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Comment by hasanas | Hacker News Reader

I feel like all people would be "sexually fluid" without social pressure. If a person can reach sexual gratification with nothing but their own fist, they can do it with anyone else's.

I don't think attraction is exclusive to physical appearance or genitalia.

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I really don't give a shit what society thinks about who I sleep with, but there's a type of basic, visceral 'punch in the gut' feeling I get when faced with a very physically attractive woman which never happens with a man. The idea that but for societal pressure I would start fancying men just does not match my experience at all.

It's hard, as a straight male my whole life, to tell whether personal anti-homo feelings are completely natural or the result of an ingrained societal bias. I wonder if there's some sort of pyschological test for that.

No it's not. Prejudice isn't preference.

Societal bias. "Homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" are, mostly, modern inventions. The line between "normal" and "deviant" behavior as regards relationships between the same sex has varied drastically over time and between cultures. In antiquity, such a distinction didn't even exist in many cases, and it wasn't that long ago that men kissing one another was considered perfectly in line with what we would now classify "heterosexual" behavior.

At least one axis here, alongside the gay-straight axis, is dominance behavior. One can feel dismissal or dislike towards people whose behavior registers as submissive. There are varying degrees to which gay men manifest this -- and considering whether your anti-homo feelings correlate with it can be informative -- but many definitely do.

Thought experiment time (perhaps this happened to you in real life as well): suppose you saw this attractive female body from behind. Then as she turned around, you noticed she was a man. Doesn't that mean you are also attracted to men in some way? At that point it's no longer binary—it's just a matter of degree.

I'd say that proves the opposite - the moment of realisation is when your brain identifies the sex of the person, and then discounts them as not being of interest.

Not being of interest yes, but it doesn't take away the fact that you found them sexually attractive in some respect.

Before they turned around, you had a mental image that filled in the rest of the picture.

I do think that there's an innate component to attraction, just as you suggest.

But we also know that mental habits, repeated for years, become deep visceral reactions. And society programs our unconscious attitudes in a way that's difficult to appreciate simply through conscious introspection.

It's actually hard to know what you'd be attracted to, if you lived in a society that truly accepted/encouraged same-sex attraction. Maybe you'd be the same. Maybe you'd have dated guys once or twice, but ended up straight. Maybe you'd have five kids with a male partner. It's hard to say - it's an experiment that hasn't been run.

In many of the papers on sexual arousal and orientation, the sensation assessed is genital arousal. In men this is erection. I wonder if this punch in the gut feeling is linked to it somehow, or independent?

In those studies -- many by Meredith Chivers -- there is a clear differentiation in men (though not in women) in arousal that distinguishes heterosexual and homosexual patterns of attraction.

Certainly happens in prisons ...

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