eirias | unpolished thoughts on reproduction, sex, and taboo

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unpolished thoughts on reproduction, sex, and taboo

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)

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. ;)

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random thoughs...can't think much now

The whole "prescribed roles" strategy makes more sense when the survival of the group is uncertain. Think of the most extreme example, those thought experiment things about starting the human race over with 15 people. I remember doing one of these in highschool. We had a list of 25 people and had to pick 15. In that case I was all for picking people mainly based on reproductive and survival factors.

Rome.

Rome definitely had problems with the birth rate among the aristocracy being too low for Augustus's taste while he was emperor (less than three children per woman, though I don't recall how long the children had to survive to count). I don't know about the lower classes (probably no one does; ancient population estimates are notoriously difficult to construct).

However, Rome was also pretty much fine with homosexuality. Not as fine as the Greeks, but the point is it was a matter of taste -- something people could reasonably debate about. Horace could write a poem which argued to society at large that, while other people might have different opinions, fourteen-year-old slave boys were much more scrumptious pieces of ass than adult women. This was socially acceptable.

What I observe, with respect to number 2, is that reproduction, once you factor out religion, is largely a matter of money. Families at the school where I teach are significantly larger than families at the population at large. 3-5 child families are not at all uncommon, and there are some families with that many sons (that is, they might have daughters as well and I wouldn't know). This makes sense to me; children are expensive to raise now that they are consumers more than producers, and now that some people's standards for the opportunities they would like their children to have have become very high. The wealthy can afford to indulge that many expensive consumers, so they can listen to the call of their reproductive instinct, whereas less wealthy people may have to let reason trump emotion.

I suspect -- no, really, I know -- that a similar factor was going on in the Roman aristocracy. Your legal status as a Roman was determined in part by how much money you had; there was a census, and your assets put you in particular categories, and people in those categories had different legal rights. Therefore there was a very strong pressure not to split your estate more ways than it could handle. Since the social presumption, reinforced by law, was that all your children had the right to an equitable share, if your net wealth was twice the minimum to be in the senatorial class, you would simply avoid having more than two children.

I would not be at all surprised if the lower classes at the time -- who probably had less access to birth control anyway -- behaved rather more as agrarian folks throughout history have: having large numbers of children who would be expected to help out.

So, yes, point 4 is a problem.

[continued...]

That point about your school is fascinating; I had always thought there was a strong negative correlation between household income and number of children. I never had much in the way of demographic data to back it up, though.

I suspect that these days, it's not so much a negative correlation so much as the far ends of the graph may have more kids relative to the middle of the graph. The rich because they can, the poor because It Just Happens. I'd expect it requires a certain level of wealth and education before one really _plans_ these things rather than figure "well, we're screwed anyways, so let's live for today and who cares what happens if a pregnancy occurs"...of course, said lackadaisical people sometimes backpedal.

Yeah, I'm with

tiurin on suspecting that it's higher on both ends -- it's just that you're much more familiar with the other end, from media and possibly real life. The rich are surprisingly unnoticeable to society at large.

Yeah. It kind of freaks me out, actually, thinking of all of those people who can drop $700 on a night at the Ice Hotel and not think twice about it.

Some people are homophobic, but me, I'm plutophobic.
(Hrm, I backformed that from "plutocracy," but wasn't Pluto the Roman god of the underworld? What does *that* say?)
(DEAR GOD, there is actually a dictionary that lists the first definition of "Pluto" as "a cartoon character created by Walt Disney." And it's copyright 2000, Princeton University.)

Yes, Pluto was the god of the underworld. Where do you think all the gold comes from? (Yes, this is actually the rationale behind the etymology.)

I am also very skeptical of arguments which talk about some sort of historical notion of "gayness". I don't believe the Romans had a concept of "gay" in the way we do. For us, relationship types are about plumbing: who has which kind and are they the same or different? "Gay" = "different plumbing". In Roman society, though, relationships were about power differentials, and the sort (and acceptability) of the relationship were determined along those lines. Old/young, free/slave, male/female, rich/poor -- and especially penetrator/penetrated -- are examples of power differentials; in a socially acceptable relationship, these lined up; in a socially unacceptable relationship, the penetrator would be at the less powerful end along at least one of the other axes. I do not think Romans could have reduced relationships to just plumbing the way we do (I mean, their way was equally reductive, it just wasn't the same).

And I have certainly heard of some very fluid ideas of sexuality and relationships in Thailand and in some southwestern Native American culture, though I don't remember the details -- things where people with one particular set of plumbing could, in effect, become social transsexuals, subsequently being held to the standards of that sex.

My point here is that it's hard to talk about "gay" because I don't think it exists as a phenomenon independent of culture. I do believe that there are genetic propensities toward non-standard sexual orientation, but the expression of those propensities (and, indeed, of "standard"!) is strongly dependent on culture, and thus the categories of sexual expression that emerge are functions of the culture. I think what you are trying to talk about is "the status of non-reproductive sex in a culture", or perhaps even "the sort of sexual activity which is considered nonstandard in a given culture", which is fair (and means I may have wasted a whole lot of verbiage here ;). But I strongly, strongly distrust arguments which take categories which only have meaning in our time and place and try to extrapolate them to another time and place -- it's like analyzing a piece of music in terms of the behavioral patterns of fish. You can do a whole lot of work in the analysis, you can see features which are strongly reminiscent of fish, you can construct a whole argument on that basis, and you've just wasted a lot of time because it has no meaning in the context of music.

That said, I strongly suspect that a culture's taboos about sex are in some way related to its reproductive priorities (which may be articulated but are more likely reflections of broadly shared values), but I am not sure that I have the brain right now to actually come up with novel ideas.

(By the way, I'd be surprised if you could see features reminiscent of the behavior of fish in music, but you know more about music than I do.)

Yes, I agree wrt "gayness"; I was too loose in my wording. "Taboos on nonreproductive sexual behavior" is a much better wording, you're right.

(And you're right; at least in Western music, motion is very much a top-down activity, whereas schools of fish show patterned motion in bottom-up ways. ;) )

heehee. heehee. You said "loose".

Aren't you glad you have me here for that sort of objective, mature, well-reasoned commentary?

That's right. I'm not really your friend; I'm just using you for your objective, mature, well-reasoned commentary. *g*

a turtle-like strategy of "popping out a bajillion offspring and hoping a few make it to reproductive age

Is there something you're not telling us? ;)

*laugh*

Um, I think I can safely say "no" to that. Cool as it might be to have n-tuplet babies, once birthed, I don't think I'd bury them in the sand and swim away.

Well, we'll just wait to see if there is eventually a "McSeahorse" signoff. *:P

Dude, if I could get a man to bear children for me I would be SO THERE.

Um, I mean, provided I liked him and stuff.

*giggle*

*visualizes you doing just that*

I asked the husband -- since his parents have written a book on sexual selection I thought it was the sort of thing he might know something about. Then he talked for half an hour, so I have given up on paraphrasing. Although he said interesting and relevant things, you will have to ask him yourself ;). (But make sure to ask about Strong Helper in the Nest, as it's the most directly relevant thing we talked about. I mean, not that cannibalism and infanticide are not continually relevant to everything! But not as relevant as you might like.)

I will try to remember to ask him myself, when the two of you COME VISIT ME IN WISCONSIN! :)

Er, I mean, the next time I see him, which seems more likely to be there than here ;). (Speaking of which, what's your early-mid July look like? There's a possibility that I'll be in the Northeast for a summer school, and it'd be nifty keen to visit on a weekend before, after, or in the middle, if you will be suitably non-hosed and open to company. I won't find out about acceptance until early April, though, and I have zero idea of my odds of getting in anyway, so you have a while to decide ;).)

I have no idea what July looks like. The general plan for this summer is "acquire house", but I'm totally unclear on how much time that takes or when it will finish or anything like that. (Which puts a crimp in any sort of summer travel plans. Well, that and the "not having any money ever again" ramification.) But we certainly will be in the area for it and I'm sure we will have time somewhere :). (I hope to be working part-time and biking like a madwoman, but this leaves plenty of flexibility.)

What sort of summer school? It'd be awesome to have you around :).

What an excellent plan!! I didn't know you guys were so close to that - how wonderful. I know you've been aching for a house for freakin' ever.

It'd be awesome to see you again - every once in a while I'm walking down the street and I get these random ukelelean-conversation urges. Alas.

The summer school: it's two weeks of hardcore cognitive neuroscience training, everything from low-level neuron stuff to high-level EEG & fMRI stuff, I think. And lots of lectures. And I'm not sure what else. Networking, I guess. (And from what I hear from [info]madmanatw's friend Nathaniel, also lots of, uh, "networking." But obviously this will be less relevant to me.) BUT, it's pretty prestigious (no idea how prestigious, other than "pretty") and so I don't have any idea what my chances of acceptance are.

On the other hand - this looks like a low-wedding summer, so maybe even if I don't get in I will try to scrounge up the cash to come visit anyway.

This discussion intrigues me because human behavior is so much less predictable than say the behavior of a photon in a plasma. Sorry if I can't speak the jargon but here goes.
Let's look at the education of women and it's affect on birth rate. When women are treated like chattel and have few reproductive choices then birthrate is high. When they are educated and in control of their bodies, then birth rate falls off. The societies where homosexuality was frowned upon (i.e. the jewish/aramaic tradition) were largely societies where men presided over large harems. In the case of women having sex with women it becomes a case of men exercising control over women to abolish such behavior. Ruling out men having sex with each other seems to be a more complex issue and this might require some research to figure out but I'd be willing to bet really that the issue of homosexuality originates in the idea that for men to exercise power over women that women can't be allowed to develop relationships with each other (much in the way that slave masters regulated the sexual mores of their "property"). Maybe then this spills over to affect all same-sex relationships as the way of small-minded philosophies have a way of narrowing themselves. But if you look at the ancient world, I think that you find it is really only homosexuality among women that is really frowned upon and then men are is fact allowed to get it on with whatever and whoever they want. It's only a modern construct of our prudish society that the taboo of homosexuality now extends to males.

Extends? It's much stronger on males than females. Female homosexual relations are fairly well accepted. Acting less feminine is still an issue, but two women getting it on, that's much more acceptable than two men doing likewise.

Considering that most red-blooded American men see two women getting it on and instantly think "threesome!"...

It's true that it's much stronger against men these days, but the earlier point -- that, in a number of ancient societies, male/male sex seems to have been acceptable (at least under some circumstances) whereas female/female sex was either taboo or simply not discussed -- is also true.

There are a few problems with this in the Greco-Roman case...one is that it's not so much that lesbianism was taboo as that we simply don't know much about its status at all...and one is that, although male social power certainly translated into greater sexual freedom, women had very different legal and social niches in Greece and Rome, so the power/chattel arguments in those societies are different. But I do buy the basic point that societies which chattelize women are likely to want to control their sexuality as well.

Interesting points. The most often cited ancient society - the Jews - explicitly prohibited male-male relations, but didn't say much at all about female-female ones; some have said that this is because they saw semen as a scarce resource and to waste it was to waste wealth. Can we make sense of this through the lens of warfare? - they were always at war with someone, right, and needed lots of bodies, so perhaps reproduction gained particular importance? Or is it all about the basic biological misunderstanding of the scarcity of semen? I don't know any more about the history of Jews than your average goy... anyone here got more cred than me on that?

Could some of this be biological? I've heard it said, although again this is ten thousand miles from my area of expertise, that more women are likely to become aroused by other women than the percent of the male population that finds other men arousing. Basically implying that women are biologically wired for bisexuality or homosexuality while most men aren't. Of course this kind of argument then depends on to what degree sexual preference is partially dictated by genetics.
With that in mind then in an ancient society with fewer freedoms for women and men in charge, woman/woman sexual relationships are discouraged and male/male run about what they do today. But then fast forward to modern times where women have become more sexually liberated and they are able to express what biology has dictated all along. One might even argue that natural selection against female homosexuality might be suppressed in a society which doesn't allow women sexual freedom and therefore, where in the male population there might have been some genetic "weeding," that never ran it's course in the female population.
Another idea is that if there is a genetic component to sexual preference then it seems possible that some populations (i.e. the Hebrews) could be genetically predisposed against homosexuality. In this case it makes them different and their laws against homosexuality could be driven by that as well as xenophobia.

It's definitely going too far to say woman/woman sexual relationships were discouraged in Greece and Rome. I mean, they might have been. Or they might not have been. With the exception of Sappho, who was exceptional in a lot of ways, they simply don't show up in the literature. No one talks about it, so we don't even know if there was an it to talk about. Was woman-on-woman sex taboo? Was it cool, as long as I got to watch? Was it not particularly popular? We just don't know.

So I have kind of wondered which way causality goes here - because you could equally make the argument that societies that require a high birthrate are more likely to treat their women like chattel. It's a more satisfying hypothesis, to me. But it could really go either way.

i wonder if men having sex w/ men was frowned upon because it meant that most likely, one of the men exercised control over the other, making the other a "lowly woman" d:
or it might be the sacred sperm thing (:

I've definitely heard this alleged (didn't

ukelele mention something about it above? and my favorite preacher (http://saltyvicar.typepad.com/) likes to talk about it, too). I actually think it's quite hard to understand sex anywhere without thinking about power.

So, one thing that strikes me about this sort of discussion: does modern society still have "reproductive priorities", and if so, why? It's not like we actually need more people than we have for any sane purpose (barring viable multi-generational off-world colonies, but that's a ways out yet). It seems to me that in modern times, reproduction ought to be solely governed by some combination of personal taste and economic restrictions. (Though it is also, sadly, still influenced by lack of information and birth control access in certain areas, a problem we really ought to have fixed by now.)

Of course, part of my disconnect may be my personal lack of a teribly strong "reproductive instinct" (and my partner's downright negative such).

It may be that all this is irrelevant if your main argument is more along the lines of taboos that were formed long ago and then passed down without being re-examined, though. Ruthlessly pruning old customs based on their current merits is one of my basic operating parameters, but I realise societies as a whole often don't function that way. ;)

Personal taste and economic restrictions are part of reproductive priorities. (Remember that we're talking about the priorities of a society; individuals, as always, can vary.)

In the agrarian society, where children are economic assets, people tend to prioritize having a lot of children. In societies which view children as substantial investments and childrearing as largely a process of providing oppportunities (eg modern America, ancient aristocratic Rome), the de facto priority is to have the smallest number of children reasonable for the perpetuation of the family. (I say "de facto" because stated social values may be different -- Rome certainly glorified large families -- it just didn't generally have them.)

"Reproductive strategy" doesn't necessarily mean "strategy for increasing population enormously", and "reproductive priorities" doesn't mean "prioritizing reproduction over other things". But it is a fact that different species, and different cultures, come to different conclusions on the quantity vs. quality of children thing, and it is interesting to ask whether these conclusions influence (or are linked to) other social taboos concerning sex.

You're right, of course. See my reply to eirias just below if you want my retraction/clarification.

Spontaneous thought about modern reproductive priorities: we no longer need strong bodies to work the farm, in most cases, but many of us *do* need competent, wealthy children to see to us in our old age. Sure, if you can and you're smart, you save for retirement, but it's more than that - many people want there to be someone to make medical decisions and visit them when they're sick and in need of companionship. Truthfully, as sick as it sounds, this was one of my earliest reasons for wanting children - the idea of dying completely alone terrifies me. (And one of my major reasons for wanting more than one - having sole responsibility for your parents as they decline seems just too awful, though hopefully I won't have to handle it for a long while.)

Although if your kid gets too wealthy and successful, there's the American Family Diaspora thing to contend with, in which case you ain't getting any visitors for Sunday dinner at the nursing home. (The facetious bits of me are now wondering if this is why American culture celebrates the middlebrow ;) )

I often here that argument, but I tend to wonder about it... as has already been mentioned several times in this thread, raising children in our current culture is *expensive*. I haven't run the numbers, but it seems to me that if you took the money you would spend on raising children and put it in a decent retirement account instead, you'd have a very good chance of having things covered.

Note I'm not saying "hence, nobody should have children". I'm making a point that it seems to me that in our society, almost nobody really *needs* children. And this is where I got my terminology wrong that ukelele corrected me about above; people do of course, by definition, still have "reproductive priorities". They just don't seem to have much "reproductive necessity". So that's where I'm getting my thesis that it ought to be only about personal preference and capability of supporting them for a while.

Of course, this completely ignores social pressures, which are a non-trivial factor that I choose to ignore because I think they're obnoxious. ;)

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unpolished thoughts on reproduction, sex, and taboo

reproductive strategy

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