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Discussion Paper
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Discussion Paper david l. rowland I want to preface my response with three points: First, a note of appreciation to the authors who provided very interesting and thought-provoking papers. Second, this is not my area of expertise and therefore my comments are those of an outsider, so I hope I do justice to these papers and other participants will add to my comments. Third, these areas of research make me a bit nervous because there’s an evaluative and, in some instances, even judgmental interpretation that is drawn from the psychophysiological data. Such judgments carry legal and social consequences for the individual. Although I don’t deal with this issue directly in my comments, it is important to note that, for good reason, the use of phallometric data for veri¤cation of paraphilias is controversial within some circles. I would like to begin by discussing Drs. Chivers and Bailey’s “The Sexual Psychophysiology of Sexual Orientation” and more speci¤cally, their conceptualization and measurement of “sexual orientation.” A problem endemic to research on sexual orientation is that a very complex and dynamic bio-psycho-social developmental process is reduced to a simple dichotomous categorization of either “heterosexual” or “homosexual.” Sexual orientation has multiple dimensions, including sexual attraction, sexual arousal, actual behavior, homo- and heteroeroticism, self-identity, and so on. It’s unclear how all of these various elements can adequately be represented in a simple label, particularly when there are gradations in each of these dimensions and when they are known to change over the lifespan. But by necessity (or at least by tradition), research on sexual orientation has relied on this simple dichotomy that, in my view, fails to capture the multiple dimensions of this state we call “sexual orientation.” Chivers and Bailey have acknowledged this problem in their paper, pointing out the many possible ways to assess sexual orientation and some of the problems surrounding each of them. The question then is which of these dimensions—attraction, arousal, behavior, self-identity, and so forth—provides the best measure for determining sexual orientation; how does one deal with inconsistencies among these dimensions (e.g., an individual who reports homoerotic fantasies but engages only in heterosexual behavior); or how does one generate a composite that captures all these dimensions? Take the example of a bisexual 492 person who chooses a life partner of the same sex. Based on a behavioral criterion, this individual is homosexual; however, based on a scale measuring attraction, this individual might be bisexual. How should this individual be categorized in terms of sexual orientation, and/or what composite variable is used to capture these seemingly discordant components of sexual orientation? The issue of determining sexual orientation is further compounded by the social desirability of one orientation over the other. Consider the example of a woman who, on a homo-heteroeroticism scale, indicates greater attraction toward women than men. Due to various social pressures, however , she has a sexual relationship with an opposite sex partner whom she¤nds arousing. In this situation, social norms lead to inconsistency between behavior and attraction, and once again, the obvious dichotomous categorization of heterosexual and homosexual appears inadequate. My second comment pertains to the general reliance upon genital response in favor of self-report measures as a means for assessing sexual arousal. A number of studies have identi¤ed subsets of men and women who show physiological, genital response in the absence of comparable levels of subjective sexual arousal. In other words, there is a disconnection between their genital response, which suggests strong sexual arousal, and their subjective evaluation of their state of arousal, which suggests low or absent sexual arousal. Because such discordance can and does occur, I am concerned about giving greater credibility to “psychophysiologically assessed ” genital response than to self-reported assessments. There are, of course, good reasons to question self-report assessments in studies on paraphilics and perhaps also in studies dealing with socially sensitive issues such as sexual orientation, but let me pose the question this way. If we assume that a person is not being deceitful about his or her level of selfreported arousal, which measure should we accept as being the more valid index of sexual arousal—his or her self-reported arousal or his or her genital response? I don’t have an answer to that question, but it is certainly one that is relevant to the issues discussed here, where the focus appears to be on interpretation of genital measures as...