Wang and Kosinki (hereafter, WAK) are only the most recent example of a long history of discredited studies attempting to determine the truth of sexual orientation in the body. These ranged from 19th century measurements of lesbians’ clitorises and homosexual men’s hips, to late 20th century claims to have discovered “gay genes,” “gay brains,” “gay ring fingers,” “lesbian ears,” “gay scalp hair,” or other physical differences between homosexual and heterosexual bodies. For WAK, facial differences “are consistent with the prenatal hormone theory of sexual orientation,” by which “gay men and women tended to have gender-atypical facial morphology, expression, and grooming styles” (p. 1). In citing a reductive version of hormone theory, WAK thus recycle 19th century sexual inversion theory, which posits that lesbians are hypermasculine women and homosexuals are effeminate men.
WAK embrace ties to 19th century science, however: “physiognomists’ main claim–that the character is to some extent displayed on one’s face–seems to be correct” (p. 8). In their paper, WAK frame their study as a bold step against a “taboo” against “studying or even discussing the links between facial features and character.” Here they stumble. There is a taboo against eating feces. It is impolite to tell homophobic jokes. To suggest that homosexuality is an issue of “character” akin to “a lack of energy and determination” or being an arsonist, as they do on page 3, is to deliberately freight your research with moral judgements and social biases. WAK now chafe against claims their project is pseudoscience (it’s not, unfortunately), but when you lay down with dogs, you wake up to a critique by fellow AI scholar Kate Crawford that you’ve produced “more AI phrenology.”
Stereotypes about men and women profoundly taint WAK’s research, as does their confusion of sex, gender, sexuality, and cultural practices. Typical of AI studies is a hermetic resistance to any contributions from the fields of sociology, cultural anthropology, feminism, or LGBT studies. For more than a decade, sociologists have developed sophisticated biosocial models of the relationships between testosterone and other inequalities that WAK ignore, notably social status and family and peer relationships. Literally the first sentence of a decade-old review of the field is “Public perceptions of the effect of testosterone on ‘manly’ behavior are inaccurate” (Booth et. al. 2006). For feminist scholars of science, this ground is well-trod, showing how pre-existing gender stereotypes have shaped the cultural meanings of hormones or sperm and eggs, and not merely described empirical reality. Studies also consistently find that there is more variation within the sexes than between them–studies that themselves ignore the diversity of intersex and transgender people.
WAK’s paper and accompanying Authors’ note consistently conflate cultural practices with a mythical, fixed, universal sexual orientation. Hormones may well cause morphological differences in bodies, but this is the first study to suggest that lady fauxhawks, men’s sculpted eyebrows or other “grooming styles” are related to intra-uterine experiences. In his 2012 book How To Be Gay, David Halperin provided the definitive exploration of the supremacy of cultural behaviors. Being a gay man has almost nothing to do with manhumping, but rather with the careful cultivation of camp humor and other cultural styles. WAK practically write the book on dyke style: “lesbians tended to use less eye makeup, had darker hair, and wore less revealing clothes” (p. 20); they also smile less and wear baseball caps (p. 21). It’s puzzling to think that two smart people who grew up outside the U.S. would think these are universal cultural responses to uterine hormones. But then again, WAK think that nose shape and cheekbones are fixed landmark contours; if they’d ever met a drag queen, they’d know contour is a verb. There is a stunning assumption here: that dating site photos and profiles are unmediated, unmanipulated, accurate facsimiles of the real body (tl;dr they’re not).
WAK are keen to address critiques of their study’s dismissal of bisexuality or gender variance by claiming that those are different things that they weren’t studying. Yet by preloading their database with examples of only white, openly gay, cigender men, WAK were sampling on their dependent variable. They determined gay faces by analyzing Facebook users who liked such pages as “I love being gay” and “gay and fabulous,” and who publicly self-reported romantic interest in only one of “both genders.” And then something interesting happened: “Unfortunately, we were not able to reliably identify heterosexual Facebook users” (p. 28). WAK’s limited perception of the complexity of sexual orientation is a problem because, as Tristan Bridges reports, surveys show not only that bisexuality is much more common these days, but that it is also the fastest growing category of reported same-sex identity for women. It’s also among the most stigmatized, both in and outside the LGBTQ community. Treating it as conceptually distinct from homosexuality is as wrong now as it was when Laud Humphreys (1970) found that about half of the men having sex in public bathrooms lived conventional heterosexual lives. As sociologist Philip Cohen summarized similarly bad research five years ago, “this is all complicated by social stigma around sexual orientation. So who identifies as what, and to whom, is never free from political or power issues.”
WAK are not interested in homosexuality as a behavior, clearly, or even as an identity, but in that specific form of gayness for which clicking “I love being gay” on Facebook is important (unfriend me now). This is a problem because sexual orientation changes over the life course, is determined by multiple factors, and is expressed in different ways that cannot be reduced to each other. Since the early 1990s, survey researchers have distinguished between same-sex identity, desires, and behavior. This practice reflects hard-won insights from HIV/AIDS research and the LGBTQ rights movement that people who have same-sex desires may not have an identity or be having any same-sex sex, and that individuals having same-sex sex may do so without having particular desire for it, or may have such sex while identifying as heterosexual. Jane Ward shows the racial privilege of this kind of same-sex behavior in her 2015 blockbuster book Not Gay, showing how white male “bromosexuals” who have “dudesex” with each other are never policed or demonized. African-American men on the “down low,” in contrast, are a topic of intense moral and medical interventions. That “straight men” are having “gay sex”–and everyone who read anything in 2015 knows it–should have given WAK pause. But where Angels in America fear to tread…
:thumbs up:
