The Psychology of Homophobia

[bilby]

Doesnt hold since homophobia is a culture dependent thing.

It is today, which is basically what I said. But go back far enough in human history and it was everywhere,

Citation needed

homosexuality was naturally selected against. It was not as good a survival strategy as heterosexuality.

That has exactly nothing to do with people's attitudes towards it.

Being a celibate monk is selected against to the exact same degree - and survived as a behaviour that was widely admired and respected in a number of unrelated religions.

What is evolutionarily fit is unrelated to what is culturally desirable.

And natural selection operates on populations, not individuals.

 

[repoman]

This is going to be scattershot:

When I was maybe 5 years old (I am told) I liked liver, but then some other kids said it was gross and I never liked it anymore. So the contagious distaste I think is a big part of it.

A coworker says he is not homophobic, but homonauseous.

There are some things that are more naturally distasteful to see than two healthy average same sex people having a public display of affection. (As if it matters so much that something others do or embody being is distasteful to us as observers.) Things like an extremely anorexic or obese person making out, a ~20 year old making out with a 70 year old and so on.

But I would guess that actually seeing in shape and attractive men making out might bother some homophobes more than two schlubs doing the same.

 

[bilby]

This is going to be scattershot:

When I was maybe 5 years old (I am told) I liked liver, but then some other kids said it was gross and I never liked it anymore. So the contagious distaste I think is a big part of it.

A coworker says he is not homophobic, but homonauseous.

There are some things that are more naturally distasteful to see than two healthy average same sex people having a public display of affection. (As if it matters so much that something others do or embody being is distasteful to us as observers.) Things like an extremely anorexic or obese person making out, a ~20 year old making out with a 70 year old and so on.

But I would guess that actually seeing in shape and attractive men making out might bother some homophobes more than two schlubs doing the same.

I don't get it.

Why would any of these be distasteful?

Surely displaying affection is a good thing?

I guess a sad lonely person might find displays of affection upsetting; but in that case, any such display would surely have much the same effect?

ETA I am not a fan of liver or kidney, but I like tongue, tripe, and black pudding.

 

[repoman]

huh, a group of teens seeing a 70 year old man french kissing a 20 year old woman would not react or talk about that later? What world are you living in?

 

[bilby]

huh, a group of teens seeing a 70 year old man french kissing a 20 year old woman would not react or talk about that later? What world are you living in?

A world in which the opinions of groups of teens were of vital importance would not be one in which I would wish to live.

 

[repoman]

The opinions that you see and have viscerally communicated to you as a teen (for most people who are not as enlightened as you) stick with people for a very long time. Teen years is when we are jostling for social position.

Look at Alec Baldwin calling paparazzi faggots and so on - that is the teen years sticking with him.

Oh and who cares what world you want to live in. All your environmental obtuseness about resources and population and sustainability is you making a world you want to live in, but will be a Mad Max world for your descendants.

 

[bilby]

The opinions that you see and have viscerally communicated to you as a teen (for most people who are not as enlightened as you) stick with people for a very long time. Teen years is when we are jostling for social position.

Look at Alec Baldwin calling paparazzi faggots and so on - that is the teen years sticking with him.

Oh and who cares what world you want to live in. All your environmental obtuseness about resources and population and sustainability is you making a world you want to live in, but will be a Mad Max world for your descendants.

WTF?

What you appear to consider 'obtuseness' I call 'paying attention'

I invite you to do the same.

 

[repoman]

The opinions that you see and have viscerally communicated to you as a teen (for most people who are not as enlightened as you) stick with people for a very long time. Teen years is when we are jostling for social position.

Look at Alec Baldwin calling paparazzi faggots and so on - that is the teen years sticking with him.

Oh and who cares what world you want to live in. All your environmental obtuseness about resources and population and sustainability is you making a world you want to live in, but will be a Mad Max world for your descendants.

WTF?

What you appear to consider 'obtuseness' I call 'paying attention'

I invite you to do the same.

https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2018/03/19/evolutionary-dead-ends/

 

[Juma]

The opinions that you see and have viscerally communicated to you as a teen (for most people who are not as enlightened as you) stick with people for a very long time. Teen years is when we are jostling for social position.

Look at Alec Baldwin calling paparazzi faggots and so on - that is the teen years sticking with him.

Oh and who cares what world you want to live in. All your environmental obtuseness about resources and population and sustainability is you making a world you want to live in, but will be a Mad Max world for your descendants.

LOL! The Mad Max world is what you get if you ignore environmental and population issues...

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Citation needed

No citation needed.

That has exactly nothing to do with people's attitudes towards it.

Being a celibate monk is selected against to the exact same degree - and survived as a behaviour that was widely admired and respected in a number of unrelated religions.

What is evolutionarily fit is unrelated to what is culturally desirable.

And natural selection operates on populations, not individuals.

Cultural behaviors are and have been subject to natural selection same as any other behaviors. That's Natural Selection 101. It's why the Norse failed to survive in America.

And what's with the "attitude" distinction? Natural selection is all about behaviors and "attitudes" are just behaviors. Homophobia is an instinctive behavior same as pulling one's hand away from a hot iron without having to think about it or have an "attitude." This is basic stuff.

It's not often I agree with Lion but here I do. His reasoning is to invent a magical space spook that commanded the behavior, and even that is a behavior that has its roots in natural selection. Mine is simply to understand how it was selected against over generations that needed high populations to survive and destroy competing populations. Homosexuality was simply selected against. Today's "homophobes" are living out that legacy. Hopefully intellect will win out in the end.

An Interesting Story

 

[rousseau]

Citation needed

No citation needed.

That has exactly nothing to do with people's attitudes towards it.

Being a celibate monk is selected against to the exact same degree - and survived as a behaviour that was widely admired and respected in a number of unrelated religions.

What is evolutionarily fit is unrelated to what is culturally desirable.

And natural selection operates on populations, not individuals.

Cultural behaviors are and have been subject to natural selection same as any other behaviors. That's Natural Selection 101. It's why the Norse failed to survive in America.

And what's with the "attitude" distinction? Natural selection is all about behaviors and "attitudes" are just behaviors. Homophobia is an instinctive behavior same as pulling one's hand away from a hot iron without having to think about it or have an "attitude." This is basic stuff.

It's not often I agree with Lion but here I do. His reasoning is to invent a magical space spook that commanded the behavior, and even that is a behavior that has its roots in natural selection. Mine is simply to understand how it was selected against over generations that needed high populations to survive and destroy competing populations. Homosexuality was simply selected against. Today's "homophobes" are living out that legacy. Hopefully intellect will win out in the end.

Much of the reading I've done lately backs up this view, that many of our behaviors evolved in a time of hunting/gathering. A mechanism (but maybe just so story) may be something like:

- homophobia encourages homosexuals to produce babies
- communities that encourage homosexuals to produce babies out-compete those who don't (or just produce more babies)
- homophobia as a psychological mechanism persists

I'd think that culture/environmental pressure is a part of it, but I'd suspect that you'd see homosexuality being normalized in very specific cultures, usually those which are rich/educated. This likely speaks to the tendency for educated and intelligent people to hold beliefs that are novel in terms of evolution.

- - - Updated - - -

The Op amounts to an attack on our universal human right to have phobias.
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/crime-scene-real-estate

Your thinking here is a bit too binary. You've gone ahead and framed my thread as an 'othering' of homophobics, when what I'm actually doing is seeking to understand the why of homophobia.

Not everything has to be about scoring a point for your team, sometimes it's just learning about the world for the enjoyment of knowing more about it.

Yes OK
Point taken.
But I'm alluding to your apparent presumption that homophobia IS irrational.
If it's not, then homophobes don't owe anyone an explanation any more than people who loath adultery or beastiality or pedophilia and so forth.

Fair enough, but I'm not asking for an explanation from homophobic people, I just want to better understand their mind.

 

[repoman]

I thought that gestational hormone exposure is a very large reason why people become gay. That is something that can't be selected for.

The only genetic component that does seem to persist is that a certain group of straight women who really like guys have brothers who also like guys. But on whole this gene is a net gain of progeny. No way that gene is going away.

 

[rousseau]

I thought that gestational hormone exposure is a very large reason why people become gay. That is something that can't be selected for.

The only genetic component that does seem to persist is that a certain group of straight women who really like guys have brothers who also like guys. But on whole this gene is a net gain of progeny. No way that gene is going away.

That's a descriptor for the possible evolution of homophobia, not homosexuality.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I thought that gestational hormone exposure is a very large reason why people become gay. That is something that can't be selected for.

The only genetic component that does seem to persist is that a certain group of straight women who really like guys have brothers who also like guys. But on whole this gene is a net gain of progeny. No way that gene is going away.

How is gestational hormone exposure not something that can be selected for?

 

[Bomb#20]

And natural selection operates on populations, not individuals.

Citation needed

 

[Bomb#20]

A few events in the past couple weeks have got me thinking about this: why homophobia is a thing, why it persists, and why it's so pervasive in under-developed countries and rural areas. I find the psychology of it fascinating because it makes no sense.

You'd think it'd be as simple as some kind of selective pressure away from homosexual sex, and toward heterosexual sex, but I'm not completely sure.

I think that's all it is. Homosexuality meant lower birth rates within a population. We don't need higher birth rates today, we actually need lower birth rates so homosexuality is not so "selected against" anymore. But the instinctive rejection of homosexuality is still there in the population because of history.

That's not how selection works. Homosexuality is always selected against*, cultural attitudes or no, because it makes people less inclined to have the sort of sex that leads to babies. If needing high birth rates induced homophobia, that decreased the selection against homosexuality, because it intimidated gays into pretending to be straight and having baby-making sex in spite of their sexual preferences. Now that we need lower birth rates and it's becoming culturally acceptable to be gay, and culturally unacceptable to pressure your gay kid into making grandchildren for you, that means homosexuality is now more selected against than ever.

(* Which of course makes why homosexuality persists in populations an interesting question. The obvious hypothesis is selfish genes: the same gene that makes a man want sex with men and unlikely to become a father also makes his sisters want sex with men and especially likely to become mothers.)

 

[Bomb#20]

But I'm alluding to your apparent presumption that homophobia IS irrational.
If it's not, then homophobes don't owe anyone an explanation any more than people who loath adultery or beastiality or pedophilia and so forth.

Anybody who loathes any human characteristic owes others an explanation, if he proposes to penalize people for being that which he loathes. Those who want to outlaw adultery or bestiality or pedophilia owe others an explanation every bit as much as those who want to outlaw homosexuality do. But keep in mind that equal owing of an explanation doesn't imply equal ability to provide one. Do you have a case for homophobia being rational?

 

[Bomb#20]

As for kids not being able to give consent (to have a loving sexual relationship) are you (bilby) excluding LGBTQ kids from the right to have a sexual relationship?

Children (of any orientation) are unable to consent to sexual relations. What part of that is causing you difficulty in comprehension?

So when a twelve-year-old boy and a twelve-year-old girl sneak off into a back room to play doctor, are you arguing they should both be prosecuted for rape, or only the boy? How many years should they get for violating each other's inability to consent? Or does being twelve mean they aren't really rapists but just juvenile delinquents who only need a few months in juvie to straighten them out?

Oh, and what ... does bestiality have to do with homosexuality? The association between the two exists only in the minds of homophobes, and is truly repulsive.

Seriously? Um, they're both minority sexual preferences that have been persecuted for millennia by majorities, authorities and religious institutions, in both cases for poorly articulated and not very intellectually or morally substantive reasons? Finding it truly repulsive for others to recognize patterns and make mental associations that ones own ideology prohibits one from recognizing and making is a hallmark of religious thinking.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

A few events in the past couple weeks have got me thinking about this: why homophobia is a thing, why it persists, and why it's so pervasive in under-developed countries and rural areas. I find the psychology of it fascinating because it makes no sense.

You'd think it'd be as simple as some kind of selective pressure away from homosexual sex, and toward heterosexual sex, but I'm not completely sure.

I think that's all it is. Homosexuality meant lower birth rates within a population. We don't need higher birth rates today, we actually need lower birth rates so homosexuality is not so "selected against" anymore. But the instinctive rejection of homosexuality is still there in the population because of history.

That's not how selection works. ... homosexuality is now more selected against than ever.

I understand how it is always selected against because we're talking human populations. What I don't understand is how you come to the conclusion that it is selected against more today than ever before. Could you explain?

 

[Bomb#20]

That's not how selection works. ... homosexuality is now more selected against than ever.

I understand how it is always selected against because we're talking human populations. What I don't understand is how you come to the conclusion that it is selected against more today than ever before. Could you explain?

In evolution, "selected against" doesn't mean "We aren't picking you for our team because we despise you". It means "likely to have fewer biological children than average". Suppose the average straight person has 2.1 surviving biological children. A gay person left to enjoy his or her preference in peace has gay sex and typically has 0.0 biological children, and adopts or is childless, aside from the rare rape/drunken experiment/favor to a friend/sperm or ovum donation. Say, 0.1 biological children on average. Now send that same gay person back in time two hundred years to an era of severe homophobia. For fear of persecution if the preference becomes known, he or she goes along with conventional mores in public, pretends to be interested in the opposite sex, marries a person of the opposite sex, lies back and thinks of England in the marriage bed while being homosexually celibate or occasionally sneaking off for adultery when opportunity allows, and ends up with (pulling sample numbers out of my ass) 1.7 surviving biological children. So the strength of the selection against homosexuality changes from (2.1 - 1.7 = 0.4) in olden homophobic times to (2.1 - 0.1 = 2.0) in a tolerant era. Selection against homosexuality gets five times stronger when homophobia goes away.