MALES’ SEXUAL PREFERENCE: BIRTH ORDER AND SIBLING CONSTELLATIONS
It has been suggested that any serious study of familial influences on sexual orientation should consider not only parents’ influences but the sibling environment as well. The presence of siblings, it has been supposed, may influence a boy’s relationship with his parents as well as the development of his social skills and style of interacting with others, both within and outside the family circle.
Sibling environments have sometimes been construed in terms of birth order and the genders and ages of other children in the household. Being an only or youngest child, for example, has been thought of as a dependent-child situation that fosters an unusual closeness to one’s mother and a lack of assertiveness, either of which may affect a boy’s relationships inside and outside the family and thus his psychosexual development.
Such a view, however, has not always been supported by empirical data. Two recent studies found no differences in the birth order of the homosexual and the heterosexual men in their samples. Earlier studies, however, did find a relationship between birth order and sexual orientation. Some, for example, reported that homosexual men were more likely to be the only or the youngest child in the family. Another investigator suggested that homosexual men were more likely to be the only child, the only son, the youngest child, or the youngest son. On the other hand, psychiatrists in one study described their homosexual male patients as less likely than heterosexual patients to have been only children.
Other studies have focused chiefly on the extent to which certain kinds of sibling constellations might affect a boy’s identification with the opposite sex and/or feelings of inferiority deriving from unsuccessful competition with brothers. Findings regarding sibling environments, however, have often been unclear and inconsistent. With regard to opposite-sex identification, it has been found that boys with older brothers are more likely to show “masculine” traits than boys who do not have older brothers and that boys with sisters tend to assimilate “feminine” gender characteristics. Another study found that males who have only sisters are more “feminine” than males who have brothers. Findings such as these have led to the speculation that homosexual males are more likely than heterosexual males to have sisters. Identification with sisters, it has been suggested, could create a less-certain masculine identity in a boy, thus predisposing him toward homosexuality. Many investigators, however, have found that homosexual males actually tend to have more brothers than sisters, and psychiatrists have described their male homosexual patients as equally likely to have had a predominantly male or a predominantly female sibling environment.
As to feeling inferior, it has been suggested that if a boy competes in vain with dominant and aggressive brothers (or sisters), he may come to devalue his maleness, an experience that might contribute indirectly to his developing a homosexual orientation. Since that might happen if a sibling is much older, it should be noted that one investigation found that homosexual men were more likely to have had much-older brothers (five or more years older) than were their heterosexual counterparts.
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