One reason I study myth is because I believe these ancient stories (told and retold over millenia) can help us better understand ourselves. And as a gay man, seeking stories which allow us to make better sense of our situation, seeking intimate relationships with those of our own gender, rather than with those of a different gender as do the great majority of our species.
I have studied the so-called berdache tradition of the Native American Indians, only to find that while many of these traditions allowed same-sex unions, they always required one of the partners to assume the role, including costume and social obligations, of the other gender–and not always by choice.
As I study the role of the goddess Athena in the lives of the Greek (male) heroes, I am doing some background reading on the goddess culture that supposedly held sway in pre-literate Europe. In reading one such book, Jean Markale’s The Great Goddess: Reverence of the Divine Feminine from the Paleolithic to the Present.* In his introduction, he makes an interesting observation which leads me to wonder about ancient attitudes toward sexuality:
It is plausible, though not certain, that the first humans were unaware of the exact role of the male in procreation, not having established a causal relationship between coitus and parturition.
Assuming that this conjecture is accurate, would our preliterate forebears then have accepted homosexual relations as natural when they occurred or did they already have fixed notions of gender?
Once our ancestors discovered the link between heterosexual intercourse and progeny, perhaps they began to devalue same-sex relationships, relegating homosexuality to a variety of initiation rituals, some of which were still practiced in the last century in a Melanesian cultures. (And may well still be followed in some isolated tribes.) For it does seem that many of the proscriptions against homosexuality serve to promote procreation.
Perhaps anthropologists have studied this and have provided research to support their theories. And given this blog, I can post an idea that came to me while reading the book. That said, we’ll never really know how our primitive ancestors treated sexual difference. But, we can wonder.
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*The book seems to lose focus after its solid introduction. Not only that, he discusses numerous archeological artifacts without providing any illustrations.
Let’s put it this way: We’re all descended from people who had heterosexual sex.
@1: Very true. There may be a few (very) recent exceptions here and there where fertilization arose through other means, but for the most part we reproduced, evolved, and generally got to where we are now through exclusively heterosexual sex.
The sad thing is that for many today your sentence seems to be not only the end of analysis but a justification for bigotry or an excuse for the denial of legal rights. How silly!
Or, looking at it a different way, torrentprime: since the perpetuation of society depends on biological procreation, why should society not hold relationships capable of it in higher esteem and grant them more benefits and privileges than those that do not?
But as technology and the economy progress, NDT, before long every conceivable relationship will be capable of procreation. Even old people.
I think your point is valid as: (1) a reason to ‘forgive’ or at least ‘understand’ (on some level) society’s past de-privileging of gay relationships; and (2) a reason for society *now* to privilege relationships with kids – increasingly including gays, or at least lesbians.
I don’t think your point could be valid as (3) a reason for society *now* to de-privilege all gay or lesbian relationships.
(and not that you were headed toward (3), necessarily; I’m just remarking in general)
To me the author sounds like a professor who never set foot on a farm. This idea that our ancestors were so stupid that they didn’t know anything about procreation is a very ivory tower theory. It wasn’t becoming literate that made us human.
Some will say that animals don’t know, they are just following an urge. But even in the animal kingdom many males recognize their offspring, and other males will wantonly murder another male’s offspring before impregnating the female themselves. Look at how one ram will control hundreds of females, won’t let another male anywhere near his harem.
The aversion seems to go beyond simple lack of procreation. Other contemporary cultures share with the Berdache the need to assume the opposite gender’s role. Just look at the Ladyboys in Thailand. Or in Burma, there is a special place for Homosexual men to be caregivers to certain Buddhist ‘gatekeepers’ who are people who died tragic deaths, and now grant wishes to supplicants. Since gay men are considered more feminine, this was a way to include them in the dominant Buddhist culture.
But even there, there is that sense, homosexuals are different, this is not mainstream society. Our sexuality is very complicated, the need to create and support the family unit is strong in all societies. so that which doesn’t support will be marginalized.
Leah, good point about Markale’s observation, but he does make clear that he was referring to our ancestors before they had discovered how to cultivate the land and engage in animal husbandry–at which point they would have understood how procreation works.
I do agree that it sounds kind of odd not to see the link between coitus and procreation, but it’s an interesting query. And when I read it, I wondered that if it were so, whether or not our forebears would have accept homosexuality — acceptance we find in several species of birds and mammals.
Dan, I am sure there was a lot of homosexuality going on in the ancient world. Otherwise why would the Jewish Bible make such an issue out of it? But my sense is that in those days, sex among humans was closer to the animal kingdom – the powerful had sex with whomever they wanted. Not much equality between the sexual partners.
Judaism and later Christianity see the foundation of a stable society in the family unit, not simply in a large number of children being born.
There are a lot more laws in the Jewish bible that regulate sexual relations between a husband and wife, than the one famous line from Leviticus.
So clearly Judaism was trying to weed out anything it deemed harmful to the family unit – homosexual sex being up there on the list.
So yes, our forbearer’s were probably quite accustomed to homosexual sex, but it was probably a very far thing from the kind of loving relationships one sees today.
I figure it didn’t take long for humans to figure out the whole “where babies come from” thing. They may not have understood specifically what happened, but I figure they got the idea pretty quick that sex with a person of the opposite gender resulted in offspring about 9 months later.
I do think in early society at least, procreation was extremely important-society’s survival depended on it-especially in a period where the losses of offspring were huge.
I think it is probably pretty easy to see where taboos against homosexuality grew from.
Leaving aside the professor’s speculation –which strikes me as highly unlikely and professorial– I will add my two cents, that responses to homosexulity –especially among men– are governed by a primary archetypal –and therefore natural– need to differentiate the two genders.
Male status is one of the pillars of primate and human survival. Hence the practically universal concern with tops vs bottoms in human cultures where male-male sex is known. Sexual behavior by males which appears to be female-like is usually responded to with demotive sanction or some form of institutionalization. The berdache is a great example of accomodating the behavior by actually intensifying the gender code.
(Understandable) anxiety about male identity and status, including but not limited to its reproductive role, strikes me as central to all forms of negative response to male homosexuality, especially toward the bottoming partner.
Ba dump bump.
I just wonder how much our primitve ancestors really knew. And Markale’s comment did make me wonder.
The survival of homosexual practices in certain culture’s initiation rites suggests to me that when our ancestors were trying to understand sexuality, they recognized the existence of non-procreative forms of sexuality and needed to find a place for them in the lives of men.
Recently I was reading how Muslim men rape infidel women in the belief that the child is 100% him/0% her.
In Islamic society a man is considered to be a ”weak” man if his children resmble his wife!
To this day this is a prevalent belief among Muslim men in much of the Islamic world.
In fact, in the Australian rape trials where the little girl victims were too young to bear children the Muslim men who gang raped them thought they were “in the clear” since no baby would come of it.
They wanted the DNA evidence thrown out on the basis of it being an infidel trick.
Yeah, they’re serving long prison terms.
From what little I have heard of the subject, current nomadic and hunter/gatherer societies around the world (which would be strong analogs for prehistoric peoples) have very different views about gender roles and sexual identities with sometimes very different views being held by closely living groups. For example, even though matrilineal inheritance and power structures are common, true matriarchal societies are very rare. Some cultures have homosexual activities integrated as a pre-marital “youth culture” sort of thing (gay until graduation). It could be that those who had a more biological tendency toward homosexuality influenced cultural views and practices at some point in the history of some groups, blurring the perceived distinction between gay people and gay behavior for that group. I doubt that any society of the past would have been perfect for homosexuals since even in an incredibly tolerant culture there will always be parents and extended family who want grand kids and they will probably be more resentful of the same-sex partner than their own child.
Like Leah noted, even if people did not have a complete understanding of the birds and the bees they would have understood, both from animal observations and personal experience that a male-female relationship of some intimate nature was required. Even though humans are not controled by instincts to the same extent that most other animals are, we still have them.
I am often struck by how many Islamic/Arab attitudes towards children and women seem to be extremistly adapted to an environment where women are rare, resources for raising children are scarce and infidelity can have a similar effect on one’s genes as starvation would if one is not lucky enough to get another chance to mate. That is not to say that the attitudes are genetic but that the culture that formed the attitudes was influenced by genetically based instincts expressed in harsh environment.
There was an article recently, I think it was Discover Magazine where the author felt that the many different cultures tended to have similar attitudes about things ranging from religion to sexual attitudes depending on whether they lived in wide open deserts and plains with harsh conditions (more monotheistic or else having a top of the hierarchy god with strict rules on sexuality) or they inhabited lush forest, jungle and savanna habitats (polytheistic or animistic with more permissive sexual attitudes). I don’t know how strong his ideas are but he feels that a lot of anthropological information fits well with his theory.
He felt that the causative factor for religious beliefs was that in the desert, the wide open expanses convey a feeling of wholeness and unity where as forests (and modern urban settings for that matter) convey a sense of diversity (and sex). The large monotheistic western cultures had much of their historical beginnings in desert like environments. Maybe coincidence.