Gaydar For Dummies: Eyes Are The Window to The Homosexual Soul
You praise yourself for having excellent gaydar, you say? You knew about Anderson Cooper all along, you boast? Nobody in this here Chick-fil-A is gay, you state with confidence?
Cornell Which one?
Maybe you're giving yourself a little too much credit, Lady Gaga.
A new study claims that you can tell right away using this simple observational technique. Yep, anybody can do it:
A Cornell University study published this month in the journal PloS ONE analyzed the pupil dilation of 325 men and women who were faced with sexually arousing images.
The subjects were of all sexual orientations, according to Cornell. A special, infrared lense was used to measure pupil response for the first time.
According to a statement from the school:
Pupils were found to widen most when study participants watched erotic videos of people they found attractive, thereby revealing where they were on the sexual spectrum from heterosexual to homosexual.
Lead author Gerulf Rieger said the study was less "invasive" than others because it did not try to find out if people got a, er, rise out of the images. Physically. He states:
We wanted to find an alternative measure that would be an automatic indication of sexual orientation but without being as invasive as previous measures. Pupillary responses are exactly that.
Researchers were able to study folks who might not normally go for such a thing, therefore theoretically getting more honest results.
One of the conclusions: Bisexuality isn't all in the heads of men who go both ways. It's physical. Cornell:
... Bisexual men in the new study showed substantial pupil dilations to sexual videos of both men and women.
So next time you bump into your local ultra-right-winger/bible thumper/anti-gay activist, look into his big blues and tell us what you see.
The eyes don't lie.
[@dennisjromero / djromero@laweekly.com / @LAWeeklyNews]
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