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This post is unpolished and criticism/honing/utter trashing of the ideas in it is welcome.
I've been thinking about what relationship the taboos on "alternative sexuality" might have to the reproductive strategy used by a society. (For those unfamiliar with this way of thinking about sex, endpoints of the theoretical reproductive strategy spectrum can be found here.)
Loosely connected thoughts, in no particular order:
1)![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ukelele observed recently that in ancient Rome, life was quite cheap, in that problems were solved by throwing bodies at them, and if some of them died, oh well, that's what life was about if you were a guy. It doesn't seem much of a stretch, I guess, if everybody's dying of random stupid diseases anyway. This got me thinking about reproductive strategy: in a society in which people frequently die young, a turtle-like strategy of "popping out a bajillion offspring and hoping a few make it to reproductive age" seems the smartest move. To what extent did the Romans do this? (All I remember about this is that their birth rate mysteriously started to decline at some point, pissing off one of the Caesars; Augustus, maybe?)
2) Today, on the other hand, in modern Western society anyway, human life is much more precious - we count our dead in wars and throw the numbers back at our leaders as if to accuse them of murder, and we have no idea what to say when someone's young child dies because it's such an anomaly. Death is this weird foreign thing. I think it's safe to say that modern Americans use the "craft a small number of exquisite children and take great care that they live to make more babies" reproductive strategy.
3) My initial thought was, maybe part of the reason that we have all of these ancient prohibitions on homosexual contact is that it was just *so much more important* to create babies back then, because you never knew if any of them were going to survive. Kind of the old-school equivalent of the economic saying, "Diversify, diversify, diversify" - you can't afford to have people wasting time screwing around nonprocreatively because NEED MORE BABIES NOW. (heh; perhaps this had something to do with women's houseboundness, too?)
4) ...which I then realized, d'oh, this totally fails to account for the Roman acceptance of pederasty, because now there's a culture that needs fresh meat like the dickens.
5) And then there's also the fact that in today's reproductive climate, if you want to be sure of grandchildren - well, you no longer have fourteen chances. So if you've only got one kid and s/he turns out to be gay, you may well be out of luck as far as "gene continuation" goes. So under that kind of thinking, it makes more sense for people to be pissy about gays *now* than it did back in the days of ancient codes. Which - I don't know; how do we stack up, comparatively? We're certainly a lot more open than Westerners were, say, in the days of Oscar Wilde.
So, is this idea a dud, or does it just need major tweaking (maybe along the lines of "starting population" or "relative power in the region")? Can it buy us anything when trying to understand where opposition to homosexuality came from?
Input from people with historical knowledge that I did not yank wholesale fromukelele, people with anthropological knowledge of sexuality across times and places, or people who know more about reproductive biology than me encouraged. ;)
I've been thinking about what relationship the taboos on "alternative sexuality" might have to the reproductive strategy used by a society. (For those unfamiliar with this way of thinking about sex, endpoints of the theoretical reproductive strategy spectrum can be found here.)
Loosely connected thoughts, in no particular order:
1)
ukelele observed recently that in ancient Rome, life was quite cheap, in that problems were solved by throwing bodies at them, and if some of them died, oh well, that's what life was about if you were a guy. It doesn't seem much of a stretch, I guess, if everybody's dying of random stupid diseases anyway. This got me thinking about reproductive strategy: in a society in which people frequently die young, a turtle-like strategy of "popping out a bajillion offspring and hoping a few make it to reproductive age" seems the smartest move. To what extent did the Romans do this? (All I remember about this is that their birth rate mysteriously started to decline at some point, pissing off one of the Caesars; Augustus, maybe?)2) Today, on the other hand, in modern Western society anyway, human life is much more precious - we count our dead in wars and throw the numbers back at our leaders as if to accuse them of murder, and we have no idea what to say when someone's young child dies because it's such an anomaly. Death is this weird foreign thing. I think it's safe to say that modern Americans use the "craft a small number of exquisite children and take great care that they live to make more babies" reproductive strategy.
3) My initial thought was, maybe part of the reason that we have all of these ancient prohibitions on homosexual contact is that it was just *so much more important* to create babies back then, because you never knew if any of them were going to survive. Kind of the old-school equivalent of the economic saying, "Diversify, diversify, diversify" - you can't afford to have people wasting time screwing around nonprocreatively because NEED MORE BABIES NOW. (heh; perhaps this had something to do with women's houseboundness, too?)
4) ...which I then realized, d'oh, this totally fails to account for the Roman acceptance of pederasty, because now there's a culture that needs fresh meat like the dickens.
5) And then there's also the fact that in today's reproductive climate, if you want to be sure of grandchildren - well, you no longer have fourteen chances. So if you've only got one kid and s/he turns out to be gay, you may well be out of luck as far as "gene continuation" goes. So under that kind of thinking, it makes more sense for people to be pissy about gays *now* than it did back in the days of ancient codes. Which - I don't know; how do we stack up, comparatively? We're certainly a lot more open than Westerners were, say, in the days of Oscar Wilde.
So, is this idea a dud, or does it just need major tweaking (maybe along the lines of "starting population" or "relative power in the region")? Can it buy us anything when trying to understand where opposition to homosexuality came from?
Input from people with historical knowledge that I did not yank wholesale from
ukelele, people with anthropological knowledge of sexuality across times and places, or people who know more about reproductive biology than me encouraged. ;)
