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Re: Homosexuality: male & female
jbernst@pipeline.com
10 Sep 1996 14:23:33 GMT
Lars Eighner is right. The 10% thing is an exaggeration, all the more so
the 1 in 6 sometimes touted by homosexuals. I would guess 2-4 percent of
males are homosexual and a fraction of a percent, up to 1 percent at most
of females are lesbians. In non-technical terms, men are more likely to
have something wrong with them than women. There are more male criminals,
more retarded people, and for that matter more geniuses. It has to do with
that Y chromosome.
I think a superb book, little if ever talked about by anthropologists (I
guess they don't think it's cool) is "Sex and Reason" by Richard Posner
(Harvard University Press). He talks about the fact that some guys are
straight but they'll settle for a man when they can't get a woman. What I
always wonder is why in many societies, there is no possibility of
homosexuality. There is no option. No one ever heard of such a thing.
Certainly among the Taman of Kalimantan I tried to ascertain whether anyone
had been a homosexual and people couldn't understand what I was talking
about. Appell reports the same for the Rungus Dusun (see his article in
"Female and Male in Borneo"). My mentor the late Kenneth Payne, who was
himself gay, and who studied the Bagobo, also said that homosexuality was
incomprehensible among the Bagobo. And this is in the Philippines, where
homosexuality is as acceptable as is ever the case anywhere in the world.
Jay Bernstein
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