Promiscuity: Repression & Freedom

The urge for indulging in promiscuous behavior may be higher among heterosexual men than is manifested in any society, because the taboo of promiscuity limits the available opportunities.

Many of our ethics and morals stem from the biological imperative of reproducing and surviving as a species.

Since human children need the most nurturing from elders and take the longest time to reach adulthood among all animals, a family man faces selection pressure (however indirectly) to stay faithful to his wife.

This pressure manifests itself as social sanction against promiscuity. The widespread social disapproval of promiscuity can limit the pool of a man's potential sexual partners, severely constraining him from translating his urge for promiscuity into promiscuous behavior.

Net effect: lower observed (measured) level of promiscuous behavior in a population.

Gay men do not face any comparable evolutionary pressure. Homosexuality was considered a perversion or psychological disorder until recent times, and is still taboo or punishable or looked disfavorably upon in less developed societies.

When homosexuality is seen as a perversion, homosexual promiscuity is seen by mainstream society merely as an addendum with little additional evil value.

Of the two 'vices' of homosexuality and promiscuity, homosexuality is clearly the much greater vice, the more repugnant evil.

Attitudes such as these are thankfully on the retreat in the developed world, but one of their unwitting legacies has been the continuing lack of social sanction against gay promiscuity.

I'm not arguing that mainstream society should proscribe homosexual promiscuity (I believe it should not), but merely that it does not.

Net effect: The absence of social pressure confers greater freedom upon gays to act upon their promiscuous urges leading to a higher observed level of promiscuity.

Amplifying Factors

When gays act upon their promiscuous urges (partly because they have the freedom to do so), the pool of available promiscuous gays also increases, thereby increasing the opportunity and providing an easy incentive to other gays with similar urges.

This positive feedback mechanism can amplify and sustain the observed promiscuous behavior at heightened levels.

Many gays have the same desires of pairing up in stable monogamous relationships and raising families as heterosexuals do, but the lack of societal and governmental support makes their task difficult.

The absence of a legal marriage and divorce framework contributes towards relationships that are broken quickly and easily with a mere verbal barrage, rather than with a deliberative, long drawn-out divorce process where the partners have the time to think it through and perhaps change their minds.

An increased break-up rate can send otherwise relationship-oriented gays into a search for new partners, thereby increasing their chances of getting into one-night stands or similar promiscuous behavior.

Casual Sex: Promiscuity & Gender

If casual sex is supposedly an inherently male instinct, why are women's appetites increasing as gender roles become more equal?

There is plenty of evidence that gay men are far more promiscuous than their heterosexual counterparts. A gay friend once suggested a very simple explanation:

'Listen, man, if heterosexual men like you could go to a bar, catch the eye of a young, seriously attractive woman and have sex with her there and then in the loo, with no strings attached, it might make you more promiscuous.

'If, after you've recovered your energy an hour later, you could repeat the same with another beauty, it might make you even more so. The main difference between gays and straights,' he said, 'is that most women are not up for this sort of thing.'

Whatever the truth of how I would behave given these options (don't go there), there is little doubt that heterosexual men in postindustrial nations are keener on casual sex than women.

A new study of 48 such nations (published in Behavioural and Brain Science) finds that, overall, including both genders, people in Finland, New Zealand and Lithuania are the most up for it, the Taiwanese and Bangladeshis the least.

In all the societies sampled, the men were keener on sex than the women, although there was a twofold variability in how much more so.

The report's author, David Schmitt, concludes that this provides strong support for various evolutionary theories, suggesting that men are born that way.

However, he does acknowledge that gender roles do modify the extent to which this natural tendency is expressed: the gap between men's and women's attitudes to casual sex is smaller in societies where there is greater gender equality.

In a critique of his paper, Alice Eagly points up some serious shortcomings to the evolutionary explanation. In two large surveys of non-industrial societies there was no increased likelihood of male casual shagging in more than half of them.

Schmitt's results only go to show what happens when societies become industrialised and patriarchal.

Evolutionary theories posit that our deepest tendencies evolved in the primordial swamp. Simpler societies should provide the strongest evidence for evolved traits, yet the opposite is the case.

Eagly does not deny that sex differences have their foundations in biology - women do the reproduction and childcare in pre-industrial societies, men have greater upper-body strength, size and speed - but she argues that the critical issue is how these differences are channelled by societies.

To be fair to Schmitt, he does state that as societies become more gender-equal, women will become more like men in their attitude.

His final conclusion is intriguing: that it's unlikely men and women will ever be equally keen on casual sex.

Only time will tell, but it's worth recalling that, for 20 years now, German and Swedish schoolgirls have started sex earlier and had more partners than boys, and that in Britain, the proportion of girls having sex before 16 overtook boys 10 years ago.

Gay Promiscuity

"Queer as Folk," inspired by a British show of the same name (and the British expression, "There's naught so queer as folk"), promises an unprecedented "honest" look at gay life.

Of course, that means lots of sex between men and talk about the same. Showtime boasts that the series is "graphic" and "controversial," hoping it will become the sort of hit that the gangster-drama "The Sopranos" has been for HBO.

Now, not unexpectedly, some of my fellow conservatives and traditionalists are upset about the show (though being on a pay-channel makes it harder to criticize). After all, "Queer as Folk" depicts some -- though certainly not all -- of that icky stuff conservatives have long suspected goes on in the gay community.

The irony is that "Queer as Folk" offers precisely what many conservatives demanded and gays denounced in their pop-culture fare: gay promiscuity.

With the AIDS crisis dissipating (for rich, white, Americans), gays and their allies want a more honest portrayal. Meanwhile, conservatives wish we could go back to the days when on-screen gays behaved like Mormons with better fashion sense.

This reversal shows an interesting evolution on both sides of the culture war. Large segments of the activist gay left wing have given up on "mainstream culture," believing instead that they should embrace some of the worst stereotypes about gays.

The group "Sex Panic," for example, declares that "anonymous sex with multiple partners" is a defining virtue of gay life.

Simultaneously, conservatives have fallen back to a defensive position on most gay-rights issues (though certainly not gay marriage), saying, in effect, "Do whatever you want, just don't bother us."

Still, it's amusing to note that Hollywood liberals - not religious conservatives - demanded that gays be portrayed as happy eunuchs. And now Hollywood's being criticized for being too conservative.

"Nothing better illustrates Hollywood's duplicitous sexual attitudes than its faux-liberated approach to homosexuality," wrote the New York Times' Stephen Holden in 1998.

"After years of the demonization of homosexuals, it's finally OK to portray positive gay characters, but it's not OK for them to have sex."

He criticized films like "As Good As It Gets" and "My Best Friend's Wedding" for having attractive, smart, funny and successful gay characters who don't even date.

So now we have "Queer as Folk," which depicts all sorts of gay "dating" - including a relationship between a 29-year-old man and a 17-year-old high school student - details of which would be unprintable in a family newspaper, even with the most clever euphemisms.

Fifteen years ago, groups like ACT UP surely would have invaded Showtime's offices and demanded "Queer as Folk" be withdrawn to the applause of cheerleaders in the press.

Instead, the most vocal complaints come from the likes of Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales, who denounces Showtime's "queasiness" because "Queer as Folk" isn't graphic enough.

Meanwhile, we conservatives have gotten what we wished for: a frank - though still sanitized - depiction of the more unsettling aspects of gay life. The real test now will be to see whether such a depiction helps the arguments of conservatives or of leftist gay activists.

tags: gay  straight  promiscuity  sex  liberation  social  biological  

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