The machine’s lower success rate for women also could support the notion that female sexual orientation is more fluid. The paper suggested that the findings provide “strong support” for the theory that sexual orientation stems from exposure to certain hormones before birth, meaning people are born gay and being queer is not a choice. Broadly, that means “faces contain much more information about sexual orientation than can be perceived and interpreted by the human brain”, the authors wrote.
When the software reviewed five images per person, it was even more successful – 91% of the time with men and 83% with women. Human judges performed much worse than the algorithm, accurately identifying orientation only 61% of the time for men and 54% for women. The data also identified certain trends, including that gay men had narrower jaws, longer noses and larger foreheads than straight men, and that gay women had larger jaws and smaller foreheads compared to straight women.
The research found that gay men and women tended to have “gender-atypical” features, expressions and “grooming styles”, essentially meaning gay men appeared more feminine and vice versa. The researchers, Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang, extracted features from the images using “deep neural networks”, meaning a sophisticated mathematical system that learns to analyze visuals based on a large dataset. I am reassured he will not misinterpret any contact between our lower bodies, and he understands my need for this reassurance.The machine intelligence tested in the research, which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and first reported in the Economist, was based on a sample of more than 35,000 facial images that men and women publicly posted on a US dating website. However, my partial embrace left my friend feeling as if I were withholding emotionally. I realized I was doing everything I could to keep my genital area from touching his body.
A straight friend of mine once complained that I don’t give him full body hugs, but instead grab his shoulders keeping my pelvis far from his, thus creating a posture that looks like the letter A. As it turns out, the gay friend worried that if he hugged too closely his friend would think he was coming on to him. Fortunately, Garfield is all about talking such things out-good medicine for those among us who are the strong, silent, swallow-your-feelings-until-you-die-of-a-heart-attack type of guys.
In his book, Garfield describes the stiff hugs he would receive from a gay friend. This legacy of violence, both physical and psychological, inflicted by straight men toward those of us who are gay naturally fuels our caution and distrust at the thought of befriending them. As a result of this behavior-identity link, sexual congress between gay and straight men decreased considerably, or at least went underground. in the mid 20th century this behavior became associated with gay identity, new at the time and seen as criminal and then sick. Interestingly, in the U.S., before there was such a thing as a gay identity, some straight men would, with little shame, engage in sexual contact with other men (usually allowing themselves to be fellated) when female partners were otherwise unavailable (see George Chauncey’s seminal book, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940) and there is good reason to believe this still occurs in other countries and cultures. Perhaps even scarier is that their emotional connections will somehow morph into sexual attraction. Straight men fret that if they get too close, others will see them as gay which in their minds means feminine (horrors!), weak, and perverted. According to Garfield, among the many obstacles to male-male platonic intimacy, fear of homosexuality looms large.