14. Science in Sexual Orientation

Atrocities aside, the results are coherent with what we now know about the relative flexibility of sexual behavior. Sexual identity (feeling like a man or a woman) is not something you “choose,” but rather something that comes already defined from embryonic development and the earliest stages of life. A transsexual doesn’t choose to be one, instead showing disconformity with his or her body from childhood. Sexual orientation (feeling attracted to men, women or both) is more fluid in women, but once it is defined is very stable in men. On the other hand, a large part of stimuli that condition a greater sexual desire are learned through experiences during different stages that are key to sexual development, and they are more susceptible to intensification, lessening or being substituted by other practices.

In 1935, Freud sent a famous letter to a mother worried about her son’s homosexuality, telling her: “Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them. (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime—and a cruelty, too. […]If he is unhappy, neurotic, torn by conflicts, inhibited in his social life, analysis may bring him harmony, peace of mind, full efficiency, whether he remains a homosexual or gets changed.”

I’ve always found it peculiar that many people immediately identify as gay the guy who has the courage to experiment with another man, but never label as lesbian a heterosexual woman who occasionally has relations with other women. This may reflect a historically higher intolerance toward male homosexuality than toward lesbianism, which is in fact one of the reasons why it is argued that science has studied male homosexuality in such exaggerated disproportion to female homosexuality.

We too often interpret animal behavior with an excessively anthropomorphic gaze. Edward O. Wilson offers a fabulous example: he observed that in several ant communities, when one dies, the others pick up the corpse and take it to an ant cemetery. They are actually doing that so that it doesn’t decompose in the nest, but some biologists interpreted this by suggesting that, despite seeming to us like insignificant insects, ants have a certain awareness of the difference between life and death. Wilson explains that if we inject a live ant with a chemical substance that is given off by dead ants, and place it in the middle of the nest, the other ants will pick it up and take it to the cemetery despite the fact that it is moving around as much as they are.