It is currently unknown whether some combination of Pavlovian conditioning, learning processes and even hormone therapies could enable truly motivated individuals with a same-sex predisposition to adapt to heterosexual lifestyles, whether for religious, cultural or personal reasons. The influence of genes can't be altered, but what about the other factors? "More information is needed to determine if preferences and limits that were established prenatally or during critical developmental periods can be extinguished or changed," Utah-based sexual orientation therapist Lee Beckstead wrote in a February review paper in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. Sexual orientation cements around puberty, and according to Gerulf Rieger, a sexual orientation researcher at Cornell University, "it is quite possible that there are several influences on forming a homosexual orientation." Genes do appear to contribute, but so do other factors, including a fetus' level of exposure to certain sex hormones in the womb, and possibly early life experiences. Lastly, gay people aren't really "born that way" in the sense of having same-sex attractions from the moment of birth. "I think men may have this capacity, too, but I think it may be more prominent in women." "Lisa found that sexual fluidity is more of a broadening of your attraction pattern rather than an erasing of your original pattern," Hoffmann said of Diamond's research. But switching to a "straight" identity doesn't rid them of their former attractions. Their erotic plasticity may explain why women with same-sex predispositions report better success adjusting to heterosexual lifestyles than gay men do.
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As Diamond noted in January in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, females' sexual fluidity may emerge from the finding that, across the board, they are sexually aroused by images of both men and women (whereas men are typically aroused only by members of their preferred sex).
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Unlike men, who are usually sexually oriented solely toward men or women, and whose sexuality is essentially fixed from puberty on, a decade of research by University of Utah psychologist Lisa Diamond and others demonstrates women have greater "erotic plasticity." Their sexual orientation can be shaped by cultural influences, altered by positive or negative experiences and intensified by feelings of love or attachment. There's reason to think women's sexual preferences, in particular, can change in response to an experience with a member of their non-preferred sex. Humans might not be so malleable - other experiments show conditioning typically works better and faster for animals than it does for people - but according to Hoffmann, some of us might be. Other experiments suggest similar effects can occur in rats.īy conditioning the animals to prefer mates of their non-preferred sex, and then conditioning them to revert back, the researchers showed that the animals' sexual preferences were somewhat fluid. However, their presumed natural predilection for females was not lost: Another experiment showed it was much easier to reorient those male quails toward females through "reverse learning" than it was to try and reorient males who had already had sex with females toward other males.
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After this learning experience, the latter group of quails maintained a sexual preference for males, suggesting that they were being sexually oriented through learning. In one experiment, male quails were hormonally altered so as to allow other "sexually naïve" (virgin) male quails to have sex with them.