“Time” on the Phantom Gay Past in nature
CommentsTime Magazine weighs in on the biological aspects of the Phantom Gay Past:
Which raises the evolutionary question of why men and women who are exclusive gay and lesbian exist. One answer is that exclusive gays and lesbians are a relatively new creation: the concept of exclusive homosexuality barely existed before modernity; even a century ago, most same-sex-attracted men and women got married and had kids.(Read “Do Monkeys Pay for Sex?”)
As Bailey, Zuk and many others have pointed out, no one has offered an adequate evolutionary explanation for the relatively recent development of exclusive homosexuality among humans. In January, the journal Evolution and Human Behavior published a paper exploring the idea that certain alleles increase the likelihood of homosexuality by blocking the effect of androgens during fetal development. Having all those alleles hampers the masculinization of some parts of the brain that affect personality, making you gay, the theory goes. Brothers of gay men who have only some of the alleles would turn out straight but less aggressive than typical guys. And because those brothers exhibit less psychopathology, they would attract more women and therefore have more kids. It was a provocative theory, but it turned out not to be proved: gay men’s brothers don’t actually have more kids than straight men’s brothers do.
GAY PRESENT: http://www.bloggernews.net/121311
Self-styled pro-family advocate, Scott Lively, has made a career of drawing parallels from Nazi Germany to modern homosexuality. He has gone around the world with the message that homosexuals were responsible for Nazi totalitarianism.
The message is clear from these anti-gay groups: laws should be passed “that will be tough on homosexuals.”
Maybe you and Scott could collaborate on a book. . .
DB: “Time Magazine weighs in on the biological aspects of the Phantom Gay Past: [quoting TM] One answer is that exclusive gays and lesbians are a relatively new creation: the concept of exclusive homosexuality barely existed before modernity; even a century ago, most same-sex-attracted men and women got married and had kids.”
This is getting truly surreal. Yet again you proudly quote in support of your PGP thesis (that before 150 years ago there were no people who were gay in terms of sexual attraction) someone who is very obviously making a parallel but otherwise unrelated point about _behaviour_. And this time you go so far as to quote someone who’s very obviously assuming the _falsity_ of your claim about attraction and _contrasting_ it with the claim about behaviour. The Time writer clearly takes it for granted that there were exclusively same-sex attracted people a century and more ago and that what needs explaining is why they seemed to get married and have kids rather than forming marriage-like same-sex couples. Words fail me.
The answer is quite simple: There really aren’t, even today, very many, if any, exclusive homosexuals, in any species, including humans( wow! enough commas, E?). Ditto exclusive heterosexuals. But within individuals that tend to be more homosexual than hetero, there is still a drive to procreate, which tends to dominate mating in both the sexual and pair-bonding senses of the term. Even once humans evolved enough to suppress such base instincts, there was a societal pressure to the same end. With overpopulation and the increasing emphasis on personal freedom, that pressure is lessening, allowing gay people to focus on their dominant preference and ignore the bisexual aspects of their sexual psychology - just like straight people do. In fact, now the pressure to choose is strong enough that it rivals or overwhelms the pressure to procreate - most bisexuals have experienced this, don’t you self-identify as bi? It would be surprising if you have not experienced extra hostility over that vs. just being gay.
Ethan: “The answer is quite simple: There really aren’t, even today, very many, if any, exclusive homosexuals, in any species, including humans( wow! enough commas, E?).”
Note that there’s at least one exclusive homosexual by orientation in the world, and that’s me. Hello. Pleased to make your acquaintance. I’m not bi, I’m gay. I can honestly say I’ve never, in my entire life, been the least bit sexually attracted to a woman, whereas I’m been regularly attracted to various guys since puberty. Nor, as far as I can tell by asking around among my friends, am I particularly unique. I don’t doubt the existence of people bisexual by orientation, but if they want me to respect their experience, they’ll have to respect mine.
Ethan: [various reasons why bi people might have acted straight]
Oh sure. Not only are these good reasons why bi people might have acted straight, they’re also good reasons why exclusively gay people might have acted straight, or at least bi. And nearly all the people that David is quoting in his Nine Scholars and Phantom Gay Past posts are making some version of this point - that there’s very little historical evidence of people _acting_ exclusively gay and these various social pressures are probably why. But there’s no use making this point to David because he has a curious blind spot, and no matter how many words you use to make it explicit that you’re talking about people not acting gay, he’ll take you as making a point about not being gay, i.e, not being exclusively same-sex attracted.
In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t feature in a future edition of Phantom Gay Past, and the bit that he’ll quote from you won’t be, “There really aren’t, even today, very many, if any, exclusive homosexuals, in any species, including humans[...]“, it’ll be “With overpopulation and the increasing emphasis on personal freedom, that pressure is lessening, allowing gay people to focus on their dominant preference[...]“.
I may be mistaken, Mark, but what I believe David has been getting at is that the whole concept of “orientation” or “proclivity” is a recent concept. (Please correct me if I’m mistaken, David).
For my part, I have a big problem with the current notion that marriage requires sexual attraction, a notion which I think is the biggest cause of today’s huge divorce rate among heterosexuals. It’s an idea which needs to be “slapped down” (to borrow Mark’s words), but same-sex marriage can only make it worse, not better, and will only reinforce it, not help reverse it.
I’m leaving for a few days, so I will be unable to respond until I get back.
Mark, keep looking for responses from me to some of our previous exchanges, as I will get to them when I have the time and the energy, both of which I haven’t had enough of lately. But I have much more to say still.
MB: “The Time writer clearly takes it for granted that there were exclusively same-sex attracted people a century and more ago and that what needs explaining is why they seemed to get married and have kids rather than forming marriage-like same-sex couples. ”
WHY the Time writer takes it for granted is perfectly obvious, and not even worthy of discussion. But the question raised: WHY they got married and had kids (like normal families), rather than “forming marriage-like same-sex couples” is easy to answer in it’s historical context.
Just as the inverse modern question: WHY people are “forming marriage-like same-sex couples”, rather than getting married and having kids (like normal families) will be easy to answer given it’s own historical context, years from now.
So spare me the “equality” hogwash. You are merely a product of your time. Forget larger principles or morality and integrity and family. Those are sooo ancient history, right?
RK: “I may be mistaken, Mark, but what I believe David has been getting at is that the whole concept of “orientation” or “proclivity” is a recent concept. (Please correct me if I’m mistaken, David).”
That’s certainly what he _says_ his thesis is, and I don’t take him to be insincere. My point is that for anything within a million miles of what I take orientation to mean, it’s perfectly obvious reading his two magnum opii on the subject, Nine Scholars and Phantom Past, that that’s _not_ his thesis, or at least not consistently so. He keeps slipping into language that is about behaviour or identity rather than attraction, as if they were the same thing, and almost all of his quotes are about behaviour or identity as well. He couldn’t keep the variants straight in his head and he couldn’t spot when his quotes supported his variant versus some other.
One possibility I’ve already floated is that he’s just confused. Perhaps when he did the research he just wasn’t aware that people use gay in different senses. Or perhaps he was dimly aware, but was so puffed up with confidence in his theodicy (”God wouldn’t make innately same-sex attracted people”) that it didn’t occur to him to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Another possibility that occurred to me more recently is that he might be torturing the definition of orientation until it’s not interestingly different from behaviour. For example in Insulting American Families he offers, “Sexual orientation is an innate, immutable characteristic, like race or sex or blood type, that indicates whether a person’s innermost attractions, romantic inclinations, and capacities for love relationships are with a member of the same or the opposite sex.” Perhaps “capacities” is a weasel word. Perhaps if, with the assistance of a gun to the head, you “can” bear to be in the same room as an opposite-sex person long enough to say “I do”, then to David you’re not gay by orientation. (Or if not quite that extreme, something off in that direction.)
RK : “For my part, I have a big problem with the current notion that marriage requires sexual attraction, a notion which I think is the biggest cause of today’s huge divorce rate among heterosexuals.”
What do you mean by “required”? If, in 2009, you want large numbers of people to _get_ married, _you_ require that they be sexually attracted to one another because you don’t have a lot of other leverage. Sexual attraction has always been a major factor in people getting married, and most of the other factors that were major have gone the way of the horse and buggy - women have economic opportunities other than housewife, men can get by without a housekeeper, children are a lot more expensive to raise and a lot less relevant as economic security, etc, etc. If you think that if we just tiptoe past we can have people not notice that the whole incentive structure has changed, you’re kidding yourself. Now of course, you weren’t actually talking about people _getting_ married, it’s only what would have made sense given that you go on to compare it to SSM, i.e., gay people getting married:
RK: “It’s an idea which needs to be “slapped down” (to borrow Mark’s words), but same-sex marriage can only make it worse, not better, and will only reinforce it, not help reverse it.”
You were actually talking about people staying married, but much the same applies: you don’t have a lot of leverage. You only have two arguments left of any force: that you don’t lightly upend the life of someone who’s gone to some trouble to rearrange it to be with you, and you don’t lightly put children through the stress of a divorce. But both of these apply equally to opposite-sex and same-sex couples.
Marty: “WHY the Time writer takes it for granted is perfectly obvious, and not even worthy of discussion.”
Maybe it’s obvious, maybe it isn’t. Let’s see if we agree on what the “obvious” conclusion is. I think it’s obvious that the Time writer wrote the way he did because he was trying to sum up a body of opinion he’d encountered which (i) uses “gay”/”homosexual” to refer to behaviour not attraction, (ii) speaks of “same-sex attracted people” when it’s important to distinguish behaviour and attraction, and (iii) took it for granted that there were always exclusively same-sex attracted people and the interesting observation was that there had been few if any groups of exclusively same-sex partnering people.
And the reason I think that’s interesting is that it’s probably much the same body of opinion that David has been trying to sum up in Nine Scholars and Phantom Gay Past, and David thinks it amounts to something quite different from what the Time writer and I do. So I’m curious what _you_ think.
Marty: “Just as the inverse modern question: WHY people are “forming marriage-like same-sex couples”, rather than getting married and having kids (like normal families) will be easy to answer given it’s own historical context, years from now.”
I don’t think you need to wait years - it’s already pretty obvious. If you take away the economic pressure to have huge numbers of kids as insurance in old age, and the practical pressure to have a provider or a housekeeper/cook, and the religious pressure to go straight, same-sex attracted people are going to go where their heart is. You have a problem with that?
Marty: “So spare me the “equality” hogwash. You are merely a product of your time. ”
Let’s imagine you had said that to a slave in the antebellum South. It would be about as trivially true, and about as morally stunted. After all, what could be more cultural than the fact that a black person in the South at the time would be enslaved to a white person? And what tradition could have more moral authority? After all, the Bible itself explicitly authorizes slavery: ‘Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you _may_ buy slaves. You _may_ also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can will them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.” Lev 25:44-46, MB’s emphasis.
Rusty-
Scott LIvely is a hack. He “researched” and wrote a book about the Nazis without knowing a word of German (you’re not supposed to do that if you want to be taken seriously as a scholar). But it is true that many early Nazis, especially in the SA, were gay.
Mark-
Capacities is not a weasel word. It’s actually a little hard to define “orientation” without using a word like “oriented.” Do you like “proclivities”?
DB: “Capacities is not a weasel word. It’s actually a little hard to define “orientation” without using a word like “oriented.” Do you like “proclivities”?
It depends on what you think it means. I can’t recall ever having heard it used except as a joke, so I had to look it up. Are we talking about “a tendency to choose or do something regularly; an inclination or predisposition toward a particular thing”? Then unless there’s additional fine-print that you’re about to explain, yes, it’s a weasel word that makes “orientation” not interestingly different from behaviour. After all, according to the definition, to see whether someone has a gay proclivity, you have to assess what they tend to choose and/or do. That is, you have to look at their behaviour. And then if you change their incentive structure and they tend to choose something else, then by definition they have a different proclivity.
So, is that _really_ what you wanted to say? Everyone else, including me and the APA ( http://www.apahelpcenter.org/articles/article.php?id=31 ) thinks that orientation is defined purely in terms of sexual attraction, and _contrasts_ with behaviour.
Yes Mark Barton, because expecting gay people to still marry the opposite sex, and to give their kids mothers AND fathers, is just like telling a black slave in the antebellum south to “shut up boy and git back to pickin cotton!”
Spare me your drama as well.
Marty: ‘Yes Mark Barton, because expecting gay people to still marry the opposite sex, and to give their kids mothers AND fathers, is just like telling a black slave in the antebellum south to “shut up boy and git back to pickin cotton!” Spare me your drama as well.’
I suppose I do flatter you to a ludicrous extent to compare you to the Great Homophobes of Yore, who would criminalize sodomy or beat a gay guy to death with a baseball bat as soon as look at you, and certainly give the slavers a run for their money. It’s rough when a last ditch effort to stop SSM is your only remaining opportunity to show any substantive contempt. But rest assured we notice you doing your best to keep the vital spirit of petty malice alive. We get it that you don’t _really_ care about kids. That was established on a previous occasion when it emerged that your hare-brained and barbarous theory of how banning SSM was supposed to help was that it was basically about holding the kids to ransom to get at their parents. Gay relationships get under your skin way before there are any kids involved.
Thus I don’t particularly expect you to appreciate the moral ugliness implicit in David’s obsession with showing there were no gay people (in some sense) in ancient history. But it’s that it amounts to, “We pounded gay pegs into straight holes in ancient X, Y, and Z, so what’s your f***ing problem with being pounded into a straight hole now?” And so I thought you might get it if I put it in the form of an analogy: “What’s this nonsense about all men yearning to be free. _Those_slaves over there are picking cotton just fine.”
“pounding gay pegs into straight holes…” I like that. Very clever. No sick pun intended, I’m sure.
Marty: “No sick pun intended, I’m sure.”
I didn’t choose it for the double entendre but I noticed it was one and decided it didn’t matter.