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Underground > Laboratory >

God and science made me hate gays

17:46 / 30.05.05

An article at ukgay.com discusses a scientific study which suggests that homophobia is innate and a result of evolutionary selection.

I'd like to see the article myself, but on the face of it it sounds like bollocks. That is, while I am sure that you can elicit disgust responses from displaying homosexual images and that tribal psychology probably is innate, its far less clear that homophobia is innate. That said, it is possible that homophobia is triggering an innate response because gays are treated with intolerance. But in that case you'd expect that societies which accept homosexuality wouldn't display innate homophobia.

21:30 / 30.05.05

I wouldn't be surprised to be honest if it was true. At least, we have to bear it in mind as a possibility. I mean, even if you take a very different position and say that people are blank slates moulded by experience and their sense of their own bodies, you could still come to the same conclusions. A psychoanalytic interpretation might - for example - put the child's desire to know where it came from to the fore in making theories about reproduction. And if that attempt to reach for a history was put to the fore, given a child's inability to understand the sexual aspect, then I think they'd probably have difficulty with dealing with it.

Now I'm not saying it's the case, but I don't think that we should reject the possibility out of hand. It is worth looking at the historical evidence - there are not an enormous number of cultures where gay sexuality achieved the same kind of respect as straight sexuality. That would suggest some commonalities somewhere along the line.

22:28 / 30.05.05

I think that one should leave the possibility open, certainly, but that it has at best a marginal effect on the politics of homosexuality (I'm of the school that says we shouldn't care, politically speaking, about biological justification). That said, I'm not sure the blank slate model does provide a useful contrast. Isn't it as limited as biological determinism?

Still, I think it would be interesting to ask what different societies attitudes to homosexuality have been. (A quick look at the animal kingdom would tell you that it isn't implausible to regard gay same gender sex as "natural" in some sense). I have only the vaguest idea of Greek and Roman attitudes to same gender sex, for instance, and would be interested to hear from someone who knows some anthropology.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

11:59 / 31.05.05

The way the gay.uk report is written does make it seem like a load of rubbish, good pre-Christian tribes on the lookout for marauding tribes of bum-rapers who would then die out and disappear from history because they didn't procreate.

19:13 / 31.05.05

They say the responses show that, as group living animals, our ancestors learned to distrust outsiders because of the threat they held over their fellow humans.

TO be fair, it's suggested that Homosexuals are merely one group that elicit this response. Anything regarded as "outsider" or "other" provokes this response. This would account for larger problems like Racism and Homphobia but can it also be taken to apply on a smaller scale?

Take School for example - anyone regarded as not part of "the group" is ostracised further and may be subjected to physical violence. Could this stem from this "hard-wired" response or am I taking this too far?

21:12 / 31.05.05

We need to see the original research really, as written up, because the ukgay.com article skimps on the detail of the argument.

If they're arguing that these innate responses have grown evolutionarily over hundreds or thousands of millennia, we have to remember that our ancestors for almost all of that timespan would have lived in small clans, with great scarcity of information and necessary emphasis on valuing similarity to oneself and fearing the other, and that "other" would be everybody you didn't grow up seeing every day.

There's an awful lot of speculation in the article based on no evidence that's outlined there. Maybe there's more meat to be chewed on. Doesn't seem particularly radical, the thought that ancestral clan behaviours survive in instinctual form in us descendants.
It would be a new finding that homophobia, specifically, is hard-wired into us but I'm not clear that's been found.

One of the biggest issues would be that, although homosexual behaviour has probably always been happening at the back of the cave underneath a sabretooth pelt, the concept of exclusive homosexuality and our idea of homosexual identity are more modern phenomena as far as we know.

22:58 / 31.05.05

One of the biggest issues would be that, although homosexual behaviour has probably always been happening at the back of the cave underneath a sabretooth pelt, the concept of exclusive homosexuality and our idea of homosexual identity are more modern phenomena as far as we know.

That sounds right, though again it would be good to actually *know*. But, if we accept that, doesn't it seem likely that homophobia is also a recent invention? Anyway, I'll try and hunt down the article proper.

15:33 / 01.06.05

The Greeks (and therefore Romans) are well known for enjoying a fairly full range of sexuality, to the extent that there is a latin word (Catamite) for a class of young boy kept in the house by an older man specifically for sexual reasons. This relationship did not exclude the possibility of marriage to a woman and often accompanied it. The origin of the word comes from the name of a young boy seduced by Zeus to be his cup-bearer and lover.

All this is relevant because it shows that a substantial wodge of our fairly recent ancestral past was more free and easy about the whole thing than we are today.

So unless someone can show me the paper, I'm with calling foul.

16:27 / 01.06.05

Here's the abstract:

"The authors suggest that the traditional conception of prejudice—as a general attitude or evaluation— can problematically obscure the rich texturing of emotions that people feel toward different groups. Derived from a sociofunctional approach, the authors predicted that groups believed to pose qualitatively distinct threats to in-group resources or processes would evoke qualitatively distinct and functionally relevant emotional reactions. Participants’ reactions to a range of social groups provided a data set unique in the scope of emotional reactions and threat beliefs explored. As predicted, different groups elicited different profiles of emotion and threat reactions, and this diversity was often masked by general measures of prejudice and threat. Moreover, threat and emotion profiles were associated with one another in the manner predicted: Specific classes of threat were linked to specific, functionally relevant emotions, and groups similar in the threat profiles they elicited were also similar in the emotion profiles they elicited."

Or, to summarize: People don't just have more or less tendency for "prejudice," they have a specific set of feelings and attitudes towards a given group, depending on exactly how they think that group threatens their society.

The study itself looked at undergrads' (all white, majority female, majority psych majors, majority mainstream Christian) reactions to various minority groups:

Activist feminists
African Americans
Asian Americans
Fundamentalist Christians
Gay men
Mexican Americans
Native Americans
Nonfundamentalist Christians

So no, homophobia wasn't particularly emphasized in the study, nor was there any discussion of evolutionary justifications for homophobia specifically. They did find that gays tended to evoke more "disgust' than the other groups here--which I guess you'd expect from a group defined by sexuality--but other groups evoked more "anger," "fear," etc. Funnily enough, by the researchers' metric the two groups most disliked overall were fundamentalists and activist feminists--presumably not by the same people! (I doubt that would be the case in the general population, but we're talking college students here.)

19:13 / 01.06.05

Sounds like the data are interesting, Silicon Dream, though any inferences not spelt out there. Thanks for digging it out.

And you're right about the evidence that emotional and exclusive relationships are recorded in Greece and Rome. They were also documented in ancient Egypt (see the tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep).

All very recent, in evolutionary terms, though. If we're looking at hard-wired traits, that means we have to start looking for evidence from hundreds of thousands of years before the Classical period and that sort of palaeohistory/social anthropology is going to be hard to find and to reconstruct. Which leaves a lot more room for present day prejudices, positive and negative, to act as a prism or filter.

02:26 / 12.06.05

The Greeks (and therefore Romans) are well known for enjoying a fairly full range of sexuality

Same-sex action was accepted in roughly the same degree as it is accepted in This Modern World Today--that is, many people were okay with it, many people were repulsed by it, and some preferred it exclusively. The full discussion of Greek sexual identity is, you know, a very big topic. That we get one of our pejoritive synonyms for "gaylord" from them is not remarkable--we get quite a few of words from them.

I dunno about all this hifalutin' science. These discussions always seem to treat culture as an ethereal, passive side-effect of evolution, which is, you know, silly. I think it's pretty not-shocking that young, hungry cultures on the edge of oblivion should have strict rules about how people are to behave, and that these priorities should change. Evolution is driven by the dynamism between opposing "hardwired" forces.

20:30 / 25.07.05

I would say that same sex pairings have existed since evolution's start. Homophobia seems like a stoic overt used imprint of Ignorance and Stupidity and Control. Scientists can prove anything they want this is the Holographic Modern Principles of Modern Maths and Physics - the same as a Paranoid Schizo of a Conspiracy Thoerist can prove anything that s/he wants.

09:54 / 31.07.05

Being a touch humourous (moi? surely not?), it occurs to me that there's another problem with trying to unearth historical views of sexuality. Classical history is largely written by authors. And historians. And artists. And philosophers.

Is anyone else seeing a tiny element of internal bias here, or is that just me?

14:27 / 02.08.05

i was led to understand at university that although homosexuality was praised by greek intellectuals, eg Plato, the wider view of society/the political system was as pejorative as in any other culture one could name.