Itās called āCalendargate,ā and itās raising the question of what ā and whom ā the right-wing war on āwokenessā is really for.
While most people were enjoying the holidays, extremely online conservatives were fighting about a pinup calendar.
Last month, Ultra Right Beer ā a company founded as a conservative alternative to allegedly woke Bud Light ā released a 2024 calendar titled āConservative Dadās Real Women of America 2024 Calendar.ā The calendar contains photos of āthe most beautiful conservative women in Americaā in various sexy poses. Some, like anti-trans swimmer Riley Gaines and writer Ashley St. Clair, are wearing revealing outfits; others, like former House candidate Kim Klacik, are fully clothed. No one is naked.
But this mild sexiness was just a bit too much for some prominent social conservatives, who started decrying the calendar in late December as (among other things) ādemonic.ā The basic complaint is that the calendar is pandering to married menās sinful lust, debasing conservative women, and making conservatives seem like hypocrites when they complain about leftist immorality.
Youāre right, I didnāt catch your mention of confirmation bias, I only saw where you said thereās no evidence that the most āanti-gayā people were closeted.
I provided an article that lists several vociferously anti-gay people that indeed had homosexual tendencies to explain why people might think that way (which is indeed evidence of at least the possibility of a correlative, if not causative, link), plus a study that systematically suggests that those observations actually may have an element of causation. Of course that link promptly broke. Thanks APAnet. I tried to link directly but realized itās paywalled if you or your institution doesnāt have a subscription. Edit: I forgot about sci-hub! Hereās a link.
Hereās a real functioning link to a decent article explaining the study, including a video of one investigator lconfirming the assertion in the first few seconds. My favorite, though, is the lead authorās quote:
The study didnāt quantify an effect size for the degree of homophobia relating to homosexuality, i.e., are the biggest homophobes those with the greatest closeted homosexual tendencies? That would be interesting.
So while itās absolutely ridiculous to state that all homophobes are hidden homosexuals, itās not unreasonable to assert that being a closeted homosexual is one driver of homophobicity, therefore any homophobe may actually be homosexual to some degree with a greater likelihood than the probability of any particular person in the population being homosexual.
Thanks for the SciHub link, but it doesnāt say what youāre saying it does. It says that a particular kind of upbringing predicts a discrepancy between self-reported sexuality and a measure of āimplicit sexuality.ā They further found a relationship between self-reported straightness and homophobia when āimplicit sexualityā was measured as āmore gayā.
Leaving aside the fact that (in my quick read-through, at least) although there was a lot of effort given to validating that this measure measured something, there was little effort given to validating that it measured sexuality, this correlation does not allow one to conclude that āthose who profess anti-gay views are likely to be gay themselvesā which is the distillation of what was expressed above. Let us start from someone who professes those views. The research means that, if you know this detail of their upbringing and if you know that they explicitly identify as straight (not the same thing as public identification) then you can predict (with clear statistical significance, but still quite low correlation) that that person scores highly on this measure of āimplicit homosexualityā.
If you check the summary table you can actually just read off the correlation coefficient between homophobic views and the measure of implicit homosexuality and see that itās not statistically significant.
And I do think that the measure of implicit sexuality, though clearly interesting and measuring something is equally clearly not a measure of āare you gay regardless of what you say about yourself.ā Itās reasonable to believe we can use it to estimate homosexuality, but itās like measuring distance with a ruler where all the markings have been scraped off. So even if a study like this did have a correlation with its measure, you then would have to mute the strength of that correlation by the strength of correlation between the measure and the underlying reality weāre interested in.
First off, I want to take a moment to recognize why I love Lemmy compared to places like Reddit or Facebook, where your alternate media equivalent would likely have told me to get fucked and made some choice comments about my mother. Instead, weāre having what is, at least speaking for myself, an intellectually stimulating conversation. It got me to really read a study outside of my discipline. Love it!
Respectfully, I think you may have misunderstood the paper. What you stated is true, but itās not the only things the investigators sought to examine. Their intent to look at reaction formation secondary to parental effectsis mentioned right in the abstract. Regardless, with enough quality data, observations secondary to the primary intent of the paper can be made, upon the results of which Iām basing my assertion.
So the point Iām making, that there may be validity behind the assertion that straight identifying homophobes may have repressed homosexual desire, is addressed right in the first study. They used a MANOVA both with and without controls for gender and parent conservative beliefs, so of course thereās a vomit stream of results. Looking at table 1, thereās a statistically significant correlation (p < .01) between participant homophobia and low explicit orientation, i.e., identifying as straight. Shocking, I know but hey, at least their gay participants donāt hate themselves!
But check out the results in study 1, which sought to assess the effects of parental autonomy support, participantsā implicit and explicit sexual orientation, and self-reported homophobia on the discrepancy between automatic and explicit measures of sexual orientation. In the āparticipantās self-reported homophobiaā paragraph, simple main effects split by self-reported sexual orientation suggested (Iām a scientist, Iāll rarely say āprovedā) that individuals who identified low in explicit sexual orientation, i.e., straight, but had higher implicit gay orientation, i.e., maybe more a friend of Dorothy than they profess, related to higher homophobia, Ī²= .56, t(32)= 3.79, p>.001. In the words of one of my old students, thatās totes significant. n=89, which is a little low but not awful.
Same in study two, which looked at parents attitudes of homosexuality on participant sexual orientation and homophobia. Back in the results, with more MANOVA chowder, again under āparticipantās self-reported homophobiaā, simple main effects suggested that higher implicit orientation, i.e., more potential repressed āflame onā, related to increased self-reported homophobia when explicit sexual orientation was low, i.e., āstraightā as an arrow, Ī²=.43, t(104)=4.79, p<.001. again, the goats of statistical significance give it a totes. n=181, I like this more.
And same in study three, same results section, same correlation. Simple main effects were split by high and low explicit sexual orientation and show that when participants identified as straight, higher implicit orientation positively correlated to self-reported homophobia, Ī²=.43, t(62)=-1.38, p<.001. n=189, yay.
Section four? Same multivariate correlation between explicit and implicit orientation and self-reported homophobia, Ī²=.67, t(132)=10.54, p<.001, n=181.
I think the issue youāre running into when youāre looking at the summary tables for each study is that itās only illustrates a bivariate analysis while a MANOVA analyses multiple variables, making a two-dimensional representation of results kind of sprawling. Youāll either have a metric fuck ton of tables or, more commonly, the results are just in the text, which is what weāre seeing here. For example, the correlation just between implicit orientation and homophobia includes EVERYONE, straight, gay, and everything in-between. Anyone who isnāt repressed should have explicit and implicit scores that are pretty similar, so thatās going to muddy the waters, getting you no statistically significant correlation because that high implicit scores means different things for different groups but theyāre all being considered together there.
Now, the study has some weaknesses. The sample size for each study isnāt real low, but itās not very high either. Another issue is the relative homogeneity of each group. These guys were largely snagging college students from one or two colleges, which is a great way to grab a bunch of people at once, but is not always representative of the population. Lastly, psychology is squishy, so thereās always the question of if the methods of assessment result in accurate data, in other words, whether the tests were bullshit or not. To this studyās credit, it uses a variety of previously tested assessment methods. But it does absolutely suggest, with statistical significance, that participants who identified as straight but may have been a little gayer than they thought have a correlation with a higher occurrence of homophobia.
Whew. This is a lot, sorry!