If you find 46 year old women more sexually attractive, then you are indeed mentally ill. But if you simply find them sexually attractive, you are not. And marriage is about more than picking the hottest female.
I think it's a reasonable point, though. If 'attraction to the infertile' is a sexual targeting error and therefore technically a mental illness, then this would logically apply to wives post-menopause.
Pair-bonding is a separate instinct from libido, and probably evolved for it's own reasons, of course.
1. The recent rise of LGBT numbers is just people identifying with fashionable labels. Studies on the rate of people who regularly have same-sex sexual intercourse prove that there isn't any rise for this.
2. I press X to doubt for these old studies proving "turning gay guys straight, works". I suspect people who participated in these studies hated being gay more than regular gay guys and so they actually were motivated to refrain from Same sex intercourse. (Also I think they may have simply lied)
3. FWIW think of pedophilia. I'm pretty sure almost everyone who has this, truly hates this and wants to get rid of this. But despite lots of research (which is actively promoted by academia unlike in the gay case) researchers don't think there is any method to turn pedophile people straight.
Yes, I see conservative media promote these silly "scientific" polls on LGBT identification all the time. Most recently the Telegraph claims 32% of young Australians are LGBT. Many people read this to mean that both 32% of males/females are identifying as LGBT. In reality, if you seek out the data in these polls you find it's about 30% of females identifying as bisexual, bisexual or 'non binary'. Among males, about 1-2% of men are gay and bisexuals a similar number. 95% heterosexual.
It's almost as if the moral panics gets clicks and consequently advertiser revenue.
In fairness, I also see leftist media pulling a similar stunt and celebrating how 'everyone is queer!' without showing the numbers by sex. It's almost as if woke feminist journalists refuse to accept that most men are heterosexual.
Both sides want to promote the rainbow for their own reasons. Teenage girls are the ones getting screwed, since their strong social conformity instincts lead them to do permanent stuff like lop their tits off when they get caught up in social contagion.
I think that an Ipsos MORI survey conducted for BBC Newsbeat showed that among British individuals aged 16–22 (Generation Z), 5% of young men identified as exclusively homosexual.
I think most high school teachers would tell you that about 5% to 10% of their male students turned out to be gay. In other words, about 1 or 2 of the boys in every class is gay. This is not really controversial. I mean, that's what they say now, if you talk to them.
Yeah, the increase is almost entirely young women identifying as bisexual.
Conservatives present it as this moral panic that all the kids are becoming transgender, but the argument is a total bait and switch. Almost everyone would be afraid if 20% of the kids did become transgender, but almost no one is afraid of 20% of young women being bi-curious.
It's also not entirely clear how many women really are bisexual. There are some experiments suggesting that most women are physically aroused by women and men:
The increase in girls identifying as transgender is enormous. And that leads to "treatment" that is drastic and mostly irreversible.
Since the increase is likely a result of the popularization of transgender, due to the LGBT ideology moving that way, this is a real problem. And that is what conservatives are correctly emphasizing, not the bisexual increase.
Afair, it was suggested that women respond physiologically to any kind of sex performance, as away of making it hurt less if forced into sex. Handy for when marauding gangs attack your clan.
I don't think you should dismiss out of hand the results suggesting that homosexual tendencies are treatable. By its nature, the meta analysis looked at many studies and found that there were successful reversals in this form of mistargeting.
Surely, if the evidence suggested that homosexuality was fixed then the majority of studies would have suggested so?
From the Meta-Analysis Conclusion: "This meta-analysis is pertinent to that political debate and provides empirical evidence, based on the literature, that treatment interventions can be successful with individuals identified as homosexual.
These findings may be criticized by many on political and personal grounds. However, it is important to note that the validity of any therapy no matter what the treatment method or goal-is found in its overall effect on the life of the client. If the treatment is right for the person, then the freedom and well-being it brings will be evident in all aspects of functioning (Nicolosi, 1991) ."
Claims of conversion are based on self report. The two studies that have robustly used penile measurements by Kurt Freund and another polish guy at a later date found no support for it.
J Michael Bailey also has an open offer at Northwestern University for any ‘conversion therapist’ to prove via much more robust arousal testing that gay men can be cured. Strange how no one has taken him up on the offer. You’d think if a gay man could become straight, and knew of the specific technique, he would scream it from the rooftops and be very willing to finally prove it. But no, all we have are a bunch of religious weirdos pretending to be straight but still with the very obvious feminine behavior that appear to stem from something neurological. That’s why you so often hear the gay men who used to run ex gay facilities come out and say it’s bullshit and a lie: there is a YouTube channel (Truth Wins Out) with dozens of these testimonies of gay men saying it’s a fraud and they themselves lied because they so badly wanted it to be true at the time.
Further, conversion therapy is still legal in 90% of the world yet no medical group, doctor or scientist from China, Russia, Africa, the Middle Rast or South Korea has been able to find any treatment despite the fact they would get a lot of prestige in these conservative societies for doing so. I Just think it’s bullshit. It’s predicated on a silly idea, ‘sexual learning’, a theory I personally find inferior to a prenatal hormonal model. Yet even if you believe homosexuality is learned (I find that unlikely given how gay men were usually very feminine boys, from about age 2-3 according to Mike Bailey), it doesn’t mean it’s curable. For example, no one would ever suggest you could ‘unlearn’ the English language, except via brain damage, because it seems permanently encoded on the brain.
>The recent rise of LGBT numbers is just people identifying with fashionable labels. Studies on the rate of people who regularly have same-sex sexual intercourse prove that there isn't any rise for this.
I agree with the first point (if we want to break it down more finely, it's overwhelmingly driven by natal females identifying as bi or trans), but self-reported same-sex behavior has actually increased.
Nowhere near as much as self-ID as part of an LGBT group, obviously, but that could change if, say, it became trendy to demand that young women "prove" their self-ID by actually having sex with other women or by transitioning.
The rate at which people actually practice same-sex intercourse in real life may have not increased much, although the amount of people fantasizing about it has almost certainly increased much more dramatically.
There is also the major issue concerning the rise of transgenderism to consider, as most of the rise in male to male sexual contact in real life (and in fantasy) is due to the rise in bisexual men having sex with very feminine males, many of whom identify as female.
Also, concerning the rise in bisexuality in females but not in males, I highly suspect this is due to most bisexual males choosing to identify as heterosexual due to them only being interested in a relationship in which they are sexually dominant with "traps."
I don't have any studies to back up my claim, its just based on personal interactions and observations, sorry to disappoint, I wish there were studies done on this though, if you have any I'd love to see them.
> I suspect people who participated in these studies hated being gay more than regular gay guys and so they actually were motivated to refrain from Same sex intercourse
Well so what? The people who are unhappy with their sexuality are the people we want to help. Unless you are in favour of forcing your opinions on "deviants" whether they like it or not.
Ummm, I think you might not be aware of how prevalent pedophilia is in the Powers-that-be class and therefore they would be strongly promoting the notion (a funding research that 'determines') that it's not their fault. Much of what we've been told by our televisions (and our professors) is a lie.
1.: My impression is that it's mostly teenage girls identifying as bisexual, which is a nice convenient way to pretend to be part of the rainbow and capture the resulting social benefits, without actually having to do anything icky. OTOH there's good evidence that grooming behavior and child sexual abuse can bend sexuality, so if greater opportunity is provided for this, we'd expect to see more actual homosexuality.
2 & 3: also strongly doubt that such interventions are effective. There's probably some kind of early-life imprinting process that results in essentially permanent changes to the brain.
Most of this "I'm THIS NEW UNUSUAL THING" bullshit is from over-socialized leftoids engaging in primate status-seeking behavior, they're literally only one step up from throwing poo to get attention.
>So since female fertility is strongly age-dependent, men's targeting must be primarily of fecund females, so age 15-45 or so. Female targeting can be less age dependent, but should at least be 15+ (and that's what we see). Thus, if someone is targeting persons outside of the adaptive age, that is a disorder of sorts.
Oh, how many times do I have to explain this to clueless psychologists? Men have evolved to choose females based on their long-term reproductive potential, not their current fertility.
Humans don't run around screwing each-other like dogs, forever having one-night-stands. Hunter-gatherer societies are not freelove hippy communes where everyone screws everyone else. What men and women in all societies do is form long-term exclusive relationships or marriages and raise kids together. So a man's reproductive success is dependant the amount of offspring his chosen wife can give him over the long-term.
So what females can potentially provide the most offspring over the long-term? Well, those that are young and haven't started reproducing yet and still have all their fertile years ahead of them. The average age of a girl's first conception in modern HG societies is about 17. It may have been a bit lower in ancestral times during our evolution when HG people lived in better habitats and were better nourished with more meat in their diet. What this basically shows is that in order for an ancestral man to stand a chance at monopolising a female's reproductive lifespan and get as many offspring from her as possible he needed to target girls no older than about 16, before any other man got them up the duff. Though targetting girls too young say like 5 year olds would not be optimal since they are a long way from reproducitve age. The best females would be those closer to the beginning of their reproductive lifespan who will start giving a man offspring sooner.
This is not just theoretical, anthropologists have seen this in primitive foraging societies that are something like we evolved in. The girls most sought after are the teen and pubescent girls who are just prior their first pregnancy. When Chagnon lived with the Yanomamo he saw that when the girls got to about 12 and grew some perky boobs all the men noticed and they would have to be closely guarded by their male relatives or husbands to stop them getting raped or abducted by raiders. By the time they had go to about 18-20 and had started having babies the men would lose a lot of interest in them, and say they were "growing old" and they would no longer have to be closely guarded.
The reason girls have evolved to grow perky eye-catching boobs in puberty is to signal that they approaching reproductive age and to honestly signal that they haven't had a baby yet and still have all their reproductive years ahead of them. Once a girl starts having babies her boobs lose pertness and go saggy. This is what the men mean by "growing old".
By the time they get to about 30 the women have been though 3-4 pregnancies, spent years breastfeeding and their bodies are wrecked. Their boobs are saggy pancakes, nipples are dry and cracked, their waists are flabby and covered in stretchmarks. The men find them gross. On the other hand, a 13yo girl who's just come up to puberty and hasn't even started ovulating yet is immensely more attractive and sought after. She hasn't had a baby yet, her boobs her pert and her nipples may even point upward. Her waist is much smaller and has no stretchmarks. Her face is young and fresh and hasn't become worn from the stresses of motherhood.
Now, if men have evolved to choose females based on their current fertility this preference makes no sense. The 30yo is still very fertile* but the 13yo is prefertile. But that is not how the human mating system works. Men have evolved to choose females based on their long-term reproductive potential. The 30yo is over half way through her reproductive lifespan while the 13yo has all her fertile years ahead of her. A man who chooses the 13yo as a wife will potentially leave behind double the amount of offspring as a man who chooses the 30yo. An absolutely HUGE reproductive advantage.
*At least during her fertile time of the menstrual cycle and between pregnancies. For our species most sex is non-reproductive and serves more as kind of bonding mechanism. This is why couples have sex all thoughout the menstrual cycle and when already pregnant.
It's incredible how controversial this statement is considered among the Western elite. The disparity between elite and public/non-Western opinion on this is enormous. Great article. It's surprising that nobody has ever made this argument before you (afaik) since it is so obviously true if you look at the data.
I read a bunch of evolutionary psychiatry and it's kinda written between the lines. I seem to recall reading a philosopher writing about this but when I searched it wasn't Sesardic. Maybe it's Stephen Kershnar (sp?).
I believe it’s a combination of atrazine/endocrine disrupters being in our food/water and environmental induction (propaganda) that’s causing increasing rates of homosexuality. Not that in matters in the long run if and when extra-uterine pods are developed with engineered gametes a century from now or more.
There seems to be some evidence that hormonal birth control has big effects on lesbianism and male attraction in women. So big points for environmental estrogen/endocrine disruption theories
The vast majority of Western people are liberal on homosexuality. There is a difference between Western and non-Western opinion, but in the West, elites and masses tend to agree on this issue.
The difference between Western elites and non-elites is still probably gigantic, at least in sincere views. You are right that peoples' claimed views have converged enormously with the elites' views.
My niece and nephew both have very confused romantic lives and this LBGTQ/gender stuff is a big part of it. Even if their underlying attraction hasn't changed, its making it very difficult for them to have healthy male/female relationships.
Back before the LBGTQ explosion, I remember fag hags generally being lower quality women than those without gay friends. The gay friends advice always amounted to the idea that these women should be more like gay men (promiscuous, hedonistic, neurotic, selfish).
Got here from the post on Palestinians, and find it necessary to comment despite the age of this post.
Firstly, "mental illness" is really just a euphemism for cognitive derangement, like distorted sensory impressions or particularly poor reasoning, leading typically to delusional convictions. This is the colloquial, common sense understanding of what a mental illness is: somebody who cannot think properly.
Further, it is not enough that some behaviour may indirectly lead to risk of mental illness. By analogy with physical illnesses, we do not say that things like smoking or extreme sports are illnesses on account that they can lead to lung cancer or broken bones respectively. Something can come with substantial risk of illness without therefore being an illness. Hence, for a condition to constitute mental illness, sensory distortions or cognitive disorders must be direct symptoms.
Because of rampant retard-tier scientism, psychiatrists wanted to rationalise that mental illness consists of chemical imbalances or some problem with physical features of the brain. Also, since mental illnesses of the "disordered reasoning" type are basically a special case of stupidity, it would seem too unkind to modern sensibilities to treat it by pointing out the stupid reasoning of mentally ill people and try to reason them out of it, despite this being in my experience highly effective. Thus, we have this bogus notion that mental illness is actually physiological, which is obviously wrong, as it would include things like dementia and alzheimers as mental illnesses if applied consistently.
Homosexuality does not (directly, at any rate) cause hallucinations or poor reasoning. Therefore it is not a mental illness. It really is as simple as that. Obviously, homosexuality is a neurological abnormality. This is beyond reasonable dispute given the extreme degree of neuroanatomical correlations, and the very probable mechanisms by which these are causally related to homosexuality.
This leaves the question only of whether it is a neurological illness. Some commenters argue that the most objective basis for classifying something as an illness is the impact on reproduction. This is idiotic as it would require us to classify any physical imperfection that reduces sexual attractiveness as an illness. Certainly there are a lot of illnesses causing people to be ugly, but ugliness is not itself an illness. Also, given the noted inverse correlation between IQ and fertility, we'd have to consider high intelligence to be an illness under this definition.
For some reason it often needs to be reiterated that gay people are not infertile and could absolutely repoduce biologically if driven to do so. Thus, we are speaking of an inherent character trait that reduces the likelihood of reproduction, but this is no different from being ugly or being a genius, neither of which are considered illnesses, nor would you consider them to be illnesses even if you can show — as is quite likely — that both are correlated with schizophrenia, bipolar, etc. (ie. the comorbidities argument).
Now, a couple of direct quotes that need to be addressed:
> But the more obvious unmentioned fact here is that stigma against homosexuals has decreased markedly in the last couple of decades
It has increased drastically over the last decade. Sure, there are fewer of the boomer variety Christian conservative around, but the homophobia of the reaction.la variety, or of many BAPists (who seem to misunderstand his work), is a lot more pernicious, and since the left has begun stigmatising male sexuality of any variety, not to mention imposing the cult of victimhood on all LGBT spaces they can, gay men are now stigmatised both on the left and the right, a marked deterioration compared to ten years ago.
As for statistical evidence for or against the minority stress hypothesis, there is hardly anything of substance on either side. For example, as tailcalled points out, the genetic correlations you cite are just as compatible with the minority stress hypothesis. The problem here is simply that social science doesn't work and was a bad idea to begin with.
> If this was caused by stigma, it should have declined rapidly, ergo, it is not caused by stigma.
Unless of course the relationship between stigma to minority stress is logarithmic, which seems to agree with intuition.
> Of course, when we classify something as mental disorder, we say that it is better generally not to have it. As can be seen with all the associations with bad outcomes, this is generally true for homosexuality.
Just wanted to highlight this quote as an illustration of the fact that naive utilitarianism is a mental illness. How sure are you, for example, that the functions ascribed by Camilla Paglia, Alexander Bard, etc to androgynous minorities is inessential to the maintenance of advanced civilisation?
> We classify depression as a mental illness, but no one goes around saying to stay away from depressed people, or not to love them.
There are plenty of Nietzscheans and BAPists who will advocate staying away from depressed people. Though I find this unvirtuous on account of the cruelty involved, I have to admit that they have a point from a practical perspective.
> Homosexuality is really a mental illness, that was declassified as such for the usual political leftism reasons.
It was only in the first place classified as a mental illness partly as a way of getting it decriminalised and reducing the overall oppression of gay people. That is, there was considerable leftist activism involved in medicalising it in the first place.
> I don't think that classifying homosexuality as a mental illness should change the behavior of heterosexuals much. Everybody has some friend who suffers from mental problems, and this is worthy of our sympathy without having to pretend it isn't really a disorder.
"Sympathising" with someone (read: pitying them) on account of their "mental illness" is a rather significant change in behaviour actually, and would only serve to further perpeutate the cult of victimhood that I regard as currently being the main cause of minority stress. My suspicion is that gay people had better mental health in Victorian England than today, in no small part because of this constant "sympathising".
For clarification, here is a common sense explanation of why some common mental illnesses are mental illnesses:
Borderline personality disorder is a mental illness because the characteristic "splitting" interferes with a person's ability to form an accurate judgement of someone's character, reflective of virtues and vices alike.
Psychosis is a mental illness because the hallucinations and (speculative) excess of arousal leads to incoherent reasoning resulting in delusions.
Anxiety is a mental illness because it leads to unrealistic catastrophising and to people "psyching themselves out", so as to be incapable of tasks that should otherwise be easy, eg. greeting someone like a normal person.
Depression is a mental illness because it interferes with a person's ability to be encouraged and inspired by things that are going well, not to mention the tendency to constantly revert to cycles of despair, suicidal ideation, etc., that distract from more productive cognitive tasks.
Progressivism, though unacknowledged as such, is a mental illness because it drastically interferes with getting an accurate picture of the world.
These are all cases of people having conditions that severely inhibit their ability to think clearly like a sensible person. Homosexuality quite obviously is not like these other phenomena.
Logarithmic means you'd need exponentially more stigma to produce a constant increase in minority stress. For example, we could imagine that encountering homophobic slurs from 8 people produces 3 units of minority stress, and that slurs from 12 people produces 4 units of minority stress, from 18 people produces 5 units, and from 27 people produces 6 units. It's not directly proportional to the amount of stigma; there are "diminishing returns" so to speak.
This would mean you'd need much more than a 90% reduction in stigma in order to get a 90% reduction in minority stress. If the level of stigma is high enough, then even a 90% reduction may not lead to a significant level of reduction in minority stress.
A Dean Byrd & Nicolosi actually excluded the two best penile studies of so called "cured homosexuals". They only included the ones from *one author*, suggesting it's not reliable.
1960 Kurt Freund finds no evidence of reoriented homosexuals having arousal to women, they responded to men. In 1976 Conrad and Wincze found that physiological arousal measurements did not support the positive reports of men who had participated in conversion therapy – they too were still aroused by imagery of men.
Why does the biological have some claim to being more real than the voluntary? In other words, why is a person's condition determined by 'gets hard on for x' rather than 'chooses to have intercourse with x'(or refrains obviously)?
Pretty sure it's limbic damage, most often caused in utero/first 2 years of life. Over sensitivity that is commonly found in shared sibling environments with the aforementioned comorbidities. Adhd, autism, Schitz, tourette's etc etc etc.. all downstream of gene mutation like fragile X or epilepsy which sets the table for oversensitive births.
If you've ever seen severe autism for instance you would recognize it's without a doubt a weakness to sensitivity. But in these cases it takes a left at Alburquerque most often, where full diagnosable conditions don't manifest as badly (also keep in mind adhd and autism presentation and prognosis greatly changes by age), but the mutation messes with the limbic system enough post birth/inutero that it changes the what should be correct size portions even though it still prunes the neurological ends more closely to normal it still inverts and makes even worse, depending on the testosterone the pituitary gland and other local limbic biology.
Two other things, limbic primacy is different between men and woman and I believe it's women that dominate with right side while men dominate with left side. Further women don't display autism as fiercely in part because their central corticl area is stronger I believe.
It is ridiculous on your side to suppose homosexuality is malleable. Do you think being Asperger is malleable? Or being low IQ? Is there any tendency that is inherent in one's basic instincts that is malleable? Maybe some phobias but it is a unique exception because of the unusual power of habituation.
Plenty of defects at birth are low heritability. Deafness caused by rubella. Birth defects from agent orange. I suggest you learn what heritability means because things can be low heritability and biological.
We are talking about complex traits. If a complex trait (thousands of alleles contribute) and it has a high heritability, it is not mallable under normal conditions.
Heigth, for example, can be affected by bad nutrition over many years as a child. But that is an extreme counter example.
Do you know the causal mechanisms of these different conditions well enough to say this, or are you just trying to make your opinion seem strong? The 'inherent in one's basic instincts'makes me suspect the latter. But feel free to explain the mechanism and I will apologize and retract.
"Aside from the gay germ theory, which I think is not likely, unless it's a metaphor for 'grooming', the other popular theory is sexual antagonistic selection. The idea here is that some genetic variants cause men to be gay, but increase fertility in their female relatives enough to make up for this. Or make the gays so helpful to relatives that their own fertility reduction is worth it. "
Isn't there also the possibility that there is a sickle-cell anemia type selection going on, i.e. if you get too many of the [trait] alleles, you're gay and have no children, but if you get only a few of the [trait] alleles, then you're straight (or at worst bisexual) and end up being more reproductively successful than someone who only got the non-[trait] alleles?
Think this is known as the "antagonistic pleiotropy" theory of homosexuality, and there's some good evidence suggesting it's true.
There have been some large studies suggesting that alleles associated with homosexuality tend to confers a mating advantage (i.e more sexual partners) to heterosexual individuals.
I would love to know how the mating advantage relates to behaviour. I am guessing it is something to do with having a better theory of mind about the opposite-sex?
Possibly some merit to this, but it will have to explain the connection to the heavy disability association like with adhd, autism, schitzophrenia, and many others in the same basket.
The entire thread of autism one researcher suggests goes back to somewhere about where we started mating with neanderthals. Assuming neaderthals weren't as attractive it could be a mutation survived there but also came with the later autism trait.
But this doesn't necessarily explain autism, it far moreso explains the overrepresentive height differences in homosexuals which seem to be heavily over representive in the short range and a little over representaive in the much talelr range.
What is common however, is phrenology. simply put homosexual heads/faces are smaller and more feminine in male homosexuals and land vice versa for femaqle homosexuals.
Having older male siblings makes one 50% more likely to be gay and this increases exponentially for each older boy. Since this is necessarily environmental (though this environment seems likely to be gestational) it provides a clear target approach for parents looking to optimize for heterosexuality.
It seems like you're simply insisting that appealing to evolution requires a value judgement. On the contrary, it's possibly the most objective account we could employ.
It's a value judgment if you then say something is good or bad because of evolution. Nothing can be considered good or bad if not for subjective moral judgments, and you can never take a ought from an is. The fact that genes want to reproduce does not translate to being morally good to have children, or not to have children, or to be sexually attracted to the same sex, or to old people, or whatever. As the other comment pointed out, an obvious case where normal people would consider it immoral to try to reproduce is if you try to reproduce via rape. An obvious case where normal people would consider it moral to refrain from reproducing is in the case of religious service. In the case of normal individual choice by couples, I don't think most people consider it moral or immoral to have children.
"It's a value judgment if you then say something is good or bad because of evolution."
Yes, anyone who draws moral lessons from evolution is indulging in the naturalistic fallacy. But to say that a behavior is maladaptive is NOT to say that it is morally wrong. Appealing to natural selection gives us an objective and * neutral * way of defining mental illness.
Well, it's complicated, because what constitutes mental illness is going to have to do both with the individual's subjective experience and with societal expectations of behavior, but I don't think not having children fits into that. For one, being infertile is not a mental illness, it doesn't even make sense to say it is, and low fertility is the norm in the high-income world, so not atypical, and if being atypical is part of the definition of mental illness, then not having children or having few children is not a mental illness.
Now, one might say that yes, a normal man or woman might decide not to have children, because they prefer to focus on their careers or whatever, but they have the potential to have children, the problem is that homosexuals also have that potential. I guess the argument is then that homosexuals don't want to have children, or rather their sexual attraction is not conducive to having children, which certainly makes them atypical for evolutionary reasons, but then one could argue that not having children while heterosexual is also atypical for evolutionary reasons.
"...what constitutes mental illness is going to have to do both with the individual's subjective experience and with societal expectations of behavior..."
Or not, if we simply define it in Darwinian terms.
"...being infertile is not a mental illness..."
Correct, a physical condition is not a mental illness.
"...a normal man or woman might decide not to have children..."
The question is whether they have impulses that would have normally led to children in a pre-birth-control era.
"...one could argue that not having children while heterosexual is also atypical for evolutionary reasons."
Correct. It's almost certainly the case that mental illness is far more common today than it was for our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
No because they are probably a couple, or they have no other choice. It would be weird for an old person to be more sexually attracted to another random post-reproductive person than to a random young person at their peak fertility, youth, and health. How many 80 yo men find 80 yo women more sexually attractive/arousing than 20 yo women (unless they are their long-term/life-time partner)?
If you're an 80 yo man, you probably have to wait until you've stored up enough testosterone to want an 80 yo woman before you can physically seal the deal, regardless of age.
I am reading this article and it’s comments with great astonishment. It tries to proof that homosexuality is a mental illness and tells us that this is a apolitical result. As if language is something objective and calling someone having a mental illness has nog subjectivity whatsoever. We are there to reproduce ourselves. That is the truth seen from a biological perspective. As if the biological perspective in itself is free of interpretation, an objective look at live itself. As if saying that when you don’t fit in the norm set by this perspective is an illness is objective and without any consequences. Bringing in the leftish point of view in this article let us see the real perspective of the writer who hopes he won’t be misinterpreted. Well I’m sorry but you are very clear that this so called scientific approach is lacking any notification of awareness that science in itself is not free of value. By making objects of subjects you already start misinterpreting the situation. By ripping out of context of love, live, relationships and attraction to people as a pure reproductive act is really taking things out of its context. There is no prove whatsoever that treatments did no other than harm to people who were thought to be ill by short-sighted people.
It seems you conflate mental illness with abuse (which DID happen historically). However in the current world mentally ill people still have basic rights and their dignity while at the same time we realize they have mental issues. There is no reason trans genderism, as well as homosexuality (which is admittedly much less destructive than transgenerism) cannot be viewed in the same way
I knew many of the researchers doing this work, and they pointed out to critics that they were treating only those homosexuals who wanted to change. Despite that, hostility to treatment increased. I can remember the bitter arguments at conferences
Well it’s still legal in Russia, China, most of Asia and the Middle East but no sharp scientist has reliably found a treatment. I tend to think it’s acceptable to be mad at frauds.
If the "germ theory" is true shouldn't we see an unusually large drop in number of gay people cause of the 2020-2021 Covid Lockdown/social distancing measuring? Ofc we could only see this in a few years
That assumes that the putative “gay germ” is not already present in the majority of the population. If the “gay germ” hypothesis is true, which I still believe it is more likely than not, then the pathogen in question would have to meet three criteria:
1.) Already present in a large fraction (if not most) of the population.
2.) Is neurotropic (that is, able to infect neurons).
3.) Currently has no effective vaccine.
The most obvious candidate that fits all of these criteria would be a member of Herpesviridae. Over 95% of the population carries one herpesvirus or another. For example, herpes simplex 1 (HSV-1) famously causes cold sores in a minority of individuals but is in fact present in approximately 60-70% of healthy adults (the majority of which obviously don’t suffer from cold sores). This implies that a specific genetic predisposition is also required. Contracting HSV-1 is not, in and of itself, sufficient. Yet another example of a pathogen that requires a genetic predisposition in order to cause problems would be H. pylori which is responsible for most cases of peptic ulcers (which are also, to some extent, heritable). Even though 30-40% of the population in the US has H. pylori, only about 20% of those infected show symptoms. This combined with the low but non-zero heritability of peptic ulcers implies that a genetic predisposition is also at play.
This is likely also the case with exclusive homosexuality in males. The low heritability of exclusive homosexuality (25-35%) is most likely a genetic predisposition to the pathogen in question. It’s worth noting that the majority of people who carry HSV-1 don’t even get it from any kind of sexual activity but rather from such things as a kiss from a relative or sharing drinking glasses/eating utensils. The fact that the “gay germ” (whether or not it is a member of Herpesviridae) is most likely already present in most of the population makes it unlikely that a drop in the incidence of homosexuality would be observed following the COVID-19 lockdowns.
It's a shame that people feel the need to apologize in advance for simply pointing out the obvious.
There is nothing 'hateful' about pointing this out, just like there is nothing hateful about diagnosing schizophrenia as a mental illness. It is what it is. Like schizophrenia it has a biological component, like schizophrenia people still need to be treated respectfully. But just like schizophrenia, we MUST be able to admit that it is not normal.
Divorcing my wife when she hits 46, because I don't want to be mentally ill.
You should replace her with two 23 year olds.
If you find 46 year old women more sexually attractive, then you are indeed mentally ill. But if you simply find them sexually attractive, you are not. And marriage is about more than picking the hottest female.
Please tell me this is a joke and you're not actually this dim. If it is a joke, it was a good one and my apologies.
I'm sure that's a joke :)
I think it's a reasonable point, though. If 'attraction to the infertile' is a sexual targeting error and therefore technically a mental illness, then this would logically apply to wives post-menopause.
Pair-bonding is a separate instinct from libido, and probably evolved for it's own reasons, of course.
Was that clever? No.
1. The recent rise of LGBT numbers is just people identifying with fashionable labels. Studies on the rate of people who regularly have same-sex sexual intercourse prove that there isn't any rise for this.
2. I press X to doubt for these old studies proving "turning gay guys straight, works". I suspect people who participated in these studies hated being gay more than regular gay guys and so they actually were motivated to refrain from Same sex intercourse. (Also I think they may have simply lied)
3. FWIW think of pedophilia. I'm pretty sure almost everyone who has this, truly hates this and wants to get rid of this. But despite lots of research (which is actively promoted by academia unlike in the gay case) researchers don't think there is any method to turn pedophile people straight.
Yes, I see conservative media promote these silly "scientific" polls on LGBT identification all the time. Most recently the Telegraph claims 32% of young Australians are LGBT. Many people read this to mean that both 32% of males/females are identifying as LGBT. In reality, if you seek out the data in these polls you find it's about 30% of females identifying as bisexual, bisexual or 'non binary'. Among males, about 1-2% of men are gay and bisexuals a similar number. 95% heterosexual.
It's almost as if the moral panics gets clicks and consequently advertiser revenue.
In fairness, I also see leftist media pulling a similar stunt and celebrating how 'everyone is queer!' without showing the numbers by sex. It's almost as if woke feminist journalists refuse to accept that most men are heterosexual.
Both sides want to promote the rainbow for their own reasons. Teenage girls are the ones getting screwed, since their strong social conformity instincts lead them to do permanent stuff like lop their tits off when they get caught up in social contagion.
I think that an Ipsos MORI survey conducted for BBC Newsbeat showed that among British individuals aged 16–22 (Generation Z), 5% of young men identified as exclusively homosexual.
I think most high school teachers would tell you that about 5% to 10% of their male students turned out to be gay. In other words, about 1 or 2 of the boys in every class is gay. This is not really controversial. I mean, that's what they say now, if you talk to them.
Yeah, the increase is almost entirely young women identifying as bisexual.
Conservatives present it as this moral panic that all the kids are becoming transgender, but the argument is a total bait and switch. Almost everyone would be afraid if 20% of the kids did become transgender, but almost no one is afraid of 20% of young women being bi-curious.
It's also not entirely clear how many women really are bisexual. There are some experiments suggesting that most women are physically aroused by women and men:
https://medium.com/@tgof137/fb20e5a070a
So 20% of women labelling themselves as such could even be low relative to reality.
The increase in girls identifying as transgender is enormous. And that leads to "treatment" that is drastic and mostly irreversible.
Since the increase is likely a result of the popularization of transgender, due to the LGBT ideology moving that way, this is a real problem. And that is what conservatives are correctly emphasizing, not the bisexual increase.
Afair, it was suggested that women respond physiologically to any kind of sex performance, as away of making it hurt less if forced into sex. Handy for when marauding gangs attack your clan.
I don't think you should dismiss out of hand the results suggesting that homosexual tendencies are treatable. By its nature, the meta analysis looked at many studies and found that there were successful reversals in this form of mistargeting.
Surely, if the evidence suggested that homosexuality was fixed then the majority of studies would have suggested so?
From the Meta-Analysis Conclusion: "This meta-analysis is pertinent to that political debate and provides empirical evidence, based on the literature, that treatment interventions can be successful with individuals identified as homosexual.
These findings may be criticized by many on political and personal grounds. However, it is important to note that the validity of any therapy no matter what the treatment method or goal-is found in its overall effect on the life of the client. If the treatment is right for the person, then the freedom and well-being it brings will be evident in all aspects of functioning (Nicolosi, 1991) ."
Claims of conversion are based on self report. The two studies that have robustly used penile measurements by Kurt Freund and another polish guy at a later date found no support for it.
J Michael Bailey also has an open offer at Northwestern University for any ‘conversion therapist’ to prove via much more robust arousal testing that gay men can be cured. Strange how no one has taken him up on the offer. You’d think if a gay man could become straight, and knew of the specific technique, he would scream it from the rooftops and be very willing to finally prove it. But no, all we have are a bunch of religious weirdos pretending to be straight but still with the very obvious feminine behavior that appear to stem from something neurological. That’s why you so often hear the gay men who used to run ex gay facilities come out and say it’s bullshit and a lie: there is a YouTube channel (Truth Wins Out) with dozens of these testimonies of gay men saying it’s a fraud and they themselves lied because they so badly wanted it to be true at the time.
Further, conversion therapy is still legal in 90% of the world yet no medical group, doctor or scientist from China, Russia, Africa, the Middle Rast or South Korea has been able to find any treatment despite the fact they would get a lot of prestige in these conservative societies for doing so. I Just think it’s bullshit. It’s predicated on a silly idea, ‘sexual learning’, a theory I personally find inferior to a prenatal hormonal model. Yet even if you believe homosexuality is learned (I find that unlikely given how gay men were usually very feminine boys, from about age 2-3 according to Mike Bailey), it doesn’t mean it’s curable. For example, no one would ever suggest you could ‘unlearn’ the English language, except via brain damage, because it seems permanently encoded on the brain.
Good points.
I want conversion therapy to be true.
But I don’t believe it is, for most gays.
I suspect it does occasionally work, perhaps half as much as Alcoholics Anonymous treatment.
>The recent rise of LGBT numbers is just people identifying with fashionable labels. Studies on the rate of people who regularly have same-sex sexual intercourse prove that there isn't any rise for this.
I agree with the first point (if we want to break it down more finely, it's overwhelmingly driven by natal females identifying as bi or trans), but self-reported same-sex behavior has actually increased.
Nowhere near as much as self-ID as part of an LGBT group, obviously, but that could change if, say, it became trendy to demand that young women "prove" their self-ID by actually having sex with other women or by transitioning.
The rate at which people actually practice same-sex intercourse in real life may have not increased much, although the amount of people fantasizing about it has almost certainly increased much more dramatically.
There is also the major issue concerning the rise of transgenderism to consider, as most of the rise in male to male sexual contact in real life (and in fantasy) is due to the rise in bisexual men having sex with very feminine males, many of whom identify as female.
Also, concerning the rise in bisexuality in females but not in males, I highly suspect this is due to most bisexual males choosing to identify as heterosexual due to them only being interested in a relationship in which they are sexually dominant with "traps."
I don't have any studies to back up my claim, its just based on personal interactions and observations, sorry to disappoint, I wish there were studies done on this though, if you have any I'd love to see them.
I'm not sure 1) is entirely correct: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590151621000113?via%3Dihub
but I admit I haven't researched the issue deeply
> I suspect people who participated in these studies hated being gay more than regular gay guys and so they actually were motivated to refrain from Same sex intercourse
Well so what? The people who are unhappy with their sexuality are the people we want to help. Unless you are in favour of forcing your opinions on "deviants" whether they like it or not.
"researchers don't think there is any method to turn pedophile people straight."
Maybe they just haven't tried hard enough.
https://media.tenor.com/H7JwVdj-77oAAAAM/coroca-unsee-this.gif
Just because someone prefers little girls doesn't mean he won't settle for big girls if he has to.
Ummm, I think you might not be aware of how prevalent pedophilia is in the Powers-that-be class and therefore they would be strongly promoting the notion (a funding research that 'determines') that it's not their fault. Much of what we've been told by our televisions (and our professors) is a lie.
1.: My impression is that it's mostly teenage girls identifying as bisexual, which is a nice convenient way to pretend to be part of the rainbow and capture the resulting social benefits, without actually having to do anything icky. OTOH there's good evidence that grooming behavior and child sexual abuse can bend sexuality, so if greater opportunity is provided for this, we'd expect to see more actual homosexuality.
2 & 3: also strongly doubt that such interventions are effective. There's probably some kind of early-life imprinting process that results in essentially permanent changes to the brain.
Most of this "I'm THIS NEW UNUSUAL THING" bullshit is from over-socialized leftoids engaging in primate status-seeking behavior, they're literally only one step up from throwing poo to get attention.
>So since female fertility is strongly age-dependent, men's targeting must be primarily of fecund females, so age 15-45 or so. Female targeting can be less age dependent, but should at least be 15+ (and that's what we see). Thus, if someone is targeting persons outside of the adaptive age, that is a disorder of sorts.
Oh, how many times do I have to explain this to clueless psychologists? Men have evolved to choose females based on their long-term reproductive potential, not their current fertility.
Humans don't run around screwing each-other like dogs, forever having one-night-stands. Hunter-gatherer societies are not freelove hippy communes where everyone screws everyone else. What men and women in all societies do is form long-term exclusive relationships or marriages and raise kids together. So a man's reproductive success is dependant the amount of offspring his chosen wife can give him over the long-term.
So what females can potentially provide the most offspring over the long-term? Well, those that are young and haven't started reproducing yet and still have all their fertile years ahead of them. The average age of a girl's first conception in modern HG societies is about 17. It may have been a bit lower in ancestral times during our evolution when HG people lived in better habitats and were better nourished with more meat in their diet. What this basically shows is that in order for an ancestral man to stand a chance at monopolising a female's reproductive lifespan and get as many offspring from her as possible he needed to target girls no older than about 16, before any other man got them up the duff. Though targetting girls too young say like 5 year olds would not be optimal since they are a long way from reproducitve age. The best females would be those closer to the beginning of their reproductive lifespan who will start giving a man offspring sooner.
This is not just theoretical, anthropologists have seen this in primitive foraging societies that are something like we evolved in. The girls most sought after are the teen and pubescent girls who are just prior their first pregnancy. When Chagnon lived with the Yanomamo he saw that when the girls got to about 12 and grew some perky boobs all the men noticed and they would have to be closely guarded by their male relatives or husbands to stop them getting raped or abducted by raiders. By the time they had go to about 18-20 and had started having babies the men would lose a lot of interest in them, and say they were "growing old" and they would no longer have to be closely guarded.
The reason girls have evolved to grow perky eye-catching boobs in puberty is to signal that they approaching reproductive age and to honestly signal that they haven't had a baby yet and still have all their reproductive years ahead of them. Once a girl starts having babies her boobs lose pertness and go saggy. This is what the men mean by "growing old".
By the time they get to about 30 the women have been though 3-4 pregnancies, spent years breastfeeding and their bodies are wrecked. Their boobs are saggy pancakes, nipples are dry and cracked, their waists are flabby and covered in stretchmarks. The men find them gross. On the other hand, a 13yo girl who's just come up to puberty and hasn't even started ovulating yet is immensely more attractive and sought after. She hasn't had a baby yet, her boobs her pert and her nipples may even point upward. Her waist is much smaller and has no stretchmarks. Her face is young and fresh and hasn't become worn from the stresses of motherhood.
Now, if men have evolved to choose females based on their current fertility this preference makes no sense. The 30yo is still very fertile* but the 13yo is prefertile. But that is not how the human mating system works. Men have evolved to choose females based on their long-term reproductive potential. The 30yo is over half way through her reproductive lifespan while the 13yo has all her fertile years ahead of her. A man who chooses the 13yo as a wife will potentially leave behind double the amount of offspring as a man who chooses the 30yo. An absolutely HUGE reproductive advantage.
*At least during her fertile time of the menstrual cycle and between pregnancies. For our species most sex is non-reproductive and serves more as kind of bonding mechanism. This is why couples have sex all thoughout the menstrual cycle and when already pregnant.
This is a very good explanation. Strange that we need this explained to it, but modern humans myself included are functionally retarded.
Thank you for writing this.
It's incredible how controversial this statement is considered among the Western elite. The disparity between elite and public/non-Western opinion on this is enormous. Great article. It's surprising that nobody has ever made this argument before you (afaik) since it is so obviously true if you look at the data.
I read a bunch of evolutionary psychiatry and it's kinda written between the lines. I seem to recall reading a philosopher writing about this but when I searched it wasn't Sesardic. Maybe it's Stephen Kershnar (sp?).
Leo Strauss
Not that controversial when one considers the opinions of the Western Elite. https://twitter.com/mattwalshblog/status/1583097165232369665?s=46&t=cjMXwVM-2Vn8lDpcb7JF8A
I believe it’s a combination of atrazine/endocrine disrupters being in our food/water and environmental induction (propaganda) that’s causing increasing rates of homosexuality. Not that in matters in the long run if and when extra-uterine pods are developed with engineered gametes a century from now or more.
There seems to be some evidence that hormonal birth control has big effects on lesbianism and male attraction in women. So big points for environmental estrogen/endocrine disruption theories
The vast majority of Western people are liberal on homosexuality. There is a difference between Western and non-Western opinion, but in the West, elites and masses tend to agree on this issue.
The difference between Western elites and non-elites is still probably gigantic, at least in sincere views. You are right that peoples' claimed views have converged enormously with the elites' views.
My niece and nephew both have very confused romantic lives and this LBGTQ/gender stuff is a big part of it. Even if their underlying attraction hasn't changed, its making it very difficult for them to have healthy male/female relationships.
Back before the LBGTQ explosion, I remember fag hags generally being lower quality women than those without gay friends. The gay friends advice always amounted to the idea that these women should be more like gay men (promiscuous, hedonistic, neurotic, selfish).
Got here from the post on Palestinians, and find it necessary to comment despite the age of this post.
Firstly, "mental illness" is really just a euphemism for cognitive derangement, like distorted sensory impressions or particularly poor reasoning, leading typically to delusional convictions. This is the colloquial, common sense understanding of what a mental illness is: somebody who cannot think properly.
Further, it is not enough that some behaviour may indirectly lead to risk of mental illness. By analogy with physical illnesses, we do not say that things like smoking or extreme sports are illnesses on account that they can lead to lung cancer or broken bones respectively. Something can come with substantial risk of illness without therefore being an illness. Hence, for a condition to constitute mental illness, sensory distortions or cognitive disorders must be direct symptoms.
Because of rampant retard-tier scientism, psychiatrists wanted to rationalise that mental illness consists of chemical imbalances or some problem with physical features of the brain. Also, since mental illnesses of the "disordered reasoning" type are basically a special case of stupidity, it would seem too unkind to modern sensibilities to treat it by pointing out the stupid reasoning of mentally ill people and try to reason them out of it, despite this being in my experience highly effective. Thus, we have this bogus notion that mental illness is actually physiological, which is obviously wrong, as it would include things like dementia and alzheimers as mental illnesses if applied consistently.
Homosexuality does not (directly, at any rate) cause hallucinations or poor reasoning. Therefore it is not a mental illness. It really is as simple as that. Obviously, homosexuality is a neurological abnormality. This is beyond reasonable dispute given the extreme degree of neuroanatomical correlations, and the very probable mechanisms by which these are causally related to homosexuality.
This leaves the question only of whether it is a neurological illness. Some commenters argue that the most objective basis for classifying something as an illness is the impact on reproduction. This is idiotic as it would require us to classify any physical imperfection that reduces sexual attractiveness as an illness. Certainly there are a lot of illnesses causing people to be ugly, but ugliness is not itself an illness. Also, given the noted inverse correlation between IQ and fertility, we'd have to consider high intelligence to be an illness under this definition.
For some reason it often needs to be reiterated that gay people are not infertile and could absolutely repoduce biologically if driven to do so. Thus, we are speaking of an inherent character trait that reduces the likelihood of reproduction, but this is no different from being ugly or being a genius, neither of which are considered illnesses, nor would you consider them to be illnesses even if you can show — as is quite likely — that both are correlated with schizophrenia, bipolar, etc. (ie. the comorbidities argument).
Now, a couple of direct quotes that need to be addressed:
> But the more obvious unmentioned fact here is that stigma against homosexuals has decreased markedly in the last couple of decades
It has increased drastically over the last decade. Sure, there are fewer of the boomer variety Christian conservative around, but the homophobia of the reaction.la variety, or of many BAPists (who seem to misunderstand his work), is a lot more pernicious, and since the left has begun stigmatising male sexuality of any variety, not to mention imposing the cult of victimhood on all LGBT spaces they can, gay men are now stigmatised both on the left and the right, a marked deterioration compared to ten years ago.
As for statistical evidence for or against the minority stress hypothesis, there is hardly anything of substance on either side. For example, as tailcalled points out, the genetic correlations you cite are just as compatible with the minority stress hypothesis. The problem here is simply that social science doesn't work and was a bad idea to begin with.
> If this was caused by stigma, it should have declined rapidly, ergo, it is not caused by stigma.
Unless of course the relationship between stigma to minority stress is logarithmic, which seems to agree with intuition.
> Of course, when we classify something as mental disorder, we say that it is better generally not to have it. As can be seen with all the associations with bad outcomes, this is generally true for homosexuality.
Just wanted to highlight this quote as an illustration of the fact that naive utilitarianism is a mental illness. How sure are you, for example, that the functions ascribed by Camilla Paglia, Alexander Bard, etc to androgynous minorities is inessential to the maintenance of advanced civilisation?
> We classify depression as a mental illness, but no one goes around saying to stay away from depressed people, or not to love them.
There are plenty of Nietzscheans and BAPists who will advocate staying away from depressed people. Though I find this unvirtuous on account of the cruelty involved, I have to admit that they have a point from a practical perspective.
> Homosexuality is really a mental illness, that was declassified as such for the usual political leftism reasons.
It was only in the first place classified as a mental illness partly as a way of getting it decriminalised and reducing the overall oppression of gay people. That is, there was considerable leftist activism involved in medicalising it in the first place.
> I don't think that classifying homosexuality as a mental illness should change the behavior of heterosexuals much. Everybody has some friend who suffers from mental problems, and this is worthy of our sympathy without having to pretend it isn't really a disorder.
"Sympathising" with someone (read: pitying them) on account of their "mental illness" is a rather significant change in behaviour actually, and would only serve to further perpeutate the cult of victimhood that I regard as currently being the main cause of minority stress. My suspicion is that gay people had better mental health in Victorian England than today, in no small part because of this constant "sympathising".
For clarification, here is a common sense explanation of why some common mental illnesses are mental illnesses:
Borderline personality disorder is a mental illness because the characteristic "splitting" interferes with a person's ability to form an accurate judgement of someone's character, reflective of virtues and vices alike.
Psychosis is a mental illness because the hallucinations and (speculative) excess of arousal leads to incoherent reasoning resulting in delusions.
Anxiety is a mental illness because it leads to unrealistic catastrophising and to people "psyching themselves out", so as to be incapable of tasks that should otherwise be easy, eg. greeting someone like a normal person.
Depression is a mental illness because it interferes with a person's ability to be encouraged and inspired by things that are going well, not to mention the tendency to constantly revert to cycles of despair, suicidal ideation, etc., that distract from more productive cognitive tasks.
Progressivism, though unacknowledged as such, is a mental illness because it drastically interferes with getting an accurate picture of the world.
These are all cases of people having conditions that severely inhibit their ability to think clearly like a sensible person. Homosexuality quite obviously is not like these other phenomena.
“Unless of course the relationship between stigma to minority stress is logarithmic, which seems to agree with intuition.”
Could you elaborate? I also dont fully understand what logarithmic means
Logarithmic means you'd need exponentially more stigma to produce a constant increase in minority stress. For example, we could imagine that encountering homophobic slurs from 8 people produces 3 units of minority stress, and that slurs from 12 people produces 4 units of minority stress, from 18 people produces 5 units, and from 27 people produces 6 units. It's not directly proportional to the amount of stigma; there are "diminishing returns" so to speak.
This would mean you'd need much more than a 90% reduction in stigma in order to get a 90% reduction in minority stress. If the level of stigma is high enough, then even a 90% reduction may not lead to a significant level of reduction in minority stress.
I think that matches my experience
There is also a lot of vague things people can do that are homophobic or stressful, that arnt eassily defined as slurs or such.
Above a certain threshold, it becomes very stressful for me and just stays that effect
There is also a sort of “i have to explain myself or constantly mask myself” stress that can happen
A Dean Byrd & Nicolosi actually excluded the two best penile studies of so called "cured homosexuals". They only included the ones from *one author*, suggesting it's not reliable.
1960 Kurt Freund finds no evidence of reoriented homosexuals having arousal to women, they responded to men. In 1976 Conrad and Wincze found that physiological arousal measurements did not support the positive reports of men who had participated in conversion therapy – they too were still aroused by imagery of men.
Why does the biological have some claim to being more real than the voluntary? In other words, why is a person's condition determined by 'gets hard on for x' rather than 'chooses to have intercourse with x'(or refrains obviously)?
Pretty sure it's limbic damage, most often caused in utero/first 2 years of life. Over sensitivity that is commonly found in shared sibling environments with the aforementioned comorbidities. Adhd, autism, Schitz, tourette's etc etc etc.. all downstream of gene mutation like fragile X or epilepsy which sets the table for oversensitive births.
If you've ever seen severe autism for instance you would recognize it's without a doubt a weakness to sensitivity. But in these cases it takes a left at Alburquerque most often, where full diagnosable conditions don't manifest as badly (also keep in mind adhd and autism presentation and prognosis greatly changes by age), but the mutation messes with the limbic system enough post birth/inutero that it changes the what should be correct size portions even though it still prunes the neurological ends more closely to normal it still inverts and makes even worse, depending on the testosterone the pituitary gland and other local limbic biology.
Two other things, limbic primacy is different between men and woman and I believe it's women that dominate with right side while men dominate with left side. Further women don't display autism as fiercely in part because their central corticl area is stronger I believe.
It is ridiculous on your side to suppose homosexuality is malleable. Do you think being Asperger is malleable? Or being low IQ? Is there any tendency that is inherent in one's basic instincts that is malleable? Maybe some phobias but it is a unique exception because of the unusual power of habituation.
Asperger and Intelligence are .8+ heritable, so no they are not mallable. Homosexuality has a low heritability
Plenty of defects at birth are low heritability. Deafness caused by rubella. Birth defects from agent orange. I suggest you learn what heritability means because things can be low heritability and biological.
We are talking about complex traits. If a complex trait (thousands of alleles contribute) and it has a high heritability, it is not mallable under normal conditions.
Heigth, for example, can be affected by bad nutrition over many years as a child. But that is an extreme counter example.
Do you know the causal mechanisms of these different conditions well enough to say this, or are you just trying to make your opinion seem strong? The 'inherent in one's basic instincts'makes me suspect the latter. But feel free to explain the mechanism and I will apologize and retract.
Whether heterosexuality is malleable is a different question from whether Asberger's or IQ are malleable. Please stay on topic.
"Aside from the gay germ theory, which I think is not likely, unless it's a metaphor for 'grooming', the other popular theory is sexual antagonistic selection. The idea here is that some genetic variants cause men to be gay, but increase fertility in their female relatives enough to make up for this. Or make the gays so helpful to relatives that their own fertility reduction is worth it. "
Isn't there also the possibility that there is a sickle-cell anemia type selection going on, i.e. if you get too many of the [trait] alleles, you're gay and have no children, but if you get only a few of the [trait] alleles, then you're straight (or at worst bisexual) and end up being more reproductively successful than someone who only got the non-[trait] alleles?
Think this is known as the "antagonistic pleiotropy" theory of homosexuality, and there's some good evidence suggesting it's true.
There have been some large studies suggesting that alleles associated with homosexuality tend to confers a mating advantage (i.e more sexual partners) to heterosexual individuals.
https://europepmc.org/article/med/34426668
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513808000688
I would love to know how the mating advantage relates to behaviour. I am guessing it is something to do with having a better theory of mind about the opposite-sex?
I didn't include it because the recent discussion with the genetic simulation was too complicated to go into.
Possibly some merit to this, but it will have to explain the connection to the heavy disability association like with adhd, autism, schitzophrenia, and many others in the same basket.
The entire thread of autism one researcher suggests goes back to somewhere about where we started mating with neanderthals. Assuming neaderthals weren't as attractive it could be a mutation survived there but also came with the later autism trait.
But this doesn't necessarily explain autism, it far moreso explains the overrepresentive height differences in homosexuals which seem to be heavily over representive in the short range and a little over representaive in the much talelr range.
What is common however, is phrenology. simply put homosexual heads/faces are smaller and more feminine in male homosexuals and land vice versa for femaqle homosexuals.
Great deep dive but I think an important element missing from the analysis is the fraternal birth order effect: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraternal_birth_order_and_male_sexual_orientation#:~:text=Fraternal%20birth%20order%20has%20been,will%20have%20a%20homosexual%20orientation.
Having older male siblings makes one 50% more likely to be gay and this increases exponentially for each older boy. Since this is necessarily environmental (though this environment seems likely to be gestational) it provides a clear target approach for parents looking to optimize for heterosexuality.
It is part of the study I mention towards the end regarding sexually antagonistic selection.
Having older male siblings make you at higher risk of being molested
Wikipedia entry says the effect isn't seen with older adopted brothers or step brothers.
And a large fraction of all sex happens between step siblings, anyone who's been on pornhub knows that.
But what is the incentive there? The older sibling(s) don't also have older siblings, so there's no one to groom them into being gay.
It can be others as well, but the more older siblings you have the higher is the risk?
But see https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/341906
This study is pretty flawed. Done before they’re old enough to honestly state orientation.
There is no value neutral account of mental disorders or illnesses.
The values you suggest, evolutionary ones, are probably not correct or useful. What is natural is not necessarily good.
It seems like you're simply insisting that appealing to evolution requires a value judgement. On the contrary, it's possibly the most objective account we could employ.
It's a value judgment if you then say something is good or bad because of evolution. Nothing can be considered good or bad if not for subjective moral judgments, and you can never take a ought from an is. The fact that genes want to reproduce does not translate to being morally good to have children, or not to have children, or to be sexually attracted to the same sex, or to old people, or whatever. As the other comment pointed out, an obvious case where normal people would consider it immoral to try to reproduce is if you try to reproduce via rape. An obvious case where normal people would consider it moral to refrain from reproducing is in the case of religious service. In the case of normal individual choice by couples, I don't think most people consider it moral or immoral to have children.
"It's a value judgment if you then say something is good or bad because of evolution."
Yes, anyone who draws moral lessons from evolution is indulging in the naturalistic fallacy. But to say that a behavior is maladaptive is NOT to say that it is morally wrong. Appealing to natural selection gives us an objective and * neutral * way of defining mental illness.
Well, it's complicated, because what constitutes mental illness is going to have to do both with the individual's subjective experience and with societal expectations of behavior, but I don't think not having children fits into that. For one, being infertile is not a mental illness, it doesn't even make sense to say it is, and low fertility is the norm in the high-income world, so not atypical, and if being atypical is part of the definition of mental illness, then not having children or having few children is not a mental illness.
Now, one might say that yes, a normal man or woman might decide not to have children, because they prefer to focus on their careers or whatever, but they have the potential to have children, the problem is that homosexuals also have that potential. I guess the argument is then that homosexuals don't want to have children, or rather their sexual attraction is not conducive to having children, which certainly makes them atypical for evolutionary reasons, but then one could argue that not having children while heterosexual is also atypical for evolutionary reasons.
"...what constitutes mental illness is going to have to do both with the individual's subjective experience and with societal expectations of behavior..."
Or not, if we simply define it in Darwinian terms.
"...being infertile is not a mental illness..."
Correct, a physical condition is not a mental illness.
"...a normal man or woman might decide not to have children..."
The question is whether they have impulses that would have normally led to children in a pre-birth-control era.
"...one could argue that not having children while heterosexual is also atypical for evolutionary reasons."
Correct. It's almost certainly the case that mental illness is far more common today than it was for our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
You may be thinking of Wakefield (mental illness as "harmful dysfunction") or Nesse's Good Reasons for Bad Feelings.
Is two old people having sex a disorder?
No because they are probably a couple, or they have no other choice. It would be weird for an old person to be more sexually attracted to another random post-reproductive person than to a random young person at their peak fertility, youth, and health. How many 80 yo men find 80 yo women more sexually attractive/arousing than 20 yo women (unless they are their long-term/life-time partner)?
If you're an 80 yo man, you probably have to wait until you've stored up enough testosterone to want an 80 yo woman before you can physically seal the deal, regardless of age.
I am reading this article and it’s comments with great astonishment. It tries to proof that homosexuality is a mental illness and tells us that this is a apolitical result. As if language is something objective and calling someone having a mental illness has nog subjectivity whatsoever. We are there to reproduce ourselves. That is the truth seen from a biological perspective. As if the biological perspective in itself is free of interpretation, an objective look at live itself. As if saying that when you don’t fit in the norm set by this perspective is an illness is objective and without any consequences. Bringing in the leftish point of view in this article let us see the real perspective of the writer who hopes he won’t be misinterpreted. Well I’m sorry but you are very clear that this so called scientific approach is lacking any notification of awareness that science in itself is not free of value. By making objects of subjects you already start misinterpreting the situation. By ripping out of context of love, live, relationships and attraction to people as a pure reproductive act is really taking things out of its context. There is no prove whatsoever that treatments did no other than harm to people who were thought to be ill by short-sighted people.
It seems you conflate mental illness with abuse (which DID happen historically). However in the current world mentally ill people still have basic rights and their dignity while at the same time we realize they have mental issues. There is no reason trans genderism, as well as homosexuality (which is admittedly much less destructive than transgenerism) cannot be viewed in the same way
I knew many of the researchers doing this work, and they pointed out to critics that they were treating only those homosexuals who wanted to change. Despite that, hostility to treatment increased. I can remember the bitter arguments at conferences
Well it’s still legal in Russia, China, most of Asia and the Middle East but no sharp scientist has reliably found a treatment. I tend to think it’s acceptable to be mad at frauds.
If the "germ theory" is true shouldn't we see an unusually large drop in number of gay people cause of the 2020-2021 Covid Lockdown/social distancing measuring? Ofc we could only see this in a few years
That assumes that the putative “gay germ” is not already present in the majority of the population. If the “gay germ” hypothesis is true, which I still believe it is more likely than not, then the pathogen in question would have to meet three criteria:
1.) Already present in a large fraction (if not most) of the population.
2.) Is neurotropic (that is, able to infect neurons).
3.) Currently has no effective vaccine.
The most obvious candidate that fits all of these criteria would be a member of Herpesviridae. Over 95% of the population carries one herpesvirus or another. For example, herpes simplex 1 (HSV-1) famously causes cold sores in a minority of individuals but is in fact present in approximately 60-70% of healthy adults (the majority of which obviously don’t suffer from cold sores). This implies that a specific genetic predisposition is also required. Contracting HSV-1 is not, in and of itself, sufficient. Yet another example of a pathogen that requires a genetic predisposition in order to cause problems would be H. pylori which is responsible for most cases of peptic ulcers (which are also, to some extent, heritable). Even though 30-40% of the population in the US has H. pylori, only about 20% of those infected show symptoms. This combined with the low but non-zero heritability of peptic ulcers implies that a genetic predisposition is also at play.
This is likely also the case with exclusive homosexuality in males. The low heritability of exclusive homosexuality (25-35%) is most likely a genetic predisposition to the pathogen in question. It’s worth noting that the majority of people who carry HSV-1 don’t even get it from any kind of sexual activity but rather from such things as a kiss from a relative or sharing drinking glasses/eating utensils. The fact that the “gay germ” (whether or not it is a member of Herpesviridae) is most likely already present in most of the population makes it unlikely that a drop in the incidence of homosexuality would be observed following the COVID-19 lockdowns.
It's a shame that people feel the need to apologize in advance for simply pointing out the obvious.
There is nothing 'hateful' about pointing this out, just like there is nothing hateful about diagnosing schizophrenia as a mental illness. It is what it is. Like schizophrenia it has a biological component, like schizophrenia people still need to be treated respectfully. But just like schizophrenia, we MUST be able to admit that it is not normal.