We’ve all heard that visibility matters. Here’s proof—scientific proof—as reported in Scientific American.
According to Harvard University psychologist Yoel Inbar and his colleagues in a recent issue of the journal Emotion, even people who say they are fine with displays of affection by gay male couples may harbor subconscious negative attitudes.
Jesse Bering, the openly gay author of the SciAm article and the director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, explains: “because these implicit (often unconscious) moral judgments are often in conflict with social prescriptions of fairness and equality for gay couples, such individuals are usually completely unaware of their own prejudiced attitudes.”
The good news? Bering observes:
Studies have shown that people can be habituated to stimuli that trigger disgust over time. . . . The key to gay people feeling comfortable expressing their affection for one another in public places, therefore, is simply to engage in such behavior more routinely.
One might fantasize about a sort of reverse Clockwork Orange procedure here: sit people down and make them watch episodes of The L Word or Queer As Folk until their nausea subsides. (Except for Season Three of The L Word, which still makes even me slightly queasy.)
The real solution is simpler, of course: take your sweetie’s hand in the park. Kiss her goodbye when you drop her off for work. (Don’t do this, of course, if you feel you would risk physical harm or loss of a job.)
While I should add that this was only a single study with a limited sample size (and I wonder if people have the same sense of disgust with lesbians as with gay men), it seems as good an excuse as any for planting a big wet one on your honey in the produce aisle.
I’ve been using a similar tactic in public situations when making even passing reference to my significant other: In the past, I might have referred to him as my “partner,” “other half” or some other gender-free construction. But now (even though we’re not fully married in Washington state), I refer to hm as my husband. At first it seemed awkward, but now the prior terms have come to seem awkward and even cloying.
Habituation to the term is working its magic on me, and if the study authors are correct, there’s hope it will work on the people I interact with.
I recommend this to other people in same-sex relationships. If, in your heart even if not in law, you’re married, start using the terms husband and wife when interacting with others.
Good idea, John. I wonder, though, if that works better for gay men than for lesbians. The word “wife” unfortunately has some negative overtones, given women’s traditionally subservient role in the household. For a long time, even after we legally wed here in Massachusetts, I referred to Helen as my partner. After 14 years, it was hard to use a new term. Now I say “spouse,” which, while it does run into that gender-neutral invisibility problem, doesn’t carry the same role-bound connotations as “wife.” But I see your point, and wish there was a better solution. At least spouse still gets across the idea of a relationship equivalent to anyone else’s.
I do my part.
Now I’ll go into the living room and tell (my fully married) partner Caro the very good news. Hey, I’ll say, it says here we should kiss! Caro will be pleased.
Thank you so much for blogging!
With lots of love from Oslo, Norway,
Aina, Caro and Luka (16 months).
Hee hee!
Wow. Norway. I’m always amazed at how the Internet is bringing the world closer together. Thanks for writing from so far away!
I’ve never been a fan of PDA for straight folks. It’s just irritating. But I guess I’ll start doing my part for the movement by doing a little more PDA with my partner. Who doesn’t love making the straight folks uncomfortable? ;^)
A while back, when Harlyn Aizley was blogging, I think about her breakup, she wrote about the toll it takes on your romantic life to essentially, in effect, pretend to be friends in public. It made a big impression on me. I thought: Who are we protecting by not holding hands and kissing each other in public? Are we trying to spare some straight people the sight of (gasp!) two ladies in love? My partner/wife/spouse and I made a pact that unless we thought we were in some real physical danger, we were going to go for it. We were actually sort of shocked how much nobody seemed to care at all.
Well put. I think it’s especially important for those of us with kids to show affection in front of them–on an appropriate level on par with what any couple, gay or straight, would do. It’s part of teaching our kids things they’ll need to know for their own relationships when they grow up.
I’ll also put out an observation: It seems to me that women who come out after having been married to men or in long-term relationships with them are more open about PDA’s than those of us who have pretty much always only dated women. Is it just me and the people I know, or does this hold true for anyone else?