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Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 11, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Could someone explain to me the likely causes of homosexuality? What do we know about what makes someone gay? Which theories do you trust?

I think it’s a male child accidentally socializing as a female identity, due to sheer accident or the way the women in their life treat them, or a repugnance to their father figure. This explains why homosexuals take on so much of female behavior and interests while still retaining the typical male kernel of hyper-sexuality and aggression. To study this you would need to look at the prevalence of homosexuality among single father households and all male schools.

There are other forms of homosexuality, one of which is when culture heavily discourages promiscuous sex with women, and then you have men fucking men’s bottoms just because they’re super horny and can’t access women. You see this in prisons. This then can become a fetish itself, maybe what we saw in Sparta and maybe with some aspects of Afghani grooming culture. This is not “identity” homosexuality though, and typically these men do not have the behaviors you find in Western homosexuals. The ancient prohibitions on homosexuality likely assume that all men fell into this category and were engaging in homosexual sex just because they were super horny and approximating a woman (same with beastiality).

To re-use my example from a few days ago, aphyr (nsfw) - where's the female identity here? Or just look at hot guys in your area - nothing here screams 'female identity'. At least in the case of trans-women, even if the concept of 'identifying as female' is meaningless, there's a sense in which they're trying to be female - but for gay men, it's a mix of masculine and feminine traits in a way that doesn't seem to have 'a female identity'.

I think it’s a male child accidentally socializing as a female identity, due to sheer accident or the way the women in their life treat them, or a repugnance to their father figure. This explains why homosexuals take on so much of female behavior and interests while still retaining the typical male kernel of hyper-sexuality and aggression

I'd caution against lamppost effect, here. Effeminate gay guys are more visible to the straights, but bara dudes, including bara dudes who want to bottom for other bara dudes, is absolutely a genre, and not a small one. A few of this demographic is bi-identifying, but a large and maybe larger number are either incapable or strongly opposed to sex with or even near women (and sometimes even effeminate men).

I'd also separately caution against conflating cause and effect. A lot of the bara dudes into bara dudes in the 1980s and 1990s spent a lot of their youth socialized with women of the same age group; there's a plausible story where the same effect that drives straight guys into 'girls have cooties' mode pushes gay guys into being less comfortable is a lot of typical male-male straight socialization contexts.

(Was absolutely the case for me.)

Do you think the authors of the ancient prohibitions would be more accommodating of current year 'identity' homosexuals?

I do think it’s possible. I doubt they would care about men pair-bonding. The issues would arise because of disease risk, and the effect on families which require an heir to have children.