The Psychology of Homophobia

[Lion IRC]

...Do you have a case for homophobia being rational?

You mean do I have evidence that people who dislike homosexuality have reasons why?
Sure.
Can I make you agree with their reasons? Probably not.
But then you probably can't make them agree with you either.

 

[repoman]

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.

Forget pray the gay away, more like gay the gay away.

 

[rousseau]

...Do you have a case for homophobia being rational?

You mean do I have evidence that people who dislike homosexuality have reasons why?
Sure.
Can I make you agree with their reasons? Probably not.
But then you probably can't make them agree with you either.

No that's not what he means, he means them having a 'rational' reason why.

Not licking a poisonous toad because you'll die is a rational reason not to do so. Being openly hostile to someone because they aren't attracted to the opposite sex is not a rational reason for hostility.. at least in the world I want to live in.

Having a justification for a belief doesn't imply that your belief is correct or based on sound logic. This is why homophobia is most prevalent in communities with brain drain and poor educational standards.. because once you learn to think you realize that homophobia makes no sense. Hence the thread.

Unless you want to live in the type of world where people burn homosexuals alive because .. ? Sure.. rational..

 

[ronburgundy]

I suspect it is strongly tied to a social need to be perceived as highly masculine in order to compete for females, who usually select males with highly masculine traits. IOW, males are homophobic for the same reason they engage in other displays of machismo.

This is why more intense homophobia tends to be directed at male homosexuals.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

...Do you have a case for homophobia being rational?

You mean do I have evidence that people who dislike homosexuality have reasons why?
Sure.
Can I make you agree with their reasons? Probably not.
But then you probably can't make them agree with you either.

Thought experiment for you, Lion.

What if you knew of women capable of human parthenogenesis? Would you dislike them or be phobic about them?

 

[Bronzeage]

Of all the gay people I know, quite a few of them have children. Among the lesbians, it's better than half.

What's really strange about this is, none of them are the child of a gay couple.

 

[Lion IRC]

...Do you have a case for homophobia being rational?

You mean do I have evidence that people who dislike homosexuality have reasons why?
Sure.
Can I make you agree with their reasons? Probably not.
But then you probably can't make them agree with you either.

Thought experiment for you, Lion.

What if you knew of women capable of human parthenogenesis? Would you dislike them or be phobic about them?

No.

Here's a better way to test the subject.
What if I knew of women capable of committing adultery? Would I dislike them or be phobic about adultery?
Yes.

We are all capable of doing things we ought not to do. And we should all have a 'phobia' about unethical behaviour, sin, evil, immorality, crime, malfeasance, wrongdoing, call it what you will.

It would be irrational NOT to have a phobia about unrestrained immorality. IMHO

 

[Juma]

Thought experiment for you, Lion.

What if you knew of women capable of human parthenogenesis? Would you dislike them or be phobic about them?

No.

Here's a better way to test the subject.
What if I knew of women capable of committing adultery? Would I dislike them or be phobic about adultery?
Yes.

We are all capable of doing things we ought not to do. And we should all have a 'phobia' about unethical behaviour, sin, evil, immorality, crime, malfeasance, wrongdoing, call it what you will.

It would be irrational NOT to have a phobia about unrestrained immorality. IMHO

Hmm ...
So why shouldnt to persons of same sex not ought to have sex?

 

[bilby]

Thought experiment for you, Lion.

What if you knew of women capable of human parthenogenesis? Would you dislike them or be phobic about them?

No.

Here's a better way to test the subject.
What if I knew of women capable of committing adultery? Would I dislike them or be phobic about adultery?
Yes.

We are all capable of doing things we ought not to do. And we should all have a 'phobia' about unethical behaviour, sin, evil, immorality, crime, malfeasance, wrongdoing, call it what you will.

It would be irrational NOT to have a phobia about unrestrained immorality. IMHO

Well if you don't understand that a phobia is by definition irrational, then you are not qualified to have an opinion.

And if you do understand that, then you must realise that you are claiming that everyone should be driven to literal insanity by behaviour you define as immoral. Which is just fucking crazy.

If something is genuinely harmful, being afraid of it is not a phobia.

 

[repoman]

A parent having promiscuophobia concerning their children is moderately sensible.

 

[Underseer]

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.

Anyway, I've had a few whiskies and it's about bed time so I'm going to leave this thread here and maybe try to expand on it a bit later.

Here's the thing: among at least some indigenous American societies, homosexual couples were seen as valued members of society because they were the ones expected to adopt orphans.

As near as I can tell: anti-homosexual sentiment is generally rooted in some form of pronatalism. Modern Christians and Muslims want to produce as many babies as possible so that their religious leaders can have more political and economic power. So the leaders go out and whip up their followers into a frenzy of hate against homosexuals.

This results in a society in which most gays and lesbians grow up in denial and believe they are heterosexual. Often, they don't find out otherwise until they are already married with children.

It doesn't matter that such marriages are likely to make both parties miserable, the important thing is that there are more babies, which translates into more earthly power for the religious leaders.

 

[Underseer]

The other form of pronatalism is admittedly also conjecture on my part.

One of the interesting things about comparing ancient Mediterranean civilizations to ancient American civilizations is what I call "civilization density."

In the ancient Mediterranean, there was much less distance and time between major civilizations, and this has a variety of consequences. For example, less knowledge would have been lost when one civilization collapsed since much of the knowledge would already have been in the hands of people in neighboring civilizations.

Anyway, for most of history, most of the Mediterranean was a bunch of city-states of varying levels of power whose level of civilization never fell below a certain level because of high trade caused by geographical bottlenecks, increased trade allowed by the calm seas of the Mediterranean sea, etc. You had a lot of civilizations jammed up near each other.

This means among other things more competition among a larger number of city-states.

A single war can result in a decrease in population, which can make you look like a juicier target to any bordering city-states that didn't participate in a recent war. Population decreases of any kind can result in a downward spiral that results in your city-state being crushed out of existence by neighboring city states. Thus, civilizations in such a circumstance would want to rearrange society to replace lost population as rapidly as possible.

Not only can this explain why many Mediterranean/Middle Eastern civilizations were anti-homosexual, it can also explain why so many of those civilizations found polygamy acceptable. In a war, your city-state is going to mostly lose poor men. If the rich men have multiple wives, then your civilization can recover lost population after a war more quickly. One man can keep multiple women pregnant simultaneously, and a rich man can afford to raise more children simultaneously.

If the "civilization density" is high enough and war is common enough, then anti-homosexual attitudes and polygamy provide "evolutionary" advantages for civilizations and we would expect civilizations with those features to out-compete civilizations without those features.

The nation-state renders all of this meaningless because most nations now have enough population to survive temporary decreases in population. Modern technology/medicine has changed human existence such that instead of being afraid of having too few people in our civilizations, we have the opposite problem, so anti-homosexual societies and polygamous societies are now at a disadvantage rather than an advantage.