FEMALES’ SEXUAL PREFERENCE: BROTHERS AND SISTERS
Birth order and sibling constellations
The relationship between a girl’s sibling environment and her sexual orientation has been considered chiefly in terms of how that environment might affect her feelings about being female. It has been suggested that young girls are likely to develop a heterosexual orientation if their sibling environments contribute to their sense of self-worth as females.
It has been supposed that sexual orientation in females could be linked to their birth order. For example, most people want their first child, or their only child, to be a son. Thus it has been suggested that girls who are the oldest in their families, or who are only children, are more likely than other children to believe that their parents wanted a boy; consequently, they may try to gain their parents’ approval by acquiring conventionally masculine traits. Indeed, two studies have found more first-born or only children among homosexual women than among heterosexual controls. Another investigation, however, found that homosexual and heterosexual females did not differ in birth order.
Other theorists have considered the effects brothers and sisters may have on a child’s gender identification and thus perhaps on a later sexual orientation. Some researchers have assumed that a “masculine” identity is most likely to develop in girls who have brothers and have hypothesized that prehomosexual girls are more likely than preheterosexual girls to have brothers, or to have many more brothers than sisters. Contrary to these expectations, one study found that heterosexual females were more likely to have a brother. Another study, though, found that homosexual females, particularly those categorized as “tomboys,” had fewer sisters than did heterosexual females, although the two groups did not differ in how many brothers they had.
Closeness and similarity to siblings
Siblings have been thought to provide children not only with companionships that are a prelude to peer relationships outside the home but also with objects of identification that can shape their sense of themselves as being male or female. We attempted to ascertain how close our female respondents felt to their brothers versus their sisters as well as the extent to which they identified with siblings of the same or opposite sex.
*24/158/5*
