This is why I can’t stand evolutionary psychology: the field reduces evolution to a meaningless modifier that isn’t tested or used to inform the results at all. This article on The Science Behind Why So Many Women Want to Befriend Gay Men is not only free of any testing of evolutionary hypotheses, but doesn’t even question the assertion in the title.
It starts with a claim.
During the course of my research, I’ve discovered that the most interesting, compelling—and, arguably, most theoretically coherent—explanation is through the lens of evolution.
Specifically, I believe evolutionary psychology and human mating can help explain why relationships between straight women and gay men tend to flourish.
Do relationships between straight women and gay men flourish more than those between straight women and straight men? Gay men and gay women? Straight women and straight women? Etc. There’s certainly a stereotype at play here…how well tested is it? How meaningful is it? If you’re going to claim to be testing an evolutionary explanation, is this property heritable and variable in the population, does it or has it affected reproductive success or survival in some way?
You will not be surprised to learn that those questions aren’t answered. They aren’t even asked. Here’s how the experiments were done.
In these experiments, straight female participants were shown fictitious Facebook profiles depicting either a straight woman, straight man or gay man. The female participants were then asked how likely they would be to trust the individual’s dating advice.
I also recruited gay male participants, and had them complete the same task (with the gay men viewing Facebook profiles depicting a straight female, gay male or lesbian female).
Here’s how I react to that.
No. There is nothing in those experiments that tests any evolutionary hypothesis. You could make an argument that they’re looking at the psychology of college students in Texas, and that’s about it. Even at that, it’s limited in how it can be interpreted — it’s about how college students in Texas report they would feel about someone they know only from a facebook profile.
The lens of evolution, my ass.
I know why many women befriend gay men, but it’s not evolution. It’s statistics.
Women are about 50% of the population. Gay men are about 5% of the population. The population of the world is about 7 billion (and the population of the United States is about 300 million). Therefore, there are ~3.5 billion women and ~350 million gay men in the world (and ~150 million and ~15 million in the US). Most people have at least two or three friends. “Many” is a vaguely defined term that generally means “considerably more than I can reliably count and conceptualize.” Most people can’t reliably count and conceptualize a nation’s worth of people let alone a globe.
So with at least 2-3 friends per person, and with women and gay men each representing evenly-distributed non-negligible fractions of a population orders of magnitude larger than most people can reliably count and conceptualize, it is a statistical inevitability that the number of woman – gay man friendships would be greater than most people can reliably count and conceptualize. Hence, “many” women befriend gay men.
Inb4 pro evopsych people equate evolutionary having an affect psychology with the field of evopsych.
Inb4 pro evopsych people equate evolution having an affect psychology with the field of evopsych.
I would be genuinely interested in cross-cultural studies that look at gender and the perception of LGBT individuals – whether these silly “gay best friend” stereotypes have arisen in non-American cultures, or what else they have instead.
The classical Athenian stereotype was quite the opposite – they had the idea that (presumed straight) women would despise men who only sleep with men for trying to poach away eligible citizen husbands from them and usurp their traditional female roles. Aristophanes makes a lot of comedic play with this notion, particularly in his women-based comedies – Thesmophoriazusae, Ekklesiazusae and Lysistrata.
Indeed, I’ve not encountered any pre-modern culture where anything like this gay men and straight women idea is apparent. Which would rather bring into question just how ubiquitous and deserving of a biological explanation it is…
of course, all women would have a gay male as a friend, eliminating the romance dynamic that usually accompanies a cis-(female/male) friendship.
*recalls Seinfeld’s ‘friends with benefits’ struggle*
evolution forces the latter, so the former, by avoiding it, evolution is also “playing a part”.
or so they seem to be inferring, tacitly.
Gender roles isolating people from each other on the basis of gender identity, plus the assumption that being a gay male makes you feminised. There, that’s pretty much it in a nutshell.
Somewhat related, there was a time when i looked at speculations about potential, plausible benefits for homosexuality as comforting, because i needed that comfort, nowadays they tend to make me rather angry.
There are a couple of ancient Mayan towns in Oaxaca and the Yucatan where the Thai concept of kathoey has been well accepted for 2000 years. Now, this isn’t gay, per se, it’s trans-gendered, a woman in a man’s body, or traditionally known as the “third gender”. But they are very well respected members of the community, primarily because they do all of the traditional “women’s work” once their mothers get old. Grinding maiz, weaving. So every mother who has a female son is brimming with pride that she will have a helper for her whole life, after that bum of a husband has abandoned her to find better work in the maquiladoras on the border, and her no-good daughters have run off with playboys to Mexico City. Why, it’s got sociobiology written all over it! A worker caste!
It drove the early Franciscan and Dominican missionaries to despair. I mean, cuz it was consenting adults.
I wouldn’t trust anyone based on a facebook profile. FFS. Friendship is supposed to be based on something, oh like, knowledge, humor, experiences in common, and so on. If you’re instantly trusting someone on the basis of a profile, you might have a problem.
With one stroke I can totally disprove the hypothesis: I knew a gay guy and I totally had more female friends than he did, despite not being a gay man myself. See, it’s got every bit the scientific rigor as the original study.
So, you get 20 years of media stereotype that gay men are straight women’s best friend and that you can totally chat about guy problems and that they know so much better than anybody else on account of both being men and shagging men and then the only possible explanation is “evolution”.
Yeah…
re @9:
BINGO
when I was in HS I had lots of female friends, ie friends who just happened to be incidentally of the female persuasion. Would frequently get asked how many I “kiSssed” (euphemistically). when I’d reply, “none” I’d get the usual rebuttal “what are you gay????” [yes, with all those punctuation marks in their facial expression]
leading to my earlier comment of how eagerly a cis-female would want a gaymale for a friend
I believe evolutionary psychology and human mating can help explain why relationships between straight women and gay men tend to flourish.
It couldn’t anything to do with the fact that women and gay men might share sympathy for eachother, since they are both impacted by the patriarchy – sure the impact is in different ways, but mutual suspicion of the patriarchy would be sufficient.
I have a friend who has said flat out, that she appreciates not having to worry about being hit on or harassed. That’s cultural. Sure, evolution arguably is why males are dumbasses who seem to want to try to copulate with anything that looks like a plausible candidate. But that’s (theoretically) under the control of society. Arguably that’s one of the reasons society exists at all.
If there is evolutionary psychology, why are there still dumbasses?
Caine@#8:
I wouldn’t trust anyone based on a facebook profile. FFS. Friendship is supposed to be based on something, oh like, knowledge, humor, experiences in common, and so on.
You missed the meeting, Caine. Friendship has been redefined as “also likes LOLcats and can click on the ‘heart’ icon”
It’s simple. Women like pink things ‘cuz berries in a forest. Gay men wear pink things. Ipso facto QED EIEIO!
I CAN SCIENCE O.O
“The lens of evolution, my ass.”
Now there’s the title for you next book. :-)
My old evopsych professor (don’t judge, it was a multidisciplinary class) said that this was because adult gay men didn’t have their own families to watch out for, so in hunter-gatherer societies they provided an additional hunter for a female’s family unit.
So yeah, noble homosexual cavemen presenting galpals with deer or something.
Actually, I ended up with a gay men and a lesbian woman as my best friends in college and he’s my daughter’s godfather.
Thing is, I didn’t know about their sexual orientation when we met. The three of us were the only working class kids in our course, suffering from cases of really bad eyerolls when the most important question about going abroad was “who’ll feed my horse”?
@17
In other words, there must be some way in which the gays are useful to us normals, there shall we find their value.
Adaptionism and cultural norms as gospel, for when you like your biology to be biology free.
Giliell:
Yeah, same with friends of mine, I didn’t know their orientation upon meeting, it’s not as if we all wear badges or anything.
do evopsychs have an explanation for why most gay men are not the firstborn?
* ( I have the statistics right here in my butttt.)
seriously. I once read that assertion as a serious analysis of the distribution of gays vs birth order. Always wondered if that was a spurious correlation with no causalities involved.
Also racked it up to my casual (pseudo)observation that of two brothers, the taller is always the younger. My sample size is not very big so always racked it up to personal bias.
I think the hypothesis that people might more easily form friendships with someone when there is not a potential for sexual attraction between the two is a reasonable one. But even assuming that’s true, I can’t possibly see how one could even come up with a test for an evolutionary origin.
@19
Oh yeah, any kind of biology or sociology (her first lecture was largely about why sociology was bullshit and evopsych is correct) went out the window.
Other gems were “men that select overweight partners are intentionally hurtingbthe genetic quality of their offspring”, “men are grossed out by periods because bleeding women attract predators”, and “women talk more politely because men could deny them food if angered”
Do they explain why they’ve left out the gay women for female subject and straight men for male subject? It seems strange and arbitrary. If you’ve got four variables, why only test three?
slithey tove
IIRC the hypothesis is that with each subsequent XY pregnancy the pregnant person produces more hormones to maintain this “alien” pregnancy which in turn influence the foetus.
I’m not saying there’s merit to this, I’m just repeating what I remember. Only, if that is true then there’s no evopsych explanation here but just simply hormones being complicated as usually.
Caine
Well, I’ll never forget how Mr told me, after meeting my two besties, that he personally doesn’t have anything against gay people, but he simply doesn’t know any*. About a year and a half later his brother had his coming out…
*He’s come a long way since
in the feminist breeding and reeducation gulagunder my gentle guiding handVivec
Funny, I also heard that men fancy chubby women ’cause we have reserves to nurse the babies even when food is scarce*.
*In my case probably until their late teens…
@23 Vivec
Holy shit….
——-
I hate this bullshit about sexual attraction getting in the way of friendships (with women, because it’s almost always framed in that context and used as if it’s valid for that context alone) and specially how much this is overly, ridiculously exagerated. To me it smacks of this idea that men could only be interested in any kind of relationship with women if it involves sex. The other part is the familiar misandric horseshit about men being unable to control themselves when their brains suffer any kind of stimulation of even vaguely sexual nature, like that their interlocutor might have boobs under their clothes.
You are an adult, if you can’t deal with feelings of attraction, you have a problem. If you only have some kind of relationship with women you find sexually attractive, you have even more problems. If any kind of contact with any woman throws you into some kind of horniness induced, apoplectic fit, you have a multitude of problems.
Look, i can understand that having a friendship with someone you have strong romantic feelings for can be very challenging and difficult (believe me, i do), but that’s not the same as “men don’t have friendships with women because boobs”.
Among my own social circles, the ones with gay men, there are no women whatsoever. It’s even more male-dominated than the local secular student group, or my graduate physics program, which is really saying something. My tentative explanation is that they’re mostly making friends through queer male social events, and through dating. I don’t understand where this straight women / gay men stereotype even comes from.
Okay wait. What’s a “fictitious” Facebook profile? Did they take a profile written by people from the groups and simply change the name and PII? Or did the investigator just craft a Facebook profile that looked to them like a straight or gay profile?
Also if the former was the case, which I earnestly doubt, were the profiles organic or were they constructed with the prior intent and knowledge of the study aims?
I happen to have plenty of female friends and have always had them from an early age, which was pretty rare for my social environment. The reason being that my male peers demanded that i play footbal and be mean to people, so i said, fuck them, and went to look for more pleasant company, which happened to be the girls in my class, whom no other boy dared to address lest they might be seen as 0.0001% less masculine. Later on, when my male peers started to show some interest in the girls for the usual reasons, i had already discovered that unbelievably, these girls were actual human beings, with whom you could even have conversations and shit, which were satisfying and valuable on their own, regardless of whether i might get to snog one of them. Something which took a long fucking time for most of my male peers, including my very nerdy friends.
And of course, nobody, male or female, knew (or in their own words, even remotely suspected) about my sexual orientation until i was 16, but i’m sure evolution has gifted women with the ability to subconsciously smell out men who like cock for some unknown reason no doubt related to gathering berries.
I would also like to point out that i’ve known two men who identified as exclusively gay who regularly had sex with women (incidentally, they seemed rather more successful in getting it on with women than the vast majority of my male acquaintances). I’ve also known straight men who happened to be strictly monogamous (i know, impossible, because science) and where far less likely to “mate” with any women, other than their partner, than the aforementioned gay men.
Oh, and bisexuals…nobody ever thinks of bisexuals…because there’s only gay men and they all think vagina is like, supergross.
HargMarglin @16
It actually sounds better, and makes more sense, if you rephrase that as “My Ass: The Lens of Evolution”.
I might even read that. :D
The presumed lack of sexual attraction between a straight woman and a gay man kinda elides the possibility that maybe, just maybe, a woman could feel sexual attraction.
“I like dancing with gay guys, ’cause if he gets wood you can take it as a compliment and not an agenda.” – Abby, in “You Suck: A Love Story” by Christopher Moore
*looks at hackneyed magazine article in Slate*
uh, this is why I can’t stand Slate.
has little to do with real science.
numerobis
Are you kidding me? Women don’t have sexual attractions. We’re totally passive beings waiting to be picked by The Man.
@Ichthyic #35
Skim the Slate article to the link “published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology”, and you’ll find that the research is, indeed, published in that journal.
And exactly what does that have to do with the scientific rigor *snicker* of the article and methods used? If they are the premiere journal of evo-psych, says how bad the field and other journals are.
There’s the answer to my question:
SCIENCE!
I wanna laugh, but I just know this guy’s going to get some kind of multi-million dollar research grant from the Tinder Institute at some point.
@33 numerobis
I am now embarrashed that i skipped that angle. Biases, they are like an herpesvirus, once you are infected they never really leave you. Thank you for seeing that glaring hole in the argument and bringing it up.
To add more cultural stereotypes to this whole mess, it’s a common assumption that gay men are the “prettier” ones and that women always fall for the guy that turns out to be gay. “Why are all the hot ones always gay?”.
@Giliell
It’s almost like evopsych is made up pseudoscience.
I’m kind of hoping that it’s just one huge dada exhibit to test the limits of what people will consider a science.
The only limit to what people will consider science is the limit to what people want to believe.
Rq @32
Thanks, a good editor makes all the difference.
@Ichthyic
If you are trying to dismiss the criticism leveled at evopsych on the grounds that it’s just Slate, or whatever, here’s a more broad and thorough look at the problems with evopsych:
Is 90% of All EvoPsych False?
@Nerd
I think that was marcmagus’ point too. I think marcmagus interpreted Ichthyic’s post the same way I did above, and offered their own rebuttal.
Original article: “Specifically, I believe evolutionary psychology”
That’d do it.
Someone plese tell this guy Will & Grace was a sitcom
sigaba @39, quoting the research:
Does anyone else find it a bit fishy that those mean attractiveness scores are exactly the same? I mean, it’s possible, but data are usually messier than that.
Let’s wrap up a few loose threads hanging around here
The huge problem with almost all these evopsych studies is that they take western college kids and declare their state to be the true, natural and universal state of humankind. Last night I watched a short segment on beauty standards in Uganda. While in the west women go to boot camp and starve themselves to fit into their 10k wedding dress, in Uganda brides must sit still and fatten themselves. The principle is the same: women must comply with the social beauty standard dominated by the male gaze, only the effect is different.
Now, whose got the “true” perspective on the attractiveness of women? Western men or Ugandan men? And what do you think would be the result of this study when done with Ugandan college students?
Male gay friends can only be seen as “desirable” in a society with a minimum level of gay acceptance. How were they seen back in the Stoneage?
Which leads to the next clusterfuck: The assumption that things have always been this way (it’s basically the same as above): While people have probably been fucking people with the same genitals since forever, “Homosexuality” as a sexual orientation is pretty new. There were no homosexual people in the 19th century because back then this was not something that you are, but something that you did(See Foucault). Again, this isn’t about the people’s sex lives, but about how they were seen and saw themselves.
Which takes us all the way back to our ancestors: We have no clue at all how same sex attraction was handled and perceived back then. How can we even presuppose that the concept of fatherhood had any meaning to them? Why assume nuclear families with a male provider* who could use a helping hand from a childfree gay uncle (but never a lesbian aunt)? Why assume that gay people of all genders are childfree at all?
*In many foraging cultures men actually provide only a minority of the food
@47:
Oh hell yes.
I’m now imagining a sitcom where a genderfluid main character discovers she can be her own gay best friend.
@48 Giliell
But….the narrative…will nobody think of the narrative?
I reckon there is sufficient evidence out there to “demonstrate conclusively” some “fundamental, hard-wired genetic differences” between rich and poor people, using no less scientific rigour than any “evolutionary psychologist” or plain old-fashioned neurosexist. Glossy colour printouts from expensive machinery cannot possibly be wrong …..
If you could manage to arrange for it to be possible to arrange subjects into groups “A” and “B” solely on the basis of experimental results without knowing what the actual feal-life dividing criterion was, so much the better.