By Justin Lehmiller
What is a day in the life of a sex researcher like? In this interview series, I talk to some of the world’s foremost authorities on sex in order to answer this question, but also to provide a glimpse into what they’re currently working on, what the media tends to get wrong about sex, and what they think about some of the most pressing issues facing the field of sex research today.
For this interview, I spoke with Dr. Paul Vasey, a professor of psychology at the University of Lethbridge who studies sexuality through cross-cultural and cross-species lenses. He has a fascinating body of research that sheds light on the origins of same-sex attraction and the way that culture influences how sexuality is expressed. Below is the transcript of our email conversation.
Lehmiller: Please tell us the story behind how you became a sex researcher. What is it that initially inspired you or drew you to this field of study?
Vasey: In many ways, my path to becoming a sex researcher was a fortuitous one and involves two stories, one about monkeys and the other about humans. I have a long standing interest in the use of non-human primates to model human behavioral evolution, so given this, I entered into a Ph.D program at the Université de Montréal under the supervision of the primatologist, Bernard Chapais. The university owned a colony of Japanese macaques that were used exclusively for observational research. I spent the first semester of my doctorate casting about for a dissertation topic and, at the same time, the macaques’ mating season began ramping up. I was really struck by how much the onset of sexual behavior affected group dynamics. I was even more struck by the amount of female homosexual behavior that took place. I had read about female homosexual behavior in this species, so I was vaguely aware that it existed from the work of people like Linda Fedigan and Linda Wolfe, but I was unprepared for how prevalent and intense it was. I thought to myself, “here is a dissertation topic that I can really sink my teeth into and perhaps make a real contribution toward understanding.” I guess I was drawn to the topic because homosexual behavior simply wasn’t “supposed” to exist in basic evolutionary terms, yet there it was, and it was so abundant.
I had virtually no financial support to conduct my doctoral research, but I was absolutely hellbent on getting the work done and knew I would have to make some very drastic decisions if I was going to make it happen. So, I gave up my apartment in Montréal and moved into a storage room in the same building where the monkeys were housed about an hour away east of Montréal, literally in the middle of great swaths of corn fields. I lived there for about 3 years and learned to speak French because there were no anglophones in the area. I think I heard English spoken maybe twice in the entire time I lived there. Few people visited and days could go by without me seeing anyone. It was a very monastic life, which was perfect for getting a dissertation done. When I wasn’t writing or analyzing data, I got to spend all my time watching forty monkeys live out their lives. I felt very lucky, even though I was really, really poor.
From there I went on to study female homosexual behavior and other forms of non-conceptive sex in free-ranging Japanese macaques at Arashiyama, Japan, which is near Kyoto. I conducted annual fieldwork there for about 13 years. I was lucky enough to share a big old house with a Japanese artist who lived at the base of the mountain. Monkeys would come into our backyard and feed in our persimmon tree. I have very fond memories of my time in Japan.
The animal fieldwork has been on hiatus for the past several years, but my former post-doctoral fellows (and now colleagues), Jean-Baptiste Leca and Noelle Günst, and I are still publishing our Japanese macaque data.
As for the human research, that too was never planned and pretty much serendipitous. I was hired as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Lethbridge in 2000 and my colleague, Sergio Pellis, encouraged me to teach a course on sex and gender. I decided right away that I didn’t want to teach a traditional course about men and women’s gender roles since other courses were covering that terrain. Instead, I thought I could make a unique contribution by focusing a course around understanding gender diversity, particularly “third” genders, that occur in many non-Western cultures. In putting together the course, I came across a documentary by Heather Croall called, Paradise Bent: Boys Will Be Girls in Samoa. After watching that documentary, I felt that I had to visit Samoa and experience the culture first-hand. I travelled there in 2003 with my colleague, Nancy Bartlett, and we conducted a small study on recalled childhood behavior in men, women and fa’afafine–feminine, same-sex attracted males that are recognized as a non-binary gender in Samoa. Seventeen years later, I’m still there and collecting data about 2-3 months out of every year. In many ways Samoa is now more home than Canada.
Lehmiller: What is your primary area of research and what methods do you typically use to answer your research questions?
Vasey: I conduct cross-species and cross-cultural research on non-conceptive sexuality, primarily homosexual behavior and orientation. I used two primate models–Japanese macaques and humans–to carry out this work.
My Japanese macaque work has largely focused on understanding the development and evolution of female homosexual behavior in this species. This work was conducted in Japan at various sites on the island of Honshu, primarily Arashiyama (near Kyoto), but also Jigokudani (in the Japanese Alps near Nagano) and Minoo (near Osaka). The macaque research is observational, so it involves long days of watching and following the monkeys in mountain forests and then recording what they do using pen and paper. This requires that the animals are known individually. I also videotape the monkey’s behavioral interactions for finer-grained analyses, which we conduct back in my lab in Canada.
As for my human research, it has largely focused on understanding the psychobiology and evolution of male androphilia (i.e., male sexual attraction and arousal to adult males). This work has been conducted in my laboratory in Canada, in Samoa (a Polynesian island nation in the south Pacific), in the Istmo region of Oaxaca, Mexico, where an indigenous group known at the Istmo Zapotec predominate, and in Doyama-cho–a gay neighborhood in Osaka, Japan. Much of my human research is questionnaire based. My research team also conducts laboratory and field-experiments using viewing-time paradigms and an assortment of cognitive tasks. We have collected hundreds of saliva samples in Samoa for a genome wide association study of male sexual orientation. More recently, we have employed eye-tracking and pupil dilation paradigms, but those data have yet to be published.
Lehmiller: Please tell us a bit about what you’re working on at the moment. What research projects are you most excited about right now?
Vasey: I find all of the research being conducted in my lab exciting so it’s hard to choose just one thing. After 20 years of annual, bi-annual or even tri-annual fieldwork at multiple different sites around the world I’ve answered many of the questions that I initially set out to address. Going forward, I’m thinking about conducting a long-term prospective study of behavioral development in Samoan boys, girls, and fa’afafine children. Francisco Gómez (one of my doctoral students) and I might conduct similar research among Istmo Zapotec boys, girls and muxe children. I’m also thinking about undertaking a multi-site, developmental study of male-male mounting in a variety of macaque species across Asia (and maybe Gibraltar) that vary in terms of their aggressivity. The idea of getting back to monkey research appeals to me. Lastly, I’d really like to carve out time to start writing books.
Lehmiller: You conduct a lot of comparative and cross-cultural sex research, meaning you look at sexual behavior in different animal species and among persons in different cultures. Why do you think it’s important to do this kind of work, and what can we do to encourage more of it in our field?
Vasey: Cross-species research affords us the ability to test claims that some behavioral or psychological patterns are “uniquely human” and thus “the unique products of human culture and socialization.” For example, some individuals claim that homosexual behavior is “unnatural” and thus, the unfortunate product of degenerate cultural forces in humans. Indeed, politicians seeking election in my own country of Canada have made such claims and my macaque research has been used by journalists to publicly correct this misinformation. If animals are the yardstick by which “natural” is measured, then arguments that homosexual behavior is unnatural are baseless. The animal research also provides a means of identifying the building-blocks from which human behavior and psychology evolved. The other great advantage of the cross-species research is that it is much easier to undertake detailed observational studies of sexual behavior in animals than it is in humans.
Cross-cultural research affords us the ability to test claims that some behavioral or psychological pattern are “universally human.” For example, on the basis of several studies conducted in the West, its widely assumed that androphilic males are less physically aggressive than gynephilic ones (i.e., males that are sexually attracted to adult females). However, research that I have conducted with my graduate student, Scott Semenyna, indicates that that no such differences exist in Samoa. This suggest that male sexual orientation differences in physical aggression are culturally malleable and that the patterns observed in the West do not necessarily manifest in other cultural contexts.
The cross-cultural research also allows us to examine claims that certain phenomenon are “the unique products of particular cultures and their distinctive socialization processes.” Proponents of this perspective argue that comparing gay men, fa’afafine, and muxes is utterly misguided, and indeed simpleminded, because these different types of male “homosexualities” are “irreducibly specific” to particular times and places. However, my students and I have repeatedly demonstrated that gay men, fa’afafine, and muxes, share numerous biopsychological correlates. Compared to male gynephiles, they all tend to have greater numbers of older biological brothers, more androphilic male relatives, similar population prevalence rates, elevated childhood separation anxiety, and elevated gender atypicality in childhood and adulthood. Taken together, this suggests that androphilic males’ identities and gender role expression vary cross-culturally, but the underlying psychobiology that characterizes these individuals is cross-culturally invariant.
Psychologists, such as Joe Henrich, have expressed a pressing need within the pages of the leading scientific journal, Nature, to conduct research on non-student, non-Western populations, to replicate this research, to triangulate it in disparate human populations, and then relate such work to comparable research on non-human species using both field and laboratory approaches. This is a very tall order, but one my lab has been working hard to fulfill.
How can we encourage more work like this? I think it is going to be very difficult because being a fieldworker often involves long periods of time away from home on a regular basis. The personal costs this entails in terms disruption to relationships with partners, friends, family, and colleagues is simply not something most people would be willing to tolerate. Apart from this, I think most people are creatures of habit no matter how much they romanticize what it would be like to live a National Geographic sort of lifestyle. Fieldwork is no picnic. It is often really physically uncomfortable, and you have to be able to cope with a high degree of unpredictability in terms of everything from working conditions to diet. In addition, if you are doing human work, you have to be able to be able to adapt to very different cultural settings, which might sound easy enough in theory, but in practice I’ve seen my fair share of people really struggle. Finally, most people only study one species and one culture (their own). Asking them to do otherwise is, as I said, a very tall order that would cause most academics to balk. Given all this, few people are going to want to make the sacrifices that are required to do fieldwork on different species and cultures, especially since it’s not particularly rewarded in academia, despite all the lip-service that’s paid to the importance of such work. At the end of the day, I think the kind of research I do is still considered, for the most part, a kind of quirky thing to pursue.
Lehmiller: I have always found your research to be very exciting and thought provoking because it challenges the way that we’ve been taught to think about concepts like gender identity and sexual orientation. For example, you’ve talked before about how gay men you might encounter in a place like the United States don’t really exist in Samoa, where instead you have fa’afafine. In fact, you’ve argued that a boy who grew up to be gay in the U.S. would probably be fa’afafine if they had grown up in Samoa instead. This suggests that our concepts of “gay” and “transgender” are not cross-cultural universals and that the “born that way” argument we hear so often is a vast oversimplification. In other words, the way that sexuality and gender are expressed is very much influenced by culture. In light of this, and based on your broader program of research, how should Westerners change the way they think about sexual orientation and gender identity?
Vasey: First of all, thank you for those kind words. I really appreciate it.
It’s true that until very recently, I never met anyone in Samoa who identified as a “gay man.” That is now starting to slowly change, and I think the presence of gay hookup apps like Grindr are, in part, fueling this change. It’s also likely that travel overseas to places like New Zealand and Australia, where Samoan cisgender androphilic men are exposed to gay culture is fueling some of this change. I began work in Samoa in 2003 and I recall that 2014 was the first time I heard a Samoan cisgender androphilic man (one of the very few I knew) say: “You know, I’m like a gay.” The next year when I saw the same guy, he said to me “You know, I am a gay.” That was when I knew things were changing. Now, ever so slowly the identity category “gay” is starting to be adopted by a handful of cisgender androphilic men in Samoa, who formerly just identified as “men.”
Hookup-apps like Grindr also seem to be having an impact on the fa’afafine community. For example, I know of one fa’afafine who was extremely feminine, but now presents in a cisgender manner comparable to your average gay guy. When I asked why (because this sort of change was unusual), I was told, “Well, you know, Grindr,” which I took to mean that if one wanted to be successful in the Grindr mating market one could greatly increase their chances by presenting in a cisgender manner like the typical gay men in Western cultures. When I think about these changes, I feel lucky I was able to begin my work in Samoa several years before cellphones and hookup apps appeared on the scene.
I think these shifts demonstrate how identity and gender role presentation can toggle around depending on cultural context and cultural diffusion, but sexual orientation remains constant. That’s why I’ve said publicly on many occasions that if I grew up in Samoa in all likelihood, as an androphilic male, I would identify as fa’afafine and present in a much more feminine manner (and need a wig!). Similarly, if the average fa’afafine grew up in Canada, they would proabably identify as a gay man and present in a relatively masculine manner (although, like me, not in as masculine a manner as the average heterosexual man). In neither instance would our sexual orientations change, but our identities and gender role presentations would. Culture appears to be irrelevant in terms of the development of one’s sexual orientation, but culture plays a very significant role in the how sexual orientation is experienced and expressed both in terms of identity and gender role presentation.
My work in Samoa suggests that culture even has a significant influence on how sexual behavior manifests (but again, not sexual orientation). The sociologist, Fredrick Whitam, said that one of the most cross-culturally variable aspects of male sexuality is the willingness of gynephilic men to have sex with feminine males. Indeed, in a Samoan cultural context, many (but not all) men routinely have sex with fa’afafine. Similar behavior is rare in Western cultural contexts. This might lead some people to think that culture influences men’s sexual orientations such that Samoan men are more prone to bisexuality, but viewing-time experiments I’ve conducted in Samoa with one of my doctoral students, Lanna Petterson, do not support this conclusion. Our results indicate that, like everywhere in the world, most Samoan men are gynephilic, including those who engage in sexual interactions with fa’afafine. Only a tiny minority are bisexual, just like in the West.
I try not to give advice about how Westerner’s should think about sexual orientation and gender identity beyond being aware that the former is heritable, and the latter is not. Consequently, there are many cultural models for gender identity, some of which tend to be more accommodating toward gender diverse individuals, and others not so much. Accommodating cultures sometimes recognize non-binary gendered categories of personhood such as fa’afafine and muxe, but I know of no culture that has specialized pronouns that are employed to address such individuals. I would caution people not to over romanticize non-Western approaches to gender diversity. What you read on the internet does not necessarily reflect reality on the ground.
Lehmiller: In your experience as a sex researcher, what are some of the biggest misconceptions you’ve encountered about sex? In other words, what are some things that are widely believed, but aren’t supported by the science?
Vasey: One of the biggest misconceptions that seems to be everywhere recently is that biological sex is a social construct and exists along a spectrum. Alice Dreger long ago articulated that how we define sex is a social decision, but the physical parameters that we draw upon in formulating that definition (e.g., gametes, gonads, genitals) reflect objective reality. Moreover, as Leonard Sax cogently demonstrates, those physical parameters manifest in an overwhelmingly binary manner: 99.97% of individuals are male or female, not intersex. Intersex individuals certainly exist but claims that their existence “proves” that biological sex exists on a spectrum seem specious.
Another big misconception is that transgender is one monolithic phenomenon. It most certainly is not.
Yet another common misconception is that pedophiles and child molesters are one and the same. James Cantor has been especially brave in try to correct that falsehood [Editor’s note: read more about Cantor’s work on this here]. I could go on, but I’ll stop there.
Lehmiller: What’s needs to change in the way that we conduct sex research? What do you think sex researchers need to do differently going forward?
Vasey: I think it is important to resist trendy ideology, virtue signaling, language-policing, and careerism in favor of science, objectivity, evidence, and open dialogue. We all need to be working hard to replicate and triangulate our research (history will be kind to those that do). We all need to work harder at being the harshest critics of our most cherished ideas. It would be nice if academics were better at embracing humility and cultivating humor. I would like to see more emphasis on competence and less emphasis on identity. Diversity in science is desirable because it brings different perspectives to the table that more fully inform the scientific process, but this cannot occur at the expense of careful, objective and evidence-based science itself.
Lehmiller: Tell us about one new thing you recently learned about sex that absolutely fascinated you.
Vasey: It’s “reading week” in Canada and so, I decided to read a book that was highly recommended by the historian, Rictor Norton, called “Fanny & Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England” by Neil McKenna. It’s about the trial of two Victorian cross-dressers and a number of “notorious sodomites.” I’m thoroughly enjoying it!
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Dr. Justin Lehmiller is an award winning educator and a prolific researcher and scholar. He has published articles in some of the leading journals on sex and relationships, written two textbooks, and produces the popular blog, Sex & Psychology. Dr. Lehmiller’s research topics include casual sex, sexual fantasy, sexual health, and friends with benefits. His latest book is Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life. Follow him on Twitter @JustinLehmiller.