February 11th saw the long-anticipated release of Lady Gaga's newest single "Born This Way," but as early as the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards the chorus for the new song was revealed: "I'm beautiful in my way / 'Cause God makes no mistakes / I'm on the right track baby / I was born this way." The subsequent release of the full lyrics in late January 2011 confirmed the direction: An equality anthem exclusive to no one. Although the song's net is cast wide, viewed specifically through the lens of attitudes toward LGB (Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual) individuals, the song reveals a specific belief about the origins of homosexuality that is so commonly equated with tolerance in America that it is rarely, if ever, questioned. This is, as the title suggests, that to be gay, lesbian, or bisexual is to be born as such. A belief that homosexuality is in any way environmentally influenced (a "choice") is equated with conservatism, homophobia, and intolerance.
American gay rights activists as well as liberals in general have aggressively pursued this dichotomy. In October of 2010 President Obama himself said, "I don't think it's a choice. I think people are born with a certain make-up....We're all children of God. We don't make determinations about who we love. That's why I think discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is wrong."
Indeed, there is evidence that, in America at least, beliefs about the immutability of homosexuality, that one is "born gay," are correlated with more tolerant attitudes toward gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. Analyzing data from a 1995 Oklahoma City survey, Wood & Bartkowski (2004) found that, among other things (including that contact with gay or lesbians significantly reduced levels of gay stereotyping and homophobia, while increasing support for gay rights--supporting the "contact hypothesis" first proposed by Gordon Allport in 1954's The Nature of Prejudice), belief among heterosexuals that homosexuality was biologically determined significantly predicted support of gay rights initiatives.
In another study, using data from a 2003 survey, Haider-Markel & Joslyn (2008) framed the immutability belief of homosexuality in terms of genetics. The authors found that not only was a belief that homosexuality was genetically determined greatly associated with positive feelings toward gay and lesbians, but that this association was greater than all other variables, including "knowing someone who is gay" (contact hypothesis).
Both of these studies use attribution theory to explain their findings. Originally proposed by the Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider in 1958's The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, Heider described how people make everyday inferences about the causes of other people's behavior, attributing others' behavior to either internal (the person), or external (the situation) causes. Expanding upon Heider's original framework, Bernard Weiner added another, crucial dimension in the 1970s: Perceived controllability. Weiner's additional factor has played a major role in social psychological studies of attribution theory ever since. In the above studies, beliefs that homosexuality is a "choice" is an attribution based on perceived controllability. As the studies reveal, this kind of attribution is consistently related to negative attitudes towards gay and lesbian men and women.
In the sphere of modern American pop music, the last year alone has seen a surprising number of highly successful songs co-opting immutability attributions to advocate messages of tolerance and acceptance. Such songs include Katy Perry's single "Firework," which was released in October 2010 as the third single from her sophomore album, and reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Perry herself described it as an "anthem" with a "fantastic message," and the video to the song featured a potpourri of culturally-appropriate images of outcast youth gathering together to dance to the beat of Perry's presumably empowering message. As if the video didn't make the song's intent any clearer, Perry quickly dedicated the video to America's hottest budding humanitarian crisis: Bullied gay youth, as addressed in Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" video campaign.
The same month saw the release of Pink's "Raise Your Glass," the lead single from her first greatest hits package, and it, too, featured not only lyrics explicitly aimed to empower the presumably dis-empowered, but a video featuring a dizzying collection of stereotypes depicting the American "outcast," crossing the boundaries of time, space, sexual orientation, political orientation and ethnicity. Admittedly, this is not new territory for Pink, with social commentary embedded in various of her past videos, perhaps most explicitly in 2006's "Stupid Girls," a critique of feminism's paradoxical mid-2000s incarnation as relevant in the age of Paris Hilton as it is now in the age of Snooki.
It is worth noting how, like Katy Perry's "Firework," Pink's "Raise Your Glass" and its similarly-themed follow-up, "Fuckin' Perfect," have seen considerable success in the United States, with the former reaching the top of the Billboard Hot 100 and the later reaching #2 (so far). Other songs, like Ke$ha's "We R Who We R," also released in October of 2010, found similar success in America, reaching #1.
However, the beliefs transmitted in these especially popular pop cultural artifacts--beliefs specifically about the etiology of homosexuality--are not unfettered by cultural influences. In a 2002 article, Peter Hegarty critiqued the immutability-tolerance link so often espoused regarding homosexuality. He noted other authors who have criticized such biological determinism as benefiting primarily "economically comfortable White men" (Terry, 1997), as well as excluding bisexual and queer identities. In addition, data gleaned from British and American individuals by the author showed that the link between beliefs in the biological basis of homosexuality and tolerance toward gays and lesbians was significantly correlated in the American sample only. Although the author rejected this as evidence that the immutability-tolerance link is "culture-bound," he argued that it represents instead evidence of a mere "symbolic association" between biological determinism and homosexuality. Addressing the possible negative consequences of such a view, he noted:
"Presenting biological determinism as a pro-lesbian and gay strategy in the classroom or in an advertisement may well strengthen symbolic associations between tolerance and biological determinism more than it actually produces genuine attitude change" (163).
Another factor closely associated with the immutability-tolerance link, at least in the sphere of pop music, can be observed in the lyrics and video to Pink's "Fuckin' Perfect." With its depictions of probable eating disorders and cutting (self-harm), the video makes a clear argument in its synthesis of image and message: Don't hurt yourself, because you're perfect. It's a message that directly suggests that a perceived lack of self-esteem might be, at least in part, causally related to disordered eating behaviors as well as self-harm. There is evidence to suggest a link between low self-esteem and eating disorders (Mayer et al., 2009), although not as clearly a causal link between media depictions of ideal body sizes and eating disorders (see Levine & Murnen, 2009).
Beyond drawing a causal inference, the "Fuckin' Perfect" video also assumes the seemingly universal importance of self-esteem. In the last decade, however, psychologists have suggested that self-esteem might not be as important as once thought. In a comprehensive review, Baumeister and colleagues (2003) found that although high self-esteem was associated with persistence in the face of possible failure, it was not significantly associated with anything else, including delinquency, antisocial behavior, smoking, safe-sex behaviors, relationship satisfaction or outcome, or better interpersonal interactions in general. In fact, the opposite was sometimes true: Individuals with higher self-esteem, when faced with an "ego threat" condition (receiving esteem-threatening feedback after an intellectually difficult test, for example), received lower ratings in a subsequent interview than individuals with lower self-esteem, with the high self-esteem individuals frequently appearing antagonistic.
In addition, cross-cultural comparisons between Western and Japanese individuals have repeatedly revealed that, in Japan, self-esteem is found to be lower than in Western countries like the United States and Canada (both explicitly--see Campbell et al., 1996; and implicitly--see Szeto et al., 2009). Using data comparing the United States to Japan, psychologist Shinobu Kitayama (2006) has argued that, indeed, the assumption that self-esteem may be equally important across all cultures is questionable.
Lady Gaga may proclaim that she's "born this way" in her new single, and she may even claim that such a sentiment is meant to be empowering to all those oppressed minorities of the world (especially the ones dogged by pesky debates of biological determinism). But, at least when it comes to "the gays," the group Lady Gaga most aggressively courts and the group--especially given her recent forays into political activism with the push to repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell--that is unarguably most directed at by this new single, there are pitfalls to such a biologically determinist view, no matter how synonymous it may now be with LGBT tolerance in America. The politicization of debates about the origins of homosexuality--although arguably necessary and unarguably related to favorable attitudes toward sexual minorities among heterosexuals--nonetheless exerts a degree of harm on LGBT individuals, constraining the discourse to those (frequently men) who identify as exclusively homosexual, denying the possibility of social (environmental) contributions to human sexual orientation, and ultimately obfuscating the truth.
The possibility that these debates are themselves culturally influenced does not detract from the veracity of the claims generated from them, but they should alert LGBT activists especially to their potential pitfalls.
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