From the AP today, I picked up an interesting little tidbit. Swedish research indicates that lesbians' brains react differently to sex hormones than the brains of straight women.
In fact, lesbian reactions are similar to the reaction of heterosexual men; previous research indicates that the opposite is true for gay men – their reaction are smilier to heterosexual women.
The research gives credence to the argument that sexual orientation has a biological basis.
Actually, although most people reading this article may ASSUME that the results lend credence to a biological foundation for sexual orientation–they do not! There could just as easily be something in gay women's experiences and environments that lead to different lesbian reactions to the scents. This experiment can only suggest that there may be differences between straight women and gay women, but it was not designed to determine how these differences may have come about.
The AP had to issue a clarification because they made it sound like those differences were statistically significant, but they were not:
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/living/health/14565443.htm
Courtesy of Hothouse