Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 7: March 2014 (27 page)

A more persuasive argument rests on biology itself. Homosexuality persists in all societies, and indeed, among the higher primates generally, because it has an evolutionary role.

Explaining why brought into play the idea of “kinship selection.” The term itself came from studying why groups in the wild can manifest seemingly odd behaviors, ones not immediately useful in survival.

This means that a gay man or woman can work for the betterment of his relations, laboring in the tribe as specialized labor, free of the burden of child rearing. Gay males might have been leaders, or explorers, or craftsmen. They might have stayed close to the mothers, to protect while the other men were away. Le
s
bians could have done general service in child rearing, or helped hunt (women often have a better sense of smell). These are available, specialized labors, just as men’s and women’s bodies adapted to special tasks.

These ideas resemble “Just
So
”-style stories explaining why given traits emerged. The crucial point is that they did emerge, in the crucible of rapid human evolution.

The genes which can occasionally confer homosexuality (in about one percent of the human population) are shared by kinfolk. Usually the slight genetic influence does not manifest itself as homosexuality, and so gets transmitted through ordinary heterosexual bonds.

But because the gay brother or sister labors on, the tribe as a whole has a better chance of surviving. Homosexuality need not be accepted because it is a right, but rather because it is indeed natural. It is pr
e
ferred as a minority strategy by evolution of the hunter-gatherer hominids we once were … and still are.

The ancient past speaks to us, but we seldom hear. I live in a town with about 30% gay population. The mayor is gay, and a friend of mine. He has been selected for, far back in Africa.

I suppose whatever he does in the bedroom does not fit the antiseptic American ideal. He does far more outside it, for our community, than I, standard issue heterosexual male, will ever do.

He belongs here. He is natural. So are the two lesbians on the city council.

I held, back in that humanities class, that we could productively consider both homosexual modes as alternate social/biological strategies which demonstrably propagate themselves. They have their own cu
l
tures, intermingling with the subcultures of men-alone and women-alone.

Perhaps, to make a distinction between the simple biological sexes and the cultural genders, we should speak of four genders.
Four strategies.

***

So the evidence is in: there are deep currents in the human psyche, ingrained in the DNA, that drive human sexuality. We do not learn to be men and women solely from society. (Indeed, how could anybody who has passed through the hormonal roller coaster of adolescence possibly believe otherwise?)

Fast-changing society doesn’t always like those deep drives. It does what it can, through conditioning, to shape them to its benefit.

The American impulse to mechanize its own sexuality has to be looked at this way. It seeks not just the victory of the vaginal deodorant tycoons; the Cause extends down to the soft-spoken socialists who dream of Perfectible Mankind, and to the feminists who long for the Good Male. Once we were devils, but we can become angels. Fine ideals, perhaps, but founded on the sand of bad science.

All such believers in social perfection are manipulators. They want to forget the press of the past, to dismiss evolution as a fever dream that will pass, if we merely
Think
Right.

A symptom of this has been the drift toward androgyny. The outright manifestation is the growing number of sex change operations. These are anatomically crude—a long way from add-water-and-stir clones—and psychologically high-risk.

Yet they spring from an underlying philosophy that is widespread: that you can fix up the hormones, tinker with the genitals, and make yourself over. Cast off your sexual hangups! Trade in that old set of synapses! Buy the new,
new
, NEW (fill in sex of your choice).

John Varley’s sex-change utopia is not a useful fictional laboratory for trying out our sexual stereotypes, because it, too, is based on a stereotype—Malleable Man. Fictional lessons, if they are to be used, must make some contact with our real lives. And we are not infinitely changeable.

There are helically stored, immutable instructions impressed into the human brain, and these cannot u
l
timately be ignored.

One of the central lessons of our century is that the opposite ideal has produced vast police states. The program of the Soviet Empire and its imitation, client states was to bring about the millennium by cond
i
tioning the populace. Orwell—arguably the greatest English sf writer since Wells—saw clearly that communists and Nazis alike thought they could produce a New Man from the tattered cloth of ordinary folk, given enough conditioning. Orwell was terrified that it would work too well. Luckily, time has proven him wrong—but it was a near thing.

Why do we learn so little from such a clear case? A proper regard for the irreducible traits we carry would lighten the hand of the reformers, make a wiser world.

In sf, our concern for mind-body dualities and man-machine interfaces ignores a singular fact. Our minds
aren’t cleanly separated along a software/hardware divide. Our software, if you like, redesigns its hardware over time, laying down fresh pathways, modifying others. Synapses build anew as you sleep.

Our sexuality—polymorphous and powerful as it is—will not abide easy changes in the “software.” Hormones and neurological wiring can’t be neatly patched, trimmed, deleted, copied or edited.

The weight of what we have been is considerable. A woman who has been a man is not the same as a woman who has never been otherwise, or wished to be. Freedom, even the blithe liberty technology can convey, is both the ability to change vectors, and having the weight of character to make changes mean something.

Our
dreams of escaping our selves, escaping even history, is
in the end the longing for a kind of triviality. Transsexuals can strive for the
Other
, but they cannot ape the embedded hormones, the delicate balances of glands, the full and weighty life that the mind-body synthesis commands. Motherhood, fatherhood, the ecstasy of union—these are not experiences detachable from the rest of life.

To be interchangeable may make us
more free
, but it would also make our lives matter less. Sexuality, it seems to me, can be aided by technology only at the margin. Abortion, contraception, sanitation—all help. In the decades to come, biotechnology will far transcend these rather simple options, presenting us with fresh choices which will excite us, horrify us, tempt us, and provoke endless arguments—all dancing about one central question:
Who are we?

We are thinking beings moored in the body. We will always have pangs of love, of jealousy, of loss. Men and women will always clash, because they have different sexual strategies. This struggle is part of the sexual specialization we see in our bodies, which evolution in old Africa has made moderately different.

Difference brings us agony and amusement alike. The tension between men and women is part of our power. The same stresses which make for romantic comedy helped us transcend the veldt.

Even in the glitzy techno-future, we cannot solve our problems and remain recognizably human by slicing up the human experience into sanitized, detachable parts. The unconscious, and the body it is deeply rooted in, will be heard.

Copyright © 2012 by Gregory Benford

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Views ex
pressed by guest or resident
columnists are entirely their own.

Barry N. Malzberg won the very first Campbell Memorial Award, and is a multiple Hugo and Nebula nominee. He is the author or co-author of more than 90 books.

***

SOME MORE PEOPLE, PLACES
AND THINGS WHICH WILL
NOT APPEAR IN FUTURE COLUMNS

.

.

1) Leigh Brackett at the second World Fantasy Convention in New York’s Statler in October 1976.
The only time I ever met her. (The only time I met Catherine Moore and Edmond Hamilton as well.)
Introduced myself to her in a corridor.
“A real thrill to meet you, Ms. Moore,” I said. “It is a real thrill to meet you too,” she said, “but I am Leigh Brackett.” My facial expression was not to be described.

“Oh, that’s all right,” Leigh Brackett said. “It happens all the time to us.”

A few minutes later, in the same corridor, I met Edmond Hamilton.
Introduced myself.
“Oh yes,” he said. “You know, I am pretty much done as a writer but it is always a pleasure to welcome a brilliant new writer who I know will carry forth far beyond me.” This was from the author of the 1964 short story “The Pro” which your editor republished in #4
(Galaxy’s Edge Issue 4, September 2013)
.
The saddest, the wisest, the most anguished and accurate work of fiction ever to deal with a science fiction writer (and almost everything else).
Catherine Moore in her Guest of Honor Speech on Saturday, the day after, concluded, “You people have been so nice and kind to me and so full in your praise of work I thought forgotten that you make me want to come back and write again.”
Thunderous applause.
In the years after, silence and then the slow arc into darkness, bearing that promise step by step downward.

***

2) The ten best science fiction stories. Your editor has asked me for—as a column subject—a listing of the ten best science fiction writers and/or the ten best science fiction stories. (Well over thirty years ago I listed in
Engines of the Night
my guesses for the twenty best of the latter.) As we all know, your editor too, this is what Ring Lardner called a mug’s game and what Fred Pohl said of book reviewing: “The fastest way I know to lose friends, except for editing.” Listing the ten best writers is an assignment to make me shudder. I might try the best fifty but only under a pseudonym. But the ten best short stories? There are at least a hundred viable nominees. But I am going to make it easy for all of us: I nominate nine stories by Alfred
Bester, drawn from his brilliant run for Anthony Boucher in the 1950s (with one from the '60s). Really, there was nothing like them. These were fifty years ahead of everyone when they were published, and like Beethoven’s Opus 130 Quartets they are
still
fifty years ahead of everyone today. “Poetry is news that stays news,” Ezra Pound wrote. The Bester roster gives us our lives, our gleaming, rotten technology and our future unto eternity. “The Starcomber,” “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed,” “Time Is The Traitor,” “The Pi Man,” “Fondly Fahrenheit,” “Hobson’s Choice,” “Oddy and Id” (that from the August 1950
Astounding
), “Of Time and Third Avenue,” “They Don’t Make Life Like They Used To.” Save the tenth cubicle for Silverberg’s “Born
With The
Dead.” A mug’s game.

***

3) Perhaps the most cutting insight on the Pohl-Kornbluth collaboration, Horace Gold in 1976 writing to me of the history of
Gravy Planet
. (In book form
The Space Merchants
.) “Fred got only so far into the novel and blocked on it. He had the advertising background perfectly but had no handle on the plot. I suggested that he bring in Cyril, who of course knew nothing about advertising. It was Kornbluth who took off on Fred’s firsthand advertising experience and made the novel sing. I have long felt that
Gravy Planet
would have been a far better novel if Cyril had written it alone, but without Fred it wouldn’t have existed at all.” Indeed, and as per my essay for this department in #5, without Fred post-Campbellian science fiction in its savagery and grace at its best circumstance might not have existed either.