DANNY S. MOORE AND CHERYL BROWN TRAVIS
Distortions of sexuality couched in the language of neuroanatomy, hormones, and sociobiology seem to be reinvented every few years, despite numerous scholarly efforts to expose the conceptual bias, methodological limitations, and practical inadequacies of these models. From what should be thorough discrediting and debunking, they rise like a phoenix. In this chapter we focus on the technical limits of biological models that become apparent when strict scientific criteria for methods, data, and analysis are applied. However, before exploring these flaws, it is helpful to give some thought as to why these biological frameworks retain such appeal.
Apparently these models persist in part because they offer a framework for understanding and managing sexuality that has the appearance of being especially scientific. Biological models are judged, by Western sensibilities, to be inherently more scientific (i. e., precise, objective, and factual) than models that deal with large-scale variables. Importantly, the science of biological models is perceived to be demonstrably accurate and in some fundamental sense true. Hence, any science that relies on biological precepts is also apolitical. We argue here that biologically based science has the nice quality of disguising politics. In fact, it is the disguise of political agendas, the camouflage of differential power, and the general denial of the effects of these that is a recurrent theme in the social construction of sexuality and gender.
The appearance of science has been used to add credence to a number of expectations about sexuality and gender roles. Cast in the language of biological science, “bio-proof” has been offered for what are believed to be immutable differences between men and women. The use of biological models commonly is believed to make psychology more scientific. Thus, in order to be able to make scientific pronouncements about sex, psychology should study sex as one would study the “science” of any other phenomena. Psychology, therefore, has contributed to the viewing of sexuality and gender roles as categorically distinct and biologically determined.
In a dedication to their book that says as much about the future as the past, Hubbard, Henifin, and Fried (1979) allude to the costs of such a biologically driven model: “To the many women, past and present, who have constricted their aspirations to fit within what they were told were the limitations of their biology” (p. v). Since the constrictions of our roles have the potential to affect men and women alike, we also would add a concern for the men who have aspired in directions that their officially sanctioned biology proscribed, compelled to exclude the nurturance of those closest to them.
It is our task within the discipline to recognize the beliefs of convenience and popular myth. We contend that these myths derive from political agendas that are camouflaged as natural science. In this chapter we dismantle the misapplication biological models on which sexist expectations of gender and sexuality are based and give particular attention to the areas of neuroanatomy, hormones, and sociobiology. We challenge the belief in a naturally nurturant, dependency driven, sexually coy female, biologically unsuited for competitiveness, and dispel the notions of the naturally ardent, sexually driven, promiscuous male, biologically equipped for intense competition and success.