marksimpson.com

by Mark Simp­son (Guardian CIF, Sun­day Jan­u­ary 6, 2008)

It’s offi­cial. The sci­en­tists have finally proved it. Gay men are as bad as women.

Or as the Daily Mail puts it in a some­what unnec­es­sar­ily long head­line: “Gay men are as bad at nav­i­gat­ing as women”.

The Daily Tele­graph head­line was a lit­tle more direct: “Women and gay men are ‘worst dri­vers’”. Actu­ally, this wasn’t what the researchers into spa­tial learn­ing and mem­ory at Queen Mary’s (no, really, that’s actu­ally their name) Col­lege claimed at all, but I say why allow the facts spoil a good head­line? Or Jeremy Clark­son col­umn? (You know it’s coming.)

What the researchers did actu­ally claim how­ever was that both gay men and women appear to “share the same poor sense of direc­tion and rely on local land­marks to get around”.

That would be cot­tages and shoe shops, I suppose.

Accord­ing to the Mail, a study of 140 straight and gay, male and female “vol­un­teers” by Queen Mary Col­lege, Lon­don claims to have found that “gay men, straight women and les­bians nav­i­gated in much the same way and shared the same weak­nesses.” For South Amer­i­can Chardon­nay and men’s buns, perhaps?

But hang on a minute. And les­bians? What are they doing lumped together with gay men and straight women? I thought that if gay men are women trapped inside men’s bod­ies, les­bians were sup­posed to be trapped inside an artic­u­lated lorry cab with their feet on the dash­board smok­ing roll-ups.

But as you read on it dawns what this sophis­ti­cated psy­cho­log­i­cal test was really assess­ing. “The Queen Mary team, led by Dr Qazi Rah­man, used vir­tual real­ity sim­u­la­tions of two com­mon tests of spa­tial learn­ing and mem­ory devel­oped at Yale University.”

Ah, so they played com­puter games. Not very good com­puter games, by the sound of it:

In one, the Mor­ris Water Maze (MWM) test, vol­un­teers were placed in a “vir­tual pool” and had to “swim” through a maze to find hid­den sub­merged plat­form … The other task, the Radial Arm Maze test (RAM), involved find­ing “rewards” by explor­ing eight “arms” radi­at­ing out from a cir­cu­lar cen­tral junc­tion. Four arms con­tained a reward and four did not, and par­tic­i­pants had to avoid tra­vers­ing an arm more than once.

Well, maybe it’s because I’m gay and dizzy, but you’ve lost me already. I want to log on and hunt for mean­ing­less sex for hours via my scores of online pro­files. You can keep your rather tedious reject Xbox game.

There may well be gen­er­alised dif­fer­ences between men and women when it comes to dri­ving or other spa­tial based activ­i­ties, such as com­puter games (men seem to play them rather more than women, though often with straight men this appears to be a way of get­ting away from women). And these may well have some rela­tion­ship to sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion, though what we mean by sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion is a ques­tion in itself — after all, bisex­u­als are not men­tioned in this sur­vey. But it doesn’t appear that this study has shown it — instead it has merely shown up some cul­tural prej­u­dices (e.g. that Tele­graph “worst dri­vers” mis­lead­ing headline).

Even the find­ings of this study appear to con­firm gay men’s role as con­fusers of assump­tions about gen­der. The leader of the Queen Mary team is quoted as say­ing: ’”Gay peo­ple appear to show a “mosaic” of per­for­mance, parts of which are male-like and other parts of which are female-like“‘. So in other words, gay men watch porn, leave toi­let seats up but also do a spot of dusting.

Per­haps though the dis­ori­ented gay men in the study weren’t gay men at all, but pissed-up fruit flies escaped from another sci­en­tific study pub­lished this week, which claimed to show that alco­hol pro­duces “homo­sex­ual ten­den­cies” in male fruit flies. The researchers claimed the amorous­ness the flies showed one another after repeated expo­sure to alco­hol is a model for how alco­hol lessens inhi­bi­tions in humans.

I sus­pect this is one claim that isn’t ter­ri­bly controversial.

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It has been pointed out to me since this piece appeared that Dr Quazi Rah­man, the man behind the study which claimed to have ‘dis­cov­ered’ sim­i­lar­i­ties between gay men and women’s brains, is the author of a book called ‘Born Gay’. If only snarky com­men­ta­tors like me could learn to be as objec­tive as psychobiologists.