Peter Tatchell offers a very persuasive and worthy thesis on Spiked about the complicated nature of human sexuality and how it problematises claims that homosexuality is all about genetics. Here’s some of the article for your information:
The homophobes are thus, paradoxically, closer to the truth than many gay activists. Removing the social opprobrium and penalties from queer relationships, and celebrating gay love and lust, would allow more people to come to terms with presently inhibited homoerotic desires. In this sense, it is perfectly feasible to ‘promote’ lesbian and gay sexuality and ‘make’ someone queer. Individuals who have a homosexual component in their character, but are inhibited by repression or guilt, definitely can be encouraged to acknowledge their same-sex attraction and act upon it.
Were future generations to grow up in a gay-positive, homo-friendly culture, it’s likely that many more people would have same-sex relationships, if not for all of their lives at least for significant periods. With this boom in queer sex, the social basis of homophobia would be radically undermined.
In this state of greater sexual freedom, where homosexuality becomes commonplace and ceases to be disparaged or victimised, gayness would no longer have to be defended and affirmed. Gay identity (and its straight counterpart) would thus, at last, become redundant. Hurrah!
hm, oddly reminiscient of the argument of this book: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/DIASEX.html?show=reviews
Fat chance. From the perspective of evolutionary biology, while there is clearly some evolutionary mechanism keeping homosexuals as a small proportion of the human population, there is just as clearly a cultural imperative that perpetuates the ostracising of homosexuals.
Apparently nature wants queers to stay around, but it doesn’t want them too numerous either.
Looks like a very interesting read, Laura.
It’s an argument that has become increasingly popular in recent years. It’s not original, but it’s worth saying again and again. Tatchell’s correct….
As for Paul, one could argue that biology has a purpose in having sexual fluidity.
A recent study (perhaps to do with the book in the Laura link) revealed that so-called straight women were more aroused by images of women than by images of men. So are they’re really straight or just trying to define themselves by the dominant binary (straight or gay)?
PaulW wrote:
FAIL.
FAIL.
Genetics is not necessarily (a) predestination or (b) programming code for natural selection.
It’s just statistics, really. Even if a credible allele could be found for statistical predisposition to homosexuality, you’d still be stuck trying to find the mechanism via which it’s expressed.
Don’t worry too much though, because it’s hard enough to explain to insurance companies, let alone pillocks on teh intarwebs.
Nature doesn’t want anything, PaulW. Nature doesn’t have consciousness, and it doesn’t have a plan. Suggesting that it does is antithetical to the scientific world view you are using to justify your position.
Well if it’s genetic is has to be recessive, clearly the gene was once selected against (test tubes are going to put and end to that) and clearly the gene survives.
Charles,
Multiple expression is what you need to think of.
For example. A gene that causes greater fertility in women may have some effects in men and intersexuals. Testosterone has some weird side effects and inter relations.
So the gene may be recessive, dominant or otherwise. However to be not selected out is a different thing then being selected for.
Big assumption, PaulW, that the same evolutionary mechanism that gives rise to homosexuals also drives straight people to gang up on them.
The money quote from Tatchell’s article is:
Our society protects many lifestyle choices (e.g. religion, marital status) from discrimination, as well as the consequences of choices (e.g. obesity - often the result of dietary choices). You don’t have to prove that homosexuals had no choice in their condition in order to establish that they are worthy of equal social status.
On the other hand, even if evolutionary forces are keeping us at a small proportion of the population, that’s no reason to accept “a cultural imperative that perpetuates the ostracising of homosexuals.”
In the evolutionary crapshoot the human being dice were rolled for you. Your “cultural imperatives” are more appropriate to a troop of gorillas.
From a conservative’s point of view, I would say that Tatchell’s idea is probably right, but the political consequences he envisages don’t necessarily follow at all. You can accept that the examples he gives of wildly different attitudes to same sex activity in different cultures over history indicate that something akin to bisexuality (or fluid sexuality over different life periods) is more common than the West had recently come to believe. But (as far as I know) in none of those cultures have the same sex relationship been seen to have the same purpose or function as marriage, and as such they can hardly be used as an example as to why our society should suddenly give such relationships the same status. In fact, a conservative can argue that we’re the odd-society-out by coming up with the completely novel suggestion that two men or women can marry.
The other way in which Tatchell’s view is encouraging to conservatives is that it undermines the idea of fearing a core sexual identity by denying that there is necessarily such an immutable thing at all. I have long suspected that gay activists were unintentionally increasing the psychological pressure on teenagers with some degree of same sex attraction by actually helping re-inforce the taunts of their heterosexual friends that they “must be gay”.
But on Tatchell’s view, a same sex attraction is not necessarily something permanent, and a person may legitimately be encouraged toward the diversity of experience which today (for some teenagers) may mean trying heterosexual experiences! Not so inconsistent with the much despised “gay recovery” movement then.
Firstly, Darlene, Laura and the linx, esp Freud and polymorphous perversity- a small change and we get di-versity rather than the inherently judgemental per-versity.
Now to the comments of my near name-sake, Paul W.
Is what he proposes so out of line with as Darlene’s thesis? I can’t find judgementalism in his post and that’s surely in line with the direction of the thread. It’s not much different to a conclusion proffered at the completion of a tute during an undergraduate philosophy course I did at uni a couple of years ago.
Now, Darlene in no way herself clarified the relationship between sexuality culture and genetics in her lead in comments- the one unhelpful aspect of her whole essay.
So why then the criticism of Paul W, if no one is prepared to offer definitive evidence one way or the other re genetics, culture and sexual behaviour?
People are ostracised for more reasons than just unorthodox sexuality. And gays themselves can be judgemental, ostracising of those outside their immediate in-group, also.. and how do I know that?
I’m in the ’sexuality is biological continuum with an interplay of psycho-social factors’ camp.
Veltyen
I agree, the whole thing is too complex and has too many shades of gray to be any thing else. I read a Scientific American article once that talked about a
continuum (isn’t the internet wonderful), you don’t get a continuum with a single gene.
Paul W.
You’re conflating evolution with cultural mores. There’s enough anthropoligical evidence of variations in the manner in which the human sexual spectrum has been dealt with. To ostracize homosexuals isn’t the only option that’s ever been used. It’s not ‘natural’.
.
Obviously there’s a certain Darwinian advantage in a species where most members are sexually attracted to those with different bits. But homosexuality is a kind of mystery from the Darwinian perspective. And the answer to this and other questions in these early days of neurology is we don’t know.
Actually Klaus we don’t know that for sure. It’s unfalsifiable.
To be more specific, I mean consciousness on a human scale that we could understand as involving things like ‘want’ or ‘planning’. I also dispute the category ‘nature’, but that’s another issue. I’m making my point on the basis of assuming the best of PaulW’s assumptions about using that category.
Perhaps under conditions where its desirable to grow the population, but maybe not when populations get too big or are growing too fast. Not that I’m claiming this is the case with homosexuality, but on the small animal scale you see sex changes or the change in sex ratios of offspring when populations are under stress.
“Problematises”? Ouch - where did that one come from?
I’m in the “I don’t care what causes it, I see no reason why it matters what gender someone is attracted to” camp. ie I have nothing useful to add to this discussion.
But I was just glad to see a LoM quote in the heading.
“..from the perspective of evolutionary biology…”
Can anyone name a major empire where certain elements of the ruling class weren’t porking fellow elements of the same sex behind the scenes?
As long as they don’t do it the street and scare the horses/proles.
The best way to keep the folks angry, confused, frustrated, divided and so easier manipulated is to fuck around with how they’re allowed to fuck around. The main monotheistic sky god religion entrepreneurs worked this angle out long long ago.
Biology schmiology. Lots of men and men and women and women have always
(a) thought about bonking;
(b) acted on that when the cultural conditions were right, which has often not involved a choice of sexual orientation.
I reckon science can help refute old theories that gayness is somehow related to “moral weakness”. In particular genetics and biology related to say, gestation stresses, also psychology, theories of the mind and anthropology come to mind as possibilities for throw up explanations more feasible and less tendentious than say, fundamentalist religious ones that invite judgement devoid of evidence.
The notion that there is a final metaphysical narrative, by interesting coincidence (also) the exclusive property of certain social institutions, which offers a last say that can upraise or condemn people without a moment’s extra thought, is widely contested. I for one do not want the blood of so-called deviants on my hand through the prejudices of brownshirted authoritarian thugs or rabid religious zealots unable to live with themselves.
“…acted on that when the cultural conditions were right, which has often not involved a choice of sexual orientation.”
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Spaghetti Straight - bends in hot water.
One of Western civilization’s fastest growing industries is quite fecund with mythology and implicit threats about this - the incarceration industry, bitch.
“But on Tatchell’s view, a same sex attraction is not necessarily something permanent, and a person may legitimately be encouraged toward the diversity of experience which today (for some teenagers) may mean trying heterosexual experiences! Not so inconsistent with the much despised “gay recovery” movement then.”
No, I think Tatchell is arguing for what might be regarded as a “queer” view of sexuality, which has nothing in common with the ex-gay movement.
Yes, Paul, gays can be bigots, they are human after all. Certainly there are some gays who seem to think anything that doesn’t fit in with the gay/straight binary is not on. Bollocks to them.
Colonel, problematises probably came from Gender Studies 101
“The best way to keep the folks angry, confused, frustrated, divided and so easier manipulated is to fuck around with how they’re allowed to fuck around. The main monotheistic sky god religion entrepreneurs worked this angle out long long ago.”
Ain’t that the true, and keep them in line as well.
“Spaghetti Straight - bends in hot water.
One of Western civilization’s fastest growing industries is quite fecund with mythology and implicit threats about this”
The jacuzzi industry?
Only if you take a strict adaptionist view of evolution. Traits can find their way into an organism via other mechanisms of evolution than natural selection.
Yes, Darlene.
Bolshie Great Yarblockos, as the SNAG Little Alex might say.
Yes Shaun, particularly if you see culture itself as related to evolution. If gays were a necessary part of the cultural fabric in the past and now, it wouldn’t have evolved and continue to function with them as a component.( Is that too Leibnizian? ).
They are obviously a component part of that great discourse that is currently existing humanity and its necessary ongoing adaptive and existential interrogation of itself. Part of the dialectic and the experience pesonally and collectively. If you dug around for a while you’d get an idea precisely what society asks (of?) itself through this aspect of its interrelating.
But as others above have said, in the meantime let’s not obsess beyond necessity. The extent to which people “idle and fritter away the day, in an offhand way”, they fret the non-arival of a problematic, contingent destination at the expense of a journey to be enjoyed, perhaps.
Did I say
“with” for “without” in the sentence beginning, “If gays were..” the last post?Dolt!
Actually Darlene’s “Sky God” point reminds of where all this liberation stuff evolved, via people like Marcuse and Leary, back in the ’sixties in the first place.
As I understand it,marriage was initially about perpetuating family over the generations and, until early in the 20C, when ideas about romantic love came to the fore, about preservation or extension of property.
My understanding of the gay marriage debate, is that its about equal rights, and, perhaps not explicitly, the tight to openly express romantic love without persecution. Genetics, I don’t know.I suspect environment and opportunity, or a dislike of the opposite esx, might have more to do with it.
It’s probably lots of things, Paul. In the end, it doesn’t really matter, I reckon.
As for gay marriage, I reckon anyone who is involved in a committed relationship should be entitled to certain rights. Whether they are married or not or queer or not shouldn’t matter.
It’s hard to work out what the fuss is with respect to gay marriage. Us heteros got married in Las Vegas, and simply returned to Australia married and told the tax office we were now married. That was it. Nobody asked to see the certificate or whatever. There were no Australian legalities whatsoever that I can recall.
Yet, the ACT has a go at civil proceedings and all hell breaks loose. It’s just stupid.