Sexuality is More Varied Than You Think
Retired neuropsychologist and mother of two gay sons, Olive Skene Johnson, Ph.D. explores gender and sexual orientation in Sexual Spectrum: Exploring Human Diversity.
(PGW: Berkeley, CA) What would you do if you learned that two of your sons
were gay? Well, as a parent, you’d certainly want to know WHY. And if you’re
also a psychologist, you’d probably turn to science to answer that
question.
That’s exactly what Olive Skene Johnson did when she learned
that her two older sons were gay. The mother of five adult children, who is also
a clinical psychologist, Dr. Johnson was baffled.
“I just couldn’t
understand it,” she says now. “I’d just assumed that our sons would turn out to
be straight, like all of our friend’s sons. I thought at first we must have done
something wrong as parents. But if that were true, why were our three younger
children – two daughters and an adopted son – all straight?”
After
reviewing all of the science about homosexuality, Dr. Johnson realized that most
people’s sexual orientation appears to be fixed at birth, and that families have
little influence on it. The studies that compared families with and without gay
children found no differences between them that would explain their children’s
different sexual orientations.
But Dr. Johnson’s enquiry ended up going
far beyond homosexuality. She went on to study all other human sexualities too,
and that made her realize how truly diverse human sexuality actually
is.
“I learned that it’s not just a matter of a few people being gay or
bisexual or transsexual or intersexual, and everybody else being straight,” she
says. “Even among straight people there’s enormous variability. Sexuality isn’t
just about who you’re attracted to; it’s about how you think, how you feel, how
you act. The truth is, the range of human sexuality is actually more like a vast
spectrum, with each of us occupying our own little niche, regardless of how we
label ourselves.”
Dr. Johnson realized there was a desperate need for a
book that would tell other people how diverse the human species actually is. But
when her search for such a book in her local library and bookstores turned up
nothing, she realized she would have to write it herself. “This was too
important to keep to myself,” she said. And so, following retirement from her
private Psychology practice in her seventies, she wrote The Sexual Spectrum:
Exploring Human Diversity ($15.95, 1-55192-681-4, Raincoast/Publishers Group
West). Dr. Johnson lives in Vancouver, Canada.
Sexual Spectrum: Exploring
Human Diversity
by Olive Skene Johnson
Raincoast • Spring 2005
5 ½ x 8,
276pp
1-55192-681-4• $15.95
Trade Paperback
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Source : http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/7/prweb262376.htm