No They're Not
Irradiated by LabRat
Title of article: Afghan Men Struggle With Sexual Identity, Study Finds.
The actual content of the article, on the other hand, details the culture clash between Western forces and the local Pashtun culture, in which men having sex with men is common but those participating deny being gay. Go ahead and read all of it; it’s interesting.
What’s more interesting to me is the title of the article and the line in it about “a new report suggests an entire region in the country is coping with a sexual identity crisis.” But, if you read the article, the locals don’t sound remotely confused; so far as they are concerned, it is culturally normal to lust after and take sexual pleasure from men and boys, and to marry women and have children with them. They’re not gay; they don’t (so far as they claim) have romantic relationships with men, just indulge in sexual pleasure, whereas gay men fall in love with and have relationships with other men. QED- at least to them.
They’re not even all that unique; that cultural pattern has been seen before, in some places and times in ancient Greece, in at least one Indonesian tribe I know of, and one African. (Forgive me for not citing- the sources on the latter two cultures are in some of my anthropology books that I never took with me when leaving home.) They all have several other things in common, too- women are largely socially segregated from the men, either in having their own separate world or simply not taking part in society at outside the home. Misogyny and extreme patriarchal control are the common thread: when women are seen as worthless except in terms of bearing sons, it apparently becomes difficult for men steeped in such a culture to get excited about having sex with them. Humans are still pretty randy creatures no matter what kind of sexually repressive culture they’re brought up in, though, so as usual, given enough time, teaching twists to accommodate the local culture- and allow the men a sexual outlet with those that ARE admirable and therefore possibly desirable. The Pashtun men probably ARE no more gay than the men participating in male-male sex in prisons are- as much as that disturbs Western sensibilities from several angles. (Though I’d bet money there are a few in there that *are* having relationships and romances and are pretty much gay- closets are big and roomy when you can be caught having sex with another man and not be doubted as straight.)
One of the arguments frequently brought up by those arguing that homosexuality is just a recent perversion and product of cultural decline is that there was no such thing as a gay sexual identity until the late nineteenth century, and they do have a point: modern Western sexual identity is very much a creation of our culture, and filtered through our understanding of how love and relationships work, which is also a pretty recent construct. Love as the primary tie between married couples, rather than economics, status, and reproduction, is one of Rousseau’s more radical inventions- just one that caught on like gangbusters in wealthy first-world nations. Thus, when Westerners wrestle with their sexual identity, they filter it through that prism of love and relationships, so that that identity is defined by who you want sexual relationships with- which our culture stresses are legitimized by love.
The thing is, heterosexual identity and relationships have come in a pretty huge variety over the course of history as well, with massive variation on when and in what contexts it’s considered normal to express sexual feelings, how many partners can or should be in a marriage, and whether it’s okay to have partners outside of your primary relationship- right up to whether it’s okay or not to achieve sexual climax when not trying to reproduce at all. (Usually the woman gets the short end of the stick on this, but there are a surprising number of cases where male ejaculation is seen as draining and lessening him as well.) This just doesn’t strike us as unusual because for obvious biological reasons, heterosexuality is normal and assumed; it doesn’t rock anybody’s world that it should vary, and vary a lot. Homosexual identity and behavior, on the other hand, we tend to expect to look the same all over the world regardless of what frame we’re thinking about it- either as a seamless whole of identity and behavior as inevitable as red hair, or as a perversion caused by some sort of pernicious outside influence.
Culture dictates, up to the point possible, the shapes that all the monkey urges humans naturally have take; it gives us the options for the acceptable ways to experience or express anger, frustration, affection, attachment, grief- and love and lust. Not all cultures are created equal, and I among others would certainly define one that found keeping children of any gender as sexual servants for the high status as disgusting- but it should not surprise us so much when they vary. The Pashtuns aren’t confused about how their world is ordered and the identities they have within that order- only we are.
January 28th, 2010 at 8:30 pm
“They’re not even all that unique; that cultural pattern has been seen before, in some places and times in ancient Greece, in at least one Indonesian tribe I know of, and one African.”
The pattern can also be found in elected Republicans.
January 29th, 2010 at 1:32 am
To further confuse westerners, men in Afghanistan like to get all tarted up as seen in these photos:
http://www.utne.com/Media/Photographs-of-Taliban-Groomed-Affectionate-Guntzel.aspx
There must be one frustrated terrorist leader in a cave in Afghanistan preaching against homosexuality and other western depravities to a bunch of men wearing eyeliner who think that buggery is totally not gay.
January 29th, 2010 at 10:39 am
Something I’ve been trying to articulate for a while, with regard to the gay rights movement: comparing homophobia to racism is a weak, weak strategy because the evidence doesn’t support the idea that anybody’s genetically “hardwired” to be gay.
For that matter, I’m extremely skeptical that any significant proportion of the species is “hardwired” straight, either. We’re a sexually reproducing species that uses sex to strengthen social bonds, ferchrissakes-it seems unlikely in principle (even without the well-established historical precedent to the contrary) that we’d evolve hardwired sexual attractions that exclude half our communities. Exclusive gaiety _and_ straightitude both semm much more likely to be the result of social pressures than of genetic “programming”.
And that doesn’t have to undermine the validity of either preference. It just isn’t like race; it’s more like religion. Your culture and background tend to steer you in a particular direction, and yeah, you could probably change it if you really wanted to. But if you _don’t_ want to, that’s all the reason you need to keep doin’ what you’re doin’, and people should leave you the hell alone about it.
January 29th, 2010 at 10:54 am
Elmo- I tend to think that rigid orientations DO exist, they’re just rarer than we like to believe from either side of the story. Otherwise there really *wouldn’t* have been gay people in cultures that offer zero acceptable outlets, including ours pre-Stonewall. I also tend to think there are probably a pretty high number of lonely and frustrated straight guys in places like Afghanistan that really *would* like to have a close, romantic and loving relationship with a pretty girl.
Evolution favors variation, and when sex acquires more functions than reproduction, things can get very fucking varied. We’re pretty simple as a vertebrate species in only having the two genders for the most part, let alone a variety of sexual preferences.
January 29th, 2010 at 11:19 am
[delurk]
Elmo and Labrat- If what I learned in some of my Human Sexuality classes wasn’t total garbage, then (at least from the Western perspective of hetero/homosexuality) there tends to be a spectrum of preference. Some people are exclusively into their own gender and some people are exclusively into the opposite gender - and a lot of people would prefer one, but will take the other if they’re bored/lonely/horny enough.
[/delurk]
January 29th, 2010 at 11:21 am
That’s the Kinsey view, and one that I think is still rather sterile a view but close enough. No accident the man was a taxonomist with an obsession with variation within species.
January 29th, 2010 at 12:05 pm
I think I came across with a more absolute position than I’d meant, especially here:
“…the evidence doesn’t support the idea that anybody’s genetically “hardwired” to be gay.”
What I mean to say is that I strongly suspect most humans are “wired” somewhere in the middle ground, either truly bisexual or leaning toward one sex or the other, but not truly exclusive. It seems very unlikely to me that more than a tiny minority of a sexually-reproducing species could be rigidly, innately “wired” for total disinterest in the opposite sex, and in a species like our (for which sex obviously has more purposes than simply procreating), it seems reasonable to speculate that a good proportion of the huge number of people who self-identify as interested _only_ in the opposite sex are influenced more by culture than by genetics.
We have known-and very strong-pressures in our culture that discourage people from identifying as unstraight, and additional pressures that discourage people-who-acknowledge-interest-in-their-own-sex from identifying as ungay. If we know those pressures can account for the polarization of orientation that we see, and there’s reasonable (if speculative) evidence against genetic “programming”, until better evidence comes along it seems most reasonable to assume that while exclusive-wired people almost certainly exist (humans being as complicated as we are, and there being almost seven billion of us), they’re probably a minority. Maybe it’s a bell curve laid over an analog Kinsey scale, and maybe it’s a hell of a lot more complicated than that, but I don’t expect there are too many people in the hardwired-exclusive camps in any model.
I think we’re saying basically the same thing, maybe with different emphasis and assumptions about the numbers. I certainly don’t mean to imply that there’s just gay, straight, and bi, and nobody’s really gay or straight.
January 29th, 2010 at 1:26 pm
Young men are famously sexually excited by girls, thoughts of girls, sensually shaped vegetables, any smooth object, any rough object, other boys, pictures, clouds, anything at all, and nothing at all. (I could add to the list, as could many others, I betcha.) In my old age, I seem to be sexually attracted mostly to human female wimmins. Who are half my age, or less. Sigh.
January 29th, 2010 at 9:48 pm
There’s a lot of American men who have sex with men but identify as “straight” because they’re not, you know, fags. That is, they don’t act stereotypically gay, they’re not publicly gay, and they’re not part of “gay culture.” They just do dudes, and in many people’s minds, doing dudes is just one symptom of the complex Gay Syndrome.
January 30th, 2010 at 10:54 pm
From the article:
“The report said: “When it was explained to him what was necessary, he reacted with disgust and asked, ‘How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who God has made unclean, when one could be with a man, who is clean? Surely this must be wrong.'”
*Bites lip, closes eyes, tries not to say something denigrating their culture.*
and fails…
This is the goddamned 21st century, and these idiots don’t even know the dead-fucking-simple tab-A-into-slot-B basics of reproduction?!
What.
The.
FUCK?!
January 31st, 2010 at 1:07 pm
Hell, even some animal species (pandas, rhinos, elephants) don’t know how to go about it until they see it done…
Combine a taboo that would prevent sex education being “normal” and broad cultural misogyny and there’s always one clueless dumbass in every batch, and, well…
February 1st, 2010 at 8:07 am
You know…considering that “Humans are still pretty randy creatures no matter what kind of sexually repressive culture they’re brought up in” and the men are all out enjoying each other…what are the Pashtun women doing?
I really hope that, in between lamenting their uncleanliness and praying for boy children after their husbands figure out how to inseminate them, they’re finding some comfort somewhere.
February 1st, 2010 at 2:03 pm
Sadly, we don’t know for the same reason there’s basically no mention of homosexual female behavior in the Bible- because what the women are doing is considered entirely irrelevant as long as it’s not interfering with the men.