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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'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.
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:
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.
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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.
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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?
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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.
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