UNews - Scott Semenyna

Unlocking the mystery — Dr. Paul Vasey’s new data analysis reveals insights into male homosexuality

caroline.zentner — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 18:07:04 +0000

A deeper analysis of a decade’s worth of data from Dr. Paul Vasey’s Comparative Sexology Lab at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge has lent clarity about the influence of two separate but linked literatures on biological variables influencing male homosexuality.

Vasey, a Professor and Board of Governors Research Chair, and his team of former students (Drs. Doug VanderLaan, Scott Semenyna and Francisco Goméz Jiménez) wanted to determine if there was evidence for both the Fraternal Birth Order Effect (FBOE) and the Female Fecundity Effect (FFE) in data they collected over a decade while working in Samoa.

The FBOE is a widely established finding that each biological older brother a male has increases the probability of homosexuality in that male by 20 to 35 per cent.

The FFE suggests that the female relatives of homosexual males have more children than those of heterosexual males, which provides an evolutionary means to offset the lower reproduction rate of homosexual male relatives. Previous research has also shown support for this hypothesis.

“More recently, people have been saying we need to use different statistical approaches when assessing the FFE that control for the FBOE,” says Vasey. “In order to see if there’s truly a fecundity effect that is occurring, we should see more children in all sibling categories including older sisters, older brothers, younger sisters and younger brothers. In contrast, the FBOE specifically predicts the existence of more older brothers.”

Vasey and his students collected data in the Polynesian island nation of Samoa over a 10-year period working with the support of the fa’afafine community. Fa’afafine are feminine, same-sex attracted males who are recognized as a third gender (neither men nor women) in Samoa.

The team subjected their data to a more robust analysis to determine whether the FBOE occurred in conjunction with the FFE.

“We didn’t find a generalized fecundity effect that influenced all sibling categories,” says Vasey. “We did, however, find that fa’afafine had more older brothers, which is consistent with the fraternal birth order effect.”

Vasey adds that the team’s analysis using a more refined approach is now the fourth to find no evidence for the FFE.

“What we originally thought was support for the FFE was actually just the fraternal birth order effect,” Vasey says. “Without my Board of Governor’s Research Chair, I never would have been able to conduct a decade of fieldwork in Samoa. I’m extremely grateful to the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge for awarding me my BoG Research Chair and for all the support I have been shown over the years.”

The study was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and has been published in the prestigious journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS).

The Research Support Fund supports a portion of the costs associated with managing the research funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, such as salaries for staff who provide administration support, training costs for workplace health and safety, maintenance of libraries and laboratories, and administrative costs associated with obtaining patents for inventions.

Puzzle of Sexual Orientation conference brings world-class researchers to the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge

caroline.zentner — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 22:19:13 +0000

While many attitudes about sexual orientation have changed dramatically in recent decades, sex researchers can still face immense backlash about their work.

It’s no wonder then that an invitation-only conference like the Puzzle of Sexual Orientation, recently held at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge, drew leading sex researchers from around the world to discuss their work in the company of fellow scientists who are also seeking to build knowledge in the field.

“In the United States and certainly parts of Canada, during parts of the past decade especially, academia has become intellectually intolerant,” says Dr. Michael Bailey, a professor at Northwestern ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ in Evanston, Illinois who attended the conference. “In certain ways, people have valued so-called social justice and identity politics at the expense of knowledge seeking, particularly about controversial topics and our domain includes some very controversial topics.”

Organized by Dr. Paul Vasey, a professor in ULethbridge’s Department of Neuroscience, and Dr. Kelly Suschinsky (MSc ’07, PhD ’12), program evaluation coordinator at the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre, the conference drew 37 participants from as far away as South America, Europe, and Australasia.

“It’s the primary conference for researchers studying the biopsychology of sexual orientation broadly construed,” says Vasey. “These are the people who are advancing science in the area; these experts think about sexual orientations being more than just whether you’re attracted to men or women or both.”

Along with drawing world-class researchers, the conference was also a get-together for several ULethbridge alums who studied under Vasey and have gone on to establish their own successful careers.

Suschinsky’s work looks at how people respond to unwanted non-consensual sexual encounters. Some of her earlier work has shown that women can physically respond to fairly aversive stimuli while men don’t have the same response. Her research is geared toward finding out why men and women differ in this regard.

Dr. Francisco Gomez Jimenez (MSc ’17, PhD ’22), now a lecturer at Brunel ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ London, UK, concentrates his research on determining what aspects of same-sex sexuality are cross-culturally universal.

“What are the traits that same-sex attracted individuals, whether males or females, share across the world, which gives us some insight as to what the underlying biological components and etiology might be,” he says.

Dr. Scott Semenyna (MSc ’15, PhD ’20), an assistant professor at Stetson ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ in Florida, looks at cultures where feminine males and women compete for the same male partner, including the Istmo Zapotec in southern Mexico and the Polynesian island nation of Samoa. Another focus is examining how females with different sexual orientations can be objectively categorized.

During the conference, researchers addressed a wide range of topics. Bailey discussed his work in paraphilias, which are unusual sexual orientations or sexual interests, such as intense sexual arousal to atypical objects, situations, behaviours or individuals.

“This was the best meeting I think I’ve ever attended,” he says. “We had nonstop talks over three days and it was tiring intellectually and I was tweeting the talks. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t have left the room.”

A former student of Bailey’s, Dr. Gerulf Rieger, now at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Essex, Colchester, England, focuses his research on finding an objective measure of female sexual orientation, a task that is much easier with males.

Catherine Salmon, a professor of psychology at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Redlands in southern California, studies the differences between male and female reactions to erotica. At the conference, she discussed the factors, including sex differences, that influence people’s perceptions of sexual images.

Dr. Ken Zucker, a professor at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Toronto and editor of the Archives of Sexual Behavior, studies gender dysphoria in children and adolescents. His presentation was a meta-analysis of data across studies looking at the sex ratio of adolescents who have gender dysphoria or are identifying as transgender.

“One of the really new developments in the area of gender dysphoria over the past 15 years among adolescents is a marked increase in the number of adolescent girls who are saying that they’re transgender,” Zucker says. “The meta-analysis I conducted shows that this is something that is being observed universally, across North America, Western Europe, Scandinavia, Australia and China.”

Ray Blanchard, who retains the status of professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Toronto, is a devoted attendee of the Puzzles conference. Blanchard studies the fraternal birth order effect, which is the finding that having older brothers increases the odds of homosexuality in later-born males.

The conference was made possible by funding from a SSHRC Connection grant, the American Institute of Bisexuality, the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge and private donors.

��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge researchers find sexual competition isn’t always against only your own gender

trevor.kenney — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 19:33:31 +0000

If the proliferation of dating apps and websites in our western culture is any indication, finding and keeping a mate can be a fairly daunting, difficult and sometimes discouraging task. But take heart, at least the competition for your prospective mate is largely limited to your own gender because as ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge researchers found in at least two disparate non-Western cultures, the competitive field is much broader.

PhD student Scott Semenyna will defend his thesis this fall.

Scott Semenyna, a PhD student in Dr. Paul Vasey’s Laboratory of Comparative Sexology, is the lead author on a paper just published in PLOS One, a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal published by the Public Library of Science. The paper, Inter-sexual Mate Competition in Three Cultures, examines when women engage in sexual competition for a man with female rivals, as well as with male rivals.

“Sexual competition typically occurs among members of the same sex. Women compete with other women, and men with men, to attract the most appealing opposite-sex partners,” says Semenyna, who will defend his PhD thesis this fall. “Same-sex attracted individuals also exist, such as gay men, making it possible that women and gay men might engage in sexual and romantic competition.”

These interactions are relatively rare in western cultures such as Canada, where only 15 per cent of women report having competed with gay men over the same object of desire. And even in these instances, such competition is generally not taken seriously. The same cannot be said for two other cultures Vasey’s group studied, Samoa and the Istmo Zapotec of southern Mexico. In both of these cultures, feminine, same-sex attracted males regularly adopt gender identities outside the man or woman binary. These individuals are known as fa’afafine in Samoa, and muxe in the Istmo Zapotec.

Vasey’s research group found that a sizable proportion of Samoan women (43 per cent) reported having competed against a fa’afafine for the sexual attention of a man, while an even larger number of Istmo Zapotec women (85 per cent) reported having competed against a muxe.

“We know these cultures have these non-binary genders that engage in this type of competition,” says Semenyna. “I think the biggest surprise was in the Istmo where a quarter of the women had no response to the muxe flirting with their husbands or their boyfriends, mostly because they thought their partners would not be interested in that. When I read the narratives though, I saw a certain level of naiveté because, in reality, lots of men were interested.”

The tactics these unfamiliar rivals use to try and poach and/or keep mates aren’t unfamiliar at all and have been used since the beginning of time. The fa’afafine and muxe frequently use flirtatious and sexually alluring tactics to try and entice men away from their female partners, whereas the women engage in guarding and emotionally punitive behaviours with their partners.

“Part of our findings are an acknowledgment that individuals who are same-sex attracted are not removed from broad mating interactions, they are actually embedded right in it,” says Semenyna. “It’s not like they are on the sidelines, they can be active participants. There are more studies in my dissertation that revolve around this area. One is women’s responses to infidelity, including infidelity that might occur with a female versus infidelity that would occur with a male.”

And while this behaviour is not as common in western cultures, its framework can be applied here and is something Semenyna may look at for future study.

“In a western frame, it’s much more likely taking place between a heterosexual man and a bisexual woman, or even a lesbian woman, just because female bisexual behaviour, identity and attraction seem to be quite a bit more common in western culture,” he says.

He is also looking ahead to his post-doctoral studies, which will be conducted in Vasey’s lab, and examining competition between bisexual women and men for the same woman. Semenyna will be the first post-doctoral fellow at the U of L to obtain post-doctoral funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

“The work is important because it demonstrates that reproductive and non-reproductive sex develop and evolve in concert, and each can influence the other,” says Vasey. “Consequently, our research on inter-sexual mate competition can help furnish transformative new insights into sexual selection, as well as the processes that underpin mating systems.”

Vasey adds that “psychologists have expressed a pressing need within the pages of the leading scientific journal, Nature, to conduct research on non-student, non-Western populations, to replicate that research, to triangulate it in disparate populations, and then relate such work to comparable research on non-human species using both field and laboratory approaches. This is a herculean task, but one my lab has been working hard to fulfill.”

For a look at the full paper, visit the PLOS One journal.

Globetrotting U of L sex researchers making a name for themselves

caroline.zentner — Thu, 16 Aug 2018 22:01:04 +0000

If the student researchers in Dr. Paul Vasey’s lab aren’t out in the field collecting data in far-flung places, they’re presenting at international conferences and publishing articles.

In early July, an article in Playboy called Scott Semenyna and Lanna Petterson, both doctoral students in Vasey’s lab, “rising stars” of sex research in Canada and termed the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge a “hotspot” for this type of research.

“It feels so unearned to be called a rising star,” says Semenyna. “I am the beneficiary of a lot of people who have come before me. I don’t think I’m doing anything particularly great. These other people who have come before me and who help and support me, they’re the people who really deserve the credit.”

Semenyna studies competition for mates in cultures that recognize a third gender — same-sex-attracted males — such as the muxes in the Istmo region of Oaxaca, Mexico and the fa’afafine in Samoa. The fa’afafine and muxes are same-sex attracted feminine males, what North Americans might refer to as transgender.

His work in this area has led to attendance at international conferences and he recently returned from the International Academy of Sex Research conference in Madrid. While there, he was part of a symposium of people conducting cross-cultural research on gender and sexual orientation. Semenyna has served as the academy’s student representative for the past three years and that has enabled him to attend the conference when it was held in Malmö, Sweden, Charleston, South Carolina and, next year, Mexico City.

“They’re very cool opportunities,” he says.

Semenyna was also a student presenter at a recent Heterodox Psychology Conference inspired by the Heterodox Academy, an association of politically diverse professors and graduate students dedicated to increasing viewpoint diversity, mutual understanding and constructive disagreement.

Sex research typically draws a range of opinions, from those who say gender is a result of socialization to those who say biology influences gender. The topics Semenyna addressed included the origins of male sexual orientation, how culture modifies gender expression, and the consequences of more male bisexuality in third-gender cultures.

In Western cultures, same-sex attracted males are typically gay men who have relationships with other gay men. In third-gender cultures like Samoa, fa’afafine—biological males who are attracted to masculine men—tend to be feminine in their gender presentation.

“We would argue, based on evidence gathered over the past 15 years, that gay men and fa’afafine share a lot in common,” says Semenyna. “There are a lot of biodemographic and biological markers that are really similar between the two groups. For example, they tend to come from bigger families, they have more older brothers, and it tends to cluster in families. About two to four per cent of the male population in the West is same-sex attracted and, in Samoa, the same exact proportion is fa’afafine. For all of those reasons, we argue that this is just what same-sex attraction looks like in males in these cultures. The biological root is the same and the cultural expression is slightly different.”

Semenyna also talked about how third-gender males don’t tend to engage in sexual interactions with one another because they’re not attracted to femininity, rather they’re attracted to masculinity.

“Fa’afafine engage in sexual interactions with masculine men in Samoa who otherwise prefer women as partners,” he says. “There’s a lot more male bisexual behaviour in these cultures. Because these third-gender males engage in sexual interactions with men, that means that women not only have to compete with other women, but also with fa’afafine, in order to attract the attention of men.”

The cutting-edge work that Semenyna, and other students studying under Vasey, have been doing is adding to the body of knowledge on sexual orientation and is garnering attention from afar.

Originally from Evansburg, Alberta, Semenyna heard Vasey give a talk when he was an undergraduate student studying at MacEwan ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ. Vasey’s research and knowledge of evolutionary psychology piqued Semenyna’s interest and he made the move to the U of L to pursue further studies with Vasey.

“It’s been great,” he says.

Study to examine competition for mates in third-gender cultures

caroline.zentner — Wed, 15 Nov 2017 21:20:12 +0000

Women in North America typically don’t worry about gay men flirting with their boyfriends but in cultures that recognize same-sex-attracted males as a third gender, all bets seem to be off.

Dr. Paul Vasey, a psychology professor at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge, wants to investigate what happens to women’s sexual psychology when they find themselves competing for mates with third-gender males. His proposed research study recently received more than $140,000 over four years from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

“The research that I’m proposing to do in this latest SSHRC grant takes a different approach,” says Vasey. “It doesn’t ask why same-sex sexuality exists. We’re going to take it as a given that individuals who are same-sex attracted exist in the environment and we want to examine the influence they have on the behaviour and cognition of heterosexual individuals.”

Most research in human mating psychology has separated reproductive interactions from non-reproductive encounters but Vasey maintains that sex for procreation and sex for recreation evolve in concert and can influence each other. He conducts research in cultures that recognize a third gender, specifically the muxes in the Istmo region of Oaxaca, Mexico, and the fa’afafine in Samoa. The fa’afafine and muxes are same-sex attracted feminine males or what could be called transgender in North America. Fa’afafine and muxes will engage in sexual activity with masculine men who are bisexual, and bisexual males are quite commonplace in these cultures.

“I’m asking questions about how those third-gender males influence women’s behaviour and cognition,” says Vasey. “When you have these same-sex-attracted, feminine males in the environment and masculine men are willing to have sex with them, this creates a unique mating problem for heterosexual women. In such an environment, heterosexual women not only have to compete with other women like they do here in Canada, but they have to compete with these third-gender males as well.”

Vasey, and graduate students Lanna Petterson, Scott Semenyna and Francisco Gomez, have conducted some preliminary interviews in these cultures, asking heterosexual women if a fa’afafine or muxe had approached their boyfriends or husbands. One woman reported trying to compete by offering her boyfriend the same sexual services as the fa’afafine, while another reported rejecting her boyfriend after he chose to be with a muxe over her.

“No one has talked about these kinds of competitive mating interactions in the human literature,” says Vasey. “Ultimately, this research has implications for Darwinian sexual selection theory because sexual selection involves mate acquisition, which results in differential reproduction between individuals.”

Previous research has shown women in North America say they would be more upset if their husbands or boyfriends had a one-night stand with another man, rather than with a woman. Women in Samoa, when asked the same question, say they would be more upset if their husbands or boyfriends had a one-night stand with a woman than with a fa’afafine.

From an evolutionary perspective, Vasey says that a woman in North America interprets the situation and concludes her husband is gay. This is something she can’t compete with so she foresees losing her husband. Faced with the same situation, a woman in Samoa likely concludes her husband is bisexual and will eventually return to her because he wants children. A husband who had a one-night stand with another woman would be more upsetting because the chances of her being abandoned would be greater.

Vasey and his students will conduct interviews, questionnaires and experiments in the lab here in Canada and at their field sites in Samoa and Mexico to obtain their data.

“This research is cutting edge. We are the only lab in the world that has a sustained program of research on third-gender males,” says Vasey. “Studying non-traditional mating systems such as those that include Samoan fa’afafine and Istmo Zapotec muxes can result in transformative new ways of theorizing about the dynamic interplay between reproductive and non-reproductive sex. This can help reconfigure our thinking and help to correct biased, incomplete or erroneous views about human sexual psychology.”

UNews - Scott Semenyna

Unlocking the mystery — Dr. Paul Vasey’s new data analysis reveals insights into male homosexuality

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