Repressive Society

[andrewducker]

I believe that people have most of their social functioning built in at a genetic level. I recommend reading Stephen Pinker's "The Blank Slate" or John Gray's "Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and other Animals" for an overview of this take on things.

Because of this, I think that much of people's wants and needs is intrinsically part of them. I believe that most cultures try to funnel these inbuilt feelings in ways which protect the society. We take people's natural feelings on (for instance) sex and teach people that these feelings are wrong, or sick or dirty. Now, sometimes there are good reasons for the social structures to exist, and strong historical causes for them, but the fact remains that they are socially imposed on top of the instincts that people have. Frequently the mismatch causes psychological dysfunction, sometimes of a severe nature.

Now, the more free people feel from cultural pressure, the less attention they will pay to the attempts to change their intrinsic nature. Historically speaking, it has only been possible to be free if you were at the top of the heap - and even then you're obviously raised in the midst of the society and strongly imprinted by it. Look at the behaviour ot the Greeks and Romans at their height, or the nobility of Medieval times. More recently, as the general wealth of the populace has gone up, more and more people have been able to free themselves from their fellow man.

Now, obviously, there's been negative sides to that freeing: not knowing who your neighbours are, a feeling of isolation and anomie, no community culture. Of course, to those people who felt hemmed in by their surrounding society this is a good thing. And without those societal rules holding us back, we're more free to act as we wish and follow our instincts.

Of course, I'm overegging this somewhat - we're all very much influenced by our societies, picking up our basic beliefs and our "starter pack" of morals and tastes from there. But it is startling how much society has changed over the last century. Believe it or not, 100 years ago a woman could be arrested in London for wearing trousers in public. 30 years ago they were still using electroshock therapy to try and cure homosexuals in the UK. Now, both of those ideas seem ludicrous. But they only seem ludicrous because we see other people as independent. And people are much more indepedent nowadays because they can be self-supporting.

Comments

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Also, Bailey & Pillard recruited their twins by advertising in gay publications that they were looking for gay twins to research possible genetic influences on homosexuality. Since the vast majority of the gay population wants to believe in a gay gene, a gay person whose twin was also gay might be very eager to volunteer for this stuudy, feeling that his twin's gayness would help support genetic theories and would thus (supposedly, according to pro-gay-gene people) benefit the cause of gay rights. Whereas a gay person whose twin was straight might feel that this twinship would not be "politically useful" and might thus be less likely to volunteer.

Also, many dozens of gay identical twin studies have been done over the past 75 years and the results have varied all the way from 0% to 100% concordance rates in different studies and every single possible variation in between - and if you line up all the data from every gay identical twin study ever done, it's quite striking to see what an absolute lack of any consistency between studies there's been. You'd expect the majority of studies to start grouping around some consistent numbers, but no such grouping occurs. It's completely all over the map. Bailey & Pillard's study happened to get more media attention in the U.S., partly because it was one of the larger studies done in the U.S. in recent years but mostly just because it happened to come out around the same time as Simon LeVay's "gay brain" claims when the media considered all "gay gene" studies to be a "hot topic." The study is not representative of any larger mass of data. The King & McDonald gay twin study done in Britain slightly more recently found only a 25% concordance rate among identical twins, less than half of what Bailey & Pillard found - the U.S. media just didn't bother reporting on that study at all.

(I found this discussion on my counter and couldn't resist the urge to add my piece.)

[andrewducker]

Cheers muchly. I'm always happy to have more to think about. Now I have to go and do a bunch more reading.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

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