The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,272

contribute to their reproductive output. Men in all-male settings such as ships, prisons, and boarding schools often make do with the available object that resembles a female body more closely than anything else in the vicinity. Pederasty, which offers a softer, smoother, and more docile object, has been institutionalized in a number of societies, including, famously, the elite of ancient Greece. When homosexual behavior is institutionalized, not surprisingly, there is little homophobia as we know it. Women, for their part, are less ardent but more flexible in their sexuality, and many go through phases in life when they are happily celibate, promiscuous, monogamous, or homosexual; hence the phenomenon in American women’s colleges of the LUG (lesbian until graduation).222

The real puzzle is homosexual orientation—why there should be men and women who consistently prefer homosexual mating opportunities to heterosexual ones, or who avoid mating with the opposite sex altogether. At least in men, homosexual orientation appears to be inborn. Gay men generally report that their homosexual attractions began as soon as they felt sexual stirrings shortly before adolescence. And homosexuality is more concordant in identical than in fraternal twins, suggesting that their shared genes play a role. Homosexuality, by the way, is one of the few examples of a nature-nurture debate in which the politically correct position is “nature.” If homosexuality is innate, according to the common understanding, then people don’t choose to be gay and hence can’t be criticized for their lifestyle; nor could they convert the children in their classrooms or Boy Scout troops if they wanted to.

The evolutionary mystery is how any genetic tendency to avoid heterosexual sex can remain in a population for long, since it would have consigned the person to few or no offspring. Perhaps “gay genes” have a compensating advantage, like enhancing fertility when they are carried by women, particularly if they are on the X chromosome, which women have in two copies—the advantage to women would need to be only a bit more than half the disadvantage to men for the gene to spread.223 Perhaps the putative gay genes lead to homosexuality only in certain environments, which didn’t exist while our genes were selected. One ethnographic survey found that in almost 60 percent of preliterate societies, homosexuality was unknown or extremely rare.224 Or perhaps the genes work indirectly, by making a fetus susceptible to fluctuations in hormones or antibodies which affect its developing brain.

Whatever the explanation, people with a homosexual orientation who grow up in a society that does not cultivate homosexual behavior may find themselves the target of a society-wide hostility. Among traditional societies that take note of homosexuality in their midst, more than twice as many disapprove of it as tolerate it.225 And in traditional and modern societies alike, the intolerance can erupt in violence. Bullies and toughs may see an easy mark on whom they can prove their machismo to an audience or to one another. And lawmakers may have moralistic convictions about homosexuality that they translate into commandments and statutes. These beliefs may be products of the cross-wiring between disgust and morality that leads people to confuse visceral revulsion with objective sinfulness.226 That short circuit may convert an impulse to avoid homosexual partners into an impulse to condemn homosexuality. At least since biblical times homophobic sentiments have been translated into laws that punish homosexuals with death or mutilation, especially in Christian and Muslim kingdoms and their former colonies.227 A chilling 20th-century example was the targeting of homosexuals for elimination during the Holocaust.

During the Enlightenment, the questioning of any moral precept that was based on visceral impulse or religious dogma led to a new look at homosexuality. 228 Montesquieu and Voltaire argued that homosexuality should be decriminalized, though they didn’t go so far as to say that it was morally acceptable. In 1785 Jeremy Bentham took the next step. Using utilitarian reasoning, which equates morality with whatever brings the greatest good to the greatest number, Bentham argued that there is nothing immoral about homosexual acts because they make no one worse off. Homosexuality was legalized in France after the Revolution, and in a smattering of other countries in the ensuing decades, as figure 7–23 shows. The movement picked up in the middle of the 20th century and blasted off in the 1970s and 1990s, as the gay rights movement was fueled by the ideal of human rights.

Today homosexuality has been legalized in almost 120 countries, though laws against it remain on the books of another 80, mostly in Africa, the Caribbean,