Of course. That’s why I mentioned that given the apparent distribution of homosexuality, that there probably wouldn’t be a great selective pressure there as we might imagine. Given a population of 100 people, they must birth 100 children. If 50% are women, and everyone finds a mate, then the average woman must have two children. The number will increase by two for every couple that, for whatever reason, cannot give birth.
If we strongly believe in an evolutionary psychology perspective, homosexuals should be shunned as much as those who cannot give birth due to congenital defects or other sources. I don’t think we find that to actually be the case, though. Certainly not today.
That’s my point. While we can build a seemingly plausible pressure against homosexuality, what we are referencing (an inability to have children) is not limited to homosexuality, so neither should the pressure.
Given the current human population, I hardly think survival of the species is any longer an issue. Perhaps gay people should be given credit for keeping the population **down **to a mere 6 billion.
Wait a minute. Homosexuals are not unable to have children, they simply don’t want to. Or to be more precise, they don’t want to engage in…ahhh…certain behavior which, until very recently, was absolutely necessary to having children.
The idea that fluffy emotional things like love, romance, and desire should have anything to do with the serious work of marriage and childbearing is a pretty recent development in most cultures…and an idea whose time has not yet come in some cultures even today. In many places, through much of history, people married the people their parents picked out for them and performed their marital duties out of, well, duty. If you actually liked your spouse and enjoyed sex with him or her then so much the better, but this was not a prerequisite. With most marriages it was something that came with time, but in many it never happened at all.
Generation after generation, married couples who weren’t all that crazy about each other managed to get through it by “thinking of England”…or maybe about whoever it was they were seeing (or wanted to be seeing) on the side. It didn’t matter that they would just as soon not “engage in certain behavior” with their lawful spouse. They did what was socially expected of them, produced the needed offspring, and in many cases had their fun with someone else – which was often more or less expected, or at least grudgingly accepted, too.
Believe it or not, the average homosexual is just as capable of suffering through unsatisfying sex with someone they aren’t attracted to as the average heterosexual is. They don’t need to be threatened into it or made to hate their natural desires, they just need to be convinced that it is something they need to do now and then for the good of the family. In other words, in the distant past if you wanted your gay kids to have kids, it was enough to treat them exactly the way you treated your straight kids.
No, of course not. At least not today. But we’re talking about the distant past here and I don’t think we should judge people from centuries past too harshly. I’m glad I don’t live in a culture where my parents could sell me off to the highest bidder by the time I hit 16 so I could spend the next couple of decades squeezing out babies, and my sexual orientation doesn’t have anything to do with my feelings on the matter. It sounds like a wretched life for any woman, straight, gay, or bi. Yet for hundreds of years, that’s the wretched life that many women had to live…regardless of their sexual orientation. The situation for men was perhaps a little better, but in most cases not a lot. But the point of all this is, given historic cultural attitudes towards marriage and childbearing, there’s no clear reason why homophobia would have been needed on top of everything else if the prime goal was to “preserve the family line”.
There are situations where a cultural attitude to the effect of “Son, you’re going to marry this girl and have children with her whether you like it or not. It doesn’t matter if you like another girl better, it doesn’t even matter if you like another boy better. It’s your duty as a member of this family to ensure that our good name carries on, and that means marrying the girl we picked out for you” might have at least be perceived as necessary. But when could “Oh by the way son, if you ever meet a man who wants to have sex with you, it would be great if you could just kill him” have done anyone a bit of good? That’s why I can’t buy sociobiological attempts at rationalizing homophobia as necessary for preserving the continuation of the species. Any supposed benefits of homophobia could be (and as best as I can tell from history, were) just as easily accomplished through other social pressures that, while perhaps unpleasant, at least weren’t hateful or dangerous.
I think there’s also a case to be made arguing that it’s for the good of the species if there are people around who don’t have as many children as they possibly can, or even any children at all, and this leaves homophobia looking even stupider from an evolutionary perspective. But really, it’s stupid no matter how you look at it.
Since I’m being longwinded already, I would like to throw in an apology for any confusion I may have caused with my earlier post. Looking back over it, I can see how I may have unintentionally appeared to be advocating forcing homosexuals into unsatisfying heterosexual marriages for the purpose of reproduction. But all I was attempting to say was that many historic societies were set up so that pretty much everyone was forced into an unsatisfying heterosexual marriage for the purpose of reproduction.
This being the case, there’d be no need for an extra stigma to develop against homosexuals. Indeed, some of these societies (most famously the Ancient Greeks) allowed people to have quite public homosexual love relationships right alongside their required heterosexual marriages.
Isn’t it the case that there was a stigma attached to, well, which party one was to the acts? Of course I’m only thinking of males here. I know next to nothing about that, and absolutely nothing about homosexual women throughout history at any period. Even my grasp of the present is shakey
At any rate, that doesn’t derail what is a great point.
I’m far from an expert on the subject myself, although I do find it very interesting. In Greece there was something of a stigma attached to being a mature man who enjoyed being the submissive/receptive partner in a homosexual relationship. This was the accepted role for younger men in a relationship, but if you were an older man it was looked down upon. If you read Aristophanes, there are jokes at the expense of these men that are pretty much the same as your cruder modern sitcom jokes about gay men…they’re portrayed as silly, unmanly, obsessed with fashion, etc. It seems the Greeks cared a lot about maintaining acceptable gender roles, but not so much about who you actually had sex with.
In regard to homosexual women throughout history, sadly there’s very little to know because almost nothing on the subject has come down to us in the written record. Not just from Ancient Greece, but from any culture. We do know that the Greeks were aware that sexual relationships between women existed. They even had stereotypes about big butch bulldykes who cut their hair like men. As with male homosexuals who favored “gender inappropriate” roles, these women weren’t seen in a very favorable light. But for the most part, Greek men don’t seem to have considered female homosexuality worth mentioning at all, and they were the ones doing most of the writing (with the notable exception of Sappho!). Since the Greeks considered women to be unable to control their sexual appetites the way men could (no, really) and since there was a huge stigma against conceiving children pre/extramaritally, I suspect that it may have been considered harmless enough for women to work off some of that excess sexual energy with each other. But maybe that’s just me dreaming.
