How is it that child sexual abuse perpetrated by a male on a girl can maker her turn out to be a lesbian (that is try to avoid intimacy with men) but cause a boy to turn out gay?

Wouldn’t he reasonably try to avoid men also?

Because many who hold this view also hold that a mother who is too intimate with her son can drive him into the arms of men (I have heard the term “emotional incest”).

As an aside, we have not figured out yet what to do with lesbians. They don’t show nearly the same patterns as men with SSA do (fraternal birth order etc.).

Do you know if bilateral lesians are associated with trauma?

None that I’ve heard of. It’s usually about serious injury, disease – sclerosis, tumors, Alzheimer’s, stroke, etc. Some causes are unknown.

FOO = Family Of Origin.

It does seem to me that among men who have sex with men (so not necessarily gay) that there’s an imbalance between those who either are the doer or will go either way, and the guys who definitely want only to be the done.

I’m going on things like the AOL hookup sites, Craigslist, etc…. so a promiscuous, and probably not completely gay group.

And on the support sites for bisexual men, it’s a huge surprise to learn a man wants to be the doer when he’s with men.

Rob has said that one of the things about sex with men is that he “doesn’t have to do anything” — I’m pretty sure he means sexually, but also socially, just punch a key, and free sex. No dating, no talking, no doing.

My gay friends, on the other hand, seem to like to date

K.

Do you know if bilateral lesians are associated with trauma?

Rob has two siblings with sever Autism — no language development at all. Of course, while they’d probably still be Autistic to a degree, growing up with his parents didn’t help matters a lot.

But I’ve wondered if Rob might not also be somewhat affected by Autism.

K.

Forgive me for picking just this one sentence out of an earlier post, but you said:

I speculated that hyperreactivity in a component of the stress system may be responsible with anal sensitivity in men.

I’m curious what you mean by “anal sensitivity” and what, if anything, it has to do with gay men.

Yes, they can be shaped by trauma. The amygdala regions can be shaped by many factors and trauma is one of them. Last year I saw a large database that some people from the Harvard keep with these size differences in the Amy based on sex, age and other variables like health status (If I remember well..). They show very clear differences due to each of these factors, which proves that it’s not a static structure and it can be impacted by a combination of factors, even during one’s lifetime. Women and men use it differently to encode emotional memory and to experience it (women on the left, men on the right). Bilateral lesions are known to lead to abnormal, indiscriminate sexual behaviour. Obviously, they play a mediating role in sexual arousal sparked by what people see. A study done in the Reber lab by a team headed by MJ Bailey found that gay men have a stronger reaction in those areas than straight men when viewing the sexual images they like. So it seems that all these findings are starting to converge on at least one area of interest. I think it all started to emerge more clearly from Stephen Hamann’s research in the area of sex differences in emotional cognition (men and women come from different planets, in terms of emotional living, according to him).

On asymmetry, which is not directly involved in sex stuff, you might be interested in this comment I wrote on another topic.

No idea how well understood is glia-glia communication. I mostly studied brain research inasmuch as it had a practical conclusion, didn’t go to cell or molecular level, though there is some practical stuff out of that area too (for people who take medications or drugs). It pays to be superficial out of profundity.

FOO ? Sorry, don’t know all the shorthands…

Rob also has a tendency to see women through a child’s lense — the “She who must be Obeyed”….

Same with men. I found his profiles on the hookup sites. So very peculiar, a naive child with freckles asking for pretty outrageous sexual acts.

He’s a very successful attorney, but even at 55 tends to collect mentors and other father figures.

He’s a cutey though. It’s funny I can write and talk about all this stuff about him while at the same time having just a warm feeling in my heart about him. I’ve gotten over the shock and pain, and now see most of the stuff that goes on with him as sort of goofy.

I still have my moments of worrying I’m marrying a gay man who will eventually leave the closet, or that he’ll begin having sex with men again, gay or not, but mostly I trust my instincts.

On the male support groups, what seems the most helpful tactic some are able to take is to not worry about their sexual orientation, but to nurture the ability to relate intimately with others — the rest seems to fall into place more or less.

My father was physically abusive. I clearly remember times in my life where I asked myself if men was really what I wanted. At those times, women felt more open to me as a possibility. But then it feels like I just sort of made up my mind, and foreclosed lesbian possibilities, so that today the idea is pretty icky. Though I do still envy aspects of lesbianism, like the break from all things phallic.

Of course with Rob, I wouldn’t mind a little more phallic focus

Back to the lense of the child: More than anything, I think I was angry at Rob when I first found out about the sex with men because I put my hopes in him as the good father I never had. I wanted to break his neck for not being that.

I’ve slowly allowed him to father me again, little by little.

BTW, his sex with men was before I met him, but while he was married to his ex. Once he got into AA, it pretty much stopped, except for twice without alcohol. He quit drinking 5 years before I met him.

Still, I was furious with him for not being more perfect.

Take care,
Katie

Katie