An Experiment Using a Sexual Strategies Explanation to Alleviate Internalized Homophobia Among Men Who Have Sex With Men in China
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Some men who have sex with men (MSM) having more casual sex and sexual partners is interpreted to be a sign of mental disorder and used to justify negative attitudes toward them by some. MSM may internalize this attitude causing internalized homophobia (IH). According to the sexual strategies theory, MSM having more casual sex is the result of differences between men's and women's sexual strategies and is unrelated to sexual orientation. We investigated whether this explanation would reduce IH and improve mental health in MSM. We recruited 255 Chinese MSM online using Wenjuanxing, Douban, Weibo, Tieba, and Blued and divided them using simple randomization into an experimental group (n = 77; sexual strategies explanation provided), an active control group (n = 99; minority stress explanation provided), and a control group (n = 79; no intervention) with pretest (N = 255); a 1 week post-test (n = 195); and a 1 month follow-up test (n = 170) of outcome measures. IH, mental distress (MD), sort-term mating orientation, and risky sexual behaviors were measured online. The data were analyzed by SPSS 28. IH was associated with MD while being married was associated with IH and sexual contact with women with both more IH and MD as were not being masculine and self-identifying as straight. The sexual strategies explanation reduced IH related to pathologizing sexual behaviors and high-risk sexual behaviors while the minority stress explanation reduced MD. Providing a sexual strategies explanation may be used to de-stigmatize casual sex among MSM.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".