WW[GT]

I don't want this blog to be exclusively about World War G/T, but it's what's on my mind right now. Specifically, I'm trying to think through how this might work out in the long run, given that gay/straight inequality--like other social inequalities--is likely due, at least in part, from facts about humanity that aren't going to go away.

I think there are two purposes to thinking this through:

1. I'd like to see more realism and humility in the face of human nature on the part of the left. Your ideals don't match human reality any more than any other religion's morality, and rigid enforcement of them will be just as inhumane as the worst puritanism.

2. I'm hoping to find some realistic optimism for traditionalism. Yes, things are rapidly changing due to societal and technological shifts, but some things about humanity don't change--or at least, they don't change that fast. At least some aspects of traditional ideas about sex and sexuality seem universal enough to be in this category. Thus, if what the left is pushing is insane and unworkable, it won't ultimately work--either we'll figure out a workaround that most people will muddle through, or there will be a backlash and an adjustment of our political order and self-understanding ... or the whole thing will collapse. Hopefully it won't come to the latter.

The persistence of pathologies of the gay community, cont.

The gay community appears to suffer from other pathologies as well, that are at least not evidently related to lack of male-female balance. High rates of mental illness, suicide, violence, etc. Again, the presumption is that the cause of these things is the societal rejection that gays face.

However, the same thing that leads me to believe that gays (at least the males) are "born that way" makes me think that the other psychological problems associated with homosexuality are likewise inborn. The truth is that a frightening amount of what think of as our personalities, dispositions, mental problems etc., are strongly influenced by genetic and other biological factors. If homosexuality has a biological cause (as seems very likely for men at least) and it is consistently correlated with other psychological or behavioral abnormalities, it seems quite likely that, whichever way the causality might run, these also have related biological roots.

If this is the case, then the pathologies of the gay community aren't going to go away. Like the persistence of the pathologies of the black community, this is bad news for society as a whole--as reality persistently refuses to live up to the ideology of equality, we get growing resentment on the part of the minority and endless guilt trips for the majority, leading either to craven worship of the minority for the true believers and dark cynicism for the skeptics.

Most folks will muddle through, repeating the official line that there are no significant differences between groups, but, in practice, keeping their distance from the problems they continue perceive in the minority group.

Gay integration, cont.: social pathologies of the gay community

In addition to the inherent structures of a human society geared to heterosexual mating and reproduction, the social pathologies of the gay community pose another obstacle to the liberal dream of a society where sexual orientation makes no difference.

Right-thinking people tell us that these pathologies are all or mostly due to oppression by straights and, thus, that they will evaporate as soon as that oppression ceases, but--taking a lesson from the experience with blacks--this seems unlikely.

Certain social pathologies arise directly from the unbalanced nature of homosexual sexuality. Male and female human sexuality evolved together in a complementary fashion. This complementarity is lacking in homosexual relationships. Yes, there are variations between individuals which mean that any given couple, homosexual or heterosexual, can be more or less complementary in various ways, but the differences between male and female sexuality are quite significant when groups are taken as a whole and individual variations cancel each other out. This means that, taken as a whole, different patterns will be seen in male-female, male-male, and female-female sexuality.

The most obvious manifestation of this is the hyper-promiscuity of a significant portion of the gay male population. We can get a glimpse of what sexuality tailored purely to male tastes looks like from straight male porn: endless random couplings that get right to the point and leave no attachments. Of course, this is a fantasy world, based on the absurd premise that females have the same libido as males, but gay men actually inhabit (or can choose to inhabit) a sexual reality that at least approximates this. Being gay does not make you a sex maniac, but male sexuality unbalanced by female sexuality tends toward sex mania, with the attendant venereal diseases. A significant number of gay men have an astronomical number of sexual partners, and the HIV infection rate remains high despite the fact that everyone knows what causes it and how to prevent it.

Not being a woman, I don't know how this unbalance is likely to work out among lesbians, but there are bound to be problems there as well. Lesbians are obviously more likely to form lasting relationships than gay men, but I recall a study showing that lesbian relationships were still significantly less stable than heterosexual relationships. So, it does not seem to be the case that more monogamous inclinations of human females relative to males leads hyper-monogamy in female-female relationships, but that there is something out-of-balance in female sexuality as well.

Perhaps opening marriage to homosexuals will, over time, change homosexual culture to be oriented toward monogamy like heterosexual culture. Gay boys will grow up dreaming of meeting Mr. Right and settling down. There's probably some truth in this. Some gay folks (mostly lesbians), will desire the settled life of marriage (and even children), and this will become a goal for some from early on, and the gay sexual market will be modified accordingly.

However, the disappearance of marriage among the lower classes makes me think that monogamy is a fragile thing that arises and flourishes only under certain circumstances. It is not "natural" in the sense that, when obstacles are removed, it just emerges as the default. Rather, monogamy is an arrangement that arose specifically around the yin and yang of male and female and is specifically oriented toward rearing offspring. Everything else (including--to some degree--old straight people getting married), is an imitation of the "real thing"--something of a tragedy or a joke. Other kinds of couples can be cute, endearing, edifying in their devotion to each other, etc., but they are not engaged in the work of family. Yes, gays can adopt or lesbians can be inseminated like farm animals, but this presupposes the weak modern ideal of family as a mere launching pad for individuals bound for the corporate/state machine. There is no essential connection of blood that ties all the individuals together and little reason for it to remain permanent.

Gays: prospects for integration

The civil rights movement started with bright prospects: Eliminate Jim Crow, and the barriers between white and black will fade away. Of course, that didn’t happen. Lower class blacks suffer from social pathologies that everyone is anxious to distance themselves (and, more importantly, their children) from. Jim Crow was (among other things) a blunt instrument for accomplishing this. The North had more subtle ways of doing it--excluding blacks from certain neighborhoods, etc. We've gotten rid of those and condemn them as racist, but we have our own ways of doing the same thing. For instance, white people--including good-thinking liberals--are anxious to move to neighborhoods with "good schools"--which effectively means "majority white and asian". Of course, there are middle class blacks, who integrate more or less successfully with the white middle class (and also must insulate themselves from lower class blacks), but the hopes of the civil rights movement have met with hard realities: no one has a solution for the social pathologies of lower class blacks, and no one really believes (when you look at revealed preferences) the official dogma that these pathologies are primarily in the eye of the beholder.

As we all know, gays are the new blacks, and the gay rights movement is the new civil rights movement. So, the question arises: what are the realistic prospects for "gay integration"?

As with blacks, we are informed that negative impressions of gays are merely prejudice--gays and straights are the same. If they're not, it's because of straight prejudice. Remove the prejudice, give gays their rights, and they'll be just like straights (except where they're better than straights!).

There are reasons to think this argument is more plausible for gays than it has proven to be for blacks. Strictly speaking, gays have never been forcibly segregated, so we're talking more about social acceptance rather than integration. The persistent differences between whites and blacks seem to arise in large part from genetic differences that come from breeding separately for thousands of years--most prominently, the mean IQ of the two populations is different. Gays are not a distinct genetic population like this, with a broad set of differences from the rest of the population that show up as statistically significant against the noise of individual variations when whole populations are considered. It seems somewhat more plausible to say that gays are just like straights, except that they are attracted to their own sex.

On the other hand, the limitations that civil rights and feminism have met up against despite legal changes and relentless propaganda should make us skeptical of the ability of the gay rights movement to fully normalize homosexuality. Like differences between blacks and whites, and men and women, the societal disapproval of homosexuality is not some peculiar quirk of our culture, but manifests itself across many (most? all?) cultures in some form or another.

Even if there's not some direct reason for this (e.g. disapproval of homosexuality somehow directly increases genetic fitness), there are basic logical reasons why "gay" will never become a compliment--namely, sexual differentiation works.

The vast majority of men like being masculine and prefer women who are feminine. The vast majority of women like being feminine and prefer men who are masculine. As much as we might protest "Not that there's anything wrong with that!", when it comes to revealed preferences, we like sexual differentiation in our mates, our associates and our children. Maybe propaganda will be able to wear down some of the felt revulsion at androgyny (at least, among some women). It has certainly already limited public expression of that revulsion, but, again, when it comes to whom we choose to associate and mate with, women prefer clearly masculine men and men prefer clearly feminine women--and, as there are obvious evolutionary reasons for this as masculinity and femininity largely boil down to signals of biological fitness, it's unlikely that this will go away, even if the boundaries and specific cultural manifestations of masculinity and femininity are modified over time.

Sexual differentiation is too basic to the structure of society and life as most people actually prefer to live it for the public breakdown of this differentiation demanded by LGBT ideology (and now being enshrined in law) to ultimately succeed. If the law will no longer allow outright discrimination against those who violate the boundaries demanded by this differentiation, people will find other means to carry on normal life. To the extent that we have free association, we can associate with people who value similar things. When parents move to neighborhoods full of people who "value education," or when white people more generally move to whitopias like Portland to be around a "vibrant arts scene" or "sustainable lifestyle," they are, in fact, selecting to be around people like them, which--in practice--means mostly whites, and, implicitly, they are expressing preference for and approval of ways of life that are most characteristic of whites in our society. In the same way, sexually normal straight people naturally gravitate to other sexually normal straight people--both for selecting mates and for friendship, and they express preference for and approval for masculinity in men and femininity in women.

This inherently limits the social acceptability of homosexuality.