sissymaidlola
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quote:
Note that sexual orientation has nothing at all to do with gender identity. That distinction didn't really become clear to so-called medical and psychological experts until around the 1950s (possibly as late as the 1960s).
Although most experts in this area would now probably acknowledge that human sexual orientation does appear to operate independently from how many people self-identify WRT gender, for sissy to say that these two guises of human sexuality are totally unrelated may be going too far. Sexual orientation is definitely NOT a sixth aspect of gender - the type of person to whom one is sexually attracted has nothing to do with how one personally wishes to present in public gender-wise, nor how one wishes others to perceive and treat one gender-wise - but since they are both themselves different sides of human sexual countenance, they are not totally devoid of some connection with each other either.
The rest of this post attempts to give some possible reasons for why homosexual pair-bonding and lack of reproductive drive (as opposed to sexual drive) may nevertheless still work positively towards the survival and furtherance of any given animal species, humans being considered here to be a highly-developed city-dwelling primate, as offensive an idea as that might be to some. Two main ideas are discussed within what follows.
One is that when any animal species faces over-population relative to the basic supply of food, water and other resources necessary for sustaining its current numbers, the introduction of a natural inhibitor to rampant species reproduction - such as an increase in the incidence of non-reproductive homosexuality within the species population - may be just one natural ecological mechanism invented by Mother Nature to more smoothly put on the skids to self-defeating population increase and thereby helping to avert the imminent disaster (which may quickly progress to mass extinction). If homosexuality in any species is based on genes, a proliferation of those genes within the species as a whole at times when it is in the best interest for the survival of that species to stabilize, or even reduce, its overall population size would be rather an elegant bionomical feedback control mechanism. So much more adaptable and smoothly preemptive than relying solely on the only other alternative population control mechanism to cull excessive numbers - viz., relying on the simpler, yet more drastic, reactive mechanism of "survival of the fittest" to take care of the over-population situation in a much more devasting manner (from the perspective of the stability of the resultant reduced species population in the aftermath of the carnage).
The other idea that is discussed is the concept that non-reproductive homosexual pair-bonds provide a safety net of surrogate child-rearing parents to recover from the fumbles of heterosexual child-rearing pair-bonds that ultimately works towards the furtherance and advancement of the overall species population rather than being simply non-productive and simply an indulgence in the sin of Onan. The fact of the matter is that there are many ways of getting from point A to point B, and rather than being simply evolutionary dead-ends as the moronic religious right like to represent homosexuality, masturbation, chastity, celibacy, asexuality, intersexuality, transgenderism, etc. (i.e., anything other than reproductive monogamous sex being bad WRT the advancement of the human race) many of these aspects of human sexuality may simply represent diverse alternative routes to achieving the same overall goal - i.e., the ultimate survival of mankind (from the overall perspective of the species rather than the perspective of any given individuals, families or specific blood lines within the species).
sissy Has read in various places over the years that the sexual orientation of a human fetus can be impacted by environmental stress on the mother during pregnancy. In times of war, for instance, pregnancies are supposedly more likely to result in non-hetero individuals. If that is true, that might actually be a very good way for humans to respond to overpopulation and the resulting lack of adequate resources for the population. There have been studies done on rats where they are put in overcrowded cages but given adequate food and water. The rats always coexist peacefully under those conditions. However, as soon as food and water resources are subsequently reduced, antisocial behaviors start to manifest, such as violence, but there is also usually a corresponding increase in homosexuality. That would seem to suggest that it is Mother Nature's means to cutting back the unsustainable rat population to better match the reduced resources that it now needs to survive.
sissy Remembers from his reading of Desmond Morris many, many years ago (i.e., The Naked Ape, The Human Zoo, etc.) that when almost any species of animal is put under stress in a zoo (normally due to overcrowding, but there could be lots of other causes) incidences of aggression, masturbation and homosexuality all increase (or are manifested where there were none before). According to Morris, it is the high stress levels that causes the increased occurrence of these traits, although that does NOT mean that increased inter-species aggression, homosexuality or masturbation may not occur for more natural reasons (outside of captivity) in certain species. The case of Wendell and Cass, the two gay penguins at New York Aquarium in Coney Island comes immediately to mind.
In the particular case of these penguins, their homosexuality would appear to be the consequence of the artificial 2:1 ratio of males to females in the aquarium's African Black-Footed penguin population. Now, one could argue that a perceived lack of available mates for an animal that is monogamous and mates with its partner for life is a form of stress. OTOH, according to the article, Cass is a fierce fighter and therefore probably doesn't have to accept his exclusion from the gene pool in the same manner that Wendell (who is "afraid of his own shadow") probably does. If Cass is able to fight off attempts from other male penguins to steal nesting materials from his and Wendell's nest during the mating season, then clearly Cass is genetically more dominant than some of these other partnered males. So it would appear that Cass has chosen his gay lifestyle instead.
The story of Silo and Roy in the Chinstrap penguin population at the Central Park Zoo in New York would appear to suggest a possible reason for why male homosexuality amongst penguins might still make evolutionary sense in the wild rather than being simply an aberration caused by the artificial environmental conditions created by a surplus of males in captivity. In their particular case they were able to take over and successfully rear a surplus egg laid by an inexperienced heterosexual mating pair that might otherwise have been allowed to perish since raising two chicks would probably have been too much of a burden for them. With penguins, the mating female normally only lays a single egg, and the poor male penguin that is left to incubate the egg for the 65-75 days that it takes the egg to hatch will lose almost half his body weight because he has to sit on the egg the entire time, and therefore cannot go off to hunt and eat like the female does. Except for eating some snow, the male penguins rely entirely on their body fat, that they laid down during the summer months, in order to survive the 4-5 month long winter fast while they build a nest, court a female, mate, incubate the resultant egg, and then nurse the young hatchling until the females of the colony return back from their winter sojourn to their nesting families in order to relieve the near-starved males of their solo chick-raising duty (or, at least, to now share some of the responsibilities of this duty).
Outside of the laying of the egg, it is the male of the various penguin species that demonstrates the "maternal instinct" that we humans traditionally associate with the female of our own and other animal species. It is the penguin males that do all the incubating and early nurturing after the egg hatches, and their roles and functions within the penguin colony are much more critical to the survival of the species than that of the female penguins. Should surplus partnerless males naturally occur in the penguin's regular habitat, then homosexual bonding between them makes as much good sense WRT increased evolutionary survival of the species as does the adoption and rearing of the unwanted and abandoned offspring of heterosexual couples by childless lesbian couples does in human society. Far from homosexuality amongst male penguins being an evolutionary dead-end, it may be Nature's way to provide a backup means of recovering from the fumbles (e.g., abandoned eggs) of the heterosexual penguin population.
Of course, the framework of language determines what can and can't be discussed in it, and how we humans discuss the gender and child rearing roles of penguins is limited by the framework imposed upon that discussion by our own human gender and child rearing role stereotypes. We allocate the term "male" to the "sperm producing" gender of a species and the term "female" to the "egg producing" gender of a species because that is how sexual reproduction takes place in humans, and it's all we know, and therefore it is intrinsic to our linguistic gender terminology. If we defined "female" to mean the gender of the species that provides the primary protective and early nurturing of the offspring, women would still be human "females" (although this traditional human gender divide has arguably become somewhat blurred over the last twenty years or so in the West) but the framework for the discussion of penguin sexual and gender roles completely changes, and what we now call the male penguin would become the female of that species.
Or to put it another way, penguins have two separate genders, but the apportioning of basic sexual and breeding roles between those two genders does not conveniently divide out in exactly the same way as it does between the male and female genders of other mammals, especially the primates and homo sapiens. Luckily, unlike humans, penguins are not bogged down with linguistic frameworks and religious, social and political bigotry, and they can just get on with the job of breeding and surviving in whatever manner comes naturally to them.
One of the conclusions that can be drawn from Morris' studies more than 35 years ago, that fellow scientists and anthropologists mostly chose to ignore, is that the human race, despite being highly advanced and intelligent city-dwelling primates, exhibits a relatively high incidence of aberrant behavior such as inter-species aggression (i.e., mass genocide, wars, riots and street crime), homosexuality and masturbation that is only observed on a comparable scale in animals in captivity when they are deprived of basic resources, overcrowded or subjected to other forms of major stress. That is, despite all of our creative sophistication and technical prowess, the "human ape" exhibits many of the traits that only our brethren primates do when under severe stress in captivity, and our advanced city communities are really no more than "human zoos."
sissy Would love to know what the incidence of human homosexuality is in sparsely populated areas of the world, and also to learn much more about how homosexuality manifests in animal populations. sissy Doesn't mind being an inadvertent personal response to overpopulation ... actually, it makes him feel somehow more useful in the overall scheme of things. Of course, he does have sex with women, but he's adopted a very strict personal no-breeding policy. Now, if only there were some spare human eggs that needed incubating sissy's sense of purpose in the Universe might be even more complete!
sissy maid lola
< Message edited by sissymaidlola -- 5/28/2005 2:23:02 PM >
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