Homophobia or Heterosexism?
The word homophobia first appeared in print in an article written for the May 23rd 1969, edition of the American pornographic magazine Screw, in which the word was used to refer to heterosexual men’s fear that others might think they are gay. Today it has acquired a different meaning.
“Homophobia can be defined as ‘the irrational hatred, intolerance and fear of LGB people.’
Heterosexism is ‘bias shown by a society or community where cultural institutions and
individuals are conditioned to expect everyone to live and behave as heterosexuals.’ While
homophobia can cause the most obvious harm to LGB people, such as bullying and violent attacks, heterosexism can cause more subtle damage to self-image and self-esteem”. (Mind Factsheet 2009).
While the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary notes the first use of the term “heterosexism” as having occurred in 1972, the term was first published in 1971 by gay rights activist, Craig Rodwell.
Neither are terms which most men or women would self-identify as. They are, as it were, external labels. Most men and women label themselves as heterosexual, rather than homophobic or heterosexist. Since there appear to be evolutionary and reproductive advantages in avoiding homosexuality, humanity is neither homophobic nor heterosexist in this respect. It’s being human.
The Bias Against Homosexuality
Much of the rest of the world is against homosexuality except for parts of Western Europe and America. Homosexuality is seen as a western malaise, and therefore un-African, un-Asian and un-Indian. Much of the world also sees the west as degenerate and in long term decline. Religions have nothing positive to say about homosexuality either. Homophobia seems pretty much universal, but why does it exist in the first place?
In the west we blame the bias against homosexuality on a number of factors; you’re a closet gay and trying to hide it, you’re demonstrating your heterosexuality, you have poor education, you’re right wing, and God told you it was bad, are just some of the reasons we’re presented with. There are some who blame this bias on British imperialism, but they flatter us. But what if we take away the views of the British Empire, Christianity and Islam? But what if we look at this aversion to homosexuality through non-Western eyes?
Homosexual Bias in History
The Brits had a law against homosexuality in India. Yes that’s true, but British rule was preceded by 300 years of Moghul rule in India and the Moghul Empire and the Muslims had laws against it as well. The British law simply replaced the variety of punishments for Zina (unlawful intercourse) mandated in the Mughal empire’s Fatawa-e-Alamgiri, these ranged from 50 lashes for a slave, 100 for a free infidel, to death by stoning for a Muslim. People will tell you that Hindus have nothing against homosexuality, but India is against homosexuality and yet they still blame the Brits. (Baba Ramdev, India’s well known yoga guru, is a Hindu, and after advising that journalists interviewing him not to turn homosexual, stated he could cure homosexuality through yoga and called it a bad addiction.)
India’s Moghul rulers were a horny bunch and they were into eunuchs and boys, and got away with it as well. Curiously, and in contrast, homosexuality was reportedly regarded as a major taboo among the common, mostly native Indian, people of the Mughal Empire. Homosexuality, though prevalent among the Mughal amirs, seems to have been rare among the common people in India. Hindus, according to the Iranian, Albiruni (973-1048), considered [homosexuality] as revolting as eating beef. (Eraly, Abraham. Last Spring: The Lives and Times of Great Mughals. Penguin UK, 2000.) Albirani was an Iranian writer and traveller who reported this many hundreds of years before the arrival of the Brits. India was against homosexuality a thousand years ago, and not because of God. So it wasn’t the Brits, Christianity or Islam producing this bias. Given India’s antipathy towards Islam, Hindus are unlikely to be anti-gay on account of the Moghuls.
Let’s look at Mongolia. It too had an empire, and Ghenghis Khan didn’t much care what religion you were. Nevertheless, Ghenghis Khan banned homosexual acts in the Mongol Empire and made them punishable by death. Mongolians today are still highly anti-gay. They follow Buddhism and Shamanism. Their aversion to homosexuality probably goes back millennia. The Khalkha Mongols, like Siberians, place a high regard on fertility, love and family, and therefore viewed homosexual affairs as a sort of abomination.
In the very last years of the 17th century, the Khalkha Mongols came under the control of the Chinese Qing Dynasty and therefore inherited its anti-homosexuality law, which punished homosexual acts with a year in prison and 100 strikes with heavy bamboo. You will note also that the Chinese had laws against homosexuality 200 years before the influence of the British Empire reached them.
Recorded history is a bit thin on the ground in Africa, but there is a whole raft of modern pro-gay research which would have us believe that heterosexual African males took homosexual men as brides, and that the entire continent was a non-binary rainbow-coloured raft adrift in a sea of protestant homophobic western imperialism. The evidence is anecdotal, a bit thin, and at variance with those parts of the planet which were able to write their own history, rather than have western gay activists create it for them retrospectively.
The view of the ancient Greeks is somewhat confusing. It is said that pederasty was common. Pederasty is older men penetrating the anuses of young boys. We are told that they formed romantic relationships, but we are also told that men for the most part were expected to get married and have children. Psychiatrists also tell us that this form of dominant behaviour, as also seen in male prison populations, is just that – dominant behaviour.
However most descriptions of Athenian, Spartan and Cretan culture vis a vis homosexuality tend to cover the 4th and 5th centuries BC. In 399 BCE, Socrates was executed on a charge of corrupting the Athenian youth, although we’re not told what that was. It is also noted that while the Greeks and Romans approved of homosexual relations, they never created an institution of same-sex marriage. One conclusion to draw is that the Greeks must have regarded same-sex marriage as an institution that would cause harm to society. Greeks had no concept of sexual orientation or identity. There was no LGBT in their culture. There was just sex, and certainly no lesbianism as far as Greek history was concerned. History also tells us that Greek men who didn’t marry, but continued in homosexual relationships were looked down upon.
That notwithstanding, what history does not describe, is the lives of ordinary people, the poor, the artisans and the slaves. In subsistence farming it’s all hands to the pump and adolescent males don’t get the day off to be humped by someone else’s dad. Some sources tell us that men got married at 30. That might be true for the rich who live longer anyway, but when average life expectancy is around 35, you start a lot earlier. Neither did most people in Greece hang around listening to philosophers. Some of them had to work, feed the pigs, milk the goats, tan hides, make harnesses for horses, plough fields, make tallow for candles, sew, weave and grind corn to make flour. It is entirely possible that the ruling elites indulged in one form of behaviour/culture and that the ordinary people conducted themselves differently.
Ancient Rome had many parallels to ancient Greece in its understanding of same-sex attraction, and sexual issues more generally. This is especially true under the Republic. Yet under the Empire, Roman society slowly became more negative in its views towards sexuality, probably due to social and economic turmoil, even before Christianity became influential. Eventually, as in the rest of Europe, Christian culture and its rules came to dominate.
Non-Western Views About Homosexuality Today
Most (93%) Indonesians believe that homosexuality should be rejected. In January 2016 when the Education Minister found out that some LGBT groups were offering counselling services at a university, he said that they were corrupting the country’s youth and that LGBT people should be banned from universities. The Vice-President followed this up with a call to the United Nations to close its “Being LGBT in Asia Initiative”. The mayor of Tangerang told the public that instant noodles and baby formula are “making babies gay”. The Indonesian Psychiatric Association lists LGBTs as people with psychiatric problems, and the government is now cracking down on LGBT content on the Internet on television.
The Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini, referred to homosexuality as a “problem” by saying “This new [homosexual] behaviour is quickly becoming a threat in our nation because it encourages people not to have proper families that have children”. Since gay couples cannot naturally procreate, traditionalist and Christian Africans for whom manhood and womanhood is largely defined by raising children, say that homosexuals are being un-African. A banner with the words: “Homosex is Not in Black culture” was frequently deployed by supporters of Winnie Mandela during her trial in 1991 and has continuously been used by people and associations all over the South Africa ever since. British rule over the Zulus only lasted from about 1880 until 1910. If they’re anti-gay, they didn’t get it from us.
Then there’s Iran, whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said in a speech in the USA in 2007 that his country had no homosexuals (alive anyway).
Today being anti-gay in Mongolia is regarded as a form of nationalism, as many Mongolians believe homosexuality to be a product of the West.
“Same-sex sexual activity has been legal in China since 1997. Additionally, in 2001, homosexuality was declassified as a mental illness” says Wikipedia. It goes on to say that “homosexuality was regarded as a normal facet of life in China, prior to Western influence from 1840 onwards”. We already know that not to be true, since the article itself points out later on that China had already passed a law against it in 1740 (about 100 years before that ‘western influence’) Be that as it may, Chinese communists, and it seems unlikely that they were influenced by the imperialist British, continued the ban until 1997. Fast forward 20 years and in 2017 a women’s basketball coach at a central Chinese university posted a photograph online showing two students holding an anti-gay banner on school grounds. “Keep homosexuality far from the university campus,” it read, the golden characters and red background in the colours of China’s national flag. “Protect Chinese traditional mores. Defend core socialist values. Resist corrosion from decadent Western thoughts.” Nothing much changed there then.
For China as well as much of Asia and Africa homosexuality is seen as a negative western influence. It will also be seen that said opposition to homosexuality is quite irrational The LGBT community in the UK say that British imperialism had repressed the wholly natural homosexual tendencies of all of India, Asia, Africa and China. That isn’t rational either.
The message from the gay, enlightened West is that the West knows best.
In fact though, what the West knows best, is science.
The Science
Doing science which unearths unpopular data and which produces politically unacceptable conclusions is not for the faint-hearted, and only big boys would get away with it. Gordon Gallup is an evolutionary psychologist, former Chair of the Psychology Department at U Albany in America, and former editor of the Journal of Comparative Psychology. He’s been published more than 250 times.
Most evolutionary research on homosexuality involves trying to locate possible gene-enhancing benefits. The “homosexuality-is-adaptive-too approach” goes with a growing tolerance for homosexuality, and would of course be both popular and politically correct. Professor Gallup came at things from a very different angle, instead asking why there is such disdain for gay people to begin with, and ask why no cultures actually endorse exclusive, lifelong same-sex relationships.
For most of human evolutionary history, exclusive homosexuality would have been a ticket to reproductive oblivion. If homosexuality were only heritable, it would have disappeared long ago. That leaves just two things to make us gay; what happens in the womb and what happens after you’re born. Parents are particularly concerned about what happens to children after they’re born. After all, without children there are no grandchildren. Reproduction is what makes us successful as individuals, not money, fame, intellect or physical prowess. A species is likewise only successful if it is able to reproduce.
Evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup’s theory about the possible adaptive function of homophobia, or, more broadly defined, negative attitudes toward gay people is that homophobic responses “are proportional to the extent to which the homosexual [is] in a position that might provide extended contact with children and/or would allow the person to influence a child’s emerging sexuality.” The most controversial aspect of the theory is that gay adults can influence a child’s developing sexuality, increasing their adult arousability to same sex partners.
Study 1
In his first of four studies, Gallup administered a survey to 167 self-identified straight undergraduate students—males and females—a survey designed to gauge the student’s “degree of discomfort” in interacting with homosexuals who held different jobs. Importantly, these occupations varied along one dimension: the extent to which the job entailed interaction with children. Included were nine sample occupations—three that afforded a high degree of contact with kids (teacher, school bus driver, doctor) and six that provided moderate to low contact (lawyer, construction worker, bank teller, pilot, mechanic, sales clerk). As predicted, the degree of discomfort was significantly correlated with the likelihood that persons in these categories would come into contact with children.
Intriguingly, hypothetical gay medical doctors elicited the most discomfort among the participants, an unexpected finding that Gallup sought to better understand in his second study.
Study 2
In the second study, all of the characters were doctors of various kinds, physicians varying in the extent to which they would have intimate contact with children (paediatrician, child psychiatrist, general practitioner, cardiologist, brain surgeon, gerontologist). When left uninformed about the doctor’s sexual orientation, participants expressed the most discomfort about the prospect of interacting with those who had “invasive” techniques, such as the brain surgeon. But the picture changed dramatically when they were told the doctor was gay. Contrary to the HIV-exposure hypothesis, which should have produced little to no differences in attitudes toward the different gay doctors, it was the opportunity for intimate contact with children that correlated with discomfort. The participants were significantly less comfortable about the idea of interacting with gay paediatricians and general physicians than they were for the other types of gay doctors. In fact, gay brain surgeons, associated readily with infectious material, elicited the least aversion.
Study 3
Gallup’s third study was even more revealing. Imagine, undergraduate participants were told, that you had a son or a daughter, either an 8-year-old or a 21-year-old, who was invited to spend the night at a friend’s house. On a scale of 1 (“not at all upset”) to 4 (“very upset”), how upset you would be, as a parent of this hypothetical child, to learn that the friend’s mother or father was gay? The participants expressed most concern when their imaginary younger child was exposed to same-sex homosexual parents (young sons being around the friend’s gay father; young daughters being around the friend’s gay mother). This was especially pronounced (mean concern = 3.3) for male participants thinking about their imaginary eight-year-old son (compared to 2.3 at the thought of him being around a lesbian). These very same male participants didn’t seem to mind the prospect of their 21-year-old son being exposed to their friend’s lesbian mother (1.6), or even for this older imaginary son spending the night around their friend’s gay dad (2.3). So, the participants’ homophobia didn’t seem to be moralistically generalized to the “gay lifestyle” but instead it emerged specifically in terms of their folk beliefs about children’s sexual impressionability.
Study 4
Gallup’s final study replicated his basic findings with a broader sample. Nearly two hundred people from the Albany area, varying along a wide range of demographics (age, sex, religiosity, education, number of gay friends) were polled on a “Homosexual Reproductive Threat Scale.” Participants responded to statements such as, “I would feel uncomfortable if I learned that my daughter’s teacher was a lesbian,” “I would feel uncomfortable if I learned that my neighbor was a homosexual,” and so on. As you might expect, variables such as sex (males being more negative) and religiosity predicted homophobia. But parental status was independently correlated with negative attitudes to gays and lesbians, too; and this effect was especially salient for the males in the survey. Fathers with young children were the most homophobic.
Summary
His tests showed increased aversion to homosexual adults, particularly males, when the said males would have been in close proximity to children. The closer the proximity, the greater the aversion. Gallup’s ideas made sense in strictly biological terms. “In its simplest form,” he said, “parents who showed a concern for their child’s sexual orientation may have left more descendants than those who were indifferent.” There are therefore reproductive advantages for the individual, and evolutionary advantages for humankind, in having a negative attitude towards homosexuality.
Other Studies
The idea that you can influence sexual orientation is anathema to gay activists and a Holy Grail to religious conservatism. However, the American Psychological Association (APA) takes the position that a variety of factors impact a person’s sexuality and that these are an interaction of environmental, cognitive and biological factors. Studies of intergenerational transfer of sexual orientation in families where the children were adopted show that gay adoptive parents are more likely to end up with children who grow up to be gay, than is the case with heterosexual parents. Percentages of children of gay and lesbian parents who adopted non-heterosexual identities ranged between 16% and 57%, with odds ratios of 1.7 to 12.1, depending on the mix of child and parent genders. Daughters of lesbian mothers were most likely (33% to 57%; odds ratios from 4.5 to 12.1) to report non-heterosexual identities. There have been several of these studies and they all produced the same results.
Recent evidence offers some support for Gallup’s model: men—but not women—who were sexually abused as children by same-sex adults are more likely than non-abused males to have homosexual relationships as grown-ups. Most researchers believe that there is something like a “sexual imprinting” process that occurs in early development, which may help to explain this, as well as fetishism and paraphilias. Note also that some of the most virulent homophobia today can be found on the playgrounds, which is consistent with the sexual imprinting model. Children and teen’s stubborn reluctance towards tolerating gays and lesbians may itself be an adaptive proscription orienting them away from same-sex experimentation.
Humans intuitively believe that having gays around children makes them slightly less likely to turn into heterosexual adults. The science seems to back this up. Non-heterosexual adults are less likely to breed, and failing to breed produces no evolutionary advantages whatsoever. Statistically speaking therefore, if you want to pass on your genes, having gay people around your kids makes this a less likely event.. An aversion to homosexuality would be an instinctive part of man’s drive to reproduce, and statistically an aversion to homosexuality might lead a person to have more descendants.
There was a 2017 study in Utah to see whether male physiological reactions to viewing same-sex public displays of affection (PDA), measured through salivary alpha-amylase (sAA), would differ as a function of sexual prejudice, compared with assessments using the Attitudes Towards Lesbians and Gay Men Scale (ATLG) and the Modern Homonegativity Scale.
They wanted to figure out why there was a rise in anti-gay hate crimes, at a time when there was a growing acceptance of LGBTQ generally. Those being studied were shown “six different slide shows depicting same-sex PDA, mixed-sex PDA, everyday items, and disgusting images, while providing saliva samples in the lab“. They found that the saliva response to same sex kissing was the same as that of viewing “universally disgusting images” and much higher than viewing every day objects. Watching gay men kissing was akin to watching maggots. This result was true across all those tested regardless of how they scored in other tests of prejudice. The study suggested that all people, not just prejudiced ones may experience a “physiological response indicative of stress when witnessing a male same-sex couple kissing.”
Evolutionary Theories
The gene-centered view of evolution is a synthesis of the theory of evolution by natural selection, the particulate inheritance theory, and the non-transmission of acquired characters. It states that those alleles whose phenotypic effects successfully promote their own propagation will be favourably selected relative to their competitor alleles within the population. In his book, The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins produced the idea of a ‘meme’. A meme was “a unit of cultural transmission”. Others said subsequently a meme could be defined, more precisely, as “a unit of cultural information that can be copied, located in the brain”. Homophobia might be seen as one such meme.
In Evolutionary Game Theory it may appear that the contestants of evolutionary games are the individuals present in each generation who directly participate in the game. But individuals live only through one game cycle, and instead it is the strategies that really contest with one another over the duration of these many-generation games. So it is ultimately genes that play out a full contest – selfish genes of strategy. The contesting genes are present in an individual and to a degree in all of the individual’s kin. A strategy of avoiding homosexuals might give your genes a better chance of making it to the next round of the game.
Conclusions
Despite denials to the contrary it is likely that aversion or antipathy towards homosexuality was probably ubiquitous. You can’t blame Judeo-Christian values, the British Empire or other external factors. Some societies might well have seen homosexuality as a threat to family values. This view may not be entirely cultural in origin.
In some societies male homosexuality was viewed from a dominance perspective, and submissive sexual partners were looked down upon. These weren’t societies of gay relationships. It is in that context, we should place sex with boys. In the Greek context it is not possible to disentangle sex with boys from other forms of homosexuality. In the 21st century though, sex with boys will put you in jail.
The ancient world didn’t have LGBTQ. These are broadly speaking 21st century social and cultural constructs, so perhaps we shouldn’t perhaps attempt to draw parallels.
The science tells us two things. Firstly that proximity to homosexual males and females can influence the sexual orientation of children, and also that we’re intuitively or instinctively aware of this. Secondly that the desire to reproduce one’s genes may outweigh cultural or societal influences.
