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.
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