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One other point. I am not convinced by biological explanations of homosexuality. I don't think it's a choice anymore than some guy goes into a bar and sits do

One other point. I am not convinced by biological explanations of homosexuality. I don't think it's a choice anymore than some guy goes into a bar and sits down and decides what color of hair to prefer. The development of sexual identity is a complex thing and there are societies in the past where homosexual relationships have been a lot more common than they are at present. For example, Plutarch characterizes pederastic relationships (probably circumscribed by all sorts of taboos in order to render them non-predatory) as forming the political backbone of Spartan society--- these relationships provided young male Spartan citizens the ability, he suggests, to make the sorts of political connections they needed to be successful later in life. If the surveys of Greek vase paintings are to be believed, it is likely that most Greek citizen women also engaged in some homosexual relationships within religious contexts in ancient Greece as well. Was this bad? I don't think so. These were all channelled into very pro-social frameworks if we believe folks like Aristotle, Plutarch, and the modern scholars who have studied vase paintings and the like. Instead I think the "born that way" thesis is actually homophobic. Our society is very aggressively hetero-normal. You can find Barby and Ken playsets, but if there was an equivalent Barby and Kendra dyke playset, well... it would be seen as sexualized in a way that Barby and Ken are not. In this context, where our society says "straight is the way normal people are" in our toys, movies, bridal magazines, etc, the "born that way" thesis reduces to "well, there is a small minority that is just different and will never be like everyone else. You aren't one of them, are you?" So in many ways perhaps even the gay rights movement entrenches obstacles to normalization of same sex relationships. I am not saying this is good or bad. I am just describing it how I think it is.

jules 14y ago
There is clear evidence for genetic and pre-birth factors in determining sexual orientation. Not all of the variance has been accounted for, but that doesn't mean that a substantial part of the variance has been solidly explained by biological factors. What exactly do you not agree with in the numerous studies that have been done? Your last two paragraphs don't make sense. That our society is very aggressively hetero normal is not caused by gay rights movements or by homosexuality being determined at birth, on the contrary. It is however caused by people who argue that marriage is only for heterosexuals.
- einhverfr 14y ago
  The problem is that trans-historically and cross-culturally the percentage of people who engage in significant same-sex relationships varies quite a bit. These range from approximately a hundred percent to a very tiny minority. We are on the lower-end of the spectrum, believe it or not. All these studies show is that there may be biological reasons that aggressively acculturating kids into heterosexuality might not reach everyone. They don't suggest that heterosexuality and homosexuality are necessarily in-born. Indeed when you think about all the cognitive stuff that has to happen before we find someone attractive, they almost certainly cannot.
  - jules 14y ago
    First of all, pederastic relationships are not at all the same as homosexual relationships between people of age. In ancient Greece, homosexuality between adult males was condemned. Your theory that the range is from 100% to nearly 0% is simply wrong. I do agree with you that birth reasons do not determine the outcome. There are two separate issues: same sex attractions and calling oneself homosexual/bisexual and having homosexual relationships. It is obvious that culture has a larger effect on the latter than on the former. It's no surprise that there are fewer people who call themselves homosexual in cultures where people are killed for calling themselves homosexual. Yet studies indicate that pre-birth biological factors have a large influence on the latter. Sexual attractions are very hard to study, unfortunately, but would likely show even larger biological influence. Even so, I do think that culture has an effect on sexual attraction.
    - einhverfr 14y ago
      First of all, pederastic relationships are not at all the same as homosexual relationships between people of age. In ancient Greece, homosexuality between adult males was condemned. Your theory that the range is from 100% to nearly 0% is simply wrong. I think we say this because we have stronger taboos against one than another. Keep in mind that women were considered to be at age of marriage at not much older, so... Also it is simply not true that homosexuality between adult males was condemned. At most homosexuality between adult male equals was condemned and the reason probably had to do with the association of anal sex with blurring gender lines (Greek pederastic relationships if we believe Aristotle, made penetrative sex strictly off-limits for this reason). Keep in mind also that "adult" is another inherently cultural concept..... It happens at different ages in different societies. When does one become an adult? Age of 14? 16? 12? 18? 21? Something else? There is no biological line there either. Indeed we've known since van Gennep that puberty and adolescence are distinct and may not even overlap in any given culture for a specific individual. But hey, if we take Plutarch's word for it wife-swapping in Sparta was the way adult male equals were supposed to... um... build connections..... But it's not limited to Greece. When you look at cases where ritual male-male fellatio is practiced, some of these places have it going well into adult-hood rather than one-time becoming a man. I don't know that you can call ritual homosexual contact "not significant." I would certainly call it significant. But even where we get to attraction, there are some basic problems which have to do with getting past the feeble nature of the senses. We can't directly sense whether someone is male or female, what social class they belong to, what kind of personality they have. So we process social cues. We see someone from behind "nice long hair, skirt, must be an attractive woman." We walk by, check her out and are horrified to see it is a bearded hippie. Everyone has had some sort of experience like this, and in our culture it provokes immediate negative emotions. Sometimes these emotions of shock and dismay (and even confusion) lead to tragedy. In one case in Denver not too long ago (see http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/19121127/detail.html http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/19121127/detail.html) a man murdered his transgendered girlfriend after discovering she had previously been a man. She had given him a blowjob the day before, and evidently he couldn't deal with the confusion over whether he had been given a blowjob by a man or a woman. This is a purely cognitive process, not one based on biology. If it were based in biology, I suppose we could treat her as the perpetrator of non-consensual sex-acts by failing to disclose the inherent nature of the act.... but I don't think think that works. So sexual attraction, and reactions to what social category someone is in (and this includes gender) are fundamentally based on cognitive processes. There is no way around this. Cognition and social instincts, rather than the inherent nature of the object of sexual desires, determines who we are attracted to. At most biological underpinnings of sexual orientation in our society affect these social instincts and cognitive aspects. They simply can't reach the underlying nature of the, if you will, archetype of attraction. (Using "archetype" here to mean the image we have that we expect to resemble the person we are attracted to.)
agateform 14y ago
There is a Stanford lecture on Human Sexual Behavior that is related to the discussion of neurobiology of homosexuality http://youtu.be/LOY3QH_jOtE#t=1h13m27s http://youtu.be/LOY3QH_jOtE#t=1h13m27s (the relevant part starts at 1:13)
- einhverfr 14y ago
  See my comments above. We can't directly sense whether someone is male or female. If we could, I am sure the world would be safer for transsexuals. We have to process what we see, and make sense of what we see in other people before we can find them attractive. Attraction is thus necessarily built on cognition. All you can show with current studies is that there might be a biological reason why aggressively indoctrinating all children into heterosexuality might not in fact cause everybody to conform.

jules 14y ago

There is clear evidence for genetic and pre-birth factors in determining sexual orientation. Not all of the variance has been accounted for, but that doesn't mean that a substantial part of the variance has been solidly explained by biological factors. What exactly do you not agree with in the numerous studies that have been done? Your last two paragraphs don't make sense. That our society is very aggressively hetero normal is not caused by gay rights movements or by homosexuality being determined at birth, on the contrary. It is however caused by people who argue that marriage is only for heterosexuals.

einhverfr 14y ago
The problem is that trans-historically and cross-culturally the percentage of people who engage in significant same-sex relationships varies quite a bit. These range from approximately a hundred percent to a very tiny minority. We are on the lower-end of the spectrum, believe it or not. All these studies show is that there may be biological reasons that aggressively acculturating kids into heterosexuality might not reach everyone. They don't suggest that heterosexuality and homosexuality are necessarily in-born. Indeed when you think about all the cognitive stuff that has to happen before we find someone attractive, they almost certainly cannot.
- jules 14y ago
  First of all, pederastic relationships are not at all the same as homosexual relationships between people of age. In ancient Greece, homosexuality between adult males was condemned. Your theory that the range is from 100% to nearly 0% is simply wrong. I do agree with you that birth reasons do not determine the outcome. There are two separate issues: same sex attractions and calling oneself homosexual/bisexual and having homosexual relationships. It is obvious that culture has a larger effect on the latter than on the former. It's no surprise that there are fewer people who call themselves homosexual in cultures where people are killed for calling themselves homosexual. Yet studies indicate that pre-birth biological factors have a large influence on the latter. Sexual attractions are very hard to study, unfortunately, but would likely show even larger biological influence. Even so, I do think that culture has an effect on sexual attraction.
  - einhverfr 14y ago
    First of all, pederastic relationships are not at all the same as homosexual relationships between people of age. In ancient Greece, homosexuality between adult males was condemned. Your theory that the range is from 100% to nearly 0% is simply wrong. I think we say this because we have stronger taboos against one than another. Keep in mind that women were considered to be at age of marriage at not much older, so... Also it is simply not true that homosexuality between adult males was condemned. At most homosexuality between adult male equals was condemned and the reason probably had to do with the association of anal sex with blurring gender lines (Greek pederastic relationships if we believe Aristotle, made penetrative sex strictly off-limits for this reason). Keep in mind also that "adult" is another inherently cultural concept..... It happens at different ages in different societies. When does one become an adult? Age of 14? 16? 12? 18? 21? Something else? There is no biological line there either. Indeed we've known since van Gennep that puberty and adolescence are distinct and may not even overlap in any given culture for a specific individual. But hey, if we take Plutarch's word for it wife-swapping in Sparta was the way adult male equals were supposed to... um... build connections..... But it's not limited to Greece. When you look at cases where ritual male-male fellatio is practiced, some of these places have it going well into adult-hood rather than one-time becoming a man. I don't know that you can call ritual homosexual contact "not significant." I would certainly call it significant. But even where we get to attraction, there are some basic problems which have to do with getting past the feeble nature of the senses. We can't directly sense whether someone is male or female, what social class they belong to, what kind of personality they have. So we process social cues. We see someone from behind "nice long hair, skirt, must be an attractive woman." We walk by, check her out and are horrified to see it is a bearded hippie. Everyone has had some sort of experience like this, and in our culture it provokes immediate negative emotions. Sometimes these emotions of shock and dismay (and even confusion) lead to tragedy. In one case in Denver not too long ago (see http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/19121127/detail.html http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/19121127/detail.html) a man murdered his transgendered girlfriend after discovering she had previously been a man. She had given him a blowjob the day before, and evidently he couldn't deal with the confusion over whether he had been given a blowjob by a man or a woman. This is a purely cognitive process, not one based on biology. If it were based in biology, I suppose we could treat her as the perpetrator of non-consensual sex-acts by failing to disclose the inherent nature of the act.... but I don't think think that works. So sexual attraction, and reactions to what social category someone is in (and this includes gender) are fundamentally based on cognitive processes. There is no way around this. Cognition and social instincts, rather than the inherent nature of the object of sexual desires, determines who we are attracted to. At most biological underpinnings of sexual orientation in our society affect these social instincts and cognitive aspects. They simply can't reach the underlying nature of the, if you will, archetype of attraction. (Using "archetype" here to mean the image we have that we expect to resemble the person we are attracted to.)

agateform 14y ago

There is a Stanford lecture on Human Sexual Behavior that is related to the discussion of neurobiology of homosexuality http://youtu.be/LOY3QH_jOtE#t=1h13m27s http://youtu.be/LOY3QH_jOtE#t=1h13m27s (the relevant part starts at 1:13)

einhverfr 14y ago
See my comments above. We can't directly sense whether someone is male or female. If we could, I am sure the world would be safer for transsexuals. We have to process what we see, and make sense of what we see in other people before we can find them attractive. Attraction is thus necessarily built on cognition. All you can show with current studies is that there might be a biological reason why aggressively indoctrinating all children into heterosexuality might not in fact cause everybody to conform.