Re: Homosexuality: male & female
Yousuf Khan (ykhan@achilles.net)
Thu, 12 Sep 1996 04:42:48 GMT
On 10 Sep 1996 14:23:33 GMT, jbernst@pipeline.com wrote:
>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.
My feeling is the same mechanism required for (heterosexual) women to
become attracted to men is also turned on within homosexual and bisexual
men. Perhaps this is the default behaviourial pattern until the point when
the embryo goes from female to male, since the female state is the default
state too.
So in other words, the female attraction gene is never turned on at all in
homosexual men, and it is only partially turned on in bisexual men, so they
fall back to their default behaviour (i.e. attraction to men). It may be
easier to _forget to_ turn on a gene at the wrong time, rather than to turn
a gene on at the wrong time. In the case of women, you are probably turning
on a gene at the wrong time. And in the case of men, you are probably
forgetting to turn on a gene at the wrong time. It's easier to forget to do
something than it is to do something.
In my own personal case, I've found that most of my girlfriends are
disgusted at the thought of female homosexuality, but a surprising number
showed no aversion (three of them altogether), and they would consider it.
For them to overcome social stigma and admit to such a thing, leads me to
believe that female homosexuality/bisexuality is also hidden beneath the
surface in large numbers.
> 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.
Which also fits into what I am talking about subverted or hidden
bisexuality. You have to have a some sort of attraction to settle for this
situation. It may not be their predominant preference, but something has to
be there to even get started.
>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.
How did you ask them? How one asks the question determines what answer one
gets back. If you ask them, "have you ever known a man to make love to a
man, or a woman to make love to woman?", though it would be direct and
simple to understand on the surface, it is vague at another level, and
therefore you will not get a proper answer. Now if you ask about individual
actions, like do men sleep together with each other at night, and whether
they masturbate with each other -- and the same question of the women --
you might get answers back which would indicate homosexuality by practice,
if not by name.
In many cases, I am sure that they may consider certain actions of
male-male relationships or female-female relationships to be just acts of
friendship, but in other cultures it is considered sexuality. Homosexuals
and bisexuals may subsist on these "friendly" acts.
>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.
It's acceptable to be homosexual in the Philippines? I don't think so, they
have as many social and religious restrictions as everywhere else in the
world; I've talked to enough Philipino parents to know that they would be
extremely shocked if a child of theirs turned out to be homosexual, just
like anywhere else in the world. And anyways, Bagobo culture might not
exactly be the same as mainstream Phillipine culture.
Yousuf Khan
--
Yousuf J. Khan
ykhan@achilles.net
Ottawa, Ont, Canada
Nation's capital
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