• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 463 0

prenatal sexual investment between the genders is a fact of life, not a moral outrage. It is ‘natural’. It is terribly tempting, as human beings, to embrace such an evolutionary scenario because it ‘justifies’ a prejudice in favour of male philandering, or to reject it because it ‘undermines’ the pressure for sexual equality. But it does neither. It says absolutely nothing about what is right and wrong. I am trying to describe mankind’s nature, not prescribe his morality. That something is natural does not make it right. Murder is ‘natural’ in the sense that our ape relatives commit it regularly, as apparently did our human ancestors. Prejudice, hate, violence, cruelty – all are more or less part of our nature. And all can be effectively countered by the right kind of nurture. Nature is not inflexible, but malleable. Moreover, the most natural thing of all about evolution is that some natures will be pitted against others. Evolution does not lead to Utopia. It leads to a land in which what is best for a man may be worst for another man, or what is best for a woman may be worst for a man. One or other will be condemned to an ‘unnatural’ fate. That is the essence of the Red Queen’s message.

In the pages that follow, I will again and again be trying to guess what is ‘natural’ for humanity. Perhaps my own moral prejudices will occasionally intrude as wishful thinking, but they will do so unconsciously. And even where I am wrong about mankind’s nature, I am not wrong that there is such a nature to be sought.

The Meaning of Homosexual Promiscuity

Most prostitutes are female, for the simple reason that the demand for female prostitutes is greater than for male ones. If the existence of female prostitutes reveals the male sexual appetite in its nakedness, then so, too, does the phenomenon of male homosexuality. Before the advent of AIDS, practising male homosexuals were far more promiscuous than heterosexual men. Many gay bars were, and are, recognized places for picking up partners for one-night stands. The bath houses of San Francisco catered to orgies and feats of repeated sex, assisted by stimulants, that boggled the mind when publicly discussed during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. A Kinsey Institute study of gay men in the San Francisco Bay area found that seventy-five per cent had had more than one hundred partners; twenty-five per cent had had more than one thousand.10

This is not to deny that there are many homosexuals who were and are less promiscuous than many heterosexuals. But even homosexual activists admit that, before AIDS arrived, homosexuals were generally more promiscuous than heterosexuals. There is no single convincing explanation of this. Activists would say that homosexual promiscuity is caused largely by society’s disapproval. Illegitimate activities tend to be indulged to excess when indulged at all. The legal and social difficulty of forming gay partnerships mitigates against stable relationships.

But this is not persuasive. Promiscuity is not confined to those who indulge in gay sex clandestinely. Infidelity is acknowledged to be a greater problem in male gay partnerships than in heterosexual ones, and society’s disapproval is far greater of casual than of stable homosexual relations. Many of the same arguments apply to lesbians, who show a striking contrast: lesbians tend rarely to indulge in sex with strangers, but to form partnerships that persist for many years with little risk of infidelity. Most lesbians have fewer than ten partners in their lifetimes.11

Donald Symons of the University of California at Santa Barbara has argued that the reason that male homosexuals on average have more sexual partners than male heterosexuals, and many more than female homosexuals, is that male homosexuals are acting out male tendencies or instincts unfettered by those of women.

Although homosexual men, like most people, usually want to have intimate relationships, such relationships are difficult to maintain, largely owing to the male desire for sexual variety; the unprecedented opportunity to satisfy