeminate or sensitive sons. However, he noted that the accuracy of Bell et al.′s findings is open to doubt for many reasons: their subjects could have been unwittingly giving them the answers they wanted to hear, failed to remember accurately, or suppressed painful childhood memories. The ethologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt stated that modern medicine was rejecting psychoanalytic theories about the origins of homosexuality, pointing to Bell et al.′s conclusion that "pure homosexuals can scarcely be modified by their environment whereas bisexuals are accessible with social learning" as an example of this process. The psychologist Seymour Fisher described Sexual Preference as a high quality study. He argued that Bell et al.′s findings support some of Freud's predictions about how homosexual men view their parents, writing that despite their claim that there is no strong connection, the "negative father" factor had a detectable impact on "gender nonconformity and early homosexual experience" for men. He maintained that they provided no information that could be used to evaluate Freud's vague statements concerning how homosexual women would perceive their mothers, but that their data does support his expectation that they would perceive their fathers in negative terms, despite their deliberately minimizing the overall importance of the father factor in the development of female homosexuality. He viewed their findings about lesbianism as especially significant since their study was published in 1981 and had a large diverse sample. He argued that their finding that recalled patterns of relationships with mother and father predicted homosexual preferences during adolescence, but not the likelihood of being primarily homosexual as an adult, could be explained by the fact that only some of those willing to engage in homosexual sex during their earlier years are able to do so as they leave adolescence, which might make it more difficult to find correlations between early parent-child relationships and "later overt homosexuality." The neuropsychologist Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen described Sexual Preference as a "pathbreaking study" which shows that parents are not "to blame for their 'sexually messed up' children".