Food for Thought
Research by Adams, Wright, and Lohr (1996) showed that men who are highly homophobic are more likely than other men to show homoerotic arousal. The researchers hypothesized that homophobia and hypermasculinity were (maladaptive) defenses against their own homosexual feelings and desires. People who are especially vocal about their hatred for the LGBT community may be responding to their fear and discomfort about their own conscious or unconscious same-sex fantasies.
What your parents tell you about bullies is true – they put down other people because they are insecure about themselves.
posted by I @ 11:55 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
The study results are complicated. An excerpt from the study (the second paragraph below is important):
The results of this study indicate that individuals who score in the homophobic range and admit negative affect toward homosexuality demonstrate significant sexual arousal to male homosexual erotic stimuli. These individuals were selected on the basis of their report of having only heterosexual arousal and experiences. Furthermore, their ratings of erection and arousal to homosexual stimuli were low and not significantly different from nonhomophobic men who demonstrated no significant increase in penile response to homosexual stimuli. These data are consistent with response discordance where verbal judgments are not consistent with physiological reactivity, as in the case of homophobic individuals viewing homosexual stimuli. Lang (1994 ) has noted that the most dramatic response discordance occurs with reports of feeling and physiologic responses. Another possible explanation is found in various psychoanalytic theories, which have generally explained homophobia as a threat to an individual's own homosexual impulses causing repression, denial, or reaction formation (or all three; West, 1977 ). Generally, these varied explanations conceive of homophobia as one type of latent homosexuality where persons either are unaware of or deny their homosexual urges. These data are consistent with these notions.
Another explanation of these data is found in Barlow, Sakheim, and Beck's ( 1983) theory of the role of anxiety and attention in sexual responding. It is possible that viewing homosexual stimuli causes negative emotions such as anxiety in homophobic men but not in nonhomophobic men. Because anxiety has been shown to enhance arousal and erection, this theory would predict increases in erection in homophobic men. Furthermore, it would indicate that a response to homosexual stimuli is a function of the threat condition rather than sexual arousal per se. Whereas difficulties of objectively evaluating psychoanalytic hypotheses are well-documented, these approaches would predict that sexual arousal is an intrinsic response to homosexual stimuli, whereas Barlow's (1986 ) theory would predict that sexual arousal to homosexual stimuli by homophobic individuals is a function of anxiety. These competing potions can and should be evaluated by future research.
from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/assault/roots/freud.html
Thank you for the insight. I hadn't heard any alternate explainations for the results, but anxiety certainly sounds like a possiblity. I guess more research is needed to know for sure. Thanks for pointing that out!
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