Abstract
Research has demonstrated that the sexual role preferences of gay men can be perceived with accuracies that exceed chance guessing from viewing photos of their faces. This research was conducted with only heterosexual perceivers making the categorizations. We therefore examined whether men who have sex with men (N = 121) were able to perceive sexual role preferences from faces and, critically, whether perceivers’ masculinity, femininity, homonegativity, and own sexual role preference affected their categorizations of targets as “tops” or “bottoms.” We found that men who have sex with men, like heterosexual perceivers in prior work, perceived gay men’s sexual role preferences accurately. Furthermore, men who self-identified with a receptive (bottom) role were more accurate in their categorizations and male perceivers who self-reported higher levels of masculinity were more likely to categorize other men as bottoms. These findings suggest that men’s masculinity could serve as a lens through which people perceive others and interact with the world.
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Notes
Bisexual men did not differ from gay men on any measures of interest.
The hit and the false alarm rates were used in the calculations of accuracy and bias. Thus, we do not focus on the separate effects for these variables in our discussion. However, more masculine people had both greater hit and false alarm rates, suggesting the possibility of a response bias.
Because the sample of bisexual men was too small for any statistical inference, we examined gay men as a separate sample and found effects that were similar in magnitude and direction. All patterns of statistical significance were the same.
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Tskhay, K.O., Re, D.E. & Rule, N.O. Individual Differences in Perceptions of Gay Men’s Sexual Role Preferences from Facial Cues. Arch Sex Behav 43, 1615–1620 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-014-0319-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-014-0319-x