What about pederasty in ancient Greece, what about sex in all-male prisons… in both those cases, you have men who by current definitions are not gay, but rather bisexual. And in both cases you have recruitment into an existing sexual culture, whether through seduction or coercion.
Human sexuality can clearly assume an enormous variety of forms, and I don’t have a unified theory of it. Obviously genes matter, starting with the basic facts of sex determination, and then in a more elusive way, having some effect on sexual dispositions in the mature organism.
And yes, natural selection will be at work. But, in this case it is heavily mediated by culture (which is itself a realm of replicator populations), and it is constrained by the evolvability of the human genome. I continue to think that the existence of nonreproductive sexuality is simply a side effect of our genomic and evolutionary “business model”, of leaky sexual dimorphism combined with Turing-complete cognition.
What about pederasty in ancient Greece, what about sex in all-male prisons… in both those cases, you have men who by current definitions are not gay, but rather bisexual.
Pederasty in ancient Greece was culturally very different from modern homosexual behavior though (or at least, the conventional view thereof; some people would contend that the ‘ancient’ model is very much lurking beneath the surface of even the most modern, ‘egalitarian’ gay relationships!). In that case, there was a very clear demarcation between an active participant (the pederast or erastês) who did behave ‘bisexually’ in some sense, but was really more properly connoted as highly masculine, and a passive participant (the erômenos) who was the only one to be specially connoted as ‘feminine’.
The sexual manifestations of pederasty were also criticized by quite a few philosophers and intellectuals, and the tone of these critiques suggests that pederasty could easily shade into sexually abusive behavior. (Notably, Christian morality also shared this critical attitude—the heavy censure of “homosexuality” and heterosexual “fornication” one finds in the New Testament can really only be understood in the light of Graeco-Roman sexual practices). Sex in all-male prisons also seems to share many of these same features; at the very least, if the common stereotypes of it are to be believed, it doesn’t really feature the ‘egalitarianism’ of modern homosexual relationships!
What about pederasty in ancient Greece, what about sex in all-male prisons… in both those cases, you have men who by current definitions are not gay, but rather bisexual. And in both cases you have recruitment into an existing sexual culture, whether through seduction or coercion.
Human sexuality can clearly assume an enormous variety of forms, and I don’t have a unified theory of it. Obviously genes matter, starting with the basic facts of sex determination, and then in a more elusive way, having some effect on sexual dispositions in the mature organism.
And yes, natural selection will be at work. But, in this case it is heavily mediated by culture (which is itself a realm of replicator populations), and it is constrained by the evolvability of the human genome. I continue to think that the existence of nonreproductive sexuality is simply a side effect of our genomic and evolutionary “business model”, of leaky sexual dimorphism combined with Turing-complete cognition.
Pederasty in ancient Greece was culturally very different from modern homosexual behavior though (or at least, the conventional view thereof; some people would contend that the ‘ancient’ model is very much lurking beneath the surface of even the most modern, ‘egalitarian’ gay relationships!). In that case, there was a very clear demarcation between an active participant (the pederast or erastês) who did behave ‘bisexually’ in some sense, but was really more properly connoted as highly masculine, and a passive participant (the erômenos) who was the only one to be specially connoted as ‘feminine’.
The sexual manifestations of pederasty were also criticized by quite a few philosophers and intellectuals, and the tone of these critiques suggests that pederasty could easily shade into sexually abusive behavior. (Notably, Christian morality also shared this critical attitude—the heavy censure of “homosexuality” and heterosexual “fornication” one finds in the New Testament can really only be understood in the light of Graeco-Roman sexual practices). Sex in all-male prisons also seems to share many of these same features; at the very least, if the common stereotypes of it are to be believed, it doesn’t really feature the ‘egalitarianism’ of modern homosexual relationships!