The Danger of Male Homosexuality vs Female Homosexuality

[Lynn Bodoni]

Originally Posted by Leaffan

'Cause female homosexuality is hawt.

Female homosexuality bores me to tears. I mean, I'm not going to try to stop lesbianism, but I have no interest in it.

MALE homosexuality is teh hawt, for me.

[Una Persson]

Originally Posted by mister nyx

And I'm sure unserious people will take your numbers as given without attempting to understand the actual phenomenon under question, or even evaluating the numbers you cite for basic plausibility. And everything about "Great Debates" has made it clear that unserious argument is the norm here -- hence all the people prior to my post who accepted the OP's assumptions without even trying to verify them. Good job, you made the vaguest possible effort to prove them right and exercised no ability to discern the quality of the numbers you got, even when they were facially ridiculous. And then you blustered at me for questioning your absurd statistics, which -- if nothing else -- obviously understate the OP's "killed, tortured, bullied, or whatever" by an order of magnitude at least.

I have no doubt that your numbers will be treated as gospel, because it has been my observation that around here, unserious arguments like the OP's are de rigueur. That doesn't mean that your unstated "conclusions" are valid, or even that they're worthy of a moment's consideration. Again, this is a small enough pond that I'm sure your nonsense will be treated seriously, but that says nothing about your conclusions -- but it says a lot about the people evaluating them.

ETA: I notice you can't even begin to respond to this: "If those figures don't show that gay men are even more disproportionately likely to be the victims of anti-gay violent crime than the general tendency for men to be more likely the victims of violent crime, than they don't go to demonstrate the OP's assumption that male homosexual behavior is more "dangerous" than female homosexual behavior." That's okay, it's just more reason to ignore your conclusions in this matter.

In other words, you either can find no hard citations to back up your opinion, or you're just too just lazy to do any looking yourself. How unfortunate!

[mister nyx]

Originally Posted by Una Persson

In other words, you either can find no hard citations to back up your opinion, or you're just too just lazy to do any looking yourself. How unfortunate!

You're right! I totally take your non-serious research seriously, including the numerous problems I pointed out before you even joined the thread relating to gathering statistics about this topic! I'm sorry I had standards, I should have judged my audience better and concluded that having standards for correctness wasn't acceptable! You're right, having standards for data and expecting someone starting a discussion to rely on them is bad and wrong! I'll pretend that the data you cited are meaningful, even though they obviously aren't, and I'll also pretend that the person who started this thread gathered them rather than openly admitting to making up his information (as he did)! Because that is how real debates are conducted! With fakey data that is gathered after the arguments are made! That's how real debate works!

[Una Persson]

...and more bluster.

You made the claim. You back it up. That's been a foundation of Great Debates for the 12 years I've been here.

My stats may be wrong or off-base, or applied incorrectly. Sure, why not? As a scientist I recognize that. But you haven't convinced anyone because all we have is you repeating your opinion and ducking and weaving any way you can to avoid doing any iota of actual work to back up your opinion with any sort of reputable citations. In the time it's taken you to find ways to avoid doing actual work, you could have easily found all the reputable citations you need - because since you're so right and all, they must be trivially easy to find, right?

Show me with some reputable citations how my conclusions are so wrong. Or, if you want to keep the dodge then just don't bother posting, because I won't be reading.

[mister nyx]

Originally Posted by Una Persson

...and more bluster.

You made the claim. You back it up. That's been a foundation of Great Debates for the 12 years I've been here.

My stats may be wrong or off-base, or applied incorrectly. Sure, why not? As a scientist I recognize that. But you haven't convinced anyone because all we have is you repeating your opinion and ducking and weaving any way you can to avoid doing any iota of actual work to back up your opinion with any sort of reputable citations. In the time it's taken you to find ways to avoid doing actual work, you could have easily found all the reputable citations you need - because since you're so right and all, they must be trivially easy to find, right?

Show me with some reputable citations how my conclusions are so wrong. Or, if you want to keep the dodge then just don't bother posting, because I won't be reading.

So the person who made the claim -- the original poster of the thread -- has no responsibility to find any evidence! SDMB-style debate is interesting! And when someone points out reasons why those invented "statistics" are perhaps not plausible, well, it's the responsibility of someone else to disprove the claim! There's no responsibility on the person who made the claim to come up with any evidence for it! This is a unique and interesting style of debate you folks have here! One doesn't have to supply evidence for one's claims, but if someone disagrees with the citation-free claims, they have to prove them wrong! What a novel and unique approach to debate you folks have come up with!

Neat!

[gamerunknown]

Originally Posted by mister nyx

I have no doubt that your numbers will be treated as gospel, because it has been my observation that around here, unserious arguments like the OP's are de rigueur.

Poisoning the well.

Originally Posted by mister nyx

than they don't go to demonstrate the OP's assumption that male homosexual behavior is more "dangerous" than female homosexual behavior

It's undisprovable. The fact that males are viewed as more dangerous than females is likely to be the causative variable in the discrimination males face, but you claim evidence that males are disproportionately more likely to be victims of hate crimes as irrelevant due to that very contention.

Of the six people listed here, only one is a woman.

In the UK, male homosexuality was recriminalised in the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, with a Labouchere amendment added to criminalise acts other than sodomy.

Sodomy itself was rarely prosecuted in US history and when women began to be prosecuted, it was for crimes like fellatio, prostitution and adultery.

I tried looking up statistics for rape and I found this website which claims that there are 520 corrective rapes a year in Cape Town alone. I couldn't find any data relating to other countries or historical justifications though. This website claims 4000 executions for homosexuality in Iran, but not whether any lesbians were executed. Men are responsible for more rapes, which may compound the issue. More info on the spread of victims of hate crime here.

I don't know of any society where male homosexuality is tolerated to a greater degree than female homosexuality.

[mister nyx]

Originally Posted by gamerunknown

It's undisprovable. The fact that males are viewed as more dangerous than females is likely to be the causative variable in the discrimination males face, but you claim evidence that males are disproportionately more likely to be victims of hate crimes as irrelevant due to that very contention.

Clearly you're missing the point. If men are generally more likely to be victims of violent crimes, then even if it's true that men are more likely than women to be the victims of hate crimes relating to being gay or bi, it doesn't demonstrate anything about other people's comparative attitudes towards male and female homosexuality. Just about their likelihood to attack a man rather than a woman.

Of the six people listed here, only one is a woman.

. . . bit of a small sample size, wouldn't you say?

I don't know of any society where male homosexuality is tolerated to a greater degree than female homosexuality.

Then you don't know of many societies. Off the top of my head, male-on-male sexual activity was normative in classical Greece, ancient Rome, imperial China, and still is in modern-day Afghanistan. In fact, male-male sexual activity is tolerated to varying degrees in a lot of the Middle East, including in countries where ostensibly it's a capital offense.

njtt already pointed this out, and of course was ignored, but it is likely more accurate to suppose that to whatever extent male homosexuality is disproportionately disapproved of in Western Europe and North America, our society may be the one outside of the norm, not all the other societies that exist and have existed in which male-male sexuality is or was perfectly normal.

[panache45]

Originally Posted by Lynn Bodoni

Female homosexuality bores me to tears. I mean, I'm not going to try to stop lesbianism, but I have no interest in it.

MALE homosexuality is teh hawt, for me.

As a gay man, I couldn't agree more.

[gamerunknown]

Originally Posted by mister nyx

Off the top of my head, male-on-male sexual activity was normative in classical Greece, ancient Rome, imperial China, and still is in modern-day Afghanistan. I

I know of those examples and also of the Azande in Congo and two-spirits in Native America from wiki. However, I don't know of any records of a society tolerating male homosexuality and reviling female homosexuality. I'd also contend that there may be a class distinction too (hope that's the right link, think Kenneth Williams describes the tolerance of homosexuality in one of the Oxbridge universities). Hitchens also talks about homosexuality in boarding schools.

Originally Posted by mister nyx

If men are generally more likely to be victims of violent crimes, then even if it's true that men are more likely than women to be the victims of hate crimes relating to being gay or bi, it doesn't demonstrate anything about other people's comparative attitudes towards male and female homosexuality.

If men are more violent, less likely to empathise and more likely to be rapists, it'd be pretty hard to ignore the reason why male homosexuality would be perceived as more of a threat by men (and historically, society has been patriarchal, so male attitudes influence norms). It's not the fact that they are male homosexuals (while female homosexuals are fine), it is that they are more dangerous because they are homosexuals as well as being male.

[mister nyx]

Originally Posted by gamerunknown

I know of those examples and also of the Azande in Congo and two-spirits in Native America from wiki. However, I don't know of any records of a society tolerating male homosexuality and reviling female homosexuality. I'd also contend that there may be a class distinction too (hope that's the right link, think Kenneth Williams describes the tolerance of homosexuality in one of the Oxbridge universities). Hitchens also talks about homosexuality in boarding schools.

I'm not sure that "two-spirits" necessarily count, since the descriptions I've read of them (which I don't trust much because they never seem to spend much time discussing which Indian societies had this practice) make it sound more like a cultural acceptance of transgenderism, which isn't exactly the same as accepting male-male sexuality. And surely there are differences relating to social class; societies aren't homogeneous and there are plenty of examples of subcultures accepting homosexuality while the broader culture didn't. For instance, plenty of straight people in Golden Age Hollywood were perfectly aware that some major actors were gay, long before that was at all socially accepted in the broader culture.

I also don't know of any culture in which female homosexuality is particularly reviled while male homosexuality isn't, but I think it's safe to say that in male-dominated cultures like a lot of the ones we're looking at, women had a whole lot less opportunity to have sexual relationships with each other (hence it seeming to be unnoticed in, for instance, the Jewish scriptures). But either way, it doesn't go to support the idea that generally, overall that male-male sexual activity is considered "more dangerous". To whatever extent that's true in our culture, and arguments could definitely be made, our culture may be the peculiar outlier.

If men are more violent, less likely to empathise and more likely to be rapists, it'd be pretty hard to ignore the reason why male homosexuality would be perceived as more of a threat by men (and historically, society has been patriarchal, so male attitudes influence norms). It's not the fact that they are male homosexuals (while female homosexuals are fine), it is that they are more dangerous because they are homosexuals as well as being male.

It could be that men tend to fear male homosexuality because they worry about the possibility of being raped. That's a plausible explanation, but I'm still not entirely convinced that there's a phenomenon here to be explained.

[HMS Irruncible]

Originally Posted by gamerunknown

Then why were you bringing up obvious evolutionary reasons, centuries old practices and obesity? If something persists for millennia, it's not a "status marker" that's amenable to change in a lifetime, is it? If it presents a disadvantage to the survival of the genes to the person displaying that status, it won't survive for millennia.

I should have been more clear. Taking for example blonde hair... it is entirely genetic in origin, and also a status marker in some places. Yet the ultimate outcome is not that blondes will edge out everyone else, the ultimate outcome is that when blonde hair becomes too common, then it can't be a status marker anymore. Alternately, some other random trait becomes culturally regarded as a status marker.

So what I'm getting at is that the contradiction between society reviling a trait that is perfectly genetically viable could be accounted for by the fact that it can be considered a status marker. High status itself may contribute to the fitnesse of any gay gene, but not necessarily so.

Here is a good primer on the causes of homosexuality.

There's no primer on the causes as they're not known and not proven. People have theories. YouTube videos are not a cite, do not waste my time with them, particularly if they won't even load. I'll happily read text if you wish to provide it.

[BigT]

Originally Posted by panache45

But wouldn't that work the other way as well? If I, a gay man, am disgusted by something that straight people do, e.g. cunnilingus, wouldn't that disgust cause me to label it as immoral, and cause me to become heterophobic? But it doesn't. Disgust, in and of itself is not a sufficient explanation.

No, because you've already experienced what it's like to be considered immoral due to your sexual preference, and thus you do not want to do it to others. If homosexuality were the dominant sexuality, and thus you'd never been discriminated against, it would probably be different.

But, now that I think of it, maybe not. There have been studies showing that gay men's brains are actually different that straight males, so it's possible that you just think differently for biological reasons.

[BigT]

Originally Posted by mister nyx

So the person who made the claim -- the original poster of the thread -- has no responsibility to find any evidence! SDMB-style debate is interesting! And when someone points out reasons why those invented "statistics" are perhaps not plausible, well, it's the responsibility of someone else to disprove the claim! There's no responsibility on the person who made the claim to come up with any evidence for it! This is a unique and interesting style of debate you folks have here! One doesn't have to supply evidence for one's claims, but if someone disagrees with the citation-free claims, they have to prove them wrong! What a novel and unique approach to debate you folks have come up with!

Neat!

No. She brought citations for the OP. Now that she did that, you are required to provide citations to continue to allege that the OP is wrong. Without doing so, you are admitting that you are not actually arguing in good faith, and thus your protestations against the lack of cites from the OP are because you didn't like the argument, and not because you thought it was false.

You can't claim that the OP is required to bring citations for his position, and then, when citations are provided, balk on the fact that you are now required to bring citations to argue against it. Or, you can, but it proves you aren't interested in an honest discussion, and thus Una is justified in no longer engaging with you:

TL;DR: If you want the OP to provide cites when it's his turn, you have to be willing to provide them when it's your turn. Otherwise he is right by default.

[mister nyx]

Originally Posted by BigT

No. She brought citations for the OP. Now that she did that, you are required to provide citations to continue to allege that the OP is wrong. Without doing so, you are admitting that you are not actually arguing in good faith, and thus your protestations against the lack of cites from the OP are because you didn't like the argument, and not because you thought it was false.

You can't claim that the OP is required to bring citations for his position, and then, when citations are provided, balk on the fact that you are now required to bring citations to argue against it. Or, you can, but it proves you aren't interested in an honest discussion, and thus Una is justified in no longer engaging with you:

TL;DR: If you want the OP to provide cites when it's his turn, you have to be willing to provide them when it's your turn. Otherwise he is right by default.

Oh, boy, this stupid thread being revived again. Great.

Thanks for sharing your insightful ideas about how debate works, BigT. I will be sure to follow your rules of debate the next time I am worried about your opinions about who is right and who is wrong.

[gamerunknown]

Originally Posted by HMS Irruncible

High status itself may contribute to the fitnesse of any gay gene, but not necessarily so.

Originally Posted by HMS Irruncible

There's no primer on the causes as they're not known and not proven. People have theories.

Both of these contentions are outmoded due to Popper. In modern scientific parlance, there is no proof, there is only evidence and disproof. If hypotheses have no mechanism for disproof, they are discarded. I don't think you've offered any for your claim that homosexuality is a status marker comparable to obesity.

I was not using the video as a cite, merely an attempt to rectify ignorance. This wikipedia article (which cites relevant studies) performs the same function. That said, I should have been more careful in my language (contributory factors to, rather than causes of).