That is all really interesting about Baily. I had heard about the transgender book and the brou-ha-ha, but I hadn't linked him with the "75% of 33 bisexual men responded to gay porn" study (that's why we're here, huh?).
I'm somewhat embarased to find that I myself got out ahead of my facts in this instance. After I made my post yesterday, I thought about it and considered going back and editing the last part about "show me where it's refuted" (I have lived in Missouri for about 25 years, and that "show me" stuff rubs off.... If you're not in U.S. and don't know, Missouri is known as "the show me state," and I think it's fair to say that stubbornness is a local virtue....). I apologize for sounding all high and mighty.
It seems that most of us agree that hammertank really had nothing more to apologize for. The intention of my initial post was to say that, regardless of how peoples' hackles got up in response, I thought it was cool that he was interested in the original study.
Another thing I was trying to get at is, that it's often useful to go back and look in detail at what the published study itself said -- not just the reports in whatever newspaper. Yet another point was: All that information is out there, and with some effort -- in some cases more than in others -- it's possible to go back and read it for one's self.
That being said, here's some other thing I get the feeling we all agree on:
1. No one study will ever "get it all right" in terms of human sexuality. Actually, any behavioral scientist who's responsible and well educated will repeat this at you until they are blue in the face.
2. The study, as conducted, certainly does not prove there is "no such thing as bisexuality." Now, we may not all agree on the rest of this paragraph: Reading the abstract, I'm relatively certain that the study itself
never says that per se, and
my guess is that there is probably at least one line in there that says, "this
certainly doesn't prove that bisexuality exists, but it does not support a
unique pattern of bisexual arousal in men who call themselves bisexuals."
...I put that in a little "block quote" because I think it's a useful point to consider when deciding how much of a huff to get in about these things: The difference between "proving" something and "failing to support" something.
When I get my hands on the whole original thing, if I'm wrong, I'll come back and tell you. If I am wrong, my guess is that that statement it will be identified as coming specifically from M. Baily.
OK, back to things I think we all agree on:
3. The study, as conducted and reported, is not by itself remarkably strong. Y'all are absolutely right: 33 self-identified bisexuals is most certainly not a large enough group to generalize to two possibly different but possibly overlapping groups: Men who self-identify as bisexual, and men who have sex with both other men and with women.
HOWEVER: What makes the study interesting and possibly important -- if we don't decide to dismiss it for other reasons -- is that there just aren't very many studies out there at all, weak *or* strong, that examine this issue. This study got the three groups from running ads in "gay and alternative" newspapers in Toronto.
1. If we used the same recruiting methods but tripled the sample sizes, how might we expect that it would change the results?
2. If we used different recruiting methods to get a more "representative" sampel -- always a challenge in studies of sexuality -- how might that change the results?
3. If we used different sets of pornography to arouse participants, how might it change the results? (This to me is actually the most interesting question because I think that the actual content of the "stimulating" material could make a difference; at the moment, I know 0 about the material they used.)
..... Because I'm embarassed about having gotten out ahead of my facts, and because I can because I'm interested, I just spent about an hour or so reading through the abstracts of about 50 publications that J. Michael Baily has been in on going back to about 1990.
1. He did indeed author a publication that suggested that it would be OK for parents to abort a pregnancy they knew would lead to a gay child because it would leave the parents more free to raise a child like they wanted. This is personally chilling to me. Given what we know about societies where elective abortion is practiced simply on the gender of the foeti (China, India), it seems to me there's evidence that that kind of elective abortion can lead to certain social problems. As someone who is for safe and legal abortion, this makes me squirm. It was also important for me personally to see this with my own eyes, because if I were just going on the basis of the blog entry that beardedwolf provided, I would have said, "at the moment, I'd have to take that as hearsay."
2. He's done a lot of science that at first glance seems sound in terms of different partterns of sexual arousal and males and females, gay and straight. It seems consistent that gay and straight men have different arousal patterns to porn than each other, and than to women.
3. He seems to have a high number of pubs that find results that don't match with previous studies... maybe kind of a red flag. He seems to be very interested in making "definitions" that are measurable, so he may be measuring things differently than others. (It's also possible he's cheating. He's got some pretty high-profile co-authors here and there, not the kind of folks who would want to be associated with research cheating.) He does consistently focus on biological measures as the basis of his definitions, rather than the other kinds of things that can go into a person's "Sexuality." This seems to me like a big place for critique.
4. He's got several pubs that talk about ethical and moral issues in social policy and how they don't necessarily have to be tied to "biological" definitions. Don't know if I'm communicating this well, but I don't think I like the "smell" of the abstracts.
5. Then there's all that stuff about the transsexuals. His controversial stance does appear to have some basis out of his research: i.e., that there appear to be two different groups of m-f transexuals, in terms of their arousal patterns to pornographic stimuli.
...so, like a lot of things in science, his body of work is open to argumentation. And that's always a big part of "scientific community," folks are arguing. It's hard to get the full impact in a newspaper report.
Now, about the NYT report of the study, published July 5, 2005. By-line is Benedict Carey, in case you want to go to their archives and look it up (this is free since about last September.) The title is "Straight, Gay or Lying? Bisexuality Revisited" In my opinion, the title is unfortunate, but it's a very balanced article. It seems to me that it gives way more air to criticisms of the study than it does to reporting on the study itself. I'm not sure why people who read it carefully would get really upset.
OK, about the Americablog entry that beardedwolf cites:
"You would think, you would hope that the New York Times would do a little research of its own before splashing the work of Dr. J. Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and the study's lead author. But no. It took threader Kathleen to alert me to what the NYT should have known before presenting this study uncritically."
1. Besides the controversy, Dr. Baily has a 15+ year history of being published in strong journals. It's not like he just popped up like a mushroom. While Americablog called for NYT to point out the controversies, they would also, then, have to point out the strength of his record.
2. The blogger is simply wrong on saying that Dr. Baily is the lead author of the study. He is not; G. Rieger is -- not only is Mr. Rieger's name first, he is also the person to whom correspondence about the publication should be directed. True, it came out of Dr. Baily's lab -- but if we're going to pick nits, shouldn't we pick them all?
3. Again, I don't think the NYT story at all presents the findings "uncritically."
Wow, what a bunch of effort I expended over old news, all because I got embarassed about not knowing everything about what I was talking about, because I wanted hammertank to not feel bad about being curious about an important question.
