Recently on PBS, there was a 3-hour documentary about the Spartans of ancient Greece.
According to this documentary, young Spartan boys at the age of 7 were taken away from their families to train to become warriors. (The training was quite rough, and lasted on into adulthood.) During this extensive training period, Spartan males had almost no contact with girls or women, and were encouraged to turn to other men for sexual relations.
What was surprising about this was what happened when a Spartan male became old enough to marry. On his wedding night, and perhaps for weeks or months thereafter, the wife would cut her hair very short and dress up in male clothing, to make her resemble the male sex partners her husband had become used to and lessen the “shock” of having sex with a woman. “Doing it” with your wife was done more out of a sense of duty to Sparta than it was out of any sexual desire.
This got me to thinking. The Spartans were probably just like any other human beings on Earth, yet not only did most of the Spartan men tolerate homosexuality, they preferred it – seemingly because they had gotten so used to it from a young age. When they got married, they eased into heterosexual as well as homosexual relationships, and I’m sure eventually learned to tolerate, if not enjoy, sex with their wives as well as with their male compatriots-in-arms.
I don’t want to suggest for a minute here that it’s possible to “cure” people of being gay. That’s not what I’m getting at at all. Nor do I mean to suggest that it’s possible to “make” someone gay or “cure” someone of beng heterosexual, a la the joke article in The Onion titled '98 Homosexual-Recruiting Drive Nearing Goal.
What I am getting at is … there’s this whole middle ground called “bisexuality” which you just don’t hear too many Americans talking about. In the U.S., you’re either labelled as “straight” or “gay”, and if you really are bisexual, straight people call you gay and gay people call you traitor. (I understand the situation may be different in Europe.) Can bisexuality be “acquired”? Can people – maybe even the vast majority of people – who normally consider themselves to be “straight” or “gay” be turned into bisexuals? Is it possible for people, despite what we think of as how they’re “wired”, to acquire a taste for sex with men or women? To add to the kinds of sex partners they already enjoy?
Some people argue that most people are “really” bisexual, but completely repress that side of them because society views it as distasteful. I don’t know if that’s true. Sounds too much like wishful thinking to me. However, I do suspect that there are a lot more bisexuals out there than is commonly assumed. It’s like the standard rebuttal to the “homosexuality is a choice” canard: why would anyone choose to be part of a minority that is so discriminated against? Bisexuals do have a choice, and I think a lot of them choose to focus on the opposite gender. Especially since most bisexuals don’t have a perfectly equal, 50/50 attraction to both sexes, but prefer one gender over the other.
And yeah, I’m speaking from experience, here. I’m bisexual, but I really don’t ever expect to act on it. I like guys, but not as much as I like girls. There are more straight women in the world than gay men, and by dating girls I’m not opening myself up to discrimination and violence. Of course, saying that I’m not looking for that kind of relationship doesn’t mean I’d turn up my nose if I found it. There’s not enough love going 'round in the world to turn it down if it falls into your lap. But generally, it’s just easier being straight.
“One thing about being bisexual is that it doubles your chances of getting a date for Saturday night”
George Carlin
Having said that, I’ll say this (realizing it might be a wildly unpopular POV): I have two sisters that are lesbians (No, not together. It always amazes me how many stupid people ask, and I think, largely, dopers are smarter than that, but I thought I’d get it out in the open). One of my gay sisters, I’m certain, was born gay. I don’t think anything in the world could have made her prefer men. She had sex with a man a couple of times, but only because she wanted a baby, and couldn’t afford artificial insemination. My other gay sister, on the other hand, I’m convinced stood some chance of turning out straight (or at least bisexual, as the OP suggests), but for circumstances. She was (as were two others of us) sexually abused as a child/adolescent. She married when she was only 17, and her husband was an emotionally abusive asshole. Nothing I’ve read, heard, or seen to this day has convinced me that if she had had better experiences with men as a whole, she might like them, and be able to be satisfied with one.
Well, as to the OP example, you have to realize that in the specific case of Sparta, the entire upbringing of the boy was a brutal conditioning/indoctrination/brainwashing program devised to produce a total warrior, or kill him in the attempt. Part of that included making his deepest, fondest interpersonal connections with fellow warriors. So yes, if you beat it into someone hard and often enough he can be conditioned into just about any behavior, thorugh associations of pleasure and pain and bonding of those who have helped one another through harrowing experiences… but it is not the same thing as “becoming bisexual”.
And, BTW it was not rare in many cultures in the past (and in some into our lifetime) for marital sex to be something that was done out of duty to the tribe/god(s)/family, rather than out of love or for fun. Even in many “straight” societies, wives were for siring children, courtesans for fun company, fellow males for a real soulmate.
Humans can be conditioned to all sorts of things… so I wouldnt doubt the possibility of ingraining on them bisexuality.
Want a wierd example ? There are churces and politicians advocating abstaining from sex until your married ! That is so wierd … goes against nature and current culture. Women especially are induced to remain virgins… thou their hormones and feeling might say otherwise.
But at what point do you say it’s “conditioning”, which implies brainwashing someone to go against his/her basic nature, and at what point do you say it’s something that’s just plain become part of their personality, like the native language they speak or their preference for the food of their native country?
Look at guys and women in prison. They have homosexual sex for years on end, and most of them aren’t gay. They use it as a means to connect on a more intimate level, both sexually and emotionally. I’d say anyone can acquire a taste for just about anything. But it can’t change the essence of the person’s orientation.
I’d be interested to know what percentage of prisoners who never had same-sex relations before being in prison, but did engage in same-sex relations while in prison, later engaged in same-sex relations even occasionally after they were released from prison.
Can bisexuality be “acquired”? Can people – maybe even the vast majority of people – who normally consider themselves to be “straight” or “gay” be turned into bisexuals? Is it possible for people, despite what we think of as how they’re “wired”, to acquire a taste for sex with men or women? To add to the kinds of sex partners they already enjoy?
I always wondered the same thing. How can a man go to prison and engage in homosexuality and when he comes out revert to being straight? Does that mean deep inside he is “bi sexual?”
Did he aquire the taste only in jail so it is therefore considered “experimentation?”
When does “experimenting” cross the lines and you become a bonified gay/lesbian? 2x? 6x? a year?
But seriously, folks – a better question might be: When does “experimenting” cross the lines and you become a bona fide bisexual?
Again, that statement I heard on TV about Americans’ attitude toward sexual preference keeps haunting me. According to a show on either PBS or the Discovery Channel, Europeans (by which I assume they meant Western Europeans) view purely homosexual folks as a small niche population, but view bisexuals as a bigger fraction of the population. In the U.S., though, you’re either straight or you’re gay, period, and if you say you’re bi it’s interpreted to mean that you just haven’t made up your mind yet. (The American attitude almost seems to carry an implied monogamy with it. If your sex partner [singular] is the same sex as you, you’re gay, and if your sex partner [singular] is the opposite sex from you, you’re straight – unless you’ve had a previous sex partner [singular] of the same sex, in which case you’re gay with a beard. :rolleyes: )
What’s? “bonified”? If it is bonified like I wake up in the morning, then I don’t understand how lesbians can be bonified. Or is it that you get a bonus for every X number of partners?
There’s an ethnography the eerily echoes what the OP said about the Spartans. The title is The Sambia, ritual and gender in New Guinea by Gilbert Herdt, copyright 1987, published by Holt, Reinhart and Winston.
I saw the sme PBS special. I was fascinating! I loved it when the Spartan woman says, “I work out in the gym. I make my buttocks hard!”
Anyway, I think most people are strongly influenced by what the majority culture tells them is normal. In our society, it’s considered normal to be straight. They said the Spartans accepted same-sex liasons for both men and women. It was normal for them.
When you think about it, it’s the people who identify 100% with homosexuality in our culture (or 100% with heterosexuality in the Spartan era) who are the very brave and strong ones. It takes a lot of courage and guts to go against the flow that way.
I know several straight men who are “gay for pay,” that is they have sex with men for money. They start out by being really uncomfortable with the situation, but gradually learn to tolerate it, and some of them grow to enjoy it as purely physical pleasure, and then go home to their wives and girlfriends.
They come to find a different kind of pleasure in male-male sex, but they remain entirely heterosexual.
Knowing these guys has led me to understand that BEING gay or straight has NOTHING to do with SEX. It’s who you fall in love with; who you are attracted to on that level beyond sex. These guys can have a lot of fun getting off with other guys, but they only fall in love with women.
Of course, some would say it’s not healthy to separate the mechanics of sex from the love aspect, but that’s certainly debatable; most of these guys seem pretty well adjusted; certainly more well adjusted than the gay escorts that I know, for whom the delineation between client and love object is not so clearly drawn.
So the ability to find pleasure in sex with a member of your own sex can definitely become an acquired taste, but HOMOSEXUALITY and HETEROSEXUALITY are, I believe, hardwired.
Peter North, noted porn actor and human jizz-geyser, started out in gay porn, but is now more widely known for his straight career. I guess if the money’s good enough…
But, again, I think lissener’s take on the emotional connection is spot on.
It is important to be careful not to assume too much from tradition, especially the traditions of foreign cultures. It may have been traditional for new Spartan wives to dress as men, and they may have even believed that this was something that their husbands needed in order to get through the honeymoon, but that doesn’t prove that Spartan men wouldn’t have been just as happy to have sex with a woman who was groomed to look like a typical woman of that culture. Traditions originate for various reasons, but they tend to continue because they’re…traditional. They don’t necessarily reflect what people would really want to do all on their own.
In thousands of years people may look back on our culture and think that American men preferred to have sex with virginal woman, and that most American brides chose to dress in the traditional costume of a pure, innocent virgins for the wedding ceremony so the grooms wouldn’t be turned off.
**
I don’t think it’s possible to say the Spartans preferred homosexuality, as it does not seem that the Spartans had any concept of sexual orientation in the way that we think of it today.
As for not enjoying sex with the wives, well, I take it you’ve never read or seen Lysistrata. Aristophanes apparently expected his audience to accept that both Athenian and Spartan men enjoyed having sex with their wives so much that, at least in a comic play, said wives could end a war by staging a sex strike.
As Miller suggested, it may be more likely that many or even most people are actually “wired” for some degree of bisexuality. If that is the case, it wouldn’t be a question of acquiring a taste as much as not having your natural tastes cramped by culture or convenience. This is not to suggest that everyone would be equally attracted to both men and women if given the chance; I suspect “pure bisexuals” are fairly rare under any set of social circumstances. But I know there are some people who are mostly straight but not opposed to the odd “walk on the wild side”, and if we lived in a culture where such behavior was considered normal and openly accepted then it might be much more common.
I haven’t read Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. Is it absolutely, positively, definitely clear in the play that the wives ended the war because they were depriving their husbands of much-desired nookie, or could the real threat have been that the wives were depriving the men of offspring?
(I understand the situation may be different in Europe.) Can bisexuality be “acquired”? Can people – maybe even the vast majority of people – who normally consider themselves to be “straight” or “gay” be turned into bisexuals? Is it possible for people, despite what we think of as how they’re “wired”, to acquire a taste for sex with men or women? To add to the kinds of sex partners they already enjoy?