Saturday Science: It's Not "Either/Or"

In this universe, I don't think anything is -- that's a fallacy derived from the central concept of the desert religions: there is a deity who is purely good; therefore, there must exist something that is purely evil.

Well, no.

However, rather than going into a universe-spanning examination of this question, let's just examine one area in which that fallacy has had severe repercussions: human gender and sexuality. Bill Nye to the rescue:

The infamous science guy gave the straightforward explanation about human emotion and hormones and the concept of gender on his new Netflix series, Bill Nye Saves the World. . . .

Nye goes on to explain how gender is something that most people come to understand by the time they are young children, but how it isn’t always as straightforward as your gender matching up with the sex assigned at birth.

“When you throw in gender, it gets even more colourful. By three or four, most kids identify with a gender. It doesn’t always match the sex they were assigned at birth.

“A person’s gender identity may change over their lifetime.”

Sadly, I can't link to the Netflix episode (well, I could, I guess, but you'd have to sign in to watch it), but I've added his series to my list on Netflix. There's a brief clip at the link, just to whet your appetite.

Reinforcements

Via Box Turtle Bulletin, a very interesting report published in 1963 from the Literature Committee of the Friends Home Service Committee on sexual morality:

“Surely it is the nature and quality of a relationship that matters,” the authors wrote. “One must not judge by its outward appearance but by its inner worth … We see no reason why the physical nature of a sexual act should be the criterion by which the question whether or not it is moral should be decided. An act which expresses true affection between two individuals and gives pleasure to them both, does not seem to us to be sinful by reason alone of the fact that it is homosexual.”

The report asserted that “sexuality, looked at dispassionately, is neither good nor evil — it is a fact of nature.” it also explored the meaning of morality itself. “It seems to us,” the report continued,” that morals, like the Sabbath, were made for man, not man for morals, and that as society changes and modes of conduct with it, we must always be searching below the surface of human behavior, to discover what is in fact happening to people, what they are seeking to express, what motives and intentions they are satisfying, what fruits good or bad, they are harvesting.”

That's essentially what I've been saying for a while: sexual morality is not about who sticks what into whom under what circumstances. It's about how we treat those we are involved with -- the quality of the relationship. (Well, morality in general is about how we treat each other.)

Selections from the full report are here.

Saturday Science: Male Sexuality

No, it's not set in stone. Of course, anyone who has followed any of my comments on sexuality in general knows that I've never believed it was, but now there's even more evidence:

The story is different for men. The sexuality of straight men has long been understood by evolutionary biologists, and, subsequently, the general public, as subject to a visceral, nearly unstoppable impulse to reproduce with female partners. Consequently, when straight men do engage in same sex contact, these encounters are viewed as incompatible with the bio-evolutionary coding. It’s believed to signal an innate homosexual (or at least bisexual) orientation, and even just one known same-sex act can cast considerable doubt upon a man’s claim to heterosexuality.

Anyone who stops to think about it knows that a teenage boy is willing to screw anything with a hole -- an urge that is not limited to teenagers: how many instances have there been of male/male couplings (by otherwise heterosexual men) in prison or the armed forces? If nothing else, Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male gave us a couple of basic insights:

Parts of the Kinsey Reports regarding diversity in sexual orientations are frequently used to support the common estimate of 10% for homosexuality in the general population. However, the findings are not as absolute, and Kinsey himself avoided and disapproved of using terms like homosexual or heterosexual to describe individuals, asserting that sexuality is prone to change over time, and that sexual behavior can be understood both as physical contact as well as purely psychological phenomena (desire, sexual attraction, fantasy). Instead of three categories (heterosexual, bisexual and homosexual), a seven-point Kinsey scale system was used.

The reports also state that nearly 46% of the male subjects had "reacted" sexually to persons of both sexes in the course of their adult lives, and 37% had at least one homosexual experience. 11.6% of white males (ages 20–35) were given a rating of 3 (about equal heterosexual and homosexual experience/response) throughout their adult lives. The study also reported that 10% of American males surveyed were "more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55" (in the 5 to 6 range).

The key, of course, is that male sexuality, like female sexuality, is not an either/or proposition.

The other key factor is that Kinsey's research was based on behavior, not identity or ideas about "sexual orientation."

I almost hate to bring this point up -- it's too easy -- but I think that most of our thinking about sexual orientation and sexuality in general is shaped, like so many of our other attitudes, by the prevailing mode of thought in the West, our heritage from the dominance of Christianity. It's an either/or way of thinking, in which things must be black or white, with no room for grays. Unfortunately, as we are learning more and more, the universe doesn't work that way -- it's a place of grays, with few, if any, absolutes.

Think about the cultures of ancient Greece, ancient Ireland (there's an episode in The Cattle Raid of Cooley in which Cu Chulainn takes a male lover), ancient and medieval China and Japan, pre-colonial Africa -- there are too many examples of men finding companionship, let's call it, with other men, and, indeed, too many instances in which these relationships became institutions.

All of this while these men, for the most part, married and had children.

So, it seems that these new insights about male sexuality are not so new.