Gay Pride Makes No Sense

[Hammilton]

Rigid gender roles? Holy crap, I'm speaking about nothing more than biology within an evolutionary framework.

It is rational for a man to [want to] spread his seed as far and wide as he can with the hope that as many children will develop as possible. This gives him the greatest evolutionary advantage.

Such a strategy cannot work for females who have a greatly reduced capacity to produce offspring (you have to figure that it's theoretically possible for one man to impregnate more than 50 women within a month if everything lined up perfectly, yet a woman can carry only one partner's child [unless you live in the south, apparently, where a woman slept with two men within such a close time span that they both managed to sire children in her]). She cannot obtain the greatest evolutionary advantage by taking every possible suitor.

It may be possible for humans to change, but at present, the two different but complementary strategies humans (and probably all mammals, possibly all chordates) have used to evolve us to the point we're at now are still very much in use.

the development of birth control has certainly changed the outward appearance of things, but that just separates copulation from pregnancy. Ultimately most people choose to have children, and women are still working to choose the best mates to have children with (using various and varied strategies for determining quality) while men are still spreading their seed as much as possible (only to have their efforts thwarted by contraception).

These things are just new evolutionary hurdles though. The women who gain less protection from birth control could very well lead to offspring 100+ gens out who are not effected by the drugs. Penis' could evolve barbs to break condoms or smaller sperm who can penetrate through them.

No different than antibiotic resistance, really, we just have much longer life spans than bacteria.

[agnixie]

It is rational for a man to [want to] spread his seed as far and wide as he can with the hope that as many children will develop as possible. This gives him the greatest evolutionary advantage.

Evolution is not something that happens to a person but to a group, and who begets who is absolutely, utterly, completely, unimaginably fucking irrelevant, except maybe to the neckbeards who obsess over it in the dark recesses of evopsych. Also the fact that your only basis for the argument is "it's rational" is basically a post hoc ergo propter hoc. It's not. It's also impossible for a hunter gatherer group to have much more than 1 child to an adult as they all must be taken care of.

Such a strategy cannot work for females who have a greatly reduced capacity to produce offspring (you have to figure that it's theoretically possible for one man to impregnate more than 50 women within a month if everything lined up perfectly, yet a woman can carry only one partner's child [unless you live in the south, apparently, where a woman slept with two men within such a close time span that they both managed to sire children in her]). She cannot obtain the greatest evolutionary advantage by taking every possible suitor.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc says "hi again, you're an idiot". Polyandric societies do exist, and the oldest social organization type known to humanity is not based around kin.

It may be possible for humans to change, but at present, the two different but complementary strategies humans (and probably all mammals, possibly all chordates) have used to evolve us to the point we're at now are still very much in use.

You know nothing about evolution besides pop evopsych. I'm going to bet you read Kanazawa.

These things are just new evolutionary hurdles though. The women who gain less protection from birth control could very well lead to offspring 100+ gens out who are not effected by the drugs. Penis' could evolve barbs to break condoms or smaller sperm who can penetrate through them.

Just stop, if you're going to be posting shitty scifi and pretend it's biology/anthropology. The whole thing about birth control is especially stupid, as for the longest time, women would have been unable to have children about 4-6 months of the year at least due to the mode of living being very active and the food rather lean.

Final point, I didn't feel like double posting even if it's in another post of yours: "transhuman" technologies, as a name, is utter bullshit. Changing the nature of gender in its social understanding, which is wrong to begin with as neither gender nor sex are binaries, does not change the fundamental nature of humanity.

[Viet Minh]

Empirical social science (those that are genuinely honest) is the judge. One can examine social factors to work out whether or not a particular group is systematically oppressed or not. E.g. female workers always earn significantly less than male workers in every country in the world.

This issue came up before, and it was mentioned that Asian Americans on average earn more than white Americans. It doesn't mean that whites are discriminated against, or Asians aren't. Poverty is one thing, but wage differences are totally irrelevant to socialism imo.

The whole point here is not to judge anything by what it looks like "on paper".

On paper our world is a democratic capitalist paradise...

Not the papers I read.. Global war, starvation, modern day slavery..

Liquidating capitalists as a class has nothing to do with literally killing individual capitalists. Revolution only removes the capitalists' control of the means of production. The October Revolution killed far less people than the bourgeois French Revolution. Lenin only killed one Tsarist family, the Jacobins massacred entire aristocratic clans.

I'm not averse to the idea I was just clarifying in case anyone misinterpreted your comment.

This is sexism, not "heterophobia".

It is sad, but again this is transphobia, not "heterophobia".

You were saying some queer people hate straight people, in actual fact this is very rare.

I don't think I've ever met any 'heterophobes' or even heard of any, I was just covering my bases because it would be judgemental to assume there were none.

In practice for such a group to be relatively progressive it would have to explicitly condemn how the "essence of white culture" has been distorted by Western capitalists and imperialists into ideological weapons to conquer the world. "Proud to be white, therefore hate the distortion of white culture by capitalism and imperialism".

Very few white people have any control over the capitalist/ imperialist culture of today, so I think its unfair to bring that issue into the matter. Its like in the topic about black nationalism, when white nationalism came up so did slavery. However historically Hispanic South Americans also used slavery, so do Hispanic groups have to acknowledge that in order to be progressive? I make this point to highlight the folly in racially-driven social grouping more than anything.

[Queercommie Girl]

Rigid gender roles? Holy crap, I'm speaking about nothing more than biology within an evolutionary framework.

A very reductionist evolutionary framework. Strategy formulated at this level of reductionism no longer offer a concrete advantage at the human level.

It is rational for a man to [want to] spread his seed as far and wide as he can with the hope that as many children will develop as possible. This gives him the greatest evolutionary advantage.

This kind of reductionist arguments can easily lead to ideologically reactionary positions on gender issues.

Such a strategy cannot work for females who have a greatly reduced capacity to produce offspring (you have to figure that it's theoretically possible for one man to impregnate more than 50 women within a month if everything lined up perfectly, yet a woman can carry only one partner's child [unless you live in the south, apparently, where a woman slept with two men within such a close time span that they both managed to sire children in her]). She cannot obtain the greatest evolutionary advantage by taking every possible suitor.

Such a strategy cannot in the concrete empirical sense work for any man either in today's world. What is "theoretically possible" is often completely unrealistic. Philosophically I'm an anti-reductionist, I am an utilitarian pragmatist who only deals with likely and realistic scenarios in the real-world.

Are you a man? How about you try to apply this "strategy" in your life right now?

It may be possible for humans to change, but at present, the two different but complementary strategies humans (and probably all mammals, possibly all chordates) have used to evolve us to the point we're at now are still very much in use.

Evolution has a tendency to take-off in "unexpected" directions. In many ways, humans are already a very "unusual" species among all mammals and all vertebrates.

the development of birth control has certainly changed the outward appearance of things, but that just separates copulation from pregnancy. Ultimately most people choose to have children, and women are still working to choose the best mates to have children with (using various and varied strategies for determining quality) while men are still spreading their seed as much as possible (only to have their efforts thwarted by contraception).

In capitalist society this translates in the concrete sense into the fact that it is easier for a richer man to find a wife. Poorer men may find it much easier to get laid nowadays than in the past, as reproduction and copulation are more separated now. But in capitalism childcare is very expensive, so wealth is the primary determinant factor.

These things are just new evolutionary hurdles though. The women who gain less protection from birth control could very well lead to offspring 100+ gens out who are not effected by the drugs. Penis' could evolve barbs to break condoms or smaller sperm who can penetrate through them.

No different than antibiotic resistance, really, we just have much longer life spans than bacteria.

This is a very strange and also illogical way of looking at things. Evolution operates at a much higher and emergent level among humans than among bacteria. Objectively speaking human technological progress is now many orders of magnitudes faster than "natural" biological human evolution. So it is very likely that long before any "natural evolution" would significantly change our species, technologies such as genetic engineering and trans-humanism would have already transformed humanity beyond recognition.

Human natural evolution is far slower than that of bacteria. But thanks to our technological and industrial powers, homo sapiens is the only chordate species that can "evolve" at a pace comparable to prokaryotes.

You are obviously ignorant of the basic Marxist idea that humans are qualitatively different from all other animals because of our ability to fundamentally change the world around us, and indeed ourselves.

Only a handful of animal species can pass the "mirror test" and therefore have a human-like self-awareness. Self-awareness makes it possible for one to have oneself as the target of one's own conscious labour, rather than just blindly subject oneself to the random course of "natural evolution".

[Lucretia]

just as white pride, tall pride or ginger pride makes no sense.

If homosexuality is something someone is born with (ie: there is no choice), then so is every other feature we have, and it makes no sense to be proud of being tall, of having a predisposition to cancer or any other condition.

If homosexuality is, on the other hand, a choice, why should someone be proud of its sexual choices, and not of something more meaningful? And when i say someone shouldnt be proud of sexual choices, it goes for both ways. It also makes no sense for some heterosexual man or woman to be proud of how many people he or she has managed to 'penetrate'... (theoretically, one could be proud of the skills involved of convincing someone to have sex with you, but that might be a little off-topic)

Am I the only one who thinks this way? does this line of reasoning also makes sense to any of you?

Also, just because i think gay pride doesn't make sense, it doesn't mean i think homosexuality is wrong, or that gay rights should not exist. of course its not wrong, and of course they should have the same rights as all human beings.

Leaving aside the ridiculous binary you construct of people either freely choosing their sexual desires, or having them assigned genetically at birth (like there can't be a third option of a broad genetic predisposition intermingling with a person's individual experiences and their social contexts), I have to ask: are you unaware of the fact that gay is not just an abstract sexual category but part of a person's identity? In a world where sexual matters are not legally regulated or made public in any way, your ideas might make some sense. But coming as it does in response to massive social repression that imposed shame, humiliation, and guilt on people for having same-sex desires, gay pride begins to make more sense, if for no other reason than as an example of people (Lenin might not approve of this pun) pushing the stick back in the other direction.

In other words, the framework of your question presupposes a world where sexuality is a neutral aspect of people's identity, when in reality people are conditioned and often coerced into the idea that heterosexuality is natural and good, while homosexuality is deviant and bad.

[Rebel Airwaves]

I agree but everyone should be proud of what they are, white, black or hispanic. Also everyone should have the same rights, but asfare as gay pride parades is a little rediculius. I mean your sexual orintation isnt a race plus you dont see straight people haven straight parade, Honestly it shouldnt be an issue

[Queercommie Girl]

I agree but everyone should be proud of what they are, white, black or hispanic. Also everyone should have the same rights, but asfare as gay pride parades is a little rediculius. I mean your sexual orintation isnt a race plus you dont see straight people haven straight parade, Honestly it shouldnt be an issue

You don't see white people having "white prides" either, unless they are reactionaries.

Sexuality isn't race, but people like be discriminated on the basis of their sexuality (or gender identity) just like people can be discriminated on the basis of their race.

The LGBT movement generally has more common with the feminist movement than with any ethnic/racial minority movement though.

[Lucretia]

I agree but everyone should be proud of what they are, white, black or hispanic. Also everyone should have the same rights, but asfare as gay pride parades is a little rediculius. I mean your sexual orintation isnt a race plus you dont see straight people haven straight parade, Honestly it shouldnt be an issue

It shouldn't be an issue in Utopia, but in the real world it is an issue. On this very day, millions of people who have strong homo-erotic urges will be confronted with questions from friends and parents, images on tv shows, plots in movies, wording in advertisements, that overwhelmingly imply that if you are a normal person, you by definition prefer to have sexual contact with somebody of the opposite sex. In the west, where blatant homophobia is beginning to be looked down upon as declasse, the idea that gay is bad is very rarely stated explicitly. Yet it is still implicit throughout culture and the media. Gay pride is an understandable attempt to offset this massive cultural conditioning with the reminder: despite the overwhelming assumption that heterosexuality is normal (read: good), gay is good, too.

Why aren't there straight pride film festivals? If you want to see one, go to your nearest movie theater and watch a romantic comedy. Why aren't there straight pride marches? Why march to make yourself feel proud about an aspect of your personality that society overwhelmingly still believes is the default, and superior, position to be in?

[Viet Minh]

Gay pride would make a lot of sense if you were a teenager going through puberty, ashamed and confused by your sexual feelings, unable to talk to anyone, surrounded by homophobic or at least hetero-centric attitudes (your peers boasting about their conquests or talking about relationships etc) perhaps even contemplating suicide because of it.

[-marx-]

I agree but everyone should be proud of what they are, white, black or hispanic. Also everyone should have the same rights, but asfare as gay pride parades is a little rediculius. I mean your sexual orintation isnt a race plus you dont see straight people haven straight parade, Honestly it shouldnt be an issue

You don't have millions of people trying to bring you down for being straight either do you?

LGBT parades are in fact very helpful and inspiring to many closeted people, it may just give them that little push to come out and say "Fuck all you bigots, this is who I am and if you don't like it fuck off and die!"

Why would the socially accepted "norm" need parades? It has nothing to prove because everyone is doing it, accepting it.

The reason there are parades is because we are oppressed by society and this is an act of defiance and celebration of who we are, something previously (and to a certain extent, still) denied to us.

We LGBT people do NOT have equal rights, society pretends we do but we don't.

[Sasha]

Its pride as in celebration, not as in better than you