From: Bradley Felton (zim@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Jul 13 1998 - 20:02:39 MDT
At 02:08 PM 7/13/98 -0400, Harvey Newstrom wrote:
>> Which
>> explains why disease was a limiting factor for this trait: since gays were
>> having sex with other men as well as with women, they had more sex partners
>> than straight males, hence they suffered disproportionately from STD's.
>
>I don't know about this. It implies that guys can't get dates because
>there aren't enough females in the world, and that increasing the
>dateable population increases dates. I would guess that other factors
>would influence popularity more than mere numbers of partners.
I'm not sure I understand your objection. Let me try to spell my point out
more clearly:
The "normal" mating pattern for humans has the young males competing with
each other to "get laid", i.e. to convince young women to let them
demonstrate their mating skills. The prize for the winners is a bit of
sexual experience, which will make them more impressive to the next female
they mate with. Eventually most of them will impress a female enough to
form a semi-permanent, largely monogamous partnership.
Males who are highly valued in the mating game have the opportunity to try
out more mates than males who aren't, gaining experience in the process.
Because of this, females evolved to value sexual expertise in a mate, as it
is indicative that other females found the male interesting, which means he
has genes which will enhance the female's reproductive success....
Evolution naturally found a way to take advantage of this situation: Males
who were willing to fool around with other males could build experience
that would mark them as experienced mates to the females, without having to
compete directly with the other males for the privledge.
The downside to this strategy was that a propensity to have sex with males
tended to stick with them even after they had found a female mate, which
means they didn't tend to settle into the same, largely-monogamous
relationship that the straight males did, but rather continued to have sex
on the side with other gay males. This increases their risk of disease,
which is the natural limit on this stratedgy. If there were no STD's, we
would all be gay (or "bi", as we would say today). The current memetic
environment that encourages gays to only have sex with other gays is, of
course, devastating to this stratedgy.
If my shotgun approach didn't answer your objection, please try again....
-Bradley Felton zim@pobox.com
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