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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36210 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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I just discovered ex-gay twitter. I personally agree with their viewpoint that a lot of gays would be happier be heterosexually married with the occasional gay experience. Mostly I just think most men even gay have naturally desires for a family and that’s best in a heterosexual relationship. And most gays don’t want to do the mundane women work of watching little kids but would rather be the more aloof father that does the male roles. You can put me in that camp that we are an evolved species with deeply rooted programming on what leads us to a happy life. And homosexuality to me seems like a couple of your genes are off that may individually have benefits but combined turned your gay, but the vast majority of your genetic programming is still happier in traditional heterosexual relationships. As a society we have decided that a small bit of a person their sexuality should dominate the totality of that person.

Culture war wise these views are far outside of appropriate viewpoints today. Anyway here’s the articles and twitter threads on the movement. Even for someone with a belief that society should be more libertarian I still think our culture has gone wrong and promoted the old ways is better for the species just not by government force.

https://www.piratewires.com/p/ex-gay-twitter

https://twitter.com/piratewires/status/1584941608688320512?s=46&t=Dc1wiLnAbZQuf1ZEsEPebA

you can put me in that camp that we are an evolved species with deeply rooted programming on what leads us to a happy life. And homosexuality to me seems like a couple of your genes are off that may individually have benefits but combined turned your gay, but the vast majority of your genetic programming is still happier in traditional heterosexual relationships. As a society we have decided that a small bit of a person their sexuality should dominate the totality of that person.

This all sounds very Just So. I mean what can anyone who disagrees with this do except to say that what is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence?

Research in the issue is essentially banned.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/forbidden-questions.html

Theoretically my logic seems rational.

That's not actually relevant. You can't respond to the assertion that your assertions are unsubstantiated by saying 'well there is no evidence so we must simply assume that I'm right.

Whether it 'seems rational' is not at issue for two reasons. Firstly, we've circled back to falsifiability - I can simply say 'I think it doesn't seem rational and we are at an impasse - and secondly, the world is generally not so simple that we can reason our way to grand claims that 'deep down nobody really wants homosexual relationships in the long term'.

If evidence is censored you can't use the non-existence of evidence as evidence for non-existence.

That's true, but if you want to argue that homosexuals all really would be happier in heterosexual relationships I think it's probably incumbent upon you to provide some evidence for it. You can't just assert something controversial without evidence and say that because there isn't any research you get to simply assume you are right.

I have a similar proposition for women: regardless of sexual preferences, many women interested in raising a family would be happier in a same-sex marriage with another woman.

Hear me out.

There are a lot of women in US who want both children and a career. If you are such a woman, it's not that difficult to find another woman with similar goals. If the two of you get along as BFFs, why not get married? If neither of you are into women sexually, that makes the arrangement even more stable: there will be no miscommunication on expectations of sexual intimacy between the spouses.

If both of you want your own biological children, you can plan out a pregnancy schedule. If one of you is way more into pregnancy than the other, that's cool too. The studs could be long-term boyfriends, male friends-with-benefits, or sperm-bank donors. The advantage of studding with long-term boyfriend is that he's even likely to pitch in financially for the child.

For male role models, bring into the fold male friends you actually admire, as opposed to those you find hot. Could be your brothers or male cousins, could be the baby-daddies, could be close male friends.

There are plenty of cultures where mothers (and grandmothers) are the stable center of the family and fathers are on the periphery. Same-sex marriage between two women interested in raising a family mirrors such an arrangement.

You would lose the father figure which some may not care about and few guys going to spend a lot of time on his non-biological kids.

This idea only works for women who want to upgrade the genetic profile of their children while having an absentee father like Musk.

Yes, the father figure would be less likely in such an arrangement. On the plus side, it increases the odds of an uncle figure.

I wonder if some sort of mutually beneficial arrangement could be made between male and female homosexual pairs via polyamory. That is, you have two men who are together romantically/sexually, two women who are together romantically/sexually, and the four cohabitate and share household responsibilities and raise a family together. With six pairwise relationships there would be a lot more room for complicated drama, but they would have more slack when dividing labor and responsibilities, and more financial flexibility due to up to four incomes in a single household (or have one stay at home parent but still have 3/4 of the adults working jobs and earning money).

Ill just say that the answer is definitely no. I think youre imaginging this scenario where everyone gets everything they want and the only obstacle is getting along, but thats not even how a marriage with 2 people works. The sacrifices required to raise a family are unavoidable and just arent possible in a group.

Here are a couple obvious examples of unresolvable issues: What if someone has to move for their job? How do you deal with the inevitable preference for their blood children? How do you untangle this arrangement if someone decides to leave? How do you visit extended families on holidays? Who actually owns the properties, retirement accounts, etc? Who makes the career sacrifices required to raise children?

I think lesbian-separatism and "gold star" lesbianism is too strong of a force to let this happen. Lesbians and gay men may be in the same political coalition, but that doesn't mean they usually run in the same social circles. Plus, a significant portion of LGBT+ people aren't interested in having kids or starting a family in the first place.

May work in theory but I think in practice gay males and lesbians don't get along all that well.

I also think in practice the typical gay male has no interest in that sort of stable domestic relationship.

a lot of gays would be happier be heterosexually married with the occasional gay experience.

You're not talking about gays there, but bisexuals. And yes, they'd probably be happier if involved in a stable relationship instead of an endless series of bouts of anonymous casual sex.

I'm not sure actual gays, that is men who are homoromantic and homosexual would be happier if they kept pretending they aren't.

And what about the spouses?

I guess one can have a genuine fondness and friendship for someone of the sex you aren't attracted to, and even e.g. taking care of a children together is imaginable, but it's very wrong to do under false pretenses. He's never going to be really passionate about her, and can only satisfy her on a romantic level through heroic, sustained effort.

In this mostly ex-catholic country I've heard from family many stories of medical professionals of some sort discovering their spouse with whom they have children is gay. They were in love with the guy, he was in denial. These arent't happy stories.

You're not talking about gays there, but bisexuals.

Not to put words in OP's mouth, but: no, I think he means gays, and if he didn't, then I will certainly bite that bullet.

The logic goes as previously stated:

You can put me in that camp that we are an evolved species with deeply rooted programming on what leads us to a happy life. And homosexuality to me seems like a couple of your genes are off that may individually have benefits but combined turned your gay, but the vast majority of your genetic programming is still happier in traditional heterosexual relationships.

I.e. it's (relatively) easy to accrue the handful of somatic mutations that flips you from enjoying the taste of the opposite sex's genitals to enjoying the taste of your own sex's gentials, but it would take a complete rewriting of a vast number of the genes for the brain's deep structures, all the way down to the monkey kernel, to make you not yearn in yer bones to be a pater familias reigning over the little kingdom of your own household and offspring.

TL;DR: Hard gays as you describe them - totally homosexual and totally contented at every level, sex + romance + the little nagging voice in their DNA that says breed breed breed breed - do not exist; cannot exist. They are biologically impossible, and any that report to be totally contented on all levels... well, I believe in the logic of evolutionary psychology more than I believe self-reported contentment questionnaires.

As I said to the author of the parent comment, this doesn't really amount to much more than a Just So story. Maybe there are millions of gay people the world over lying about their real preferences, but I am much more inclined to belief in revealed preferences than blind speculation about how I or you reckon people have evolved. 'I believe in evolutionary psychology' unfortunately appears to amount to little more than 'my assertions are unfalsifiable'.

Also, I'm not gay but I've got to say I don't really 'yearn in [my] bones to be a pater familias reigning over the little kingdom of [my] own household and offspring'. So am I just lying, or I don't actually know what my real desires are? In which case, in what way could it reasonably be called a 'yearning' do something if one is not conscious of the yearning themselves.

I believe in the logic of evolutionary psychology more than I believe self-reported contentment questionnaires.

Then you believe in something very shaky.

A lot of people find puppies cuter than babies. Hell, on a deeper level, people aren't physically repulsed by condoms. Evolution just isn't capable of psychological engineering that precise: you're not a deeply robustly programmed creature of family, you're a hacked-together mess of impulses and inclinations and psychological systems that boot from the limited information of the genome to a giant mess of crappy wetware compute.

I think there would be no reason to expect in advance that it would only take a few flips to be sexually attracted to your own gender. Ignoring the evidence, evolutionarily due to sexual selection you would expect that to be exceedingly unlikely. The only reason I think you say "yes of course it's only a few mutations" is because of plentiful contradicting evidence. So why do you accept that in the case of gayness, but not in the other cases? Given the evopsych model has already failed once on the topic, I wouldn't put all that much stock in it anymore.

As far as I can tell, you are arguing here that it should be no more improbable to nullify/flip three heteronormative desires (sex fetishes and romantic notions and DNA breed imperative) than it would be to flip/nullify one heteronormative desire (sex fetish). To which my response is simply: that's not how probability works. Rolling three sixes in a row is less likely than rolling one six.

I'm saying that under an evpsych model not preadjusted for the prevalence of exclusive same-sex attraction in reality, flipping one heteronormative desire is already so implausible that it calls the entire approach into question. Clearly, gay people indicate to me, there's something weird going on with homo/hetero; so maybe if we had a model for that that actually gave ten percent homosexuality high likelihood from the start, it would not treat these three desires as independent. (Or maybe it would! The point is a simple independent model is already insufficient to explain gays at all.)

It's not a 'couple genes off' but the pair bonding mechanism isn't on the Y chromosome (iirc almost nothing is, it's very small information wise) and it develops during pregnancy under influence of cross sex hormones.

Best present day theory about gayness is that it happens by improper protection of the brain from cross sex hormones during development due to a failure of an epigenetic mechanism.

the little nagging voice in their DNA that says breed breed breed breed - do not exist; cannot exist.

Seeing as they often have interests and attitudes and personality traits of the other sex (eg. catty), maybe they want to get pregnant ? I'm just spitballing, I mostly ignore them so I have never inquired about whether they yearn for children.

People (gay, straight, bi, whatever) who don't want children aren't that rare. Nor are older people who say they would have chosen to not have children if they had ever considered that as a choice. I'd expect wanting children to be a majority view for the obvious evolutionary physiology reasons, but it hardly seems like a universal one. Are you saying all of those people are lying to themselves?

Honestly for spouses - we have a surplus of educated females - it seems likely their would be plenty where the best option would be companionship and partnership as their best option.

Mhmm. Has it ever happened - e.g. a woman consciously partnering with a gay man to raise family ? I mean, I think it might have, but I've not heard of a case.

Consciously I don’t know but it happened frequently in the past.

I would argue that marriage happens most often when people are ready to make compromises from their ideal.

This lines up a lot with this article describing being gay in Saudi Arabia that I read a few years ago. The gay community is entirely bottoms, who often dress effeminately, picking up straight men. And it's only being a bottom that's illegal, the top won't be prosecuted.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/05/the-kingdom-in-the-closet/305774/

I really wonder how in the West gay culture got to be how it is, where you have tops who are purely homosexual or homosexuals who have domestic symmetrical pairings where they take turns and live similarly to a heterosexual couple.

Everything you and @sliders1234 said makes some sense to me. I know a few guys who are happily married to women and who either have an understanding with their wife that they'll sleep with guys from time to time (and she'll go do her own thing from time to time) or who specifically seek out MMF threesomes. Are they gay? My guess is they're probably innately more attracted to men than to women (otherwise why bother with all of the social coordination and self identity issues that such behavior must engender), but they certainly identify as straight. One of their wives kind of propositioned us for a threesome once, after we shared a bottle of wine, or at least left the idea floating in the air in a plausibly deniable way, which we didn't act on because, although he is really hot and a great guy, we're married and monogamous and pretty committed to the whole white picket fence lifestyle. Notably, none of these guys is obviously gay in terms of mannerisms.

I tend to agree that guys who aren't flagrantly homosexual in the stereotypical sense could (usually, probably) live happy lives married to women, and that being married to a woman would make it a lot easier to start and raise a family, for all of the reasons @sliders1234 mentioned.

On the other hand, being gay isn't just sex, it's whom you're attracted to, whom you develop crushes on, who causes butterflies in your stomach, whom you fantasize about holding hands with and going on adventures with and talking with until 5am on a school night. Getting to experience that full romantic journey is a core part of the human experience. That part of your life is usually over by the time you are married and settled, or a couple of years into being married and settled, but it's still a big part of your life in terms of time and particularly in terms of emotional impact.

Also, among straight couples, the woman is usually the partner who initiates divorce (something like 70% of the time?) and being married to a gay guy is only going to increase the sympathy she'll get from society if she does so, regardless of the understanding that she had. That would really scare me. I also would not be comfortable hiding a secret like that from the rest of society, and think it's morally questionable to marry a woman if you're a gay man -- that isn't the life that most little girls dream about having.

But yeah, I totally understand why a deniably gay guy might choose to marry a woman, and even why he'd be happy with having made that decision. It isn't for everyone though, and it wouldn't be for me, and IMO we shouldn't view it as justification not to offer legal same-sex marriage.

I know a few guys who are happily married to women and who either have an understanding with their wife that they'll sleep with guys from time to time (and she'll go do her own thing from time to time) or who specifically seek out MMF threesomes. Are they gay? My guess is they're probably innately more attracted to men than to women (otherwise why bother with all of the social coordination and self identity issues that such behavior must engender), but they certainly identify as straight.

I think some of this reflects a certain flavor of bisexuality that prefers opposite-sex attraction or is 50/50 on the matter. For simple numbers game reasons it's really easy for bi guys to end up in het relationships regardless of their preferences, and still feel cravings to top a guy / get dicked on occasion. There's a lot of risk and identity complexity involved in doing that, enough that some people just ignore it, but it's like these are unique risks compared to other sexual interests.

((Although your category definitely exists: I've got a slight preference for same-sex over opposite-sex, and were I social enough that poly didn't look incredibly frustrating, could definitely understand the draw.))

Also, among straight couples, the woman is usually the partner who initiates divorce (something like 70% of the time?) and being married to a gay guy is only going to increase the sympathy she'll get from society if she does so, regardless of the understanding that she had.

Yeah, that's a big problem. As is the bit where 'being on the down low' presents a lot of other risks, and prevents a lot of rewards of same-sex attraction, compared to monogamy or open polyamory.

It was amazing to see how spot-on Anthony Burgess got that WW1-interwar gay subculture in Earthly Powers. Can't think of any other books that portrayed it.

There's a slightly different portrayal in the Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amos.

Might be a particularly British thing. It reminded me of a relevant passage from C. S. Lewis's autobiography Surprised by Joy, in which he describes his experience at British boarding school:

As we sat round our clamped table, silent for the most part and speaking in whispers when we spoke, the door would be opened at intervals; a boy would look in, smile (not at us but to himself) and withdraw. Once, over the shoulder of the smiler there came another face, and a chuckling voice said, "Ho-ho! I know what you're looking for." Only I knew what it was all about, for my brother had played Chesterfield to my Stanhope and instructed me in the manners of the Coll. None of the boys who looked in and smiled was a Blood; they were all quite young and there was something common to the faces of them all. They were, in fact, the reigning or fading Tarts of the House, trying to guess which of us were their destined rivals or successors.

It is possible that some readers will not know what a House Tart was. First, as to the adjective. All life at Wyvern was lived, so to speak, in the two concentric circles of Coll and House. You could be a Coll pre. or merely a House pre. You could be a Coll Blood or merely a House Blood, a Coll Punt (i.e. a pariah, an unpopular person) or merely a House Punt; and of course a Coll Tart or merely a House Tart. A Tart is a pretty and effeminate-looking small boy who acts as a catamite to one or more of his seniors, usually Bloods. Usually, not always. Though our oligarchy kept most of the amenities of life to themselves, they were, on this point, liberal; they did not impose chastity on the middle-class boy in addition to all his other disabilities. Pederasty among the lower classes was not "side", or at least not serious side; not like putting one's hands in one's pockets or wearing one's coat unbuttoned. The gods had a sense of proportion.

The Tarts had an important function to play in making school (what it was advertised to be) a preparation for public life. They were not like slaves, for their favours were (nearly always) solicited, not compelled. Nor were they exactly like prostitutes, for the liaison often had some permanence and, far from being merely sensual, was highly sentimentalised. Nor were they paid (in hard cash, I mean) for their services; though of course they had all the flattery, unofficial influence, favour, and privileges which the mistresses of the great have always enjoyed in adult society. That was where the Preparation for Public Life came in. It would appear from Mr. Arnold Lunn's Harrovians that the Tarts at his school acted as informers. None of ours did. I ought to know, for one of my friends shared a study with a minor Tart; and except that he was sometimes turned out of the study when one of the Tart's lovers came in (and that, after all, was only natural) he had nothing to complain of. I was not shocked by these things. For me, at that age, the chief drawback to the whole system was that it bored me considerably. For you will have missed the atmosphere of our House unless you picture the whole place from week's end to week's end buzzing, tittering, hinting, whispering about this subject. After games, gallantry was the principal topic of polite conversation; who had "a case with" whom, whose star was in the ascendant, who had whose photo, who and when and how often and what night and where. I suppose it might be called the Greek Tradition. But the vice in question is one to which I had never been tempted, and which, indeed, I still find opaque to the imagination. Possibly, if I had only stayed longer at the Coll, I might, in this respect as in others, have been turned into a Normal Boy, as the system promises. As things were, I was bored.

…

...I cannot give pederasty anything like a first place among the evils of the Coll. There is much hypocrisy on this theme. People commonly talk as if every other evil were more tolerable than this. But why? Because those of us who do not share the vice feel for it a certain nausea, as we do, say, for necrophily? I think that of very little relevance to moral judgement. Because it produces permanent perversion? But there is very little evidence that it does. The Bloods would have preferred girls to boys if they could have come by them; when, at a later age, girls were obtainable, they probably took them.

Definitely a different outlook than modern "homosexuality". It definitely matches the BBC interview you brought up: the "bottoms" are Tarts, but there is no special word for the tops.

I believe you are right, and it is interesting how completely taboo it would be to suggest to a gay person, “Maybe a heterosexual relationship and a family would make you happier?” What percentage of people in heterosexual relationships experience little or no sexual desire for their partner? Between the elderly and the ugly I would guess >50%, but plenty of hetero people are fine making that compromise in exchange for a friend, a companion and a family.

I believe you are right, and it is interesting how completely taboo it would be to suggest to a gay person, “Maybe a heterosexual relationship and a family would make you happier?”

Whereas suggesting to someone heterosexual that exploring the same sex experiences would not be out of place in a conventional agony aunt column

Only if either the questioner was female, or the column had an exclusively female readership (admittedly, true of most agony aunt columns). A normie male reader who read an agony aunt suggesting a straight guy try out teh ghey to see how he felt would bozo-bin the agony aunt.

a lot of gays would be happier be heterosexually married with the occasional gay experience

How do the women feel about this? It seems like open relationships are most popular among a crowd that uh, doesn’t think gay men should pursue heterosexual relationships, and the crowd that thinks gay men should just marry women doesn’t approve of homosexuality, and most women probably don’t want their husbands having sex with other people.

There are (conservative) cultures where it's considered semi-acceptable for married men to have sex outside the marriage. For example, I have met multiple women from Mexico who have expressed sentiments along the lines of "wives should never cheat, but if husbands cheat once in a while that's unfortunate but understandable."

Sure, plenty of wives would turn a blind eye to the husband visiting prostitutes on a business trip. And some cultures expect high-status men to have mistresses and think that that's part of marrying a high-status man. But it seems to me that going into it with the expectation of the husband cheating on her as a normal part of the marriage would be a deal breaker for most women in American culture, and that those women who think homosexuals should marry women would expect those men to treat their urges for other men the exact same way that they would treat their urges for other women.

I'm wary of the attempts to explain everything in terms of biology, but this clearly has evolutionary biology background. Man cheating on his wife, provided that he doesn't leave the family and spend too much resources on cheating, is a very low-risk thing. Wife cheating creates paternal uncertainty in the minimum, and the possibility of the family spending resources on the offspring the man has no genetical relationship to. Is it a surprise there's such an asymmetry here in some cultures (in fact, afaik, in many cultures)?

Re. the gay cheating side of the conversation: even taking STDs into account like someone mentioned, it does seem like "husband occasionally buggers some dude" is better for a woman's outcomes than "husband gets 2nd wife and kids to support, either legally or illicitly".

Most men's cheating doesn't go as far as "2nd wife" - in fact, many couldn't really afford it even if they wanted, but most wouldn't want it anyway. From this point of view, both hetero and homo cheating is driven by the same impulse - finding some experience or variety lacking in the monogamous marriage, without giving up the other benefits such an arrangement provides. And excepting STDs, in both cases it's low risk - unless the husband gets on the hook for child support or such. Indeed, with this consideration buggering some dude is probably lower risk, in general.

I was vaguely thinking of Afghanistan and other conservative cultures that nevertheless ended up with homosex on the side (maybe not entirely due to the Greeks invading them). And the competition from 2nd+ wives is a very real threat to women in some of those places.

It is a known phenomenon that males who are deprived of female company, either by being of low status or being in circumstances where there are just no females at all (army, ships, prisons), engage in homo-sex routinely, in almost any culture. I don't think it has anything to do with the Greeks, it's mere biology - male sexual drive is just too strong, and when you combine it with poor impulse control with is also common in such populations... In fact, in a very conservative culture it's also probably safer to bang a dude than to have sex with a female outside of marriage - that female likely has either a husband or father/brothers, and they would react very harshly against any such transgression. Again, nothing to do with Greeks here.

I can tell you the answer - it's fine, for some women. If you're in a culture where it's not "I am gay" but "I sometimes have sex with men" (they exist today!) you probably also have more traditional and non-western views. Marriage isn't just a matter of romance, there's also a significant element of family unification and being part of a social structure.

Some women want mostly the latter and don't care much if their husband sucks dick once in a while if he treats them right and fathers children. With some luck, these women's parents will set them up with a guy who is known to be a bit odd but otherwise a decent fellow. Parents are quite practical when finding their children a spouse.

I think most women who went through modern western sex-ed would have that concern, particularly if that sex-ed didn't obfuscate the fact that gay men are a cesspool of venereal disease. That's far from universal in the kind of places I'm talking about.

Also, venereal disease transmitted by gay men is not necessarily a major risk in a place like Bangladesh (not that there are any good statistics on it). If there's no grindr and you only manage to escape nosy relatives for gay sex a few times a year, there's no reason that gay men would have the astronomically high HIV rates that they do in the US.

particularly if that sex-ed didn't obfuscate the fact that gay men are a cesspool of venereal disease

There are many less inflammatory ways to make the point you are making here, but you chose a maximally pejorative phrasing. Don't do this.

can you not call gay men cesspools here, im pretty sure insults like that are not allowed here.

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