Gay Men Can’t Drive
Or rather, gay men can’t navigate. That’s the outcome of a piece of research that was done in London recently:
Gay men navigate in a similar fashion to women, according to research that offers fresh evidence for a heavy biological influence over sexual orientation.
Now this is all rather intimately tied into the background research that gives us our EQSQ personality tests so it’s worth explaining some background again. Essentially, the current belief is that there is a spectrum of brain types, which we call from female (or empathising) to male (or systemising). Autism is an expression of an extreme form of the male brain. There are certain attributes which are associated with the male brain, one of which is spatial reasoning. This is what gives the male brain that better talent at map reading, as an example. Now we also have to point out that not all men have the male brain, nor all women the female: here on this blog we once asked an economist (which uses much the same spatial skills as map reading) whether she was good at reading maps and her answer was that she was, better than most men in fact.
And the mechanism which produces this male or female brain type is thought to be exposure to fetal testosterone in the womb (other recent research is showing that this is better than plausible, if not yet proven).
I’ve been terribly hesitant to even think that sexual orientation is influenced in the same manner: that it’s heavily (if not completely) biologically influenced I have no doubt, it’s the mechanism I’m thinking about.
Yet, if we are finding that gay men (on average remember, always on average) share some of the attributes of the female brain, then we are at least going to have to think about whether they do so for the same biological reason.
Is it all caused by the same thing, the level of exposure to fetal testosterone? If it is (and it’s nowhere near proved yet) then that enables us to answer another question, which to why homosexuality persists, for it is plainly not an evolutionary mechanism to maximise the number of one’s own descendants. Thus it’s unlikely that it is passed down in the genes: but if the mechanism is environmental, in the womb, that neatly sidesteps that problem.
January 8th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
Why homosexuality persists is because many men find it sexually fulfilling. Think about it: there are many ways to reach orgasm, right? To be blunt, there are simply more ways to achieve all of these with 2 males than any other combination of 2 people. In terms of sexuality (versus biology), it’s quite practical that way.
Female bodies are nowhere near as phallic. According to many biologists (including your guy, Tim – Desmond Morris, in The Naked Ape), breasts are appealing to males because they mimic the buttocks. See http://www.nyu.edu/fas/ihpk/CultureMatters/Mascia-Lees.htm. Biologically speaking, breasts evolved because we’ve shifted our copulation from ‘aft’ to ‘fore.’ So even if the result (offspring) is different, the attraction (buttocks) can be the same no matter the pairing.
Homosexuality has likely existed since the beginning of time. In ancient cultures, just because men were engaging in homosexual behaviors it didn’t mean they didn’t wish to also spread their seed. They did both. They had wives to give them babies and find sexual satisfaction with and they had other males to find sexual satisfaction with. Especially in times of war the latter happened. But even while not in war, this was common.
January 11th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
Yes, I’m aware of Morris’ views on that. In one book he illustrates it with a back view of a woman in a bikini with a front view.
I’m also aware of the ancients: Sparta was a society in which the military were actually paired off in homosexual units.
And while (although I don’t in fact share the thought) I understand your point about sexual opportunity (which I think is a little more to do with it: two men are more likely to be up for sex at any time) we’ve still not explained the puzzling point. Why does homosexuality persist when it is so obviously detrimental to the procreation of children?
Yes, I’m aware that this question can be answered by saying that for most it doesn’t preclude some heterosexual relationships: but it still persists more than it *ought* to, if it is truly genetic in causation.
January 14th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
What if men’s genetic urge to engage in sex has less to do with procreation, directly, and more to do with the pleasure of the sexual act, itself? If men are given a strong (genetic if you wish) drive to engage in sexual acts, it will eventually lead to more children being born. Do you really believe that any ‘creator,’ mystical or biological, is so exact? From evolutionary standpoint, do we really believe men were given sexual urges (the ability to have an erection and reach orgasm) so specific, it programs them to one specific preference? If we are to believe Morris’s breast-buttock mimicry theory, then perhaps breasts were ‘needed’ to keep men interested in women when position got switched and so forth.
Of course much of this is in the realm of surreal. What we can evaluate is the concrete evidence. In ancient days, homosexuality caused not a blink. It was normal. With the development of ‘newer,’ more organized religions, such as Christianity, and as these religions gained political, legal, and financial power, widespread perceptions of such things as homosexuality transformed.
And why would phallic symbols be attractive to women alone? If you strip away programmed perceptions, getting to the core of it all (urges, desires, etc.), that’s a rather bizarre way of thinking.
January 18th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
I would turn the first part of your argument around. I don’t think that men’s near constant desire for sexual gratification is consciously driven by their desire to procreate, not at all. However, looking through the evolutionary looking glass we can posit that women are fertile for only some few days each month. Men who did have near constant sexual urges (as a result of their finding the sexual act so pleasurable) would be more likely to have sex with a woman during said fertile period than those who were less enamoured of the exercise.
We are thus descended from (and remembering that the majority of all men who have ever lived left no children) those men who did enjoy sex, thus had sex more often and thus procreated successfully.
The enjoyment came first if you like, leading to the procreation.