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Industry: Email Alert RSS FeedBiased Use of Cross-Cultural and Historical Perspectives on Male Homosexuality in Human Sexuality Textbooks
Journal of Sex Research, Nov, 1998 by Bruce Rind
At the bottom of each sheet judges indicated whether they thought the textbook drew moral distinctions between man-man sex and man-boy sex in our society. Evidence that it did, specified by instructions on a separate sheet, included (a) labeling man-man sex homosexuality and presenting it as normal, but labeling man-boy sex pedophilia and presenting it as pathological; (b) explicitly distancing the former from the latter by claiming, for example, that homosexual men are unlikely to have sex with boys and disdain men who do; and (c) grouping man-boy sex morally and conceptually with rape, incest, and/or man-girl sex.
Coding Procedure
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Four judges familiar with the previously presented cross-cultural and historical data on homosexuality coded the textbooks. Another professor who is also a sex researcher, a graduate student in human sexuality, a lawyer with an advanced degree in history and knowledgeable about sex in history, and the author acted as judges. Each judge independently read the material from the 18 textbooks and coded it. Except for the author, the judges were masked with respect to the names of the textbook authors when coding the photocopied material. Judges worked on the photocopied material first and then evaluated the actual textbooks for evidence of drawing moral distinctions between man-man and man-boy sex in our society. After coding all the material, the judges used instructions from a separate sheet to assign values to the entries in 3 of the columns. For codings on how the example was described, instructions were that transgenerational examples were to be assigned a 0 (i.e., biased) if they were described as relations between men, a 2 (i.e., unbiased) if they were described as relations between boys and older males, and a 1 (i.e., mixed) if they were not described. Transgenderal examples were assigned a 2 regardless of actual description. For codings on how the example was labeled, based on the assumption that the textbook referred to man-man sex as homosexuality and man-boy sex as pedophilia in our society, transgenerational examples were to be rated as 0 (i.e., biased) if they were labeled homosexual, 1 (i.e., mixed) if they were not labeled, and 2 (i.e., unbiased) if labeled pederastic or pedophilic. For codings on whether the example was appropriate, codings judged inappropriate were assigned 0, mixed were assigned 1, and appropriate were assigned 2. In a second step, the judges shared their results with one another and attempted to resolve discrepancies through discussion, which involved going hack to the scholarly literature reviews on cross-cultural and historical homosexuality, if necessary, to argue for a particular coding.
In addition to coding examples, as discussed above, the author recorded the number of times scholarly reviews of cross-cultural or historical homosexuality (e.g., Carrier, 1980; Ford & Beach, 1951) were cited in the chapter on homosexuality and in the chapter discussing pedophilia. The rationale was that these reviews are at least as much about man-boy (transgenerational) sex as man-man (transgenderal) sex. Hence, they provide legitimate perspective for both types of sex in our culture. To use them for man-man sex, but not man-boy sex, would then constitute bias.
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