On Apr 11, 12:41 pm, Josh Hill  wrote:

[Re-sending as the original didn't seem to make it]

>Just read an interesting article on the subject in today's Times:
>
>http://tinyurl.com/ytp5db
>
>I suppose it's too much to expect an accurate treatment
>in a popular science article, and certainly this one doesn't
>disappoint, neglecting as it does to mention the Kinsey
>scale and the malleability of our sexual desires.

Yeah, this article (like many others) seemed to be tailored to
laypeople who wouldn't actually pay enough attention to understand all
of what they were reading, but who'd find it validating to be told
that scientists were supposedly finding something that confirms their
own comfortable stereotypes. That being said, as you say there may be
some accuracy behind some of the analysis, although it's still very
much a provisional hypothesis. From an evolutionary perspective,
bisexuality in women may have a specific function due to the fact that
sexual relationships with other women provided a sexual outlet and
intimate social connection at times when it wasn't ideal for a woman
to get pregnant. By comparison, bisexuality and same-sex attractions
in men may have less of a specific function but instead be mainly or
even entirely an evolutionary side-effect. (As an aside, I wonder
whether contraceptive technology will very gradually decrease the
degree to which women have a biological propensity to view sexual
intimacy with men as a pregnancy risk. It's likely that technology
will also gradually reduce biological differences between women and
men over time, as many of those differences have much less of a
function today than they did in an evolutionary context.)

Overall, for both women and men, same-sex attractions are likely to
reflect a general trait for variety in evolution: most people will
display a biologically favoured trait (like being at least primarily
heterosexual, or disliking the idea of one's long-term relationship
partner being sexually intimate with others), but there are exceptions
due to the importance of variety. Consequently, having same-sex
attractions or being poly (respectively) may be a result of
individuals not displaying a dominant trait due to the priority that
evolution gives to variety. Variety is so crucial in evolution because
it allows a gene to survive even if the external environment changes
unpredictably, so the best course of action for a gene is to exhibit
the preferred trait in most persons but for there to be exceptions.
This generalised trait for variety may apply even for some traits
where the non-favoured condition of them has no evolutionary benefit
whatsoever (in other words, this is a side effect of a generalised
evolutionary trait for variety).

Biologically speaking, there may be a difference for same-sex
attractions in men due to the fact that male sexuality doesn't have a
nine month cooldown period in the event of a successful pregnancy, so
there's virtually no context in which a man having sex with a woman
leads to a negative evolutionary outcome for him (except things like
incest or if there are negative social consequences afterwards).
Consequently, sex with other men may not be biologically favoured over
sex with women at any time, and thus men (as a generalisation) may
have some degree of biological programming to only look for sex with
other men if there aren't women available, e.g. when away from the
tribe in a hunting party. The typical social norms in men's prisons
may be partly a reflection of this: the non-availability of women
leads to a modified version of homophobia whereby only the man who
plays a receptive role in a penetrative sex act is considered to be
deviating from heterosexual norms. This may be a factor in the
atmosphere of competitiveness and aggression between male prisoners,
given that competing over who gets to play the penetrative (or "male")
role in sex may be more intense than when criminally-minded
heterosexual men compete for female partners (and status and
resources) on the outside. (Competition over scarce resources, e.g.
when each prisoner doesn't get much food per meal, is another
contributing factor.)

Anyway, if bisexuality is less of a specifically favoured evolutionary
trait in men than it is in women, then it may be that bisexual men are
in some ways more like women. Commenting based only on anecdotal
experience, it does seem that bisexual men are comparatively more
likely to be into activities like "cross dressing" or otherwise
roleplaying being female in the bedroom, or having sexual fantasies
imagining oneself as a woman. There are other potential explanations
for this of course, but it would be interesting to empirically study a
number of "feminine" traits across men of all four sexual orientation
types (heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, asexual) -- such traits
including cross-dressing as well as choice of occupation, career and
subjects graduated in; biological indicators such as hormonal
patterns; etc. It wouldn't be surprising if both homosexual and
bisexual men had these traits more strongly than heterosexual men, but
in the event that bisexual men had some traits more strongly than
homosexual men, this would be consistent with the hypothesis that
bisexuality itself is a "feminine" trait in the sense that men are (or
may be, I should say) more likely to express their sexuality in a
polarised category as either heterosexual or homosexual. (Naturally,
displaying publicly observable stereotypically feminine behaviour in
social settings is probably less common in bisexual men than in
homosexual men, as it often relates to partner selection for the
latter group).

>Still, there's some interesting stuff here, including the oops
>rediscovery of something that Freud observed 100 years ago:
>men, rather than women, determine object choice -- women
>seem in most cases to be intrinsically bi.

Speaking of Freud, there's a number of things he said that are worth
noting. One is that there are many ways to do therapy, and that all
that lead to recovery are good. Another is that he wanted there to one
day be a science of psychology, but that his ideas were best guesses
based on the information he had available. Particularly noteworthy is
the fact that Freud correctly identified a history of childhood sexual
abuse in some of his female clients, but his colleagues put pressure
on him to re-interpret his findings as that these women were just
making things up due to an overactive imagination. So, when we look at
some of the less plausible psychodynamic concepts around children's
sexual development, it's worth remembering that it's not entirely
Freud's fault that he ended up turning out this rubbish. It's also
advisable to familiarise oneself with Asch's and Sherif's experiments
on conformity (as well as the Rorschach inkblot test) before being too
hasty to agree with theories or hypotheses that are popular amongst
one's scientific colleagues.

Incidentally, JMS may have been making a reference to Freud's
predicament in the plot in _Invoking Darkness_ where Galen discovers
that Wierden has been trapped in the machine on Z'ha'Dum all that
time.

Matthew
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