On March 3, 1939, a Harvard freshman named Lothrop Withington, Jr., bet some of his classmates $10 that he could swallow a live goldfish. Among those who gathered around Mr. Withington to watch the spectacle was a Boston reporter who dutifully recorded the moment for posterity.
What followed next was a study in mass psychology. For whatever reason, a competitive goldfish-swallowing craze swept the country.
Over at the University of Pennsylvania, a student downed 25 while a guy at MIT briefly became the “new Intercollegiate Goldfish Swallowing Champion” with a count of 42. As the spring progressed, some girls joined in, and rivalries emerged between schools. According to one source, the final winner may have been Clark University’s Joseph Deliberato, who in April of that year gulped up a stomach-turning 89 goldfish in one sitting.
The goldfish challenge continues today, although without quite the frenzy.
But the goldfish challenge was instructive about the lengths some young people will go to “fit in” with the crowd by mimicking and/or adopting the behavior of popular members. That might explain what’s happening at Brown University.
“Social contagion” is defined by the CDC “as the spread of behaviors, attitudes, and affect through crowds and other types of social aggregates from one member to another.” Obviously, the internet was not available in 1939. But newspapers, radio, and newsreels all hyped the fad, and campus newspapers also publicized it.
When the Brown University student newspaper, the Brown Daily Herald, polled the student body and found that about 38% of students identified as either homosexual, bisexual, queer, asexual, pansexual, questioning, or other, most of us realized that social contagion had to be at work because that’s more than five times the national rate for adults not identifying as straight.
A similar poll conducted ten years ago found that just 14% of Brown students identified as being LGBTQ.
Interestingly, the numbers of gay men and lesbian women actually fell. The numbers of other sexual identities soared.
Since the Herald first conducted a survey of sexual orientation on campus in 2010, Brown students identifying as lesbian and gay dropped by more than half from 46 to 22%.
About 19% of that group were college-age members of Generation Z.
The number of students identifying with other groups, however, soared: Bisexual students increased by 232%, and other LGBTQ+ groups rose by a collective 793%, the Herald found.
Of the LGBTQ+ respondents, the most common orientation was bisexual at 53.7%.
“There are two theories, that greater tolerance is allowing more to come out of the closet, or Bill Maher’s assertion that LGBT is trendy among some youth,” professor of political science at the University of London Eric Kauffman told the College Fix in June. “I think the second theory better fits the data and explains more of why the rise occurred.”
Swallowing goldfish was also “trendy” in 1939. And how we can tell that the doubling of LGBTQ people since 2010 is more related to sociology than psychology is that sexual activity hasn’t increased in tandem with the increase in LGBTQ numbers.
“If this was about people feeling able to come out, then we should have seen these two trends rise together,” Kaufman said.
“What we find instead is that identity is rising much faster than behavior, indicating that people with occasional rather than sustained feelings of attraction to the opposite sex are increasingly identifying as LGBT.”
Others, including Sharita Gruberg of the LGBTQI+ Research and Communications Project with the Center for American Progress, agree with Kovecses that the environment of greater awareness that Gen Z was raised in has driven the numbers.
An interesting experiment would be to poll the same people 10 years from now and find out how many still identify as anything but straight. Sexual experimentation among the young does always lead to a change in sexual identity. That’s another argument to prevent the transgender industry from experimenting on children who need time to discover who they are.
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