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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sexual Preference (book) | 13/14 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_Preference_(book) | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T08:55:27.778790+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Other evaluations, 1990–1997 === The philosopher Edward Stein maintained that Bell et al.′s data undermine the hypothesis that a person's sexual orientation is determined by the sex of the first person he or she has sex with. Gonsiorek and Weinrich maintained that Bell et al.′s view that sexual orientation is set by early childhood is also held by most other experts on the topic, including Green and Money. They described Bell et al. as "essentialists", who, unlike supporters of social constructionism, maintain that "homosexual desire, identity, and persons exist as real in some form, in different cultures and historical eras". Gonsiorek and Douglas C. Haldeman both credited Bell et al. with disproving psychoanalytic theories about the development of homosexuality. The economist Richard Posner credited Bell et al. with providing evidence that "childhood gender nonconformity is a good predictor of both male and female homosexuality". He also believed that they showed that boys are not more likely to become homosexual the more adult siblings they have, and provided evidence against the idea that adult homosexuality results from seduction or early homosexual experiences. The psychologist Kenneth Zucker and the psychiatrist Susan Bradley described Sexual Preference as a "classic study". They maintained that its data, including its finding that "detached-hostile father" is relatively characteristic of a majority of the white homosexual men in their study and a minority of white heterosexual men, are consistent with those of previous clinical research, including Bieber et al.′s study. They wrote that the psychoanalytic perspective that views homosexuality as a mental disorder and explains it in terms of family dynamics influenced the way in which Bell et al. conducted their inquiry, and that Sexual Preference must be understood in the context of sexual politics. They suggested that because homosexuality had been delisted as a mental disorder for eight years by the time the book was published, Bell et al. faced a problem if their data "showed a departure from an ideal of optimal functioning in homosexual men". They argued that, because of their concern for homosexuals, and also influenced by political correctness, Bell et al. deliberately minimized the "observed significant effects" shown by their study, though they noted that this was also in part an objective interpretation of weak effects. They wrote that prior to Bell et al.′s study, researchers were aware that phenomena usually interpreted as parents influencing their children could be interpreted instead as the reverse, and that Bell et al. recognized that "the direction of effects" was a "problematic aspect of their research design". In their view, resolving the "direction-of-effects issue" raised by Bell et al. through retrospective studies comparing homosexual with heterosexual men will be difficult, and that until then the issue will remain "a matter of theoretical taste." The philosopher Timothy F. Murphy described Sexual Preference as an important study of homosexuality, adding that despite its limitations and flaws, it, like the Kinsey Reports and Homosexualities, should be considered a useful part of a scientific process of "measuring the adequacy of hypotheses and evidence". John Heidenry suggested that Sexual Preference was the most important book on sexuality published in the early 1980s. He wrote that Bell et al. "analyzed every known hypothesis, idea, or suggestion about the origins of homosexuality and found most of them were wrong." He credited them with avoiding the biases of many previous studies, which had drawn their samples from unrepresentative sources such as psychotherapy patients or prison populations, but noted that they failed to identify the cause of homosexuality. He observed that their suggestion that homosexuality may have a biological basis placed them in opposition to Kinsey's views, and that they ignored research that correlated the origins of same-sex preference with factors such as time of puberty, the amount of early sex, and masturbatory patterns.