In her seminal book, Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences, renowned sociomedical scientist and Barnard professor Rebecca Jordan-Young broke down 13 years of exhaustive analysis on hundreds of studies on sex, gender and the brain.
Have you heard the statistic that 10% of men are gay? That's from Kinsey's research, too.īut as the patchwork of studies that make up this story receive more and more scrutiny, holes appear. Ever heard of the scale for human sexuality? It measures sexuality on a continuum from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual. Though the work he conducted in America in the 1940s and '50s is largely controversial - some questioned his survey methods and say he made broad claims his research couldn't support - there is generally agreement that he kickstarted modern sex research. If you know anything about sex research, you know Alfred Kinsey. What the science says about human sexuality We choose our actions, they wrote, not our feelings. Words like 'choice,' 'preference' and 'lifestyle' are loaded because they've been used to oppress sexual minorities. The opposite of 'I was born this way' is not 'I chose this way.' In a 2016 article on sexual orientation published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, researchers wrote that 'whether sexual orientation is a choice' is a poor phrase for advancing our understanding of sexuality.
