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Homosexuality, Promiscuity, Human Culture and Human Nature
ege02
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I'm reading this book called The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, by Matt Ridley. And it's me, Ege, and I like making threads about books I read. 
It's a great book. He talks about human nature and how and, more importantly, why, it has evolved within the context of sexual reproduction.
In chapter 4 he is talking about polygamy and the nature of men, and is generally talking about our culture with respect to sexual relationships (e.g. why in no society on Earth do they usually come from the women or her family) when he touches on homosexuality. I thought it was an interesting passage for discussion:
The above passage is a discussion within the more broad topic of human culture vs. human nature, in other words nature vs. nurture.
In the book Ridley generally criticizes social sciences such as history, sociology, psychology, antropology, and politics for trying to explain human behavior as if the year 1859, the year of the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, never happened. They insist, he says, that human culture is a product of our own free will and invention, and society is not the product of human psychology, but vice versa.
However, he says, this simply is not true. Humanity is of course morally free to make and remake itself infinitely, but we do not do so. We stick to the same monotonously human pattern of organizing our affairs. If we were more adventurous, there would be societies without love, without ambition, without sexual desire, without marriage, without art, without grammar, without music, without smiles -- and with as many unimaginable novelties as are in that list. There would be societies in which women killed each other more often than men, in which old people were considered more beautiful than twenty-year-olds, in which wealth did not purchase power over others, in which people did not discriminate in favor of their own friends and against strangers, in which parents did not love their own children. But there aren't any such societies.
He is saying that he is not using this logic as an argument against outlawing, say, racial prosecution on the grounds that it simply is human nature and you cannot change human nature. He acknowledges that laws against racism do have an effect - a useful and necessary one - because people calculate the consequences of their actions. What he is saying instead is that even after thousands of years of strictly enforced laws against racism, we will not one day suddenly be able to declare the problem of racism solved and abolish the laws secure in the knowledge that racial prejudice is a thing of the past. We can rightly assume that a Russian is just as human after two generations of oppressive totalitarianism as his grandfather was before him.
But why, then, Ridley asks, does social science proceed as if it were not the case, as if people's natures are the products of their societies and cultures?
It's a great book. He talks about human nature and how and, more importantly, why, it has evolved within the context of sexual reproduction.
In chapter 4 he is talking about polygamy and the nature of men, and is generally talking about our culture with respect to sexual relationships (e.g. why in no society on Earth do they usually come from the women or her family) when he touches on homosexuality. I thought it was an interesting passage for discussion:
THE MEANING OF HOMOSEXUAL PROMISCUITY
Most prostitutes are female for the simple reason that the demand for female prostitutes is greater than for male ones. If the existence of female prostitutes reveals the male sexual appetite in its nakedness, than so, too, does the phenomenon of male homosexuality. Before the advent of AIDS, practicing male homosexuals were far more promiscuous than heterosexual men. Many gay bars were, and are, recognized places for picking up partners for one-night stands. The bathhouses of San Francisco catered to orgies and feats of repeated sex, assisted by stimulants, that boggled the mind when publicly discussed during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. A Kinsey Institute study of gay men in the San Francisco Bay Area found that 75 percent had had more than one hundred partners; 25 percent had had more than one thousand.
This is not to deny that there are many homosexuals who were and are less promiscuous than many heterosexuals. But even homosexual activists admit that, before AIDS arrived, homosexuals were generally more promiscuous than heterosexuals. There is no single convincing explanation of this. Activists would say that homosexual promiscuity is caused largely by society's disapproval. Illegitimate, "shameful" activities tend to be indulged to excess when indulged at all. The legal and social difficulty of forming gay marriages mitigates against stable relationships.
But this is not persuasive. Promiscuity is not confined to those who indulge in gay sex clandestinely. Infidelity is acknowledged to be a greater problem in male gay marriages than in heterosexual ones, and society's disapproval is far greater of casual than of stable homosexual relations. Many of the same arguments apply to lesbians, who show a striking contrast: Lesbians rarely tend to indulge in sex with strangers but instead form partnerships that persist for many years with little risk of infidelity. Most lesbians have fewer than ten partners in their lifetimes.
Donald Symons of the University of California at Santa Barbara has argued that the reason male homosexuals on average have more sexual partners than male heterosexuals, and many more than female homosexuals, is that male homosexuals are acting out of male tendencies or instincts unfettered by those of women.Donald Symons wrote:Although homosexual men, like most people, usually want to have intimate relationships, such relationships are difficult to maintain, largely owing to the male desire for sexual variety; the unprecedented opportunity to satisfy this desire in a world of men; and the male tendency toward sexual jealousy. . . . I am suggesting that heterosexual men would be as likely as homosexual men to have sex most often with strangers, to participate in anonymous orgies in public baths, and to stop off in public restrooms for five minutes of fellatio on the way home from work if women were interested in these activities.
That is not to say that homosexuals do not long for stable intimacy or even that many are not morally repelled by anonymous sex. But Symon's point is that the desire for monogamous intimacy with a life companion and the desire for casual sex with strangers are not mutually incompatible instincts. Indeed, they are characteristic of heterosexual men, as proven by the existence of a thriving call girl or "escort" industry that, at a price, supplies happily married businessmen with sexual diversions while they are traveling. Symons is commenting not on homosexual men but on men -- average men. As he says, homosexual men behave like men, only more so; homosexual women behave like women, only more so.
The above passage is a discussion within the more broad topic of human culture vs. human nature, in other words nature vs. nurture.
In the book Ridley generally criticizes social sciences such as history, sociology, psychology, antropology, and politics for trying to explain human behavior as if the year 1859, the year of the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, never happened. They insist, he says, that human culture is a product of our own free will and invention, and society is not the product of human psychology, but vice versa.
However, he says, this simply is not true. Humanity is of course morally free to make and remake itself infinitely, but we do not do so. We stick to the same monotonously human pattern of organizing our affairs. If we were more adventurous, there would be societies without love, without ambition, without sexual desire, without marriage, without art, without grammar, without music, without smiles -- and with as many unimaginable novelties as are in that list. There would be societies in which women killed each other more often than men, in which old people were considered more beautiful than twenty-year-olds, in which wealth did not purchase power over others, in which people did not discriminate in favor of their own friends and against strangers, in which parents did not love their own children. But there aren't any such societies.
He is saying that he is not using this logic as an argument against outlawing, say, racial prosecution on the grounds that it simply is human nature and you cannot change human nature. He acknowledges that laws against racism do have an effect - a useful and necessary one - because people calculate the consequences of their actions. What he is saying instead is that even after thousands of years of strictly enforced laws against racism, we will not one day suddenly be able to declare the problem of racism solved and abolish the laws secure in the knowledge that racial prejudice is a thing of the past. We can rightly assume that a Russian is just as human after two generations of oppressive totalitarianism as his grandfather was before him.
But why, then, Ridley asks, does social science proceed as if it were not the case, as if people's natures are the products of their societies and cultures?
ege02 on
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It is?
That's implying a European from the Victorian era wouldn't be horrified to see the gamut of modern entertainment. We're making progress to suit our needs, sure.
Another question - given today's effective birth control tools, what's the moral argument against incest between adult relatives other than it's icky?
I'm not sure I accept the assertion that social sciences assume all behavior is derived from culture rather than biology. Culture plays a larger role in human behavior than many people realize, but denying biological factors would be foolish, and I don't think any mainstream social science does.
pleasepaypreacher.net
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News to me.
For the passage I included he has three sources.
1. An interview with D. Symons
2. Symons, D. 1979. The Evolution of Human Sexuality. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
3. Tripp. C. A. 1975. The Homosexual Matrix. Signet, New York.
pleasepaypreacher.net
It's more an evolutionary thing. Same reason we don't kill each other unless it's in self-defense/craziness. Breeding within a family has a much higher rate of birth defects.
But I read the article as "Meta Ridley".
Turns out this Ridley is more "crazy" than "evil space dragon". But for a giggle, try to imagine the Metroid villain Ridley in a suit and wearing glasses saying this stuff.
They don't fuck their own young because those who used to fuck their own young went extinct due to having low parasite resistance (i.e. low genetic variety) and higher chance of passing deleterious mutations to offspring.
I assume the reasons are similar for humans, and our moralities have come to reflect those reasons. I don't know though. I may be treading into evo-psych too much.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Can't I just say it's gross and something people in alabama do? I mean really do we have to have a firm moral argument to not want to have sex with direct relatives?
pleasepaypreacher.net
I think it's a bit of a jump to assume tha people's natures are primarily biologically determined. I think the same of the assumption that social sciences assume biology is irrelevant to the way social units work. This all reeks of oversimplification, people aren't quite as simple as bicycles.
Well, like I said, it's not only about birth defects. It's also about disease resistance. By mating with a close relative you're essentially giving parasites - who are your enemies in the genetic arms-race - a chance to catch up.
After all, that is why sexual reproduction exists: to make sure that your off-spring won't have similar susceptibility to parasites as you.
Not having read the book, I am at a disadvantage. However, I when I read Genetics, I got the feeling that Ridley has a VERY pro-genetics-as-controler bias. For instance, take the promiscuity aspect. There is, in our feminist fearing world, a belief that men and women have the same sexual tendencies. However, this is probably not biologically true. A man can impregnate many women, whereas a woman can only get pregnant a certain amount of times.
And we form cultures around this. However, while genes may be the starting point, they are not the be all and end all. Androgynous societies often form in places like the Himilayas, where resources are limited. Thus, low numbers of offspring are needed so that the farming land does not become too divided. There culture is deeply rooted in this fact, but there are too many factors in play to call Genes the decider in this.
They aren't. Ridley's point is that regardless of culture and "social conditioning", there are some underlying human characteristics that are common, i.e. part of our nature. When New Guinea was first discovered by explorers and they ran into a tribe of humans that were excluded from the rest of humanity for a hundred thousand years, they found that people in that tribe still behaved in a human way - they smiled to show pleasure, frowned to show anger, they loved and they cried and all that.
I know you are not necessarily disagreeing with me. I'm just saying that at the most fundamental level, our behavior is biologically determined. We can use social conditioning to suppress some parts of it, and to reinforce other parts, but at the end of the day our nature (not our behavior) is primarily dictated by genes.
I'm not sure how people are defining "nature" but it sounds pretty damned broad.
It's funny you mention the Himalayas because he gave that example on the page I am reading right now.
Androgynous though? Do you mean something else that means female-controlled?
It may not be a concern in the conscious sense, but from an evolutionary stand-point, medicine is a brand-new factor so it probably has a long time to go before it starts affecting sexual selection.
You see this in other areas: people are attracted to beautiful people because beautiful people are subconsciously perceived as healthier. Considering where medicine stands right now, the difference in health-levels between a beautiful person and an ugly person is probably unimportant in terms of offspring's chances of survival goes, but your genes are probably not "aware" of this.
Does that make sense?
I meant "polyandry"
I think the explanations would differ from culture to culture.
Perhaps if you give an example we can discuss it.
Actually, there is a society in which (at least at one point in the recent future) fathers did not love their offspring. The society didn't understand the connection between sex and reproduction: they thought women became pregnant by bathing in the ocean. Hence, they lacked a notion of fatherhood. While there would often be a boyfriend around to help care for a woman's children, he did so out of obligation to her and not out of love for the child, and often it wouldn't be his genetically.
There are like a thousand billion ways to structure families. If you get into anthropology about that sort of thing you see pretty quickly that genetic reproduction is a fixation that we have particularly. All sorts of societies have had rules for social reproduction (the continuation of families, lineages, power structures and so on) that didn't hinge on genetic offspring, involving complicated and convoluted adoption rules.
I don't think that anyone would deny that human biology affects our social structure. After all, dogs run in packs and we live in cities, and clearly biology is playing some role there. I think the objection is instead to the ease with which armchair evolutionists can construct non-rigorous explanations of our current social practice. Because the way we happen to do things as a culture seems natural to us it's easy to project that behavior onto our very essence, as if it were inescapable. But seeming natural is not a sufficient criteria for that.
They may very well be polyandrous because, since resources are limited, men spend on average more time on the fields gathering resources, so the females need more males to take care of their young, to protect the house, etc. So it probably is not that low numbers of offspring are needed, but rather that families would rather have - and can get away with - few offspring that have higher chances of survival (thanks to more males providing for the family) and thus reproduction, than high numbers of offspring that will probably die off in the low resource setting.
Edit: Also, ancient Greeks and Israelites.
We are talking about marrying cousins, right?
I think the answer is that the advantage towards parasite-defense gained from marrying strangers is offset by the social benefits one gains from marrying cousins in those societies. Social status, familiarity, political power, etc.
I mean no one is saying your genes are the only determining factor, because whether or not genes are passed on to the next generation depend on whether they provide advantages to the carrier in its current environment.
For instance, if the current political structure is one in which families preserve authority and power making members marry close relatives, then genes that encourage the carrier to marry outside the family will be at a disadvantage and, given enough time, eventually go extinct. So you'll end up with a society in which people have a tendency to marry their cousins. Since social conditioning usually reinforces instinct, it will therefore be the next sure step in social evolution: to end up with a society where people are encouraged to marry their cousins.
That goes against the genetics argument. Genetic studies have found that genetic variation between different ethnic groups is very very small. If genetics were the primary force behind of human behavior all cultures would end up being rather similar in the long run. There's only a handful of cultural constants and homosexuality is simply not one of them. Which makes me beg the question why would he pick homosexuality as his study?
The chapter has like 15 different parts. Homosexuality is only one of them.
Well, the environment is different. Whether a gene is considered good for fitness purposes depends on the particular environment in which it exists.
If the entire Earth was one homogeneous environment, with everything being the same in every single parcel, then humanity would probably be one uniform culture, like you said.
:?:
I presume that since the original anthropological work was done someone's told them how babies actually get made. I don't know how that's affected things in the mean time.
You people all need to become defense lawyers. I think nexuscrawler has this mostly right.
I wasn't laughing at the society. Look closer at what you said.
I have not read this book. tell me does he address the issue solely in Modern American cultural terms? Homosexuality is by no means homogeneous. Using statistics about homosexuals in San Francisco i the 80s says little about anyone but homosexuals in San Francisco and their behavior. What does it tell us about Ancient Greece where homosexual relations amongst married men was common?
When you start using really loaded terms like "human nature" you better be ready to defend the positions from all historical and cultural fronts. This is why evo-pych is damn near impossible to prove since there's too many factors involved to isolate genetics.