Thinking Through Human Sexuality (What is a woman? What is a man?)

Comments welcome, but be nice (makes for a more productive conversation). SEUTTER, RAY & Rovers, Martin. (2004). Emotionally Absent Fathers: Furthering the Understanding of Homosexuality. Journal of Psychology and Theology. 32. 43-49. 10.1177/009164710403200105. Homosexuality is a complex and multi-factorial mosaic. The debate regarding the etiology of homosexuality ranges from the biological to psychological, from the essential / materialist to the constructionist. This study explored emotionally absent fathers as one variable in the understanding of homosexuality. The levels of father-son and mother-son emotional connectedness / distance, measured in terms of intimacy and intimidation, were studied among male Catholic seminarians in Canada. Results indicated that those seminarians who identified their sexual orientation as homosexual scored significantly lower on their level of intimacy with their fathers than did heterosexual seminarians. No such differences existed in the relationship of seminarians and their mothers. There were no significant differences on the intimidation scores. Results lend new credence to the "weak father" theory of homosexuality and to the importance of same-sex emotional connectedness in the psychosexual gender development of individuals. Implications for therapy are discussed with suggestions for further research. https://www.researchgate.net/publicat... _____ KANAZAWA, SATOSHI. (2020). Father absence, sociosexual orientation, and same-sex sexuality in women and men. International Journal of Psychology, 2020 Vol. 55, No. 2, 234–244, DOI: 10.1002/ijop.12569 A recent evolutionary theory of female sexual fluidity suggests that women may not have sexual orientations in the same sense that men do, and that women’s apparent sexual orientation may instead be a byproduct of their sociosexual orientation. One developmental factor that has consistently been shown to influence sociosexual orientation is father absence in childhood. Consistent with the prediction of the theory, the analyses of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) data show that father absence significantly increases women’s, but not men’s, same-sex sexuality in adulthood, whether it is measured by self identity, sexual behaviour, or romantic attraction. Further consistent with the theory, the association between father absence and same-sex sexuality in women is entirely mediated by their sociosexual orientation. https://personal.lse.ac.uk/kanazawa/p...