FEMALES’ SEXUAL PREFERENCE: GENDER CONFORMITY
Play activities
Childhood play activities have been regarded as indicative of the type of sexual orientation a girl is likely to develop. If homosexuality grows out of a female’s rejection of her femininity, as psychoanalytic theory suggests, then this rejection may be expected to become manifest not only in a girl’s gender identity and personal traits but also in the play activities she chooses or avoids. Thus, it has been thought that extended tomboyishness or lack of interest in typical girls’ activities may reflect a deeper rejection of feminine roles and a tendency to adopt masculine roles instead. Moreover, it has also been suggested that typical girls’ play activities provide a sort of “training ground” for feminine roles in later life. Activities such as playing house, playing with dolls, or dressing up in their mothers’ clothing, for example, have been seen as providing girls with an opportunity to “rehearse” adult feminine roles and to develop the types of interpersonal skills that go along with such roles. Again, psychoanalytic theory would suggest that girls with little experience in typical girls’ play activities might be less able to accept their own femininity or feminine roles later on.
Research in this area has consistently found homosexual women to have been less attracted to typical girls’ activities and more attracted to boys’ activities during childhood than were their heterosexual counterparts. It has been reported, for example, that homosexual women were more likely to have been tomboys in childhood and to have continued their tomboyishness into adolescence. Other investigators, comparing homosexual with heterosexual psychiatric patients, reported that while they were growing up the lesbians were more likely than the heterosexual women to have disliked dolls and girls’ games and to have been tomboys who preferred boys’ games. According to another investigation, homosexual women were less likely than heterosexual women to report that as children they had played “grown-up lady” games, pretended to have a baby, “mothered” a doll, or played house with themselves as mother.
Many theorists believe that the development of sexual orientation in women is related to the degree to which they define themselves as “feminine” and embrace popular expectations of the way women should behave. Thus, heterosexuality would be expected to develop most frequently among girls who have strong feminine identities and feminine interests. They include a tendency to be accommodating toward males, to seek personal fulfillment through the roles of wife and mother, and to anticipate “completion” through a physical and emotional union with a man.
The development of a homosexual life-style in females, it has been suggested, is related to a more “masculine” orientation. According to psychodynamic theory, for example, homosexuality may represent a woman’s rebellion against her place in the world and a desire, conscious or unconscious, to attain the privileges and status that men enjoy. Whereas for men marriage is seldom an overriding concern, for women marriage—and thus heterosexuality—is supposedly definitive of their lives, e.g., their principal investment is in homemaking and motherhood. Homosexual women, it has been proposed, reject this life-style and seek instead a relationship with another woman in which neither partner rigidly adheres to a conventional sex role.
The investigations that have addressed the question whether homosexual and heterosexual women differ with regard to their gender traits give mixed results. One study found that homosexual women, compared with their heterosexual counterparts, described themselves as having been more masculine during childhood. Another study, however, compared homosexual and heterosexual females on projective tests and found no evidence that the homosexual women were more rejecting of the female role.
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Tags: Women’s Health