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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sexual Preference (book) | 7/14 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_Preference_(book) | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T08:55:27.778790+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Gay media === Sexual Preference received a positive review from Robert Herron in Christopher Street and a mixed review from George Smith in The Body Politic, while in The Advocate it received a note from the editor and mixed reviews from the biologist Doug Futuym and the social scientist Richard Wagner. Herron credited Bell et al. with disproving mistaken ideas about the causes of homosexuality and described it as a "massively impressive achievement". However, he criticized the authors for their use of the term "sexual preference" and for failing to define "homosexuality". He also believed that they should have stated unambiguously, instead of simply suggesting, that homosexuality is innate, and maintained that as social scientists, they could not properly assess research on biological influences on homosexuality. Smith considered the study useful for its challenge to established views about the causes of homosexuality. However, he was unconvinced by its conclusion that homosexuality has a biological basis and found its account of the subject remote from real experience. Smith argued that while Bell et al.′s path analysis suggested that various variables cause one another, this was "an illusion created by statistical manipulation", and concluded that their category of "Gender Nonconformity" was a construct created by the researchers. The Advocate wrote that the study had received media attention for its findings that sexual orientation is not determined by parenting and may have a biological basis. It described it as "the major report on homosexuality in 1981", and noted that for budgetary reasons it was likely to be the last report on homosexuality from the Institute for Sex Research. Futuym wrote that the book had received attention from the media because of its authors' suggestion that homosexuality may have biological causes. However, he believed that they failed to demonstrate this and that other aspects of the book were more important. He noted that it was subject to criticism on the grounds that its sample of homosexuals was unrepresentative and that its subjects may have distorted their accounts of their childhoods by making them conform to their present views of themselves, and that its path analysis was open to question, and criticized its authors for failing to explain the operations of "childhood gender nonconformity". He observed that while they argued that sexual orientation might be biological because of the lack of any apparent psychosocial causes for it, it was possible that there were psychosocial causes that they had failed to investigate and that might operate early in life. He argued that a study such as theirs would be able to identify the causes of sexual orientation only if the causes were "few and very strong." However, he believed they deserved credit for showing that there was no support for the "standard psychosocial theories" or the belief that homosexuality is caused by seduction. Wagner credited Bell et al. with distancing themselves from medical and psychiatric hostility to homosexuality, but criticized them for failing to conclude that searching for causes of homosexuality is misconceived. He believed that the media had wrongly interpreted their study as showing that homosexuality has a biological basis. He described their path analysis approach as a "complex theoretical model", and predicted that it would be a long time before it and its associated data could be "tested by the scientific community." Nevertheless, he considered the approach open to question, arguing that it was doubtful whether causal models could explain the development of sexual preference.