Sixteen Volts

In my earlier post "Two percent is not enough, recruit, recruit, recruit!", I marveled how gays and their supporters have succeeded, within only a decade or so, to turn the issue of supporting gay marriages from a blatant cuckoo-clock absurdity to a virtual requirement for any civilized person. I also wondered why the major media doesn't consider it to be newsworthy that the major Canadian gay rights organizations are demanding the age of consent law to be changed so that adult gay men could legally have anal sex with 14-year-old boys. Or why we don't have a Muslim equivalent of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, even though mainstream Islam is more hostile toward gays and extramarital sex than the Catholic Church has been during the last century, and those hairy guys would be sooo funny dressed in hijabs or burqas, perhaps playing the roles of the horny wives of Muhammed. But then again, as you can see, many things often puzzle me about homosexuality. So perhaps I could now write out some of these issues, hoping that my readers might illuminate me with the answers. That's what blogging is for, learning about the world and each other.

First, there is that big ole question of whether homosexuality is something innate or whether it is learned from nurture or the omnipresent cultural programming. As I pointed out in my old post "All things just keep getting better" (in which I brought out my more gay-friendly side), it is nothing short of astonishing how the gay men can so successfully reject the prevalent cultural programming of how they are supposed to desire hot slender women. This should pretty much tell you how effective cultural programming really is and how much weight we can put on theories how the cultural programming creates the preferences that people have. Sociobiology and evo-psych win once again! But perhaps we should leave finding out the answers to this question to the real experts in the relevant fields, but just like many others before me, I would certainly be curious to see how many people in the pro-choice camp would make a sudden U-turn if a practical test to detect future homosexuality in vitro were ever developed. Quite a few, I bet. Or perhaps this would only be the loudest ones, the rest of them suddenly finding comfort in the privacy that modern medicine allows them to have when they finally decided to have their only child at the age of 35. After all, it's my body, so it's my choice!

I would also like to point out, the way that David Brin pointed out in his old post "Emotional roots for hypocricies of BOTH left and right...", that it sure is strange that when it comes to homosexuality, the political left suddenly makes such a massive and uncharacteristic exception to their usual doctrine of infinite malleability and absolute reprogrammability of humans. When it comes to gays, their doctrine that nothing in humans is ever innate goes straight out of the window. Oh no, homosexuals are just born that way and can't help it (at least the male ones), and no amount of social engineering can ever change them, even though social engineering could change everything if only the enlightened progressives had the power and we could somehow get rid of those pesky conservatives. Brin:

A risky aside: Nobody speaks of the profoundly hypocritical exception to the left's own dogma of absolute reprogrammability. This exception is an equally absolute faith in the predetermined nature of homosexuality, labeling it as genetically pre-welded and hopelessly unalterable by any post-natal influence. No other human trait is given utterly obligate status by the left. And given it by dogmatic decree! In every other case, the ideologically correct incantation is to demand that we attribute traits to individual experience and control.

I could also write a few words about the groveling that Brin knew he had to do after writing that "risky" paragraph, since I think that it is rather revealing that Brin didn't seem to realize the significance of this near-instinctive required groveling and what it means to his other ideas. But perhaps I shall leave that for my readers to build on.

Moving on. There are a whole bunch of people out there, especially in the fundy Christian circles, who claim that they used to be gay, but then prayer or some kind of treatment or therapy made them straight. I tend to be somewhat skeptical about such claims, since I don't believe that fundy Christian ooga booga chanting really has the power to change anything as fundamental as sexual orientation. And perhaps many of these men were bisexuals to start with. But I do have to point out one serious hypocrisy that I have observed. It is not difficult to find strong denials and refutations about the claims of these "ex-gays", and these denials and refutations routinely say something about the sexual orientation being innate and it just cannot be changed. Now, for all the reading that I have ever done, I do not recall ever seeing similarly unwavering skepticism or loud declarations about the how human sexual orientation is permanent expressed in the cases when some man who has been a heterosexual for all his life suddenly decides that hey, he is actually gay, and starts living accordingly. Why is that?

Of course, there is a whole bunch of interesting and thorny philosophical and practical issues of what would happen if some group of real scientists came up with a treatment that turns homosexuals into heterosexuals. Judging from the way that soccer moms have revealed their real opinions about kids with Down syndrome, I would guess that they would express similar hostility towards not having grandchildren. For example, suppose that this treatment must be given during childhood in order for it to work. I wonder what Egale and other similar outfits would then say about that, as they noticed that their supply of succulent 14-year-old boys just waiting for some "hands-on mentoring" about the joys of anal pleasure is suddenly drying up.

My North American readers are probably not familiar with the amusing comics of Ralf König, a German comic book artist who is a homosexual. His work has been translated in many languages, including Finnish, and his comics have actually been quite popular in Finland. Heck, since they feature gay men, every progressive must constantly proclaim how great these comics are (just like that TV show "Queer as Folk", which is, like, the best show ever), or risk losing his credibility in the leftist community. But I'm not saying that Ralf's work is bad, since some of the stories are quite revealing and even though I don't know anything about German gay comminity, I can easily see that some of these stories hitting them close to home. Gay men are still men, and thus rather predictable in many ways. One particular storyline that I suddenly remembered when I wrote the above paragraph was about a really "sensitive" and "progressive" older gay man who, whenever some young guy who was unsure about his sexual orientation appeared to the scene, was really friendly and supportive towards him and always somehow talked him into experiencing the beautiful gay thing with him. The story ended years later, with some of his "pupils" who were now active homosexuals, talking to each other in a gay bar, with a pissed-off "He did it to you too?" attitude.

Another König comic strip that I can remember now was also rather hilarious. It was about a homophobic straight guy who was immobile in a hospital bed, and a gay nurse came up and after some arguing, decided to give him a handjob against his wishes. First the straight guy opposed this and screamed for help, but soon he started enjoying it, of course, until the, uh, climax of the strip. I wonder what would happen if somebody published a similar comic about a lesbian who is immobile in a hospital bed and a straight fratboy male nurse then gave her "what she really needs". I certainly might be wrong, but I think that such a comic probably wouldn't be a big hit in the progessive community.

First comes love, then comes marriage, as the quaint old children's rhyme informs us. In most Western countries, there are no laws whatsoever left against two gay guys living together and banging each other, but this does not seem to be enough for them, but they also want the rest of us to behave as if they really were "married". This is a much stronger demand than just the right of the two gay individuals to live together and share their lives, and thus needs to be justified accordingly: the simple appeal of individual freedom to do whatever you want does not cut it, since the gay marriage advocates clearly don't give a whit about the other people's individual freedoms to exclude and discriminate in their lives and their private property, for example. Of course, these days it is de rigueur for every progressive to support gay marriage uncritically, scoffing off the reactionary opponents with the scorn of "Now that they gays can get married, I guess that my heterosexual marriage is in danger, ha ha, oh man, aren't those bigoted homophobes really that silly, unlike us leftist sophistoes?" Jane Galt shot down this silliness in her old post "A really, really, really long post about gay marriage that does not, in the end, support one side or the other", to which I have linked to a few times but it is just so great that it doesn't hurt to do it once more. And with the proven track record of leftism in making life better, I wouldn't personally be that trusting when they say that this time it is going to be different. Remember when the welfare policy of giving free housing and spending money to single mothers without requiring essentially nothing from them in return wasn't supposed to increase the number of single mothers, and with them, all the nasty social pathologies that are causally and statistically associated with single motherhood?

Oh yeah, and then there is that often-hurled handy word "homophobe". How far back to the past do you need to go for that word only not exist, but also not make any sense at all? How many people currently live in societies where the mainstream culture is "homophobic"? The vast majority, I'd bet. To say the least, it is an interesting definition of a mental disorder that the vast majority of people fall under, but serious people seem to behave as if this actually was a serious slur. Of course, there are few words currently as devoid of any real meaning as the word "homophobe", which really just means "a person who opposes something that gays want". We can only try to guess what the objective meaning of this word will be like within a decade or two. For example, when we look at it, it turns out that homophobia is the only real reason that anybody could ever oppose gay marriage. To prove me wrong on this, please point me out some instances of opposition of gay marriage and arguments against it that are not homophobic. Can anybody point out even one such instance?

Enough of that, let's move on to a more light-hearted and humorous topic. When I was in high school, I remember watching a documentary on television about a young man who lived somewhere in Central Europe, though I can't remember closer details. This young man was worthy of a documentary since he had a very... interesting sexual orientation in that he was an automobile fetishist, that is, he considered automobiles sexually attractive and desirable. The exact mechanics of his sexual expression were mercifully left unsaid and left for each viewer's imagination, and I also don't remember if this documentary mentioned which cars he found most desirable. Perhaps a curvy Renault was more attractive to him than an ugly old Lada.

Now, what I later found very interesting was the matter-of-factly way that the documentary said that the poor young man is getting psychiatric help for his sexual orientation. I am sure that most viewers considered this appropriate and did not even raise an eyebrow. But the more I thought of this later, I realized that I couldn't come up for any reasons for giving psychiatric treatment to this man so that these reasons wouldn't apply to gay men just as well. Yes, this young man felt shame and anxiety because of his unnatural desires, but don't you think that this was really due to the bigoted attitudes of the other people around him? And certainly there is no chance that he could spread any deadly diseases or harm anybody else or himself, assuming that he doesn't stick his wiener into a hot exhaust pipe. So could somebody explain me, why are we automatically giving this man psychiatric help instead of standing for diversity by supporting and celebrating his unique desires? What is the essential difference between car fetishists and homosexuals in this respect, other than their numbers?

Perhaps the answer is in that this man is indeed unique, or at most one in a million or so. Every minority group needs to have its numbers swell over a certain threshold before others can even begin to take its existence and demands seriously. Imagine, for a moment, a parallel universe where homosexuals were one in a million whereas automobile fetishists were as common in population as homosexuals over here, and as active in declaring that their desires are normal and natural. Which group do you think would be mercilessly mocked and pitied in public and automatically directed to receive psychiatric treatment, while the other group was first grudgingly tolerated, then later accepted, and finally celebrated as its members proudly gave fabulous and colourful pride parades?

Well, that was a bit of a no-brainer. But now that we are gedankenexperimenting in a leisurely fashion, we could also ask a more interesting question of what life would be like if gays were the numerical majority while the straight people were a small minority. How would the gays then behave towards heterosexuals? The news article "A new intolerance visits Provincetown" gives us one possible answer. When I try to decide how I should feel and act towards some group, I always ask myself what they would do if the tables were turned. For this reason, I find it difficult to feel sad about the AIDS epidemic, since if there was some disease that for some reason disproportionately affected people like me, you just know that the groups who currently tend to be most severely ravaged by AIDS would either find this raucously funny when "Mother Earth" is shedding itself from its evil oppressors, or simply declare it not to be their problem. So as they say, turnabout is fair play.

And speaking of which, there is the important question of many homosexuals there actually are out there. The bumper sticker of "ten percent" is constantly touted, and some of the nuttier gay advocates have stated even higher figures going up to one third. (As an amusing aside, I remember one Finnish guy writing years ago that when such a gay rights advocate was visiting his school, the class dimwit had started to point at the other students and counting "you are gay, you are not, you are not, you are gay...") It should be obvious to any reasonable person that figures this high are clearly false, and the number of exclusive homosexuals is closer to two percent. Come on, think about it: if one in ten men really was gay, and that there were no other differences between straight and gay men other than their sexual target seekers, gay liberation would happened a long time ago. Although I have to add that when I once read some gay advocate claiming that about half of all men have had homosexual experiences during their teenage years, and that "circle jerks" are quite common among heterosexual teenagers, I suddenly understood much better the old feminist chestnut that says that watching too much pornography can seriously distort the sense of reality. I guess that this would apply to at least some gay men just as well!

To bring this long post to an end, let's ask a question originally posed by The Danimal:

How many gay men do you know who worry about date rape? According to feminists they should. Why don't they?

Indeed. For the sake of my leftist readers who might either strain their brains or fall into comforting doublethink ("gay men are morally superior and don't rape or harass other men"), perhaps I should tell them the answer: this is simply because, with the possible exception of rare sitcom-style situations, men (both straight and gay) never go on a date with somebody who they don't consider sexually attractive enough so that they wouldn't desire to have sex with that person. For example, were I single again, I would have an absolute zero chance of being date-raped by a gay man, for the simple reason that I would never go on a date with another man. Similarly, I would have zero chance of being date-raped by a woman who I don't find attractive enough to bang, for the simple reason that I wouldn't go out on a date in the first place with such a woman. I would only go out on a date with women whose sexual advances I know that I would welcome. See how that works?

Of course, I can see that following this simple tactic to prevent date rape would be much more difficult for women, since their criteria for men's sexual desirability is not as much based on looks but also on social status and the thickness of his wallet, and thus they cannot determine on a first impression whether they would want to have sex with that man, but need several dates to find this out and make up their minds later, with the plausible deniability exit available for them should they find themselves disinterested. Gays and lesbians are probably more compatible in this sense with their potential dating partners, and thus get to avoid this problem.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Monday, July 24, 2006 at 2:58 PM