Gayness: Not Genetic So Much As Pheremonal?

Interesting article on homesexuality and possible hormonal causes. Just make sure you skip all the irrelevant apologetics and political concerns ("we swear, we don't mean to imply there's anything wrong with homosexuality or that it's a 'choice'" -- half the freaking article) and go to the science, which is interesting.

Boys born with many older brothers in the family have a much higher chance of becoming gay. Which suggests, to me at least, that homosexuality may be an evolutionary check on overpopulation. The article discusses the possibility that women's wombs produce different hormones during pregnancy if they've given birth to multiple children, perhaps inducing a homosexual orientation in younger children of big clans.

Which leads me to to pheremones. Maybe there's also sort of invisible, intangible pheremonal Darwinistic battle of the chemicals going on, too. Are we all sending out pheremones designed to drive others into homosexuality, and thus increase our own chances of winning the contest to pass our genes to the next generation? Some male fish turn gay when exposed to the hormones of other male fish; female fruit flies can be induced to become lesbian by exposure to chemicals.

I'm not just interested in the stuff about homosexuality, but in the larger question of how sensitive we may be to chemical communications we're not even consciously aware of. Why do we despise some people who are, objectively, unobjectionable? Maybe it's because we detect that their pheremones are similar to our own, and thus represent a threat to the chemosexual reproductive niche we're designed to fill.

Why do we sometimes just "click" with other people, for no particularly discernable reason? Again, maybe it's just agreeable chemicals triggering the "trust hormone" and turning near-strangers into quick confidantes.

None of this is exactly a surprise to anyone who's ever heard of pheremones or oxytocsin. I'm just wondering about the actual magnitude of it, how profound the effect of unconscious chemical information-exchanging might be on human relations, friendship and antipathy, and love, desire, and hatred.

Because, it seems to me, if pheremones can flip your sexual drive from straight to gay, what the hell can't they do?

Bonus Fun Facts From the Article: Based on quantified physical arousal to pornographic pictures showing both gay and straight couplings, I now know what I always suspected:

1. All bisexual men are just plain old gay. The word "bisexuality" is to gay men what "libertarian" is to liberal men: it's just a way to avoid the dreaded label.

And, even better:

2. Not only is bisexuality real in women, but in fact almost all women are aroused by depictions of both straight and gay sex.

Almost no men are truly bisexual, whereas almost all women are. Pornography always tells you the truth.

The theory first forwarded by Dennis Finch -- "All chicks are just three cocktails away from some hot girl-on-girl action" -- seems to be edging closer to full scientific peer-reviewed confirmation.

Edit: In my rush to claim evidence for my pet theory, I ignored parts of the article that noted that these hormonal signals and sexuality-flips seem to occur in the womb, not just walkin' around in the park playing Yankee-Pirate as a six year old. Dr. Reo Symes schooled me proper, anad I've edited to reflect his wisdom.

He is, after all, pretending to be a doctor on the Internet.

posted by Ace at 03:20 PM

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