Exactly. The fact that homosexuals exist and have sex with each other doesn’t bother me in the least, and I fully support gay rights. As a straight male, the only revulsion I have is with the idea of myself being intimate in any way with a man. I believe that this revulsion is biological in origin.
I came in here to say this, but from a slightly different angle. I find watching sex (or even just kissing) pleasurable if I can imagine myself in the place of one of the participants, and unpleasant if I would NOT want to be one of the participants. This is why I avert my eyes if I see two men kissing (Torchwood, I’m looking at you!), and why I would never watch gay male or bondage or scat porn, and why lesbian scenes don’t bother me (though I don’t seek them out), and why I don’t watch porn that has ugly women in it. My discomfort has nothing to do with the idea of gay sex, but more with the (involuntary) thought of myself being a part of it.
I think this pretty much covers it. The fact that we have pretty well documented cultures in which even ostensibly straight men engage in gay sex (ancient Greece and Rome, modern Afghanistan, etc.) makes it highly unlikely that there’s a significant biological element.
I think that you are missing the point re: the porn. In an oral scene, the camera only has so much field of view it can focus on. Lots of men like to watch as their partner performs the act on them. The director has a choice; focus on her face and what she’s doing, or focus on her other attributes which can be difficult because of necessary positioning, and take away time from the more common fantasy. I also don’t think that men find penises revolting in general. They like their own, and imagine themselves in the scene. The money shot works the same way.
As to the second part of your post, I’ve never had the sort of experiences that you think are common. I think that you are indeed an outlier, and not the norm.
I’d say that it’s cultural. Certainly not biological. A couple of examples in my own mind would be that homosexuality isn’t always looked on with revulsion or even social stigma. The Greeks spring to mind, though they aren’t exactly unique. Another example is (this is from memory) that chimps and monkeys will exhibit homosexual behavior when they are in a closed group (say, in captivity or otherwise isolated for long periods of time) in the absence of a female. This seems to indicate, to me at least, that biologically there is no revulsion factor, since it seems humans exhibit similar behavior (based on reading about rampant homosexuality in the Brit Navy during long deployments).
As for the trope aspect given in the OP, I think that most people are hinked out about homosexual sex in our (presumably US) culture because, well, they are hinked out about ANY sex outside of their own bedroom. I know a lot of folks who go pale thinking about old people having sex, or about dwarves (or elves…hell, I know some folks who were hinked out about the sex in Avatar) having sex, or about…well, any sex that they aren’t having themselves. For my part, I’m not really interested in ANY sex (hetero, homo, interspecies or self inflicted) that I’m not a participant in.
Right, but here’s the kicker: our gut reaction doesn’t know or care whether conception will actually occur. But if the idea of something that could possibly lead to procreation arouses (and you could make a case that even heterosexual oral and anal sex fall under this as they could be considered foreplay to vaginal sex, even if the vaginal sex never happens) and something that most certainly won’t lead to procreation (gay sex) doesn’t, does that not at least merit consideration of a biological component? qpw3141 said it better than I so I’ll just quote him now:
This makes a great deal of sense and was the line of thinking that I was using in the OP, but I still haven’t seen any actual cites on whether there have been any attempts to study this scientifically.
A lot of people have mentioned the Greeks, but just because gay sex was largely tolerated, how do we know that a significant if not majority of people were repulsed by it even in their culture? Maybe they just weren’t vocal about it because the powers that be supported it (and if Greek women were repulsed by it, they certainly didn’t have a say). And from my limited understanding of ancient Greek culture (please correct me if I’m wrong), gay sex wasn’t unilaterally supported anyway - only in certain situations and under certain premises (older men with younger men, and the older man would be the “top”. If two younger men had sex or an older man was the receptive partner it would still be considered shameful).
Taking exhibition of gay sexual behavior as an indicator of a lack of biological component is also shaky ground. Especially since you’re talking about situations where men (and the chimps) who would otherwise consider themselves straight resorted to homosexual behavior only after a period of isolation from women. In fact, that almost certainly seems to indicate an initial avoidance reaction (which doesn’t mean disgust/revulsion of course, but it could) that was eventually inhibited because of a sex drive powerful enough to overcome it.
I’m just trying to play devil’s advocate here since most of the responses seem to be leaning toward the cultural side. I don’t doubt that a desire to fit in and exhibit machismo (and whatever the female equivalent is, since I’ve heard just as many or probably more women expressing a revulsion to gay sex as men) has contributed toward it, but I have trouble believing that’s the whole story.
The point is that, at least afaik, there was no social stigma attached to homosexual behavior (in these cultures)…which means there was not automatic revulsion factor.
No, I don’t believe that was the case. It was pretty wide spread throughout the various social and economic classes, and it wasn’t stigmatized. And, afaik, Greeks (and Romans for that matter) were human, not mutants. To me this seems to indicate that any revulsion factors present are culturally based, not biologically based.
That’s not my understanding, though I haven’t made an extensive study of it. My understanding is that on campaign, Greek men of equal social and economic status would often form sexual bonds, and that in some cases with elite troops it was required. And that such sexual bonds weren’t looked down on in any way, and in fact were seen as natural.
I think in Rome some of what you are saying is true (i.e. the penetration vs penetrated…a dominance game basically), but again I don’t believe such relations were stigmatized to any great extent, which is the point. If there was a revulsion factor then you’d have an ingrained and automatic stigmatization of such behavior, since presumably it would be present in the majority of any given culture. Instead we have a rather spotty stigmatization of homosexuality that, to me at least, seems to revolve more around religious belief than any inherent biological revulsion to homosexuality.
And then there is the fact that monkeys and chimps don’t seem to have any kind of revulsion reflex about such behavior, and (from memory…haven’t looked it up) participate in it in the absence of female partners.
There’s a big difference between “don’t care to see it” and “revolting.” I don’t care to see straight porn, but it doesn’t revolt me (or rather, if a particular film revolts me, it’s on a basis other than the fact that there’s a woman involved).
Listen, if it were biological in nature, wouldn’t the revulsion have to be universal and cross-cultural?
Incidentally, apes and monkeys of lots of species have been document engaging in extensive homosexual behaviour under numerous circumstances in the wild, not just when they’re in single-sex captivity. So have nearly 600 other species – in some cases homosexual sex has been observed in species where heterosexual sex has never been successfully observed. Check out Bruce Bagemihl’s landmark book Biological Exuberance for exhaustive documentation.
Of course not. Why would it? Brown eye color is biological but it’s not universal and cross-cultural. Do you believe that homosexuality itself is biological? Because that’s certainly not universal and cross-cultural. (ETA: of course I mean it’s not universal in the sense that not everyone is gay, not that there aren’t some gay people everywhere)
No… you’re entirely missing the point of my statement. I really don’t want to derail the thread, but I was responding to the idea that if something is biological it must be universal and cross-cultural, which is what matt_mcl said.
He was talking about the revulsion reaction you were theorizing. If such a reaction were biological we’d see it in some percentage of any given human population. Instead we see it clustered mainly in cultures who persecute or otherwise revile homosexuality for whatever reason (generally religious based). Even in cultures where it is looked down on there are many instances where circumstance makes otherwise heterosexual males have homosexual relations (like my example of the British Navy in the past)…which wouldn’t happen if there was in ingrained, reflexive and biological ‘revulsion reaction’.
I can’t see how such a reaction could or would plausibly be biological in nature, since it seems highly dependent on the culture under discussion. Unless you are further positing that cultures also cluster high concentrations of humans with or without this biological ‘revulsion reaction’, and that this is also something unique to humans but only in certain clusters. That seems an awful lot of factors to pile up, when the simply Occam like answer is that it’s simply cultural factors that impact the view of homosexuality in a given grouping of humans.
Homosexual activity is not a dead end, though–it’s perfectly possible for an individual to reproduce before or after gay sex–just not by that means. In fact, this must happen relatively often, given the reported incidence of sometime homosexual experiences among hetero-oriented men.
Also, evolution isn’t just about individuals’ genes; it can be beneficial to a population’s survival (say, in a band or tribe or village) to have non-reproducing individuals.
This kind of talk makes me a little sad.
I’m not gay, never had gay sex or any interest in it, but I’m not revolted by the idea. It just doesn’t turn me on, the same as some women don’t or wouldn’t turn me on.
I have had the experience of being an object of desire by at least one man and a couple women (that I knew of) which I could not reciprocate… and it just made me feel a little bad. Not sickened, just sorry, because my assumption has always been that the desire for intimacy, at its most basic level, is more or less the same for everybody, regardless of gender and orientation. And I know how it feels to be on the other side of that ache.
On the other hand, I like seeing people who have found intimacy with someone and are happy with each other. I don’t need to watch them in bed, but I like seeing same-sex couples holding hands and kissing, just like opposite-sex couples. It has nothing to do with me–I’m happy for them.
Discussions in this vein always seem to bring up the porn, and the idea of inserting oneself (heh) into a scene. Okay, your porn preferences are your own, no need to justify those–but when we’re dealing with real people, in person, can’t we put that mentality aside? A gay couple holding hands and kissing in public isn’t some kind of unwanted deviant pornography forced upon you–it’s not about you at all. They’re real people trying to live their lives and be close with someone, and that’s not revolting. It’s nice.
Homosexual activity (or any sexual activity that cannot result in reproduction) is an evolutionary dead end because you can’t pass your genes on using it.
The reason that revulsion of activities that cannot lead to reproduction could be a useful evolutionary trait is that it would tend to prevent potential reproducers concentrating on some form of non-reproductive sex to the extent that in excludes reproductive sex.
It’s not impossible and if you can come up with a credible theory as to how that would work and how it would outweigh a trait that would tend to concentrate activity on activities that could lead to reproduction, by all means let’s hear it.
