Does prenatal testosterone determine sexual orientation? A look at racial differences

The conventional wisdom is that sexual orientation, at least for men, is genetic, but the heritability estimates are actually rather weak.

Some researchers have theorized that homosexuality is caused by prenatal exposure to testosterone (T).  Baby boys develop into gay men if they are exposed to insufficient levels of T during a critical period of development, and baby girls develop into lesbians if they were exposed to high prenatal levels. The level of T isn't the only factor: individuals also differ in terms of how sensitive they are to T.

If such a theory were true, we should see racial differences in sexual orientation because blacks tend to be more sensitive to T than whites. Their androgen receptors genes located on the X chromosome tend to be more responsive to androgens. We should see a lower prevalence of black gay men and a higher percent of black lesbians.

The General Social Survey asks about sexual orientation.  Here are the responses by race (sample size = 26,227):

Percent homosexual
Blacks
Men  3.8 
Women  2.2

Whites 
Men  3.0 
Women  2.3

These numbers fail to support the theory for both men and women.  There should be more white gay men, but there are fewer.  There should be more black lesbians, but their prevalence is very similar to that of white women. 

How do black and white males differ in a way that would lead to more black gay men?  I'm not sure.  Greg Cochran theorizes that homosexuality is caused by some unidentified prenatal infection, and it might be the case that blacks live in conditions conducive to more infections.

Study: You can tell if someone is smart and male or female by looking at their brain

A recent, amazing study looked at how strongly the morphology of the brain (as measured by structural brain MRI scans) predicts IQ and the sex of the research subject.  The graph below shows the results from two different data sets.  "Morphometricity" on the y-axis is defined as the proportion of the variation of the trait that is explained by variation in brain morphology.

The morphology of the brain explains NINETY-FIVE percent of the variation in IQ.  In other words, intelligence is very strongly predicted by the "architecture" of the brain.  And gender?  Morphology explains NINETY-THREE percent of the variation in sex, or whether the subject is male or female.

In a table not show here, brain morphology only explains 55% of ADHD, 50% of schizophrenia, 38% of autism, and 20% of Parkinson's. 

Now, if gender and IQ are merely social constructions and are not biologically meaning, why are they so closely related to brain morphology, even more closely related than several brain diseases?  People who push the biology-doesn't-really-matter-for-IQ-and-gender view are idiots and liars. 

You've got two kinds of people (or perhaps four)

Richard Lynn's new book Race Differences in Psychopathic Personality makes a convincing case that blacks and American Indians score high on exploitativeness (my term) while Asians tend to be the opposite--let's call this "fairness."  Whites are closer to Asians, while Hispanics are what you would expect as a hybrid of white and Native American.

People who accept human biodiversity (HBD) tend to focus on general intelligence, and for good reason: it is very important for individuals, societies, and for all of humanity.  But let me also stress the importance of this exploitativeness-fairness continuum.  Your life will be better if you deal with people who are smart and fair rather than cunning and exploitative.

So this leads to a typology of four kinds of people: 1) smart-fair, 2) smart-exploitative, 3) dumb-fair, and 4) dumb-exploitative.  I don't know about you, but I've known plenty of examples of each, but the situation tends to actually get simpler in the aggregate because at this level smart and fair tend to go together.  Asians as a group not only score low on psychopathy, they are also highly intelligent.  Blacks tend to be exploitative and unintelligent.  So at the macrolevel, there is a tendency toward two types: more contributive and less contributive people.

You might counter that history shows lots of Asian exploitativeness. The Rape of Nanking, etc., etc.  Humans treat each other horribly all the time, but my contention is that the average traits of people have an important impact on the quality of a society.  A key reason why Japan is a better country than Nigeria is that it has a higher prevalence of intelligent, fair people.

Occam's Razor demands the simplest explanation: races are internally different

Richard Lynn's new book Race Differences in Psychopathic Personality describes hundreds of studies conducted around the world. One American study that strikes me is a simple one of racial differences in doing one's homework that is described on page 61.

The mean number of hours studied per week by high school seniors looks like this: Asians, 3.9; whites, 3.4; Hispanics and blacks, 2.0.  Asian teens study roughly twice as much as other minorities.

Academic apologists work full-time concocting reasons for the racial gaps we see, but how do we blame homework differences on malevolent, discriminatory whites?  Homework is done at home with no whites looking over your shoulder. The schools provide even poor minority kids with books and materials for assignments. Parents and kids simply decide how much time gets devoted to studying.

You might respond that minority kids are given less homework because of the "bigotry of low expectations." But why do Asians do more than whites?  If you answer that schools are just following stereotypes, so schools with lots of Asian students assign more homework, it simply starts to seem like schools might respond to what students are like, or hardworking families select schools with higher expectations.

It just becomes absurd to pin these racial gaps on anything at all bad that whites do.  Again and again,  we see that whites are mediocre.  What sort of white supremacist country sorts whites into the undistinguished middle?  I want a better brand of supremacy!

After reading Lynn's descriptions on more than 700 studies from dozens of countries, Occam's Razor demands the simplest explanation: the races are internally different.

Has more "play choking" in porn led to more strangulation homicides?

Mass shootings always get people talking about the causes of violence, but these are rare acts that in some ways are atypical.  For one thing, most homicide involves a single victim, and the perp typically has a specific beef with the victim.  Mass shooters often shoot "symbolic" victims: more or less random members of a class of people they have a grievance against.

Women are usually murdered by a man they have they have a current or former relationship with. With the rise in recent years of "play choking" in pornographic scenes, I thought I could test the psychologists' hypothesis that witnessing images of acted-out violence, even play violence, can put ideas into the heads of people, especially violent-prone individuals, that increase the risk of homicide.

The CDC has a great website that allows you to generate trends on specific causes of mortality.  I was able to make a chart of the rates of homicide by choking among female victims since 1999.

Over this period, this type of homicide has fallen from 3.3 to 1.8 deaths per 1 million females, so the pornography hypothesis is not supported.  While the rate has flattened over the past several years--the years where play choking has gotten more popular--there is no increase as the hypothesis would predict.

One reason why sociology is evil

Following Jeffrey Epstein's death, we have learned where he found his justification for raping teenage girls. He explained to an interviewer that, "criminalizing sex with teenage girls was a cultural aberration, and that at times in history it was perfectly acceptable.” “He pointed out that homosexuality had long been considered a crime and was still punishable by death in some parts of the world.”

Various social science disciplines, especially cultural anthropology and sociology, enlighten every freshman with the brilliant insight that the world's 7.7 billion people don't agree on every point of right and wrong, and today's norms can vary from those of past societies.  This truth is banal and harmless enough, but then these "scientists" pull a fast only and imply that since values have varied, there is NO objective morality. The values and rules we live by are just arbitrary and were simply invented willy-nilly by someone in the past.  They are mere conventions, so when your mom tells you sex with underage girls is wrong, you can say that many cultures have not had a problem with it, and rules against it are merely prejudice and superstition.  This technique makes it very easy to follow your desires, whatever they may be.

Of course, these social scientists are either fools or liars.  The question of objective morality--whether there is right and wrong independent of what people think--is not answered by the fact that cultures have varied on what is moral. Objective morality might exist, and like a bullseye, has been missed by various degrees by various cultures.  But since the one cardinal rule for social thinkers is that "all cultures are equal," then it becomes impossible for some groups to be better shots than others.

These are questions for philosophers, not dumbass sociologists.  Social scientists pose as if they are value-neutral, or at least they used to, but they constantly smuggle in their "anything goes" value systems, although "systems" give their thinking too much credit. And they are too obtuse to see how their bad philosophy helps the Epsteins of the world commit their crimes.

How does gay promiscuity compare with that of lesbians?

Looking at sexual orientation, gender, and variety of sex partners is a good way to show how men and women really are very different. (The need to document this shows the crazy times we live in.)

According to evolutionary theory, since men can pass on their genes with minimal commitment, they have evolved the tendency to desire non-committal sex with a variety of partners.  Since having children is such a tremendous investment for women, they have been selected to be much choosier about sexual partners.  It's not typically hard for a women to get sex, but it can be a challenge to find partners who have the willingness and ability to provide resources to the offspring, or at least who have high-quality genes to pass on to one's children. 

If you're paying attention, you can see that a conflict arises: men who want many partners, and women who want few.  So many men are not able to get what they want.  But what about gay men?  There is no sexual conflict for them: just a bunch of guys who want novelty.

The General Social Survey (GSS) asked adults about: 1) sexual orientation, and 2) the number of male and female sex partners since age 18 (sample size = 23,579). Let's look at the numbers for male partners first:

Gay men average 43 male partners--much more than any other group. Coming in at a distant second is male bisexuals with close to 15 men.  Female bisexuals have a mean of roughly 12 male partners, and straight women report an average of 5.5.  The average for lesbians is a little over two men.

Now for the number of female sex partners since 18: 

The category with the most women partners is bisexual men with a mean of almost 20.  Next is straight men with almost 16 1/2.  Lesbians average close to eight female partners, and the mean for female bisexuals is around 5.  The mean for gay men is 2.6 women.

If we add together partners of either gender, the ranking for the total number of sex partners since 18 looks like this: #1) gay men, #2) bisexual men, #3) bisexual women, #4) straight men, #5) lesbians and #6) straight women.

So, sexual minorities have the most partners, but gay men and lesbians stick out; gay men because their numbers are so much higher, and lesbians because their numbers are atypically low.  Compared to lesbians, gays have around 4 1/2 times the number of partners.

This is consistent with evolutionary theory: men like sexual variety much more than women, and they show this most clearly when they are pursuing partners who also like variety; namely, other men.  Lesbians are not like other sexual minorities in that they do not pursue variety much. Why? Because they are women dealing with female partners.   

Who has sex more often--straights, gays, or bi-sexuals?

We straight people tend to be sexually repressed, right?  Isn't that what we're told by the experts?  That is hardly the case.  The General Social Survey asked American adults how often they've had sex in the past year (sample size = 23,771).  I've listed the modal category for each sex/orientation group, and by modal category I mean the most frequently given answer.  The percent who gave the modal answer is given in parentheses:

Modal category is 2-3 times per week
Straight men (24.0%)
Straight women (25.0%)

Modal category is weekly 
Bisexual women  (20.6%)

Modal category is 2-3 times per month
Gay men (20.6%)
Bisexual men (28.4%)
Lesbians (25.8%)

The pattern is clear here: straight people have sex more often than sexual minorities.  We even have more frequent sex than bisexuals who have double the potential partners!  We don't need to look to them about a healthy sex life. They need to look to us.

Now, you might be skeptical, thinking how gay men seem to have sex like crazy. You know--who's going to put the brake on sex when it's two men involved?!  Well, we're talking here about the frequency of sex, not the number of different partners. If your priority is variety (and perhaps STI's), gay men seem to have the advantage.

Data: Almost one-quarter of black men are exploitative compared to ZERO percentage of Chinese men

 A recent post focused on racial differences in psychopathy, and while people know the obvious connection between being a psychopath and committing crimes, few realize that the correlation between a promiscuous lifestyle and psychopathy is about as strong.  In fact, a lifestyle of casual sex is one criterion for diagnosing psychopathic personality.  Evolutionary psychologists have developed the concept of sociosexuality, which refers to an interest in non-committal sex. The correlation between sociosexuality and psychopathy is roughly 0.4, an impressive number.  It's strong enough that factor analysis would probably reveal one supertrait that underlies psychopathy, criminality, and sociosexuality--a syndrome we could call exploitativeness.

So, are there racial and ethnic differences in sociosexuality or exploitativeness (as indicated by high sociosexuality)?  The General Social Survey does have one item used in sociosexuality inventories--the number of sexual partners since age 18.  Let's pick an arbitrary cutoff--25+ partners--to indicate exploitativeness.  For now, I will focus on men and will limit analysis to ethnic groups with at least 50 respondents (sample size = 10,789):

Percent with 25+ sexual partners since age 18

Black  24.3
Scottish  19.8
Spanish  19.7
Jewish  19.1
American Indian  18.2
Greek  18.2
Italian  16.6
Puerto Rican  15.7
Other Spanish  14.9
Norwegian  14.6
Irish  14.4

Percent for total sample  14.1

Russian  13.9
French  13.5
English/Welsh  12.9
Austrian  11.5
Polish  11.4
German  11.2
French Canadian  10.2
Swedish  10.1
Dutch  9.9
Mexican  8.7
Danish  8.2
Czech  7.8
Asian Indian  4.1
Filipino  3.3
Chinese  0.0

You can see that by selecting a cutoff of 25 partners, this gives us 14.1% of US men being exploitative.  More importantly for this post, we see tremendous diversity in this trait.  Almost one-quarter of black men are exploitative compared to ZERO Chinese men.  Looking at general patterns, Southern Europeans tend to have higher numbers, while Asians fall to the bottom.  These patterns are consistent with numbers presented in Richard Lynn's Race Differences in Psychopathic Personality.  He found high psychopathy among blacks and American Indians, moderate levels among whites, and low levels among Asians.