All things just keep getting better
Like
most other men, I was quite homophobic at a younger age. You couldn't
tell me that two guys banging each other wouldn't be freaking
disgusting. Anyone who wants to condemn me for this, remember the First
Universal Rule of Preferences: whereas you others are fully in control
and responsible of your attitudes and preferences and can change them
at will, mine are innate and I cannot change them in any way. This
universal rule can be observed in action in almost any debate about
some controversial issue.
But for some reason as I grew older, the thought of male homosexuality as an abstraction does not feel quite as uncomfortable as it used to. Of course, at this point it is necessary to emphasize that I am happily married and don't feel any kind of urges to have sex with men. But the idea of other men wanting to have sex with each other doesn't evoke feelings of disgust any more.
From the sociobiological standpoint, a relaxed attitude towards gay men is probably a smart way of looking at things by the general "hey, more girls left for me" logic amusingly analogous with the way that women try to convince other women that the looks competition for the best men is silly and other women shouldn't do it. Robin Baker's excellent book "Sperm Wars" presented a hypothesis that homosexuality is sustained as a byproduct of bisexuality, since whereas homosexuality is of course an evolutionary dead end, bisexuality turns out to statistically increase the reproductive fitness for a man. However, the evolutionary competition does not result in every man being a bisexual, since if too many men are bisexual in a culture with no concept of "virus" or "disease" let alone any effective cures, the STD's would spread like a wildfire somewhat like the HIV spread in the gay bathhouses of San Francisco. (For this reason I believe that there is some genetic basis for homophobia especially in the minds of young men, just like for many other feelings of revulsion that humans feel.)
I tried to think of reasons for this change, and perhaps the idea of gay men as nice stylish gentlemen that the mass media constantly sells me has taken in. After all, I kinda tend to believe everything that TV tells me. Or perhaps I am just getting jaded: it takes a lot more to shock me than it used to. The drag queens and the Tom of Finland -style leathermen still feel somewhat strange to me (they have the right to exercise their own preferences, but I still don't quite understand what the point is), but I don't feel any disgust towards the normal-looking, well-dressed, well-behaving gay men. Perhaps I consider these men to be solid members of society and good consumers who keep the economy rolling. After all, for a gay man it would be easy to be a person that I would like to be ideally. In our modern society where Christianity has been totally harmless for the last fifty years the gay men have the best potential to base their worldview on individual liberty, the free market and principles of rationality and Western science. Gay men don't need to suck up to women by pretending that they accept all the irrational, emotional and soft left-wing attitudes that tend to be typical for women.
Of course the gay men are the straight women's best friends, as the saying goes, but a normal gay man would probably also be a good friend, supporter and a wingman for a straight man. Homophobic readers might now protest about the potential for inappropriate sexual attraction, but I don't think that it would really be much of a problem. The prevalent homophobia of our culture has taught the gay men perfectly well what would happen if they started making advances towards straight men, and besides, unless he lives in some total backwoods, a gay man can go and find as much many sexual partners as he wants, since gay men are not constrained by the women's lower desire for casual sex. Telling a gay man not to lust for some average straight guy is like telling someone who typically eats filet mignon for dinner that he is not allowed to dine at McDonald's. Not much of a loss, really.
In this light I actually find it comical that leftists and other socially conscious progressives so eagerly advocate gay issues. For me personally, this association has always been quite annoying, and has made me associate gay men with the leftist ideologies --- in the end totally wrongly and unnecessarily. If some accident of history had caused the above groups to be against homosexuality (but then again, the leftist rulers of the Soviet Union weren't exactly "gay-friendly", and it's not that hard to imagine a first-wave feminist denouncing gay men for their refusal to financially support some woman and her children) I probably would have felt a lot more sympathy towards gay men. I am ashamed to admit to having actually taken delight in the misfortunes of gay men, since I knew these misfortunes indirectly hurt the oh-so-morally-very-superior leftists. But of course gay men are innocent for the veneration that the progressives practically rain on them, and should not suffer for it. (By the way, I would be a happy man to get even one percent of that veneration from any equally powerful group.)
Behind the leftist adoration of gay men lies clearly the same idealistic view that the Left has of every other somehow oppressed minority group. You see, the leftists believe that all oppressed groups automatically share their leftist goals and are equally enlightened, progressive, conscious and selfless as the leftists are, even though the reality has always been pretty much opposite once they actually had to take a closer look. Whenever a leftist has encountered members of the proletariat or primitive cultures in faraway lands, seeing their real desires and ideas has always been a very traumatic experience for the leftist. I predict that after the gay liberation, the gays are going to similarly disappoint the sociopolitical left pretty badly.
Until then, it is easy to believe that gay men, knowing that so far they have had their best chance with the leftists, have learned to say things that please them. But of course the gay community supports dismantling the nuclear plants, doubling the welfare spending and increasing the minority quotas in the boards of directors of corporations. This attitude is genuine only for the small subset of gay men who really is ideologically leftist and has thus joined the ranks of the left, and whom the left probably believes to be a representative sample of all gay men. In reality, the average gay man is probably as ideologically progressive as the average native American is a noble environmentalist or the average African rejects the Western standard of living and longs for the primitive matriarchal eco-culture instead.
Especially the alliance between the gay men and feminists is purely a marriage of convenience which will collapse the very moment that gay men gain enough acceptance in society. Call me cynical, but I just can't imagine men who don't really need women for anything to bother spending their energy to advocate feminist goals and hurt their fellow men. (The Catholic priesthood gives a historical precedent of how friendly the powerful men tend to be towards women's issues when they don't really need women for anything. Didn't work so well for women, did it?)
The very existence of gay men is itself educational since it so brilliantly undermines much of the standard leftist pap. You know, how everyone is born a blank slate in which nothing is innate but everything is determined by nurture and the cultural environment which is, just like people, infinitely malleable at least when controlled by the enlightened progressives yadda yadda. It is nothing short of astonishing how the gay men successfully manage to reject the prevalent cultural programming how they are supposed to desire women. This pretty much tells you how effective cultural programming really is and how much weight we can put on theories how the cultural programming determines the preferences that people have. The undeniable stubbornness of homosexuality forces the left to temporarily forget its core principles and make a very uncharacteristic exception by declaring that sexual preference is 100% innate and especially cannot be changed in any way. But once you accept the concept of such innate traits and propensities, perhaps many other traits and propensities are somewhat innate too...
Gay men also show an admirable steel backbone in resisting the cultural demands on what they should consider sexually attractive. No matter how much they are constantly told that they should desire women, they just shrug and keep having sex with men instead. Now, compare this to the average straight man, who typically tends to fold like a house of cards when the feminized mainstream culture starts telling him that it is wrong for him to find young slender women more attractive than middle-aged obese women. Of course, straight men will still keep behaving according to their unacceptable beliefs whenever they have a choice, and in our society where saying the correct words is much more important than actually behaving according to these words, this in sufficient.
With their real-world behaviour, the gay men also serve as practical counterexamples for certain leftist dogmas. For example, if the feminist theories of society were generally correct, gay men wouldn't put much weight on looks in their choice of sex partners. Heh, sure thing. (I remember how some feminist once complained that straight men evaluate women that they see based on their looks, and when another commenter explained how gay men behave even worse towards men, the first writer immediately started to explain how if true, it is an entirely different thing. Just couldn't bring herself to think of anything bad about those cute gay guys.) Gay men also should be very afraid of date rape and be vocal against it, the same way feminists are. But for some reason, gay men just don't seem to worry about being date raped very much. Why? Answer left as an exercise for the reader. (Hint: to become a victim of date rape, you must first go on a date with someone whose sexual advances you would reject. With the possible exception of rare sitcom-type scenarios, neither straight or gay men ever go on dates with people who they find sexually horrifying.)
Most of what I have written so far applies to gay men only, not to lesbians. The very first article by Steve Sailer that I ever read was the excellent "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay", a handy tabular guide to the differences between gays and lesbians. The guide makes one wonder why these two groups are so commonly associated with each other since it seems difficult to find two groups that would be more different from each other. Lesbians, of course, tend to form the ideological hard core of feminism --- most feminists aren't lesbians (a movement that can potentially enlist at most 1% of total population is rarely very effective) since any woman can support a movement whose aim is to get special perks for women, but you don't have to be much of a cynic to see where certain feminist memes such as "women don't need men to be happy" originated. (Thought experiment: imagine you were a lesbian woman who "doesn't look traditionally attractive" as the popular euphemism goes, but who wants to have sex with younger attractive women. What kind of memes would you try to spread? Are there any groups in society that currently try to spread those memes?)
As is evident from Sailer's table, the attributes of the lesbian community are basically identical with those of leftism in general, which doesn't give much hope for me to ever finding them as ideological allies. As a man, I think I would rather take my chances with men who, in a very concrete fashion, love men. The society organized for their needs is not as likely to be a bad place for me.
(Edited for tone and presentation)
But for some reason as I grew older, the thought of male homosexuality as an abstraction does not feel quite as uncomfortable as it used to. Of course, at this point it is necessary to emphasize that I am happily married and don't feel any kind of urges to have sex with men. But the idea of other men wanting to have sex with each other doesn't evoke feelings of disgust any more.
From the sociobiological standpoint, a relaxed attitude towards gay men is probably a smart way of looking at things by the general "hey, more girls left for me" logic amusingly analogous with the way that women try to convince other women that the looks competition for the best men is silly and other women shouldn't do it. Robin Baker's excellent book "Sperm Wars" presented a hypothesis that homosexuality is sustained as a byproduct of bisexuality, since whereas homosexuality is of course an evolutionary dead end, bisexuality turns out to statistically increase the reproductive fitness for a man. However, the evolutionary competition does not result in every man being a bisexual, since if too many men are bisexual in a culture with no concept of "virus" or "disease" let alone any effective cures, the STD's would spread like a wildfire somewhat like the HIV spread in the gay bathhouses of San Francisco. (For this reason I believe that there is some genetic basis for homophobia especially in the minds of young men, just like for many other feelings of revulsion that humans feel.)
I tried to think of reasons for this change, and perhaps the idea of gay men as nice stylish gentlemen that the mass media constantly sells me has taken in. After all, I kinda tend to believe everything that TV tells me. Or perhaps I am just getting jaded: it takes a lot more to shock me than it used to. The drag queens and the Tom of Finland -style leathermen still feel somewhat strange to me (they have the right to exercise their own preferences, but I still don't quite understand what the point is), but I don't feel any disgust towards the normal-looking, well-dressed, well-behaving gay men. Perhaps I consider these men to be solid members of society and good consumers who keep the economy rolling. After all, for a gay man it would be easy to be a person that I would like to be ideally. In our modern society where Christianity has been totally harmless for the last fifty years the gay men have the best potential to base their worldview on individual liberty, the free market and principles of rationality and Western science. Gay men don't need to suck up to women by pretending that they accept all the irrational, emotional and soft left-wing attitudes that tend to be typical for women.
Of course the gay men are the straight women's best friends, as the saying goes, but a normal gay man would probably also be a good friend, supporter and a wingman for a straight man. Homophobic readers might now protest about the potential for inappropriate sexual attraction, but I don't think that it would really be much of a problem. The prevalent homophobia of our culture has taught the gay men perfectly well what would happen if they started making advances towards straight men, and besides, unless he lives in some total backwoods, a gay man can go and find as much many sexual partners as he wants, since gay men are not constrained by the women's lower desire for casual sex. Telling a gay man not to lust for some average straight guy is like telling someone who typically eats filet mignon for dinner that he is not allowed to dine at McDonald's. Not much of a loss, really.
In this light I actually find it comical that leftists and other socially conscious progressives so eagerly advocate gay issues. For me personally, this association has always been quite annoying, and has made me associate gay men with the leftist ideologies --- in the end totally wrongly and unnecessarily. If some accident of history had caused the above groups to be against homosexuality (but then again, the leftist rulers of the Soviet Union weren't exactly "gay-friendly", and it's not that hard to imagine a first-wave feminist denouncing gay men for their refusal to financially support some woman and her children) I probably would have felt a lot more sympathy towards gay men. I am ashamed to admit to having actually taken delight in the misfortunes of gay men, since I knew these misfortunes indirectly hurt the oh-so-morally-very-superior leftists. But of course gay men are innocent for the veneration that the progressives practically rain on them, and should not suffer for it. (By the way, I would be a happy man to get even one percent of that veneration from any equally powerful group.)
Behind the leftist adoration of gay men lies clearly the same idealistic view that the Left has of every other somehow oppressed minority group. You see, the leftists believe that all oppressed groups automatically share their leftist goals and are equally enlightened, progressive, conscious and selfless as the leftists are, even though the reality has always been pretty much opposite once they actually had to take a closer look. Whenever a leftist has encountered members of the proletariat or primitive cultures in faraway lands, seeing their real desires and ideas has always been a very traumatic experience for the leftist. I predict that after the gay liberation, the gays are going to similarly disappoint the sociopolitical left pretty badly.
Until then, it is easy to believe that gay men, knowing that so far they have had their best chance with the leftists, have learned to say things that please them. But of course the gay community supports dismantling the nuclear plants, doubling the welfare spending and increasing the minority quotas in the boards of directors of corporations. This attitude is genuine only for the small subset of gay men who really is ideologically leftist and has thus joined the ranks of the left, and whom the left probably believes to be a representative sample of all gay men. In reality, the average gay man is probably as ideologically progressive as the average native American is a noble environmentalist or the average African rejects the Western standard of living and longs for the primitive matriarchal eco-culture instead.
Especially the alliance between the gay men and feminists is purely a marriage of convenience which will collapse the very moment that gay men gain enough acceptance in society. Call me cynical, but I just can't imagine men who don't really need women for anything to bother spending their energy to advocate feminist goals and hurt their fellow men. (The Catholic priesthood gives a historical precedent of how friendly the powerful men tend to be towards women's issues when they don't really need women for anything. Didn't work so well for women, did it?)
The very existence of gay men is itself educational since it so brilliantly undermines much of the standard leftist pap. You know, how everyone is born a blank slate in which nothing is innate but everything is determined by nurture and the cultural environment which is, just like people, infinitely malleable at least when controlled by the enlightened progressives yadda yadda. It is nothing short of astonishing how the gay men successfully manage to reject the prevalent cultural programming how they are supposed to desire women. This pretty much tells you how effective cultural programming really is and how much weight we can put on theories how the cultural programming determines the preferences that people have. The undeniable stubbornness of homosexuality forces the left to temporarily forget its core principles and make a very uncharacteristic exception by declaring that sexual preference is 100% innate and especially cannot be changed in any way. But once you accept the concept of such innate traits and propensities, perhaps many other traits and propensities are somewhat innate too...
Gay men also show an admirable steel backbone in resisting the cultural demands on what they should consider sexually attractive. No matter how much they are constantly told that they should desire women, they just shrug and keep having sex with men instead. Now, compare this to the average straight man, who typically tends to fold like a house of cards when the feminized mainstream culture starts telling him that it is wrong for him to find young slender women more attractive than middle-aged obese women. Of course, straight men will still keep behaving according to their unacceptable beliefs whenever they have a choice, and in our society where saying the correct words is much more important than actually behaving according to these words, this in sufficient.
With their real-world behaviour, the gay men also serve as practical counterexamples for certain leftist dogmas. For example, if the feminist theories of society were generally correct, gay men wouldn't put much weight on looks in their choice of sex partners. Heh, sure thing. (I remember how some feminist once complained that straight men evaluate women that they see based on their looks, and when another commenter explained how gay men behave even worse towards men, the first writer immediately started to explain how if true, it is an entirely different thing. Just couldn't bring herself to think of anything bad about those cute gay guys.) Gay men also should be very afraid of date rape and be vocal against it, the same way feminists are. But for some reason, gay men just don't seem to worry about being date raped very much. Why? Answer left as an exercise for the reader. (Hint: to become a victim of date rape, you must first go on a date with someone whose sexual advances you would reject. With the possible exception of rare sitcom-type scenarios, neither straight or gay men ever go on dates with people who they find sexually horrifying.)
Most of what I have written so far applies to gay men only, not to lesbians. The very first article by Steve Sailer that I ever read was the excellent "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay", a handy tabular guide to the differences between gays and lesbians. The guide makes one wonder why these two groups are so commonly associated with each other since it seems difficult to find two groups that would be more different from each other. Lesbians, of course, tend to form the ideological hard core of feminism --- most feminists aren't lesbians (a movement that can potentially enlist at most 1% of total population is rarely very effective) since any woman can support a movement whose aim is to get special perks for women, but you don't have to be much of a cynic to see where certain feminist memes such as "women don't need men to be happy" originated. (Thought experiment: imagine you were a lesbian woman who "doesn't look traditionally attractive" as the popular euphemism goes, but who wants to have sex with younger attractive women. What kind of memes would you try to spread? Are there any groups in society that currently try to spread those memes?)
As is evident from Sailer's table, the attributes of the lesbian community are basically identical with those of leftism in general, which doesn't give much hope for me to ever finding them as ideological allies. As a man, I think I would rather take my chances with men who, in a very concrete fashion, love men. The society organized for their needs is not as likely to be a bad place for me.
(Edited for tone and presentation)
In journal Evolution and Human Behavior there is a series of studies concentrating on 2:4 ratio, the ratio of second finger to fourth finger. The lower the index, the higher the effects of testosterone in brain. For example, top soccer players have lower 2:4 ratios than those that do not succeed as well, on average. Men have lower 2:4 ratios than women. For Ilkka it may be of interest that in comaprison of nations and races the Finnish men score right after black Caribbean men on this measure of testosteroneness. Even Finnish women beat the British men in this!
This measure, lowness of 2:4 is most prominent in bisexual men, who copulate with both sexes, after which come the gays, with straight men having the highest 2:4 ratio, thus least testosterone-affected brains.
Gayness can be therefore be explained as some kind of error in the path to competitive testosterone brains.
One can also think that as animals (humans included) in general prefer their look-a-likes for sex, a high testosterone drive for this would by-pass the need for female genitalia and a well-built male body would be more interesting for mating.
Posted by geenistö | 10:04 AM