I watched this last night and it was interesting. the MRI scan was a bit freaky though; I wouldn't relish the though of having to lie there for 90 minutes to go through all of the images they put up.
It was interesting though that when Barrowman spoke to the chap who'd decided not to be gay any more, he didn't ask him whether that just meant he'd been bisexual rather than gay, in the first place.
when Barrowman spoke to the chap who'd decided not to be gay any more
What I thought was interesting was that the man was comparing gayness to smoking or eating chocolate. The implication I got from that was that it was something that gave him great pleasure, but that he felt was bad for him. So it seemed as though his "evidence" didn't amount to much more than saying that gay men can marry women, have children, and avoid gay sex. That's not really telling us anything we didn't know already. What would have been interesting would have been if he'd said that he'd managed to change himself so that, had he been put in the MRI scan, he wouldn't have responded sexually to the images of naked men.
It's also available via the BBC's iPlayer (http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00cr1ht) until the 31st of July, for anyone in the UK who doesn't have a TV/couldn't watch it at the scheduled time.
It's really strange how Barrowman's accent shifts from something which sounds like a sort of generic American accent to a Scottish accent which I can't pin down exactly, but doesn't sound Glaswegian to me, though it does give me the impression it's from somewhere in the central belt.
There wasn't any mention (as far as I can remember) of bisexuality. So I did get a bit of a sense that the programme set up binary oppositions: nature/nurture, male/female, straight/gay. It did complicate them a little bit by pointing out that some things about the brains of gay men can resemble women's brains (straight women? I'm not sure, because they didn't say much about lesbians' brains) but once they'd brought up questions of gender, they could perhaps have explored them a bit more. On the other hand, they didn't have a lot of time to get across all the science, and scientific findings almost always end up being simplified when they're filtered through the media, so it's not that surprising that the discussion didn't get very subtle or complex.
I can't comment on the programme itself at the moment, because I haven't seen it yet. But Barrowman's accent shift doesn't surprise me, because I do something similar for similar reasons, although it's nowhere near as obvious as his shift (and a different selection of accents).
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Date: 2008-07-25 10:33 am (UTC)It was interesting though that when Barrowman spoke to the chap who'd decided not to be gay any more, he didn't ask him whether that just meant he'd been bisexual rather than gay, in the first place.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-25 11:04 am (UTC)What I thought was interesting was that the man was comparing gayness to smoking or eating chocolate. The implication I got from that was that it was something that gave him great pleasure, but that he felt was bad for him. So it seemed as though his "evidence" didn't amount to much more than saying that gay men can marry women, have children, and avoid gay sex. That's not really telling us anything we didn't know already. What would have been interesting would have been if he'd said that he'd managed to change himself so that, had he been put in the MRI scan, he wouldn't have responded sexually to the images of naked men.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-25 10:59 am (UTC)It's really strange how Barrowman's accent shifts from something which sounds like a sort of generic American accent to a Scottish accent which I can't pin down exactly, but doesn't sound Glaswegian to me, though it does give me the impression it's from somewhere in the central belt.
There wasn't any mention (as far as I can remember) of bisexuality. So I did get a bit of a sense that the programme set up binary oppositions: nature/nurture, male/female, straight/gay. It did complicate them a little bit by pointing out that some things about the brains of gay men can resemble women's brains (straight women? I'm not sure, because they didn't say much about lesbians' brains) but once they'd brought up questions of gender, they could perhaps have explored them a bit more. On the other hand, they didn't have a lot of time to get across all the science, and scientific findings almost always end up being simplified when they're filtered through the media, so it's not that surprising that the discussion didn't get very subtle or complex.
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Date: 2008-07-26 02:41 pm (UTC)