You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (14 page)

The huge difference in responses to the last question posed is actually moderated. The responses of the men who turned sex down generally belied lack of interest, for example apologizing that they would but they were in a monogamous relationship or offering to do it tomorrow instead. None of the women were apologetic in their refusals of sex.
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If this were merely cultural, it is likely at least one female would have been willing to act on her desire in what could have been a secret occurrence on an immense campus.

These large disparities are not limited to heterosexual college students. Homosexuals portray the behavior of men and women freed from negotiating with the opposite sex’s libido. They are also a population willing to defy sexual cultural norms.

In one study, gay men had higher frequencies of sex than lesbians at all stages of relationships. In the first two years of a relationship, two-thirds of gay men but only one-third of lesbians were having sex three or more times a week. After ten years, eleven percent of gay men but only one percent of lesbians were still having that much sex.

Outside of relationships, the difference becomes even more extreme. As already noted, another study found that forty-three percent of gay white men had
over five hundred sex partners, whereas zero percent of their lesbian counterparts had reached that number.
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Third, some of these differences emerge at a very young age. Prior to puberty, young boys tend to have their first sexual fantasies in response to a visual stimulus. Girls, in contrast, report that their first sexual fantasies occurred in the context of a real or imagined romantic relationship.
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Boys’ fantasies begin several years earlier than girls’, despite starting puberty later, and they are more frequent, intense, distracting, sexually explicit, and positive in associated feelings.
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Fourth, many of these differences can be tied to testosterone.
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Testosterone is the hormone that promotes sexual desire in both sexes. Although it appears to have more potency in women,
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men still have seven to eight times more testosterone than women on average.
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Testosterone levels have been associated with sexual arousal in males,
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and high-testosterone women have sex more often than do low-testosterone women, and with more people.
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These results have been validated by testosterone therapy in women, in which treated women had higher frequency of sexual activity, sexual arousal, sexual desires, and sexual thoughts.
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If testosterone has a marked effect within the sexes, where people are getting the same cultural messages, it is reasonable to assume that the enormous difference in testosterone is a reason for the differences between the sexes as well.

Fifth, our physical features are in line with other species in the animal kingdom where the male pursues sex with greater aggression and frequency. A study in contrast is the katydid (bush cricket).
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When the male katydid ejaculates he loses about a quarter of his body weight. The human equivalent would be fifty pounds of semen. This load of ejaculate is filled with nutrients, and amounts to about a tenth of the food supply that a female bush cricket will have in her lifetime. As could be expected, men are the choosier katydid sex. Females have the higher sex drive and primarily pursue the males.

Male humans, on the other hand, have an inexhaustible supply of semen, making sex virtually costless. Men would probably not be so biologically eager to have random sex if it cost them fifty pounds in body weight, or if they were at risk of becoming pregnant.

Due to pregnancy, the genetic reward for indiscriminate sex is smaller for
women. A prehistoric man who copulated with a dozen women in a week could be rewarded with a dozen descendents, while a prehistoric woman who copulated with a dozen men in a week would still only have one. She would only be genetically rewarded for more intercourse if her partner was a better candidate than the one that preceded him (and his semen was able to win the sperm competition).
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Sixth, these differences are cross-cultural. The previously mentioned study that found men want twice as many sexual partners as females polled over 16,000 people scattered over fifty countries on every continent.
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The fact that these differences occur in widely varying societies proves they are not socially based.

Seventh, it is common sense. Many men and women of above-average testosterone levels do not need science to tell them their urges are not cultural, but chemical. (It is noteworthy that academics, some of whom theorize about sex drives, have below-average testosterone levels as a group.
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)

I am familiar with high-testosterone men who welcomed the lowered libido caused by antidepressants. For the sake of productivity (not constantly thinking about sex) and their relationships (not cheating) they had fought these urges for years. If their urges were cultural, not chemical, antidepressants would not have succeeded where will power had failed.

A third popular American misconception regarding sex is that homosexuality is a choice. While undoubtedly some people engage in homosexual behavior by choice, particularly women,
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the sexual preference for most people is based in their biology.
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The research supporting this has finally begun to receive American media coverage, but the issue is still presented as if it is debatable due to evangelical Christian opposition. In 2007, fifty-six percent of the population no longer thought homosexuality was a choice,
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and the choice argument is becoming difficult to sustain as the scientific evidence piles on.

For people familiar with the gay community, scientific evidence was never needed to tell them what they already knew. If homosexuality was a choice, few would choose to endure it. America has treated homosexuals with open scorn. Up until 1973 the American Psychiatric Association referred to homosexuality as a mental disorder. As late as 1990 the United States government, through its Immigration and Naturalization Service, considered homosexuals undesirable. In 2003, the President of the United States implied homosexuals were sinners.
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Homosexuals were, and still are, disowned by friends, family, and religious communities.
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It is difficult to believe that this is a chosen path.

Additionally, until recently America’s gay culture was underground except for being lampooned and characterized as sinful. It is unclear why adolescents only exposed to homosexuals through hearing supposed “dykes” and “faggots” disparaged would throw away their lives to copulate with people to whom they were not naturally attracted.

Many rural Americans do not have exposure to gays in their communities and think that homosexuality primarily occurs in more liberal cultures. This is a faulty premise, because there probably are gays in their community, but they are closeted. And there would be many more if their gay children had not committed suicide,
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or fled to the bigger cities where they have support in numbers and relative anonymity.
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The biologic basis for homosexuality is only beginning to be understood. The gist of current theory is that people’s brains are formed in the womb. We all start out with a female brain. What makes a male brain begin to take shape is a massive dose of testosterone and other male hormones that occurs six weeks after conception. During this extremely delicate process things can go amiss.
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The fact that the female brain is the original brain can explain why homosexuality occurs at a much higher rate in males than in females—estimated at two to one.
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There is simply more opportunity for irregularities to occur in the formation of the male brain.

This sexualizing of the brain can manifest in three areas—(1) physique, for example hermaphrodites; (2) mating preference, (3) and gender, for example, exhibiting masculine or feminine behaviors.
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Because of these different areas,
feminine behavior is not a litmus test for a man being homosexual, although femininity and male homosexuality are closely bound. Feminine boys who prefer passive social activities like playing with dolls and playing house to more competitive and physical exercises like sports do tend to be homosexuals when they sexually mature.
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Adult gay men are less feminine. This can be explained in two ways. First, gay men have endured years of socialization from family and peers that is often cruel. Secondly, gay men are attracted to masculinity and must masculinize themselves to attract other gay men.
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This predicament was revealed in a review of thousands of gay personal ads, in which the requested traits were masculine ninety-six percent of the time. When advertisers described themselves as either masculine or feminine, ninety-eight percent of the time it was as masculine. In all the ads where someone was specific about a trait he explicitly did not want, the trait was a feminine one.
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One gay man’s story, which echoes a common theme in the gay community, was, “I met this cute guy at the bar. He seemed so butch and like such a stud, but when I got him home, the first thing he did was throw his legs in the air.”
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This occurrence is also represented in the gay saying “butch in the streets, femme in the sheets.”
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Although feminine traits can be hidden, it is difficult to erase them completely. Studies have shown that gay men move and speak more effeminately than straight men, giving credibility to those claiming to have “gaydar.”
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Studies have also found that parts of the gay male brain are more similar to the female brain than to the straight male brain. For example, one cell grouping in the hypothalamus, the area that controls sexual preference, has been found in two studies to be larger in straight men than in females and homosexual men.
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Another study showed that fifty-two percent of the identical twins of homosexual men shared their brothers’ sexual preference, while with fraternal twins the number was twenty-two percent.
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This demonstrates that, as with height, homosexuality is influenced by genes but not determined by it. That is, one’s genes may make it more likely that when one’s brain is formed the abnormalities occur that make one a homosexual.

Other findings point to biology as well. Homosexual behavior has been found in over 450 animal species.
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The behavior is amazingly diverse from species to species. Male West Indian manatees perform simultaneous oral-genital stimulation (the “69”
position) on each other, while male Amazon River dolphins (Botos) will copulate with other male’s blowholes. Male Brown-headed Cowbirds will not only solicit mounting from other male brown-headed Cowbirds, but will solicit males of other species, such as house sparrows, and are occasionally successful.

Not only does homosexuality occur in nature, but scientists have been able to manipulate hormones in laboratory rats to produce homosexual behavior. In one study, male rats were castrated at birth and then given estrogen, while female rats had their ovaries removed and were given testosterone. The modified male rats would assume the female mating position with their hinds raised, while the modified females would feverishly mount them and thrust away.
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And although scientists have not yet isolated genetic markers for homosexuality in humans, they have done so in several species of insects.
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Other support for biological causes includes the following: homosexuals are found in widely varying cultural groups throughout history
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; most homosexuals realize they are attracted to the same sex before the age of ten even though at that age they often do not have the vocabulary to describe this attraction
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; children raised by homosexual parents are not more likely to identify themselves as gay as adults
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; and all attempts to turn homosexuals straight through reparative therapy have failed.

Perhaps most damaging to the socialization theorists are the real-life examples. One study followed children reassigned as females because of poorly formed penises at birth. Due to the social construction concept that gender is a product of socialization, it was thought this would be the best route for these children. They were surgically modified as newborns and brought up as females while not being told about their operations.