Is gay marriage "the final tactic of the women's movement"?

[JRDelirious]

Sweet Jesus on a rollerskate, that’s… some unusual reasoning in that article.

OK, so in his view, this is a trick to lure the maximum amount of males into a priapic ghetto of homosexual promiscuity. This sounds like a more academic formulation of the idea that if you lift the restrictions on XYZ sexual act, everyone will just run to do it, and you’ll eventually have people having sex with transit trains and with the Budweiser Clydesdales, or marrying 5 nieces, or the Viacom Corporation, just to see how it feels like. It can’t really be that kind of thesis, can it?

I would suppose, the goal is for all the horny men to be so busy doing each other that they leave the world in the hands of the Femis and low-libido easily ruled males? That sounds like something you’d read in bad femiporn. Or posted on alt.sex.stories.femdom
(BTW, the only comment about this I’ve heard from one of my local Radical Feminists was actually to the contrary of the whole notion. She was despairing that now even the Gays wanted to perpetuate legally-binding marriage as a good thing to have in society! (You can tell she’s an unreformed 60s-70s RadFem) )

However . . . Ivy League seniors “are being encouraged to submit to extreme acts of surgical mutilation in order to erase their sexual identity.” ??? Huh

[cowgirl]

Radical feminist checking in.

He’s right, you know: the whole ‘gay marriage’ thing is just a plot we cooked up at our last meeting.

[Skeptico]

BrainGlutton , that was a beautifully written post; regardless of my position on the issue. A thousand sex partners a year, imagine that…

[BrainGlutton]

@Sage Rat

On top of this, then, I would suggest upbringing. Boys and girls are raised differently. It annoyed the heck of me once when my uncle chided his daughter for playing rough with her sister because “girls shouldn’t act that way.” Boys are encouraged to play games that emphasize the desire to compete and to win. Girls are encouraged to play house and look pretty.
So I would have to wonder if the male sex drive is less a product of actual physical impulses, and more with the desire to go out and enjoy the pillages of war (i.e. sex and sexual domination) as trained into us by our parents.

Well, a lot of feminists and sexual revolutionaries back in the '60s and '70s believed that if we got rid of artificial cultural gender-roles, then gender-specific sexual behaviors would disappear. But despite the sexual revolution and despite the feminist revolution, not a lot has changed in that regard. Prostitution still exists, sex has not become so easy to get that prostitutes can’t make a living; and it’s still almost exclusively men who go to prostitutes. There are male prostitutes but they mostly serve gay male clients. Ditto with strip clubs, pornography, etc. Rape still exists, and it’s still something men do to women, or to other men. Marriage still exists, and adultery still exists.

I incline to accept the theory of sociobiology, as developed by E.O. Wilson. Evolutionary imperatives have programmed our sexual behavior. We’re all hard-wired to optimize our reproductive success, our transmission of our gene-code to future generations. A woman can have maybe ten children in a lifetime; it’s in her interest to snag just one man, hang on to him, and keep him from straying, so he’ll provide for her and her children. But a man, given access to enough fertile and willing women (and actually, they don’t even have to be willing), can sire literally hundreds of children in a year. Do the math. We are all descended from the men (and the women) who had the most reproductive success. As a result, a man is genetically programmed to want to insert his penis into as many different warm human openings as possible. Of course, when a man seduces a woman he is not consciously trying to get her pregnant, usually that’s the furthest thing from his mind, but it doesn’t matter. Under the surface, his gene-code is driving him.

Homosexuals, of course, generally do not reproduce at all unless they make special arrangements. But it doesn’t matter. A gay man still has a male sex drive – it’s just that the object of it is different. (Which raises the question of how homosexuality can be hereditary, and why it doesn’t breed itself out of the gene pool – but we’ve already had threads on that.)

@j66

Women are as horny as men; sex is just not as sure a thing for women as it is for men.

For real psysiological reasons, women have more physically disappointing sexual experiences than men do. That takes it toll on the libido.

Maybe so, j66, but there’s another difference: You can always get it if you want it. The glory of being a man is that you can’t get pregnant. The glory of being a woman is that you can always get laid. You don’t even need to be fertile, or young, or beautiful by the standards of the culture you’re living in. You can be a really ugly and disgusting woman, and you can not only find men willing to have sex with you, you can find men willing to pay good money (and risk arrest and punishment and public humiliation and incurable diseases) for the privilege of having sex with you. I’ve seen a lot of ugly whores on the street who appear to be making a steady living, if nothing more.

[Kimstu]

BG: A woman can have maybe ten children in a lifetime; it’s in her interest to snag just one man, hang on to him, and keep him from straying, so he’ll provide for her and her children. But a man, given access to enough fertile and willing women (and actually, they don’t even have to be willing), can sire literally hundreds of children in a year. Do the math. We are all descended from the men (and the women) who had the most reproductive success. As a result, a man is genetically programmed to want to insert his penis into as many different warm human openings as possible.

I think this argument is somewhat valid, but I’m a little dubious about evolutionary psychology (the new name for sociobiology, AFAICT) in general. In its most general form, it seems to be a newer and more scientifically sophisticated way of saying “It’s God’s will”: “it provides an evolutionary advantage, so our genes make us do it.”

I rather doubt that as a universal principle. I incline more to Gould’s idea of “spandrels”, the frequent development and survival of traits that don’t provide an evolutionary advantage but that go along for the genetic ride because they don’t provide any significant disadvantage. I think too many evo-psychs seem to overlook this possibility in favor of making up an evolutionary advantage that they think accrued to our primate ancestors from a particular behavior that they’re trying to explain. Sometimes people just do what they do because it’s what they do, y’know?

That said, if for the sake of argument we go with this hypothesis, I think it still could be modified somewhat. After all, the best reproductive advantage for the women in your scenario would be to have a male supporting her offspring but still have sexual access to other, possibly more virile or reproductively desirable males, right?

Maybe this is why many cultures have a prejudice against women as inherently adulterous (cf. Ecclesiastes and the Puranas). Maybe women do desire random sex opportunities as much as men do but simply indulge it less because we have more to lose, unless it can be managed in secrecy.

Would we straight guys conduct ourselves in such a disgusting, hedonistic, promiscuous fashion, if the world were full of straight or bi women who were willing to relate to us on exactly those terms? Would we fuck unseen women through opaque partitions? Would we make use of 1,000 or more female sex partners in a year? Would we go to highly charged mixed-gender clubs where everybody dances up a sweat, does lots of drugs, and has orgies of fornication in the dark corners?

Actually, when I read that, the first thing I thought was that it did sound kind of attractive (barring the drugs bit)—if it wouldn’t risk my health or make me a “bad girl” or something. Maybe it’s not that women really aren’t biologically impelled towards promiscuity, but rather that we’re biologically impelled not to risk too much for the sake of promiscuity.

Your mission, BG, should you choose to accept it, is to make promiscuous heterosexual sex less socially threatening to women and reduce its perception as damaging to their chances of social and emotional desirability and security. (Maybe you could combine it with a knitting club or something. :D)

Oh right, there was an original thread topic here, wasn’t there? Count me in among the feminists who think that this guy is several sandwiches short of a picnic, at least on the topic of gay marriage.

[MrVisible]

Another factor in gay male promiscuity that people tend to ignore is that it’s expected behavior.

Society sees promiscuity as the norm for gay people. A lot of guys figure that if they’re already being condemned for doing something, why not do it?

To be honest, up until a few years ago, the idea of spending my life with one guy hadn’t really occurred to me. I didn’t move in gay social circles, so I didn’t know any long-term gay couples, and there’s a major dearth of stable gay couples portrayed in the media. In fact I remember the first time I saw one. Four Weddings and a Funeral. Of course, the funeral was for one of the gay men.

Now that I’m with the man I want to share the rest of my life with, I’d love to get married, to show him commitment. To show him I’m not afraid to tie my life to his, that I have faith in him and in our relationship, to assure him that I’m in this for the long haul, to be by his side for life.

Growing up, I never even thought that this might happen.

Can you see where that might encourage promiscuous behavior?

[Cervaise]

I think Mr. Kunstler needs to make friends with some actual gay people. Skulking around in the back of the crowd at the Pride Parade is clearly skewing his perception. :rolleyes:

[jayjay]

@Cervaise

Skulking around in the back of the crowd at the Pride Parade is clearly skewing his perception. :rolleyes:

But the view is spectacular!

[j666]

BrainGlutton;

That is not entirely true.
But, yeah, it’s true; but it is just another facet of my original point. Women are slower to orgasm, and can be left unsatisfied. So they think twice before they struggle out of those damn control-top panty-hose.

But I just noticed something I missed last night

Exhibit three: the “Lives” endpaper of the Sunday Magazine, an article by a woman whose life was devastated because a 21-year-old male babysitter had given her 9-year-old daughter kissing lessons. . . .

Finally, though, the New York Times gives the game away with that Magazine endpaper about the babysitter who gave kissing lessons and thus destroyed a mother’s life. The Times stands for a new and extremely peculiar form of puritanism: one that regards heterosexuality as fundamentally disgusting …

This guy thinks homosexuals are all by nature predatory and the Catholic Church’s problems result from uncloseted homosexuality rather than millenia of mysogyny, but that a 21 year old kissing a 9 year old is normal heterosexuality instead of 'fundamentally disgusting?

WTF!

[Sage_Rat]

@BrainGlutton

Well, a lot of feminists and sexual revolutionaries back in the '60s and '70s believed that if we got rid of artificial cultural gender-roles, then gender-specific sexual behaviors would disappear. But despite the sexual revolution and despite the feminist revolution, not a lot has changed in that regard. Prostitution still exists, sex has not become so easy to get that prostitutes can’t make a living; and it’s still almost exclusively men who go to prostitutes. There are male prostitutes but they mostly serve gay male clients. Ditto with strip clubs, pornography, etc. Rape still exists, and it’s still something men do to women, or to other men. Marriage still exists, and adultery still exists.

I do believe that there are bio-physiological differences between men and women which will cause us to behave differently even given the same exact upbringing. Though I would argue that most of the people from the 60’s and 70’s grew up and raised their children similarly to how they had been raised. I don’t think that there are very many parents who have actually raised their kid without trying to inhibit or encourage some sort of gender normitive behavior.

I just doubt that whatever actual physiological urges men might have–even if these are stronger than women’s–are strong enough that this whole idea that we “just can’t control it” is valid. I can control myself. Lots of guys can.

For instance, if you think about bachelor parties. Men are expected to go out and do something lewd before their marriage. Their friends will arrange it so, and anyone who goes will essentially be required to do something out of sheer peer pressure. I can appreciate some fine jiggle when it comes to it, but I can imagine very well that the reason I might get a lap dance at my bachelor party would have more to do with getting my friends off my back than because I “just can’t control myself as a guy.”

To be certain, there probably are guys who truly do have raging hormones and insane amounts of testosterone flowing through them on a constant basis (I have heard that guys in jail tend to have more Y chromosome.) But for the most part, I suspect that the reason guys behave the way they do is due to snowballing over the last several millenia based on the actual bio-physiological differences between men and women, until we have come to expect–if not encourage exagerated bahavior based on those differences.

[BrainGlutton]

@JRDelirious

However . . . Ivy League seniors “are being encouraged to submit to extreme acts of surgical mutilation in order to erase their sexual identity.” ??? Huh

Well, Kunstler was talking about the case of Luke Wilson, a Brown senior, born female, who underwent surgery to acquire more male characteristics. Who is “encouraging” this is unclear – except that the New York Times not only printed a sympathetic account of it, but put it in the “Sunday Styles” section. I think what JHK really has a problem with is the implication that your gender identity is something as trivial and changeable as your clothing or your hairstyle.

@Kimstu

After all, the best reproductive advantage for the women in your scenario would be to have a male supporting her offspring but still have sexual access to other, possibly more virile or reproductively desirable males, right?

As I recall (don’t have any sources in front of me), the theory of sociobiology (or evolutionary psychology) also predicts that result – which provides an explanation for why adultery is not a strictly male peccadillo.

[Minotaurus]

@BrainGlutton

Is gay marriage a radical feminist tactic to “get as many men as possible corralled into a gay ghetto with the priapic diversions of gay life” and to achieve “the complete marginalization of men”? If so, is this a good thing or a bad thing?

this one was interesting

I just came overt this older debate and what hit me was thet feminist always have been very pro-gay and anti-hetero-male

[tomndebb]

If you would like to initiate a discussion, (not a series of one-liners), on this topic, feel free to open a new thread with a link to this one.

Posting to ancient threads in which some participants may no longer be members or which may have included heated discussions already resolved in other threads or by e-mail is generally considered inappropriate.

Closed.

[ /Moderating ]