Homosexuality used to be considered a personality disorder. Now scientists believe it is caused by a hormone imbalance while the child is in the womb. It is now becoming more and more acceptable to be gay.
My question is - is it possible that other sexual preferences like pedophilia/necrophilia/bestiality are also formed by some sort of hormone imbalance in the womb?
If we take out the fact that children and animals can’t consent and the ‘ick’ factor of necrophilia, do you think it would be possible in the future that these behaviours will one day be acceptable in our society?
Homosexuality isn’t acceptable because of what causes it–it’s acceptable because we’ve realized as a society (mostly) that there’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t hurt anyone and it’s possible for a gay person to be a perfectly great/nice individual. Not so much with pedophilia.
American society started becoming more accepting of gays long before people thought they understood the causes of sexual preference. And it’s still not fully understood. Prenatal hormones are thought to be the largest factor at this point, but there are other factors. And I don’t want to descend into nitpicking, but calling it a ‘hormone imbalance’ makes it sound like a disease.
I think trauma is a more likely explanation but there are probably multiple factors that explain those kinds of things. That’s how it is with most behaviors, really. Behaviors can be influenced by genetic and environmental factors and a lot of other things.
No, I don’t. You can’t take out the ‘ick’ factor here, and the lack of consent makes it very different from consenting adults or peers.
Very possibly. In fact, I’d be surprised if pedophiles weren’t born this way.
Regarding bestiality and necrophilia, I’m not so sure. I’d suspect that necrophilia at least is rather a kind of fetish.
To say the thr truth, I’ve zero issue with bestiality. We ride animals because it’s useful or just for fun, we have them dragging heavy loads, we kill them because we need their meat, or want good shoes or find them tasty, and so on…, so I don’t see what the big deal is with fucking them. It’s just a matter of eek factor IMO. So, I couldn’t care less whether people are in bestiality because they’re born this way or for any other reason. Might become legal someday if many people come to think like me. But it won’t be because some scientist discovered the “bestiality gene” or somesuch.
Regarding pedophilia, knowing that people can’t choose not to be pedophiles wouldn’t change a thing and wouldn’t make acceptable to act on such urges. We won’t accept that adults have sex with children, regardless of the reason. It doesn’t mean that pedophilia could never conceivably be socially acceptable (it has been in some cultures), but it would come from a significant social change, and in this case too, whether or not people are born with this attraction would be irrelevant.
I also doubt people will be ready to let anybody fuck cadavers, again regardless of the cause of necrophilia. In fact, it might be the strongest taboo of the three. In many places, fucking a goat would just make you the target of jokes, in some places, fucking a young boy would have been perfectly acceptable, but I don’t think there has ever been a culture where fucking a corpse would have been viewed with less than utter disgust and contempt.
To sum up, in all three cases, knowledge that people can’t help being attracted to dogs, kids or corpses won’t change a thing. Only a different cultural perception of dogs, kids and corpses “rights” or “acceptable uses” could result in such a change.
Right- I don’t think you’re a bigot, I was just pointing out something about the phrasing you used.
In this case it’s because there was a campaign for gay rights, and a growing number of people have accepted the argument that consenting adults should be allowed to be with who they want to be with.
But is that a rational basis for making it illegal? I thought that was one of the main pro gay marriage arguments: That just because you find it “icky” doesn’t mean that you can deny people the right to express themselves how they want sexually.
He wasn’t offering it as a reason it should be illegal. He was saying the taboo is unlikely to change. The rational basis for making it illegal would be that we give people the right to dispose of their bodies the way they want to (that is, if you chose to be buried, you obviously didn’t want to be exhumed and molested) and that this kind of thing would be incredibly distressing to the families of the deceased.
Except nobody is denying the right of gay people to express themselves. Adults can do whatever they want behind closed doors. The ick factor applies to social standards outside of the bedroom.
The current opinion is that homosexuality is an innate behavior. The same could be said for other sexual desires.
Not really a rational basis. But by comparison with animals, not only it’s perceived as icky, but also human bodies are generally to a large extent sacred, not uncommonly even perceived as dangerous if not granted some expected level of reverence. And even though it’s not nearly as true in our current society, there’s also an emotional attachment to the body of the deceased.
I’m not saying it’s objectively morally wrong to have sex with a body, just that it would be difficult for such a thing to become socially acceptable. And again, whether or not people are born with an attraction for dead humans isn’t going to be relevant.
By the way, about the OP premise that the idea that homosexuals being born with way and having no choice in the matter helped with the acceptance of homosexuality. It might have been true in the USA (“See…we aren’t evil scum who chose do to evil and sinful things for the sake of it”), but I remember this concept being originally strongly rejected over here (France) because : “What? You’re saying that we’re different from you? Some kind of monsters, maybe?” .
I thought that this rejection had disappeared over time, but recently, I’ve been attacked for mentioning the “hormones in the womb” concept. My interlocutor obviously perceived this statement as a hint that I was homophobic. I’m not sure how widespread is this attitude nowadays.
Do you think that if there was a campaign for man/boy love (I think I saw an episode of L&O SVU where they mentioned something along those lines) or a campaign to let old men screw 15 year old girls, people’s minds would change and it would become acceptable in general society.
I think the argument for bestiality that clairobscur put forward is an extremely rational one. (I think Peta will be coming after both of us now LOL)
There are organizations like that. The famous one is NAMBLA, although I’m not sure they really exist anymore. No, they haven’t changed many people’s minds. But one or two groups don’t make a movement. Gay rights was a movement. And like I said, the consent issue is always going to be there if you’re talking about relationships with children. A growing number of people agree that if you have two consenting adults, or at least two peers, there’s no problem.
You’re joking about PETA, but if I were projected say 150 years in the future, I wouldn’t be that surprised to discover that children are taught in school we were evil and heartless people who ate cows, and that the noble and heroic members of PETA were routinely ridiculed by our sorry asses on message boards.
It isn’t exactly crap. Homosexuality used to be consider a mental disorder and the American Psychiatric Association didn’t remove it from their list of disorders until 1973.
