I didn't say there wasn't.
None of this seems relevant to my point.
Coming from personal experience, I have absolutely no desire to have a sexual encounter with any man, and I'm about as comfortable with homosexuality as it gets. I just do not find men physically attractive. Often intellectually attractive, yes, but never physically.
Again, not very relevant. Like every other adult alive, you're the product of both your genes and your upbringing. Looking at a single individual, or at a single society at a single point in time, isn't going to be very useful for disentangling the two.
Ok, if I'm clear on your point it is that sexual preferences are at least partially cultural?
Not so much sexual preference in itself, but how we conceptualise it. I tend to think that whether one is mostly attracted to men or mostly attracted to women is for the most part fixed at birth or in early childhood. But conceptualising this as being either homosexual or heterosexual, and consequently finding any hint of sexual activity with the dispreferred sex deeply discomforting isn't.
The idea that you have to be a different kind of person to like men that way is pretty new. Even in cultures that penalised gay
sex, the general notion doesn't appear to have been that there's a special kind of people that should be eradicated, but that the
act is so bad that anyone who gives in to this temptation is to be punished - which almost assumes that everyone is potentially tempted, even though the temptation may be much stronger for some people than for others.
Now, if you don't have this idea of this clear line, you might, as an adolescent or young adult, experiment with same-sex sex because why not? If you're wired to like the opposite sex, it probably won't be all that great so you probably won't make a habit out of it. But when you have this idea that there gays and heteros and little in between, knowing that you're mostly attracted to women makes you hetero, makes even trying off limits, and makes the idea seem more yucky than it otherwise would even if your preferences themselves are exactly the same.
ETA: When Paul adressed the Korinthians, he didn't say "this is going to be irrelevant to most of you, but it's going to be pretty hard to swallow for the gays among; sorry about that, gays, it's just what God demands". He addressed his sermon against same-sex
sex to the entire congregation, obviously expecting that every last man could be a potential transgressor.
There we agree. But I think your study is still a long way from proving the degree to which it's cultural, or that culture even plays a significant part in sexual preferences.
You could also interpret your study as that there were simply more gay, or partially gay men, who were deterred from experimentation due to their material interests. It doesn't necessarily mean that strongly heterosexual men became more comfortable with homosexual behaviour.
I think you misunderstood: The result was actually the
opposite of what one might naively expect: When homosexuality was less visible, generally frowned upon much more, and same-sex acts actually punishable by law,
more, not less, people reported having experimented with same-sex sex. When homosexuals became more visible and accepted, at the price of being construed as a different kind of people who have desires no "normal" person could possibly have, the numbers of young men reporting ever having given or received a blowjob from another man etc.
dropped -- now that they had to prove, if only to themselves, that they're not
one of them, they were starting to find the things their fathers and grandfathers had done out of curiosity (despite their illegality) extremely icky!
