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Sexual Preference: Its Development in Men and Women

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"Sexual Preference: Its Development in Men and Women" by Alan P. Bell et al is widely regarded as a classic work about the development of heterosexuality and homosexuality. For that reason, it should be read by anyone interested in the subject. Having said that, however, I think readers need to be aware that it is in fact a terrible book; I'm giving it a single star only because Amazon doesn't have a zero star option.

Its authors purport to test the accuracy of psychoanalytic theories about the development of sexual orientation, but employ a methodology that is entirely inappropriate for that task. They describe their approach on page 32: "Respondents were asked to rate their sexual feelings and behaviors on the seven-point Kinsey scale, which ranges from 'exclusively heterosexual' (a score of 0) to 'exclusively homosexual' (a score of 6). Respondents' sexual feelings scores were then averaged with their sexual behaviors scores. Those with a combined score of 2 or more were classified as homosexual; those with a combined score of less than 2, heterosexual."

Yet psychoanalysts would be very unlikely to accept those definitions of heterosexuality and homosexuality; they have traditionally used different criteria for classifying people as heterosexual or homosexual. Freud, for example, was perfectly clear that sexual orientation had to be assessed based purely on people's sexual feelings, and that their actual sexual behavior is strictly speaking irrelevant. Freud explains this in his study of Leonardo da Vinci; see for example page 178 of "Art and Literature", in the Penguin Freud Library: "What decides whether we describe someone as an invert is not his actual behaviour, but his emotional attitude." (By "invert", Freud means a homosexual).

Not all analysts would have agreed with Freud about that; Bieber, for example, wrote that he did not "diagnose patients as homosexual unless they have engaged in overt homosexual behavior" (in Judd Marmor's "Sexual Inversion: The Multiple Roots of Homosexuality", page 248). Yet while the approach of analysts such as Bieber is different from Freud's, it is also fundamentally different from Bell et al's. The upshot of this is that Bell et al's results cannot be used to test psychoanalytic theories about "heterosexuality" and "homosexuality": quite simply, psychoanalysts are not talking about the same things when they use those terms. Bell et al seem totally unaware of this problem.

While it is quite possible that even if Bell et al had used different criteria for classifying people as heterosexual or homosexual, their study might have produced results that would have looked essentially the same, that cannot be guaranteed, so in a purely technical sense the results they produced are worthless for testing Freudian ideas. It might be argued that one could use Bell et al's original data about their respondents' sexual feelings to test Freud's theories about the development of sexual orientation. Yet that approach would involve another problem: Freud did not use the Kinsey scale or anything equivalent to it, so it is far from clear what relevance, if any, data based on Kinsey scale ratings would have to Freud's theories. They would have, at best, a certain limited and indirect relevance to testing Freud's ideas, and at worst no relevance whatever. In the end, it may make little difference; if researchers who claim to be testing Freudian ideas employ ways of measuring sexual feelings and behavior that Freudians would not accept as valid, there is no way their conclusions can be seen as definitive.

Alan P. Bell, Martin S. Weinberg, & Sue Kiefer Hammersmith

Sexual Preference: It's Development in Men and Woman

(Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1981) 242 pages

This was an official publication of the Kinsey Institute,

which did much of the earliest research into sexual behavior.

However, this book is now mainly of historical interest.

It is based on the faulty assumption

that family and peers cause sexual orientation.

If you would like to discover better books on sexual orientation,

search the Internet for this following bibliography:

"Best Books on Sexual Orientation".

James Leonard Park, author of

Imprinted Sexual Fantasies: A New Key for Sexology.