Yes, and I have experienced both. I recognize that some men are attractive by the usual societal standard, but I don’t find them attractive (i.e. Brad Pitt, Cary Grant). Some men I find attractive in a different way, like the aforementioned Taye Diggs and Owen Wilson. I don’t want to have sex with them, but if I knew them in person I’d probably want to be around them and possibly like them more than their personality dictates, yet I can’t imagine myself getting sexually aroused by them.
I like kiwi fruit. What does that make me?
You don’t own a German shepard, do you?
I would self-identify as a heterosexual male. I don’t enjoy porn that involves cock. In fact, if Cinemax would get their act together I’d only watch all-female porn.
According to your thesis, then, I’m… an uber-lesbian?
Minor point: I think what’s meant in the OP by “abundance of big, hard cock” isn’t just that cock is present in hetero porn but specifically that it’s shot and edited in such a way as to make it a pronounced aspect of the visual (as opposed to its incidental presence without much focus on it besides its necessary inclusion in the close up dick/vaginal/anal shots) and that it’s size is of aesthetic value to the viewer even if heterosexual.
But isn’t that what he’s saying? That everyone recognizes attractive men (as you’ve stated you have) and that then some people develop the urge to touch them and others don’t; I believe he labeled it as ‘maturing to become…comfortable with sexuality’ on the one hand or become homosexual on the other. You’re the former.
I think that’s what was meant…?
Could everyone please stop saying “big, hard cock?” It’s making me feel… confused.
In this discussion, the implicit assumption has been that there are cognitive factors that lead to homosexuality. The explanation is probably much “lower level”. You can make a male rat homosexual (i.e. it will act like a female with respect to a male, and adopt the lordotic posture typical of a receptive female) by injecting a large dose of female hormones immediately after birth (Dewhurst 1969, Dorner 1976). Rat brains have a different timeline of development, and for a few days after birth the rat brain has far more plasticity than the equivalent human brain, something like the mid-gestation human brain. The same can be done with females: give a neonate female rat pup a large dose of male hormones, and it will act like a male when it grows up (territorial, try to mount females, etc.).
There is lots of other evidence along these lines, and I just don’t have the energy to summarize it all here now, but it boils down to this: there is some circuit/subsystem in our brains that makes us attracted to males or attracted to females sexually, and that circuit gets set up early in development (in utero) by the hormonal environment.
Thus, all the cognitive factors being debated may be post-hoc rationalizations of basic biological drives.
So what would you inject rats with to make butch gay or girly lesbian rats?
I think they tend towards big cocks in porn for three reasons:
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Lots of guys want to be in porn, which is why male actors are paid less, supply and demand. If you have a choice of what male actors are going to be in the film, why not pick the big-dicked ones, because…
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When watching a porno, a man is imagining themselves to be the guy doing the fucking. Why would a guy want to imagine being a small-dicked guy, even if they do happen to be small-dicked themselves? We want our heroes in action movies to be strong manly men, and we want our porn heroes to have big dicks.
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It adds to the “realism” of the female porn star acting like getting fucked is a powerful experience. Seeing a female porn star moan and howl as she’s prodded with a 5" dick is going to ruin the suspension of disbelief.
Thank you. I try my best to express myself, but I just can’t. I think i’m getting better though. Anyway, I’ve learned enough to step aside when others have something to say on my side of the topic. (seriously, only when I lay off for a while do people come out and agree). So for now I won’t say much. What you said was eloquently put, and moreover, exactly what I was thinking. I don’t usually agree with anyone 100%, but this was it.
Yes, that’s a good criticism. I think that a) women don’t have the overpowering urge to hump something that many men do and b) women have more complex criteria for selecting a partner. I think it is easier for women to become bi/homosexual, but they feel less incentive to do so (and the homophobia spiral, which is not about incentives, is also very weak).
tomndebb… your criticisms are mostly against the homophobia spiral. I stress that it’s not the only (or most popular) mechanism. E.g., I can easily see how a person can have a homosexual urge at a young age. I think, in fact, everyone can. Maybe people who happen to have such a fond memory come to grow up gay. Or maybe ‘homophobia’ (in a weak sense of the word) plays a part in them thinking about that incident later in life.
And let me say one last thing before I go quiet: evolution has a very powerful urge to weed out homosexuality. What I like about my theory is that it’s about a way for homosexuality to sneak under the radar, so to speak. There may still be low-level male/female brain parts, as neuromancer pointed out, but evolution will try very hard not to mix them up. For example, what is the natural incidence of homosexuality in the rats that have this very clear switch?
To this I’ll add the following:
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It is easier to shoot a larger penis than a smaller one. A longer larger penis allows for more camera angles while intercourse is still occuring.
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Porn is about Arousal and Climax. A little flaccid penis isn’t really a good vehicle for conveying the message of : “This is arousing.”
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Adding on to #2, The male in porn is also usually significantly larger than his partner, reinforcing the “dominant male pleasuring his partner” role. This is closely linked to the protective powerful mate concept.
I’m sorry, but that’s just incorrect. Evolution has no urges, powerful or otherwise.
Anthropomorphizing the process of evolution does not serve to strengthen your argument.
Don’t get too fond of your hypothesis. It certainly doesn’t rise to the level of a theory, and stands in contradiction in many places with a lot of data that is generally accepted as fact.
But have fun with it while you can!
If you believe this, you don’t know squat about evolution. Evolution is a series of random accidents; some get passed on to subsequent generations, some don’t.
Damn, who’s been teaching this crap about evolution? Is it some sort of reaction against creationism?
Hurricanes have a strong urge to become more powerful over warm water. They have a strong urge to cause destruction if they make landfall.
Evolution does have trajectories and ‘goals’, even if you hate the “anthropomorphic” language. You say one thing about trends in evolution, and you have a million people on this board screaming the doctine “evolution’s not teleological!” It’s like that Stephen J Gould book I read where he tries to argue that the goal of evolution isn’t to produce more complex things with time. He gave a great explanation why it just “seems” that way: organisms can’t get any simpler, but random drift can always make them more complex. What a fool, he just spent 200 pages explaining the very mechanism by which evolution produces more and more advanced things. (Or is that not the same as “evolution’s goal is ever-increasing complexity?” Are we arguing about phrasing?)
Why do people have this desire to prove evolution doesn’t do anything? Yes, it’s a bunch of random mutations (like the molecules in a cloud). And yes, those random motions mean gay genes don’t get passed along (and clouds float and drop rain). Sheesh.
And yet, if there is a biological component to homosexuality there’s been no reduction in its representation in the gene pool in recorded history. So clearly there is something wrong with your analysis.
Language matters, especially in science. A “trend” and an “urge” are not at all the same. Not even close. Moreover, it is important to know that a trend signifies nothing about the future, but only about the past, and is a meta-data interpretation.
If you simply must qualify evolution metaphorically, then you need to impose the theory of natural selection, which is the framework in which evolution occurs. Evolution is always happening. It is nothing more than unpredictable mutations (unpredictable because there is no guiding hand). It is natural selection that determines which mutations survive.
At the risk of piling on, your respondents have been correct that your description is inaccurate and Liberal is correct that language matters.
Huricanes have no “urges” to become more powerful; the result of a hurricane passing over warm water is an increase in energy levels within the hurricane that result in greater wind strength. If hurricanes had urges, they would wander about the ocean seeking warmer water to become stronger, and avoid landfall that will result in their dissipation.
Gould’s point was exactly accurate and you do not seem to have understood it, even if you gave it lip service. Evolution has results–the complexity and survival or death of species–but to have a goal, it would need to find some way to actually pursue that complexity or it would need a decision mechanism to choose which species were intended to survive or die.
In the case of homosexuality, if evolution had a “goal” or an “urge” to eliminate homosexuality, it would seem to me that evolution would have actually accomplished that effort a few million years ago, yet the evidence is that a fairly large number of critters, particularly among warm-blooded species, continue to produce homosexual individuals.
Which brings up another point. Not every frigging thing with respect to biological life is about evolution. We don’t have everything that we have just because we are progeny. Sometimes, it is ridiculous what people will project onto evolution. I’ve heard people say that Scandinavians have evolved narrow nasal passages to better deal with breathing in the cold. And yet the Inuit have wide nasal passages and their environment is just as cold. Such characteristics are a result of mutations NOT happening. They’re just plain heredity. And that’s not even an extreme example.
The whole thing works differently for generalized creatures like man than it does for specialist creatures like beavers. Man’s intellectual adaptability is as often the key to his survival as is selection from nature. It can be argued that because man’s brain evolved, evolution has a role in man’s generality. But being intelligent (in an IQ sense) certainly doesn’t necessarily ensure survival. Clever beats smart any day. So does brawn, which helps establish political control (especially in early man). The progeny that survive are, more than anything, lucky.