From: gsmith@lauren.uucp (Gene W. Smith)
Subject: Re: Genes, Categorical Hypostatization, and You
Organization: IWR, University of Heidelberg, Germany
Date: Sat, 3 Oct 92 16:51:19 GMT

In article <92275.204329HERSCH@auvm.american.edu> <HERSCH@auvm.american.edu> writes:
>In article <1992Sep30.192224.7291@sun0.urz.uni-heidelberg.de>,
>gsmith@euterpe.uucp (Gene W. Smith) says:

>Really? For the first time in this conversation, I start to become
>interested in the underlying stuff. These dudes are proposing gay
>rodents and homosexual rams? Can you give me some references?

It's not going to be too easy for me to find references here in Darkest
Germany, especially on Reunification Day weekend.  But you might look
at Money's "Gay, Straight, and In-Between" and check *his* references,
for  a start.  Some of what I was talking about was the work of a guy a
little too much like your Mad Nazi Scientist for comfort--a (former
east) German by the name of Dorner or something like that.  The idea
is, see if you can produce homosexual behavior (in rats, say) by
mucking around with their hormones during gestation.  This has been
done with a few species, and the results duplicated by other workers. 
So people start to think about humans--Dorner was off on the idea that
maybe homosexuality could be prevented, which would obviously be a Good
Thing, etc.

I was mentioning homosexual rams because of the amusement value of the
US Dept. of Agriculture study on dud rams.  Why were 10% of the rams
unwilling to mount ewes?  It turned out that it probably had something
to do with the fact that they *were* willing to mount each other, which
in turn led to the study (on quite practical grounds this time) of what
to do to prevent it.  (No answer as yet, so far as I've heard, so we
can breathe easier for a while yet.)

>One of the things that I've enjoyed, in talking to you, is that you are
>unwilling to let anything get by that shouldn't get by.

Glad you like it, anyway.  

>But there is, nonetheless, a whole lot of anthropological work
>on New Guinea cultures (work that I'm not really qualified to
>evaluate) that seems to call the "homosexual" and "heterosexual"
>categories, as they are generally deployed, into question. There
>really do seem to be cultures where "homosexual" behavior is
>*universal* during part of people's lives.

In fact, I don't think it is so surprising that there could be such
variation, even given some degree of innate determination.  In another
posting it was mentioned that it is actually rather common for
heterosexual men (in *our* culture, now) to respond sexually to boys
(as measure by this device whose name I forget, but which is basically
a Dick-Rigidity-Meter.)   

Suppose for a moment that there really are such things as innate Kinsey
0's and 1's, so to speak.  A boy may trigger some of the same neurons
in these innately heterosexual male brains as women do.  It also seems
likely that many, perhaps most boys could be sexually fluid enough at
the right age to be at least somewhat responsive (think, for instance
of the notorious situational homosexuality of English public schools,
for an exmaple from a modern  society.)  This would be especially true
if such contacts were encouraged, while contacts with girls were
discouraged.

In such a culture, the desires of the minority of innate 5's and 6's
which I am postulating would be buried in the noise to some extent of
all this pedophilia.  Especially if there was some idea that it was
unmanly, etc. A person whose real tendency was more towards adults
could well find boys satisfying enough, especially if he concentrated
his attentions on the older ones.  And even if adult relationships were
pursued, they might not be noticed to any great extent because of a
lack of cultural sanction.

It's a hypothesis, anyway.

>It may give some people fits, but some of this evidence would seem to
>support a Freudian explanation of polymorphous perversity with cultural
>direction of lust, whether that cultural direction is across lifetimes
>or only across situations.

What I am suggesting may sound a bit like that, but I am really
thinking more along the lines of centers connected with
response-to-females and response-to-males in the hypothalamus, together
with the possibility that boys of various may stimulate both of these
centers, or perhaps merely or mostly the female-response ones.  

Actually, what I read about such research indicated that homosexual men
were more aroused by *adolescent* boys than heterosexual men, in line
with what we would imagine to be true.  So this idea would depend on the 
boys being very young or some degree of arousal in heterosexual men
by adolescent boys to make much sense, I fear.

>My original explosion was directed toward someone who said "we just
>won't know until science weighs in with its judgment"....that's a
>paraphrase, but his point seemed to be that we really couldn't decide
>whether "homosexuals" were to be pitied or despised until science told
>us which way to feel.

Idiots come and go, but the Usenet remaineth.  I noticed he wasn't
making sense, but you were more interesting.

>The *real* project is to tear down some of the walls between the
>disciplines. And maybe deference is a first step.

I think it works better when people defer to the outside wisdom because
they recognize its value than when it is simply asserted that they
*must* defer. It doesn't help when people don't even realize that
someone outside the field might have valuable things to say, because of
what they know or study.

-- 
     Gene Ward Smith/Brahms Gang/IWR/Ruprecht-Karls University 
               gsmith@kalliope.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de
Newsgroups: alt.politics.homosexuality