Houston Southard

Timothy D. Wilson - Strangers to Ourselves

Cock rings solved the riddle of homophobia. Let me finish.

Conscious versus nonconscious processing is not a ying and yang thing. We're predominantly controlled by cognition we can't consciously control. The brain's anatomy having been built from back to front wasn't accidental, but evolutionary. Our senses take in millions more bits of information every second than can be consciously processed.

We have a positive emotional reaction to something and spend the rest of forever finding reasons to support that feeling, or vice versa. We see others' mistakes as personality flaws and our own as situational. We silo into circles that think what we think, and are threatened by any and all outside of it. We're just affirmation- and acheivement-seeking, pain-avoidant little meat calculators.

It makes us seem largely like a black box, but in the futile battle between conscious thought disguising nonconscious processing, a forever timely and extremely provocative study stands erect. It's the first to couple conscious thought with nonconscious physiological response to show hypermasculinity is just nonconscious homosexual thoughts wreaking havoc on conscious homophobia.

The study, in a nutshell (heh), gave a large group of males a homophobia survey then put them in private rooms with a fancy rubber ring (specifically a plethysmograph, the coup de gras in measuring male sexual arousal) to watch 1 of 3 types of porn: girl-guy, girl-girl, or guy-guy. The self-applied instruments to participants' genital instruments recorded changes in penile circumference during the viewings, and I think you know where this is going. Those who rated highest on the homophobia scale were most sexually aroused in the guy-guy viewings, although they claimed otherwise afterwards. So it goes.

Our siloed circles, be it via social norms, religious beliefs, or otherwise, validate or punish non-hetero behavior. I love this study because when it engenders outrage, it only reinforces the results. Wilson's book and research are about exponentially more than this lone example, but if this dissuades you from picking it up, wrestling with the rest of its content likely would've done the same.