Gaydar: Can We Detect The Sexual Orientation Of Others?
What is popularly known as gaydar is a kind of sixth sense which allows you to detect whether someone is homosexual or not at a glance. There are many people, both homosexual and heterosexual, who claim to be able to deduce this information and have a “nose” for sexuality.
Psychologists, like good scientists, wonder what happens when someone states with such certainty that they know the sexual orientation of others.
Is this a skill that we have developed by making homosexuality visible and building an identity around it? Could it be that our gaydar is actually not as infallible as we think? And if so,What do we base our judgments on? when we are so sure we have deduced what kind of people the other has sexual relations with?
There are different interpretations of how gaydar works One of the explanations says that the faces of heterosexuals and homosexuals, both men and women, are different. People, by detecting these morphological differences, would be able to discern sexual orientation.
This ability has been brought to laboratory conditions on several occasions with moderately positive results. Even showing only specific features of the face such as the eyes, the nose or just the mouth, participants are able to deduce sexual orientation and get it right more than half of the time.
This explanation is not without criticism. Many researchers believe that rather than trait characteristics, what participants judge is contextual information that is consistent with homosexual stereotypes For example, the presence of a well-groomed beard, the emotional expressiveness of the face, etc., is the information that subjects use to judge, rather than the morphology of the face. Unfortunately, we do not know for sure whether gaydar based on facial information responds to traits or stereotypical characteristics.
Speaking of stereotypes, this is the second way that theorists and researchers propose as a means of deducing sexual orientation. From this perspective, gaydar is the phenomenon that occurs when the individual judges another’s sexuality based on how many stereotypes they meet. These stereotypes do not arise out of nowhere, but are socially constructed In addition to being hurtful or reductionist, homosexual stereotypes serve to form differential categories.
Social categories, although they may be useful because they allow us to organize reality in an economic way, generate prejudices. To differentiate between categories we need observable attributes that allow us to differentiate the categories at a glance. As homosexuality is not a tangible property, we attribute other features to this category. For example, the presence of feminine mannerisms and gestures, the well-groomed appearance or the form of emotional expression. Although in some cases they may be true, they do not correspond to the entire homosexual population.
The gaydar could consist of a deduction through these stereotypes, which in addition to making us err on many occasions, They are harmful to the homosexual community due to their reductionism Roughly speaking, although the presence of “homosexual characteristics” predicts sexual orientation, we leave out all those gays who do not meet the stereotype. Because of this, we only get confirmation that we have judged stereotypical gays well, leading to the false illusion that our gaydar is infallible.
The scientific evidence
Although there are not many studies in this regard, the evidence is contradictory. As we have seen before, there is research that finds a slight effect on the correct differentiation of facial features of homosexuals and heterosexuals. However, inspection of the face does not explain all the functioning of the gaydar. The most complete explanation is offered by the way of stereotypes
Along these lines, a study in this regard carried out a series of 5 experiments to examine the viability of hypotheses based on facial features and stereotypes. This study found no evidence in favor of recognizing sexual orientation through facial features. Furthermore, it is hypothesized that the ability to recognize sexual orientation in previous studies that do find an effect has more to do with the way the subject is presented in the photo and the quality of the photograph, than in the subjects themselves. traits.
In this same study it is indeed found that, when judging orientation, the gaydar is based on stereotypes. People fall into stereotypes without realizing it, hence the feeling of the gaydar is more similar to an intuition that the subject does not know why he has, instead of a logical deduction Likewise, in those trials in which the researchers affirm the existence of a gaydar, the participants make more judgments based on stereotypes, while when the researcher denies the existence of the gaydar, the judgments are much less stereotypical.
Criticisms and dangers
The term itself may be perpetuating judgments based on stereotypes. We know that gaydar is nothing more than a form of biased and prejudiced intuition. When it is given a proper name, we forget that it is a phenomenon based on stereotypes. By granting it the status of sixth sense, its use becomes widespread and is perceived as harmless, when paradoxically stereotypes towards the homosexual population are perpetuated and increased. By talking about gaydar we run the risk of legitimizing a social myth.
To begin with, any reasoning based on stereotypes is of little use when we talk about a complex aspect of identity. Statistically speaking, for a stereotypically gay attribute (imagine “taking good care of your skin”) to be useful in identifying homosexuals, it would have to be something that occurs 20 times more in the homosexual population than in the heterosexual population. For this reason, believing in the existence of a gaydar is typical of fallacious reasoning.
We cannot miss the opportunity to comment on how the maintenance of these stereotypes is harmful to social progress and the visibility of all forms of sexuality. For understand a phenomenon such as sexual orientation in all its complexity It is necessary to get rid of shortcuts. We know that as we categorize reality, that is how we see it. Stereotypes anchor us cognitively and do not allow us to see beyond the categories we know. The visibility of sexual diversity happens precisely through the break with these categories.
As with gender, it is not about stopping using categories, but rather about not attributing rigid expectations or stereotypes to them that constrain the ways in which each person’s identity is manifested. Overcome these cognitive barriers It means being able to understand sexual orientation for what it is: a simple matter of preference in sexual relations regardless of the way you look, the gestures you use and how much you take care of your body. This is a sine qua non condition for integration.
