Thursday, March 29, 2007

Freakonomics and sexual orientation

One of the salvos in that interesting TNR attack on "Freakonomics" strikes me as way off the mark. Scheiber ridicules a paper, by the Emory University economist Andrew Francis, titled "The Economics of Sexuality: The Effect of HIV/AIDS on Homosexual Behavior, Desire, and Identity in the United States."

The paper's premise is that men who experience both heterosexual and homosexual desire will modify their choice of partner, depending on how dangerous they perceive homosexual sex to be at any given time. Scheiber finds this self-evidently ludicrous:

Granted, there is a legitimate, if sometimes tawdry[!],literature examining the way sexual behavior responds to disease. But Francis wasn't talking about changes in behavior -- less promiscuity, greater condom use, etc. He was talking about changes in sexual orientation.

But obviously -- this is not controversial, is it? -- for some people the line between sexual "behavior" and "sexual orientation" is not as bright and shining as Scheiber imagines. As a former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, has he really never read an account of, for example, life at an all-male English public school in the 19th or early 20th centuries? Even when it comes to sexuality, at least for some people, opportunities, risks, and social context clearly make a difference -- as the "Freakonomics" school rightly recognizes, and as Richard Posner, a frequent TNR contributor and hardly a trendy freakeconomist, was pointing out 13 years ago.

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Posted by Christopher Shea at 01:06 PM

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