Tops, bottoms, and versatiles: what straight views of penetrative preferences could mean for sexuality claims under Price Waterhouse.

• Author: Ayres, Ian
• Position: II. A Preliminary Study of Attitudes Towards Penetrative Preferences B. Results through Appendix, with footnotes, p. 740-768

2. Results

   Our sample of eLab respondents, described in Table 1, was fairly diverse but not entirely representative of the broader population. After excluding the 121 respondents who identified as LGBT, we were left with 828 respondents. Of those, 523 were female and 305 were male. The average respondent's age was 37.3 years, with a standard deviation of 15.3. Among respondents, 6% identified as Hispanic or Latino and 24% identified as having a non-white racial background. Ninety percent of respondents said they had spent the majority of their lives in the United States. For educational attainment, 10% had never attended college, 31% had attended some college, 29% were college graduates, and 31% had attended at least some graduate school. Particularly in light of the high level of educational attainment, we suspect that our results might be biased in favor of greater tolerance for gender violations.

   Using a two-sided Mann-Whitney test for statistical significance, we made pair-wise comparisons of answers among the different versions of each vignette. (76) We compared unspecified-Tom to top-Tom, bottom-Tom, and versatile-Tom across all three questions. We also compared top-, bottom-, and versatile-Tom to one another. Then we compared all versions of the Laurie and Ron vignette to one another across all three questions. Full p-values for these tests are listed in Tables 2-7. One, two, or three asterisks following the p-values denote where we found, respectively, weak ([alpha] = 0.10), ordinary ([alpha] = 0.05), or strong ([alpha] = 0.01) statistical significance.

   Regarding respondents' willingness to go to a barbecue festival with Tom, presented in Table 2, we saw only one strongly significant effect: people were significantly less likely to go to a barbecue festival with Tom when Tom was described as versatile, as compared to when Tom's penetrative preference was unspecified (p = 0.003). But there was also a weakly significant tendency to disfavor bottom-Tom in comparison to unspecified-Tom (p = 0.077), as well as a weakly significant tendency to favor top-Tom over versatile-Tom (p = 0.066). Comparing the means for each response (computed for illustrative, but not inferential, purposes), (77) Table 2 also shows an overall pattern of feeling most comfortable with unspecified-Tom, followed by top-Tom, then bottom-Tom, then versatile-Tom.

   Results for the cocktail party question, reported in Table 3, also display the same ordinal ranking of means, with respondents most likely to attend with unspecified-Tom, followed by top-Tom, then bottom-Tom, then versatile-Tom. However, the gap between unspecified-Tom and all the other Toms widened. Additionally, respondents were significantly more likely to go to the cocktail party with unspecified-Tom than with versatile-Tom (p = 0.001) or bottom-Tom (p = 0.008). Most notably, we even saw a statistically significant difference between versatile-Tom and top-Tom (p = 0.046).

   Finally, Table 4 reports on the ability of the various Toms to pass as straight. Again, we saw the same ordinal ranking of means, with the unspecified-Tom being most likely to pass, followed in descending likelihood by top-Tom, bottom-Tom, and versatile-Tom. Top-Tom, bottom-Tom, and versatile-Tom were all significantly less likely to be perceived as "passable" than unspecified-Tom, but the differentials between the three specified groups were smaller and not statistically significant. Although mentioning penetrative preference amplified how "gay" Tom was perceived to be, no particular role in anal sex was considered "gayer" than another.

   Next, we considered whether subgroups of our study population differed in their prejudices towards specific versions of Tom. Based on earlier studies that have shown men and women to react differently to homosexuality and gender-nonconformity, (78) we decided to control for respondents' biological sex. Second, based on surveys showing generational shifts in attitudes towards homosexuality, we also sorted our study population into two age clusters, roughly at its median: those at least thirty-three years old and those thirty-two years old or younger. (79) We then performed Mann-Whitney significance tests, like those performed on the entire study population, for each of the three subgroups. Results are presented in Tables 2a-2d (for the barbecue setting) and Tables 3a-3d (for the cocktail setting).

   For the barbecue setting, we saw no significant results in any of the subgroups. Three of the subgroups--younger men (Table 2a), younger women (Table 2b), and older men (Table 2c)--did, however, display the same ordinal ranking as before: top-Tom, followed by bottom-Tom, followed by versatile-Tom. Older women (Table 2d) did not, instead favoring bottom-Tom ahead of top-Tom, though not at a statistically significant level. Although Tables 2a-2c show a fairly large gap between top-Tom and versatile-Tom, replicating what we saw in the overall study population, the difference was not statistically significant--perhaps because of the much smaller sample size.

   For the cocktail setting, we did see significant results. Younger men (Table 3a) and younger women (Table 3b) again favored top-Tom over versatile-Tom. Like those two groups, older men (Table 3c) also had the highest mean ranking for top-Tom, followed by bottom-Tom, and then versatile-Tom. Because of the distribution of the responses, however, the Mann-Whitney test registered statistical significance for the top-bottom difference but not the top-versatile difference. (80) Older women (Table 3d), by contrast, showed no statistically significant tendency to favor one penetrative preference more than the others and did not follow the same ordering of the means seen in all three of the other groups.

   Overall, the Tom vignette points to prejudice against certain penetrative preferences. In several instances, both within the full study population and within certain subgroups, respondents favored top-Tom over versatile-Tom. Then there is the disfavoring of bottom-Tom by older men. Both of these results are bolstered by the fact that both versatile-Tom and bottom-Tom, but not top-Tom, elicited a significantly less favorable reaction than the baseline set by unspecified-Tom. Additionally, there is the overall trend in computed means, placing top-Tom first, versatile-Tom last, and bottom-Tom in the middle, which is of no statistical significance in isolation but which was very persistent across nearly all the comparisons we made.

   The results also seem to suggest that prejudice against certain penetrative preferences is variable. It is true that changing the setting did not change the result within the entire study population: a tendency to favor top-Tom over versatile-Tom. But that tendency was stronger in the cocktail party setting. Moreover, after we separated the population into subgroups, we found several significant biases among the subgroups on the cocktail party question, whereas we found no biases with the barbecue question. Additionally, we found real differences among the subgroups in the cocktail party setting. In particular, we found that older women did not display the tendency (found among younger men and women and older men) to favor one penetrative preference over another.

   We should emphasize that this finding does not mean that older women are less likely to discriminate against homosexuality, nor does it mean that younger women are equally likely to discriminate against homosexuality as younger men. Indeed, Tables 2a-2d and 3a-3d show a higher average rating among younger women than among younger men across all versions of Tom. The relative ratings of each version of Tom, however, suggest that young women nonetheless tended to have gender on the mind when evaluating sexual practices. We therefore might reasonably expect that, among young women who do have an overall negative view of homosexuality, some of that negativity arises from gender norms. The results among older women, meanwhile, show that certain contextual factors, such as the age of the discriminator, can make that less likely.

   Regarding Laurie and Ron, we did see some tendency in the data to favor as friends the versions of the couple that had Ron as the penetrator (Table 5). That tendency was not, however, statistically significant. That is not especially surprising, given that the question ("Are Ron and Laurie a couple you can see yourself being friends with?") was more direct than the questions we asked about Tom's likability, and therefore more likely to bring about social-desirability bias. Also, the fact that respondents were presented with a question about Laurie and Ron's joint likability as a couple differentiates this scenario further from the Tom vignette. Accordingly, the Laurie and Ron results are not substantially in conflict with the Tom results.

   Particularly remarkable were the questions about Laurie and Ron's latent homosexuality (Tables 6-7). Respondents were overwhelmingly more likely to think that both Ron (Table 6) and Laurie (Table 7) had "occasional homosexual desires" when Laurie was the penetrator. Every single pair-wise comparison between Ron-as-penetrator and Laurie-as-penetrator had a strongly significant p-value (p

   First of all, these results rule out the possibility that penetrative preferences are only culturally relevant in the typical homosexual context. Although the effect on actual prejudice was not statistically significant when measured by the first question, the latter questions show that penetrative preferences had an effect on our respondents' perceptions even in the context of a heterosexual relationship. Laurie and Ron were described as a loving couple contemplating whether to have children, but respondents were persuaded that both Laurie and Ron were more likely to have homosexual desires merely because of the roles they played in bed. By comparison, respondents overall had almost no response to the...