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Originally Posted by fightnight
What I was getting at was that a male who was bisexual might not decide to act on their arousal toward another male due to societal factors, thus making it seem as though there is more of a spectrum with women than with men. However if we were talking about research on what men actually feel, as opposed to what we actually see happening in society, my point would be moot.
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Right. I suppose that I'm talking about sexual arousal, and you're talking about who people actually choose to have sex with. When I spoke of male sexual preference being dichotomous and female sexual preference being more of a spectrum I was suggesting that men tend to display a dichotomous distribution of arousal (either they're attracted to men or their attracted to women), while women tend to be more of a spectrum of arousal. Some of the research demonstrating this uses equipment that presumably measures arousal directly (fMRIs, vaginal plethysmographs, etc.). So, the sprectrum/dichotomy difference is there independent of societal factors.
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I think for the purpose of this thread, when people say "biological", they mean "inherited", or at least that's what I meant. The difference between "biological" and "environmental" would relate to something after birth, some stimulus from life experience, causing one to psychologically prefer a sexual orientation other than heterosexuality.
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I agree, though I wouldn't consider psychological to be separate from biological.
Also, there are a lot of different categories of possible environmental causes of homosexuality:
-in utero trauma
-some other abnormality of the gestational environment
-a normal response to an environmental cue within the gestational environment caused by the mother herself
-environmental trauma after birth (during development)
-A normal response to environmental cues after birth
-A combination of the above
-A combination of the above with a genetically caused tendency toward homosexuality.