Abstract
The current study tested the hypothesis that men who are androphilic (sexually attracted to adult men) in a non-Western, developed country—Japan—would recall engaging in more female-typical behavior, and less male-typical behavior, in childhood, compared to men who are gynephilic (sexually attracted to adult women). Androphilic men, androphilic women, and gynephilic men (N = 302) responded to the Female-Typical Behavior Subscale and the Male-Typical Behavior Subscale of the Childhood Gender Identity Scale, which asked participants to recall their childhood behavior. Results indicated that gynephilic men scored highest on the Male-Typical Behavior Subscale and lowest on the Female-Typical Behavior Subscale. Androphilic women scored the highest on the Female-Typical Behavior Subscale and lowest on the Male-Typical Behavior Subscale. Androphilic men scored intermediately for both the Male- and Female-Typical Behavior Subscales. The results supported the hypothesis that Japanese androphilic men would recall greater gender-nonconforming childhood behavior compared to gynephilic men. These results further reinforce the conclusion that childhood gender-nonconforming behavior is a cross-culturally universal aspect of psychosexual life course development in androphilic men. We discuss why this may be the case, as well as why cross-cultural variation occurs in the magnitude with which recalled childhood gender nonconformity is reported by androphilic males.
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Notes
In Western culture, men who are gynephilic are labeled heterosexual, whereas men who are androphilic are labeled gay or homosexual. These identity categories are not necessarily recognized cross-culturally (including in Japan; McLelland, 2000) and, consequently, represent poor constructs for the type of research conducted here. As such, we employ the terms androphilic and gynephilic, which lend themselves much more easily to cross-cultural comparisons.
We have used the term male, as opposed to men, here because many androphilic biological males in non-Western cultures identify as belonging to a “third” gender category that exists beyond that of “man” or “woman.”
Developing countries are those with a low standard of living, undeveloped industrial base, and low Human Development Index (HDI) relative to other countries (Sullivan & Sheffrin, 2003). The HDI is a composite statistic of life expectancy, education, and income indices used to rank countries into four tiers of human development (United Nations Development Project, 2013).
McLelland (2000) analyzed 607 personal ads by Japanese androphilic men in the June 1994 issue of the magazine Barazoku and the majority stated that they were not interested in foreign partners.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Eiji Enomoto, Chiji Masafumi, Kiyoshige Murata, Ayumi Sawada, Yoshiko Sawada, Sachiko Shimada, Hideki Shiraume, Takashi Yanai, Ryoko Yoshikawa, and all of the individuals who agreed to participate in our study. Various stages of this research were supported by the University of Lethbridge, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Masters Scholarship to LJP, Chinook summer research award to CRW, and SSHRC Insight Grant to PLV. All the authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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The University of Lethbridge Human Subject Research Committee approved this research. Participants were required to sign consent forms prior to taking part in the study. All procedures performed in this study were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Canadian Tri-Council Policy Statement 2 (2014): Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans.
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Petterson, L.J., Wrightson, C.R. & Vasey, P.L. Recalled Gendered Behavior in Childhood: A Comparison of Androphilic Men, Gynephilic Men, and Androphilic Women in Japan. Arch Sex Behav 46, 119–127 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-016-0781-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-016-0781-8