![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eiriasThis 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. ;)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-25 02:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-25 02:32 am (UTC)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 ;).)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-27 02:08 am (UTC)What sort of summer school? It'd be awesome to have you around :).
(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-01 04:16 am (UTC)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.