unpolished thoughts on reproduction, sex, and taboo

[eirias]

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. ;)

Comments

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

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.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

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?

[drspiff.livejournal.com]

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.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

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.