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Kinsey Scale

Discussion in 'Chit Chat' started by Beware Of You, Nov 19, 2013.

  1. Beware Of You

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    Am I the only one who doesn't believe in it?

    I am doing a PhD in Psychology and one one of the Stats modules we do, the lecturer practically ripped the research to shreds as its sample size is a fraction what it needs to be to be valid.
     
  2. Sitri

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    I don't believe it, but it is useful. The scale itself is terrible but the idea, that sexuality is not just straight bi or gay, is good. It destresses the importance of lables and allows one to truly think about who they are.
     
  3. Beware Of You

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    I guess but in Psychology nothing is ever black and white, I know more than others being genderqueer, okay I have man parts but there is a little bit of me that is a badass rock chick i
     
  4. Tetraquark

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    The Kinsey Scale has its uses in the same way that the solar-system-like model of the atom has its uses. However, neither corresponds with reality, only giving a glimpse of the true situation. The old model of the atom conveys that the nucleus is at the center and the electrons somewhere around it. The Kinsey scale conveys that there is more to sexuality than gay, straight, or bi.

    Where the Kinsey scale falls flat is that it doesn't capture the complexity of human sexuality. The one way it fails is in implying that, as your attraction to one gender diminishes, your attraction to the other must increase. This erases people on the asexual- and aromantic-spectra. It also assumes a gender binary, and treats all types of attraction as equal and similar in nature.

    Looking at my sexuality, for example, I could pick and choose definitions of attraction and end up anywhere from a 1 to a 6 to an X, if I'm on the chart at all (i.e. I have to say I'm female for it to work, but that's only partially correct).
     


  5. I think for it's time it was groundbreaking research

    and it did help to show that things can be shown on sorts of specturms which is a great idea

    but to me sexuality / gender and romantic feelings all need to be shown and there fore it all needs to be graphed as a cube

    with each of these items for each person given as a vector and maybe for each individual through their lives their vector may vary and for some individuals their vector does not

    say for a bi gender person their gender vector bounces back and forth - but possibly their orientation vector is always towards the feminine (or not)


    and similar actions can happen along the romantic vector

    all of this combines to give for each individual possibly a point in the cube to describe them at any point in time

    for me I am Female on the gender scale, female attracted (making me lesbian as the general old word to describe me) and I love romance so I am high on the romance scale

     
  6. fortheloveoflez

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    I think the numbers are kind of pointless...but the idea behind it is important. The idea being that people are individualistic in terms of their attractions
     
  7. Pret Allez

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    When we're talking about the Kinsey scale, we have to be careful about what is meant by it. When most people say "I am Kinsey X" for X an integer from zero to six, they are simply rating their attraction to binary genders. When narrowly understood as a spectrum of sexual attraction to binary genders, then obviously the Kinsey scale exists.

    When we're talking about asexuality, that's different, because it's more orthogonal to the discussion of sexuality. The assumptions that are necessary for a sexuality scale no longer obtain. Also, Kinsey scale doesn't account for non-binary genders.

    The Kinsey scale is only "wrong" if one thinks that it is supposed to do more than what it was set out to do, which is validate the existence of a continuum of sexualities relating to binary genders. Since it is a continuum, clearly it also has a distribution.

    And depending on the size of the population we're estimating and the statistical method being used, it needs a certain sample size to estimate a population statistic within a certain confidence interval. (And this too, depends on how valid the assumption about the underlying distribution is. I am thinking that sexualities are probably not normally distributed.)
     
  8. blueberrymuffin

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    The scale i believe is a concept from the results they found...including that 1/3 men have a sex same encounter in their lifetime. That to me, if true, would indicate that if 5% of the population is gay (kinsey 6), a heck of a lot more are on some kind of spectrum of not fully hetero (kinsey 0).

    Of course there may be those who will "try anything once," or are desperate (prison/marooned), but 1/3 the population?
     
  9. Tightrope

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    The methodology was reputedly faulty, on various levels. I think that some sort of Kinsey "type" scale exists, but I don't think someone is going to reinvent the wheel. Kinsey was in a very unconventional marriage and was reportedly bisexual. The number of 37% of men having a same sex encounter that led to orgasm is an eye-opener. I don't think the number is higher than 15% to 20%. It would be fun to know which politicians and famous stars are in that 37% (or 20%).
     
  10. gravechild

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    I've long suspected rigid gender roles for men being one of the main reasons male sexuality deviating from the binary is met with hostility, disbelief, and ridicule from none other than... men themselves. Is it a surprise most are going to identify as either gay or straight, when there's overwhelming pressure to conform to either side?

    Human sexuality might be too complex to reduce to a simple scale, considering how little we still know of it, though KS did provide a good starting ground in showing that people are not entirely black-or-white in their behaviors and attractions, an idea probably considered revolutionary at the time.
     
  11. blueberrymuffin

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    ^males in general need a sexual liberation movement. It's sad that guys can't make physical contact, or admit to it, without being assumed gay, at least in the US. I think that's slowly changing. It seems like a ton of young people these days talk of experimenting and "curious" sexuality. Where they would fit on this scale or if that varies over their lives i dunno, but kinsey also fought against labels.

    He made the error though of pointing to the fact most gay people also experimented as indication there is no such identity, only behaviors. Of course back then, the pressure to not be gay was so great that many would go against their desires at least once.
     
  12. Spatula

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    Men who break the gender-assigned rules are met with hostility from other men because if the rules for "being the alpha male" break down, then whoever currently has traits that are seen as alpha-traits stands to lose. At least that's what they think.
     
  13. SemiCharmedLife

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    Here's 2 cents from another PhD student:

    I don't think the Kinsey scale is a scientifically valid scale. There aren't strict criteria for what it means to be a 2 versus a 3, etc. And it's not like you can say "I'm a 2 therefore I'm 20% straighter than someone who's a 3" or anything.

    But it doesn't have to be scientifically valid. I'm not sure you can even quantify sexual orientation the way you can a lot of other things. What the Kinsey scale is good for is breaking the binary framework of sexual orientation and giving people who are not exclusively one way or the other a sense of normalcy and a way to identify themselves. That's good enough for me.
     
  14. Hrantou

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    I'm just gay. I don't need a scale to tell me that.
     


  15. basically what you are saying is - men need feminism - - all we feminist have been asking for all along is - equality in ALL things (&&&)

    we WANT you to be free to express yourselves - please do (!)

    a lot of people really don't seem to get this