Sex, Time, and Power

by Leonard Shlain

  Corroborative evidence that Mother Nature had difficulty titrating the male animus and anima can be observed in the behavior of postpubertal males. At a time when male testosterone surges, boys struggle to establish their gender. Young males are far more confused about their sexual identity than are young females. They exhibit more gay behavior than older men, and their exhibitionism exceeds, by a wide margin, lesbian exhibitionist behavior among young women. Paradoxically, because of this gender confusion, young straight men are far more homophobic than are older men.

  Homophobia is rampant in the majority of societies because every man is a blend of masculine and feminine. In cultures that venerate the former values over the latter, many men cannot come to terms with their anima. Not knowing how to deal with a part of themselves they consider foreign, they project their unease onto gay men, who have obviously accepted what they cannot. A man who acknowledges both his anima and his animus is not threatened by the existence of gay men.

  Sociologists have conducted numerous studies attempting to determine the proportions within a society of gays and lesbians. Virtually all of these studies depend on voluntary surveys conducted by questionnaires. A hidden political agenda motivates many of them. The scientific surveys most often cited are the Kinsey Report and the work of Masters and Johnson, both of which relied on the forthrightness of the respondents.† A recent study by Laumann and his associates reported the numbers of males who acknowledge that they are ESSP to be 2.8 percent. In his study, only 1 percent of women responded that they were lesbian.13

  Gays and lesbians, however, smile when told of these statistics, because they know better. The evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson estimated in his 1978 book, On Human Nature, that in any given male population approximately 8–13 percent of males and 5 percent of females have strong ESSP inclinations.‡14 Wilson drew on the research of Alfred Kinsey, who took great pains to point out that there was a sliding scale between exclusive heterosexuality and pure ESSP.15 There remained many shades of gray. Some men experienced ESSP only for a brief period of time in their lives. Others experimented on both sides of the scale, and Kinsey also defined the parameters of bisexuality. Kinsey concluded, after spending twenty years studying the sexual habits of Americans at midcentury, that “one in ten men has had strong homosexual tendencies for at least three years in his life between the ages of 16 and 55.”16

  Wilson estimates that the lower limit of his 8–13 percent figure has been surprisingly stable throughout history. The number of men willing to openly acknowledge their gayness depends, however, on prevailing attitudes within the larger culture. In classical Greece, for instance, it was socially acceptable for a man to express his same-sex sexual preferences. Homer’s Iliad repeatedly extolled male friendships, such as the one between Achilles and Patroclus, as more noble and pure than heterosexual relations. From historical accounts, classical Greece contained many gay men, and bisexuality was far more common then than it is today. At the battle of the Plain of Chaeronea, in which the Thebans defended their city against the invading Macedonians in 338 B.C., Theban warriors fought alongside each other as pairs. The Sacred Legion consisted of gay soldiers paired with their lovers. (To many Greeks, a soldier could hardly be expected to risk his life for another unless he loved him.) Today, there are many nodal points in the world that follow the example of ancient Greece, from San Francisco’s Castro district to the Greek island of Mykonos.

  On the other hand, the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Church’s Counter-Reformation forced gay alliances underground at a time when even an offhand accusation could lead to burning at the stake, a not uncommon fate for gays in Calvin’s Geneva, Pope Paul IV’s Rome, Isabella and Ferdinand’s Spain, and elsewhere. Many a so-called witch was incinerated because others had accused her of being a lesbian. Three centuries later, in Victorian England, the brilliant, witty playwright and married father of two, Oscar Wilde, suffered a debilitating prison term for publicly acknowledging “the love that dare not speak its name.”

  The attitudes and practices regarding sex in the gay and lesbian communities provide a window into the intricate, accommodating dance straights must perform. In general, gays and lesbians are freer from the various traditional male-female constraints.

  Prior to the AIDS epidemic (which dramatically altered the sexual behavior of gays), multiple partners and/or multiple acts in an evening were not uncommon in many of the bathhouses that flourished in metropolitan centers. The randiest straight male could rarely match the number of encounters available to the sexually adventuresome gay.

  Gay sex has a much higher incidence of anonymity or near anonymity than does straight sex. One particularly hypersexual gay man recorded forty-eight anonymous sexual encounters in a single evening.17 These may occur in assignations so brief and casual that any kind of emotional commitment is nonexistent. Of course, not all gay men choose to behave in this manner, but enough of them do to provide a stark contrast to the sexual habits of straight men.

  The actions of these members of the gay male community suggest that if straight men could have their druthers many would also prefer to indulge in sex in this manner. However, straight men are far less likely to find partners eager to engage in what the novelist Erica Jong in her 1973 book Fear of Flying called a “zipless f—k.” A straight man would find it exceedingly difficult to locate a group of enthusiastic women to join him for an orgy of anonymous sex. Explicit sex clubs, and peep shows with private booths for straights, have cropped up all around the world. But, unlike his gay counterpart, a straight male must pay money to receive these benefits. (Gay prostitution also exists primarily in the context of age differences between consenting gays. Almost without exception, the older man pays the younger one.)

  In contrast, lesbian women are rarely interested in anonymous sex, nor do they exhibit the hyperkinetic frenzy that is evident in some of their gay male counterparts. More often, they form long-lasting committed relationships. Among themselves, anthropologist Meredith Small reports, lesbians wryly refer to the phenomenon they call “lesbian bed death.”18 After an initial frenzy of passionate lovemaking, it is not uncommon for a lesbian couple to settle into a routine in which sex plays a remarkably minor role.

  The principal reason for the marked differences between the sexual encounters of both gays and lesbians and those of straights is the former’s lack of the need to compromise when negotiating sex. Further, each partner brings to an encounter the same sexual equipment, ensuring that each knows how the other’s operates. Each partner in a male-male or female-female sex act has more-or-less similar expectations, because they are of the same sex. Contrasting the differences between gay sex and lesbian sex throws into stark relief the compromises each straight man and woman must make to accommodate his or her partner.

  Nowhere are these negotiations more clearly evident than in the “world’s oldest profession.” The extraordinary scope and persistence of prostitution attests to many males’ desire to seek sexual relief without any emotional strings. In discussions among themselves, many men express the belief that exchanging money for sex may actually be the least expensive way—emotionally, psychologically, and financially—to alleviate the male’s near-constant sexual burr.

  But it is not only sex that men purchase. One young sex-worker, in a conversation with her older and more experienced madam, marveled at how men were willing to part with their hard-earned money for what to her seemed so brief a sexual release. The older woman explained, “You are mistaken if you believe that your john is paying you only to have sex with him. He is also paying you to go away after the sex is over.”

  Hormones, sexual attraction, and love continue to play prominent roles in sexual union, as they have since the outset of our species. Factoring these out of the equation, men often attempt to achieve intercourse with a woman without a commitment, whereas women rarely acquiesce prior to obtaining it. There are many gradations of commitment, but a woman most commonly seeks a man who will offer
her resources to initiate sex. She also must determine if he would be willing to “provision” her if she gets pregnant. And, most important, he has to demonstrate that he has the character that would motivate him to remain to help raise their child, and to continue to grubstake his family with a steady supply of resources. Add to this laundry list that he would enter into such an arrangement willingly, displaying eagerness and joy. The archetypal two-parent family remains the best social instrument for ensuring that a child will mature in an emotionally healthy and economically stable environment. And the creation of offspring that mature to beget offspring is the primary force propelling the process of evolution. That being the case, could there be other, subtler reasons why homosexuality persists in our species?

  The human species manifests features of each sex within each individual.

  Chapter 17

  Same Sex/Hermaphrodite

  A capon will sit upon eggs, as well as, and often better than a female. This is full of interest; for [there are] latent instincts even in the brain of the male. Every animal is surely hermaphrodite.

  —Charles Darwin1

  In each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man’s brain, the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman’s brain, the woman predominates over the man…. If one is a man, still the woman part of the brainmust have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her.

  —Virginia Woolf2

  Although poorly understood, selective pressures in the human species have ensured gay behavior in every generation and in every culture. ESSP’s ubiquity suggests that it is a very old trait and was likely present at the dawn of our species. Perhaps this unique development arose from the need to enhance the survival of a primate species that had precipitously switched its diet from roots and shoots to haunches and hamhocks in order to provision burdened mothers and their children with intelligence-enhancing brain food. The insertion of ESSP into the human genome was one of four adaptations that Natural Selection cleverly slipped in among the chromosomes to assist a newly minted Homo sapiens hunter in his deadly competition with other species for survival. A dollop of the same mysterious formula was also ladled into Gyna sapiens chromosomal potpourri, so that lesbians would also be mixed into each generation. Before discussing the wherefores of lesbianism, let me propose an additional hypothesis to explain the evolutionary whys of gays.

  I shall call my thesis the Theory of Eights.* Four unique human traits appear in any given Homo sapiens population, and each one uncannily hovers around the stable level of 8 percent of the males. The four are ESSP, color-blindness, left-handedness, and baldness. Eight percent roughly equals about one out of twelve men. I believe that these four traits taken together represent a constellation of genetic adaptations that enhanced the success of the original human male hunting band. Let us examine each one of these, beginning with ESSP.

  Evolutionary biologist William Hamilton proposed that a brother (or a sister) is more invested in helping his sister’s children than he would be in assisting unrelated children. In a series of experiments, Hamilton reaffirmed the adage that “blood is thicker than water.” A man’s niece and nephew carry one-quarter of the same genes as he does. If he aids them and they live long enough to reproduce, then some of his genetic material wiggles into the next generation, even if he himself does not father any offspring.3 Anthropologist Robert Trivers greatly expanded Hamilton’s theories and used them to explain the prevalence of human altruism.4 Building on Hamilton’s and Trivers’s work, E. O. Wilson proposed that the emergence of human homosexuality increased the likelihood that ancestral children would survive.

  Raising a child to maturity is a perilous, difficult, and energetically expensive exercise. Having uncles or aunts who do not have children of their own is a plus for any child. Along with a mother, father, and grandparents, an additional set of undistracted avuncular relatives who have the child’s interests at heart increases the chances that the child will pass on the many different genes of disparate members of the earlier generations. Gays incrementally increase the fitness of a species that carries heavy child-care responsibilities.5 Before I discuss the crux of Wilson’s argument concerning the advantage ESSP conferred on the hunting band, another area of anthropological research must be examined.

  Using brain measurements and making comparisons to extant hunter-gatherer tribes, anthropologists Leslie Aiello and Robin Dunbar have correlated the size of the hominid cortex with the ideal size for an archaic hunter-gatherer society. They estimate that the approximate number of the optimal sapient group—including babies, children, adolescents, elders, and infirm—would be somewhere between 100 and 150.* Within each Pleistocene band, the core group of hunters contained from eight to twelve men in their prime.

  The template of an eight-to-twelve-man hunting band is still discernible in contemporary and historical societies. Ten soldiers constitute a squad, corporations consider twelve adults the ideal size for a board of directors, there are nine players on a baseball team, eleven members on a football team, nine Supreme Court justices, twelve members of a jury, twelve apostles, twelve deities formed the Golden Circle in ancient Greece, and ten Jewish men comprise a prayer minyan. It takes approximately nine to twelve vigorous adults to undertake a communal project, lend to it their combined wisdom, energy, and cooperation, and see it through to a successful conclusion.

  Wilson argued that if there was one man out of the twelve who did not have a wife and small children to feed, then a hefty portion of his share of the kill could be distributed among the remaining hunters’ families. Assuming that the ratio within ancestral populations was similar to contemporary ratios, the presence of a gay hunter among eight to eleven straights would have increased the meat supply available to women and children by roughly 8 percent.

  Even though the hunting group no longer forms the essential core of society, gays still contribute to the general welfare by playing a similar life-enhancing role within the culture at large. Meat segued into resources, which, in turn, have transformed into capital. Excess capital is one of the reasons gay contributions to the larger community are disproportionate to their numbers.

  Additionally, gays enrich the frisson of their culture’s life because they seem to possess, on average, aesthetic sensibilities and creative abilities in greater proportions than are present in the average population. The reasons for this skewing relate to the anima-animus discussion from the previous chapter. The connection between beauty, creativity, and openly gay males is plainly evident in the extraordinary blossoming of the historical periods we deem “Golden Ages”—classical Greece and the Italian Renaissance, to cite two, both of which had many high-profile ESSP contributors.

  Gay representation in the arts and literature has ennobled human culture throughout the ages. But these are not the only fields in which gays have made their mark. Architecture, music, religion, the military, science, mathematics, academia, and many other fields can claim gay geniuses. Human culture would be grayer and less sumptuous had the following men been interested in heterosexual pursuits and channeled their energies into a workaday life: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Tchaikovsky, Leonardo, Newton, Milton, Michelangelo, and Nietzsche.*

  This increased sensibility to aesthetics, harmony, and creativity could be the result of differences in the organization of the gay brain. The corpus callosum is the broad band of connecting fibers joining the two cortical hemispheres. In a gay male, it is approximately 15 percent larger than that of a straight male, and there is less specialization between the two lobes in gays than in straights.† Language centers are more evenly distributed. Ambidexterity, an indication of less left-hemisphere dominance, is also more common among gays and lesbians. The degree of differences discovered so far between the size of the corpus callosum and specialization of the hemispheres in gay men lies midway between the variance present between a right-handed heterosexual male’s brain and a right-handed heterosexual female’s brain.8 We are just b
eginning to understand the subtleties of how the brain functions differently in these subgroups.

  Whether these differences in brain organization are responsible for what appears to be the enhanced aesthetic and creative spirit in gay men is still unknown. Not every gay is more creative and sensitive than every straight male. In general, however, few would dispute that gays more often choose to work in the arts and other fields that require appreciation of beauty and harmony than do straight males. Gayness, a trait that originally evolved to put more meat in the mouths of mothers and babes, has advanced to making contributions that enhance the overall quality of the culture.

  Another 8 percent condition found in males is commonly referred to as “color blindness.” Technically, true color-blindness (achromatopsia) is an exceedingly rare and debilitating condition. The more familiar inherited color-deficiency is the inability to distinguish between two of the three primary colors, red-green defects being more common than red–other-color defects. Color-deficient men are so little inconvenienced by their disability that many are not even aware they have a problem. Most commonly, a woman calls it to the man’s attention by pointing out to him that he is wearing two different-colored socks. The gene responsible for this flaw resides on the X chromosome and is recessive. Therefore, the condition is exceedingly rare in women.9