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Jan. 13, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:33
596 Biology and Sexuality

The brain and the naughty bits

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Hi everybody, it's Estefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope that you're doing well.
Thank you so much for joining me for another video slash audio session.
I read a book recently that I found just fascinating, and I highly, highly recommend it.
It's called Why Men Don't Iron by Anne and Bill Moire, who are jointly running a television company specializing.
In international science documentaries.
I'm married, so naturally this book caught my eye for very obvious reasons.
And the idea behind the book, or the approach that the book takes to gender differences, is to point out the biological differences between the genders, and also goes into a very, very fascinating discussion of homosexuality.
And there is a sort of idea out there around homosexuality That it is much more prevalent than is generally believed, and there's lots of psychological theories that Freud had his, Jung had his, and other people have their own.
Psychological theories about why it is that men and women become, or are born, or actually the psychological theories is that they become homosexual.
Kinsey, who did the famous sex study in the 1940s and 1950s, he claimed that 37% of all males had experienced, or were experiencing perhaps during the survey, homosexual relationships, and a further 13% had homosexual urges even though they did nothing to satisfy those desires.
Here was startling proof that fully 50% of males were actively or potentially gay, and Kinsey did not conclude that the other 50% were free of homosexual urges.
He postulated a scale of male sexuality which ranged from wholly heterosexual to exclusively gay and concluded, quote, Males do not represent two distinct populations, heterosexual and homosexual.
The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats.
Not all things are black, nor all things white.
It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories.
Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separate pigeonholes.
The living world is a continuum of each and every one of its aspects.
The sooner we shall learn this regarding human sexual behavior, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.
Now, the self-selected sample that was involved in Kinsey's interviews was kind of a problem.
His concerns about his own homosexuality, although married, he was probably homosexual, biased his choice of subjects.
No modern academic would recognize Kinsey's survey as reliable, but its influence still persists, mainly because his results reinforce the fashionable bisexual theory that sexuality is a bell curve or a continuum.
So Kinsey keeps his place in the pantheon despite the fact that survey after survey have demonstrated how utterly wrong his results were.
Later research demonstrates again and again just how rare homosexuality actually is.
And so, for instance, an NOP poll in America suggested that homosexuals were 3.3% of the male population in a 1988 survey by America's National Opinion Research Center yielded a figure of 2.4%.
The total number of men who'd ever experienced male-to-male sexual conduct was 7.3%, according to another study.
A study in Hawaii, only 3% of males had ever engaged in same-sex activity, and so on.
The most comprehensive study to date surveyed 34,000 high school students in America and reported that by the age of 18, 99.2% of males were exclusively heterosexual.
Just 2.8% of the 18-year-olds had experienced homosexual acts, but less than 1% were exclusively gay.
This low figure is reinforced by the findings of the National Survey of Men, considered to be the most representative study of American males, which suggested that That only 1.1% of all males were exclusively homosexual, and only 2.3%, which includes the previous 1.1%, had ever experienced homosexuality.
So this is survey after survey, generally seems to take the approach, or the fact, that exclusively homosexual men are in about 1.4%.
And that's very interesting.
And I think that what I'm going to argue for here is tolerance for homosexuality.
And why I'm going to do that and why it's important to look at these numbers to begin with, I'll sort of get on as we move along.
And... There is, of course, based on Old Testament and some New Testament writings, and basically in a lot of primitive religions, well, a lot of religions which are by definition primitive, in their thinking processes, there is quite a lot of homophobia.
In fact, it's more than homophobia, that's fear of homosexuals, it's homocidia, or it's the desire to attack and kill homosexuals in these Old Testament and in these religious kinds of writings.
So I'd like to argue that homosexuality is much more rare than we think that it is, and the reason for its rarity is because it's not primarily a psychological phenomenon.
They're a psychological phenomenon associated with being gay, But those phenomenon generally come around because of society's hostility towards homosexuals, which is just horrible.
I mean, the same thing happened when people were left-handed at one point, sort of forced to become right-handed, and of course we know that left-handedness is not a choice, it's just biological.
It's the way that your brain is sort of wired.
So the homosexual lobby has done quite a bit to try and widen the scope of homosexuality to include a much wider section of the population.
And by that, I think what they hope to do is they hope to create this image, this idea or this aura that people who are Gay bashers or homophobic are themselves probably secretly gay, and I don't think that that's a really good...
Hoping that the sniper gun is going to go off in the sniper's hands I don't think is the right approach.
I think that we need to work from the biology upwards to understand a little bit more about homosexuality so that we can...
View it not as a choice and not as something that is far more widely disseminated in society, so that we can just look at it as a biological phenomenon, like being left-handed and so on.
And we don't need to, I think, take the approach that those who attack left-handed people are secretly left-handed themselves and so on.
So let's have a look at some of the basic biology that occurs when people are in the womb, when you're a fetus.
So, hormones determine our gender.
Every fetus, every human life starts off as a female, and there is a hormonal activity that occurs in the womb that determines one's gender.
Hormones, among other things, are the switches that activate genes during the development of the fetus.
In turn, those genes instruct the growing fetus whether to be male or female.
Let's have a look at what occurs in the womb so that we can understand a little bit more about this kind of stuff.
Hormones determine our gender.
That's pretty uncontroversial.
The same hormones determine our brain structure.
...into either a male or female pattern.
Now, that's very, very controversial, the idea that the hormones that change our physiology, that create what is, I think, technically known as the naughty bits, also have a strong effect on the way that our minds work is something that we should be fairly clear about and, I think, understand quite clearly.
Hardline feminists don't really like the idea that the brain is hardwired because they think that different means unequal, but that, of course, doesn't mean the same thing at all.
So, the basic human template in the womb is female.
Every fetus begins as female.
At about six weeks, the girls turn into boys due to a flood of hormones that, as these authors put it, drench the developing baby and so convert sugar and spice into slugs and snails in a sort of massive transubstantiation miracle.
The male fetus is capable of making high levels of androgens or male hormones such as testosterone.
The male starts making the hormone at six weeks, and it's not a one-shot action.
It goes on for months in the womb.
Each successive dose of hormones is doing its bit to turn what is originally female into a male.
Now, in the third month of pregnancy, a heavy dose of testosterone affects the developing boy's brain.
Among other effects, this dose of testosterone sets his sexual orientation.
Until now, his brain has been effectively female, and like any female, his sexual longings, if he had any, would be focused on males.
The testosterone drench reverses his polarity, and from now on he will be attracted to girls.
But if the testosterone dose falls below a critical high level, the brain...
Remains female. All fetuses receive some testosterone, even those destined to be born girls, but samples taken from the amniotic fluid suggest that the brain-saxing drench of testosterone is eight to nine times higher for boys than it is for girls.
Now, that's worth taking just a moment to ponder about, because the kind of prejudice that we have inherited from our religious ideologies, our sort of cult Ideologies around hostility towards homosexuality has a lot to do with, obviously, in the 1st century AD or the 2nd century AD when a lot of the New Testament was written and even earlier when the Old Testament was written, people had no clue about the biology of what went on in the womb.
I mean, these people were so primitive they were almost waiting for stalks.
So, they just really couldn't understand what had happened in the womb, and the fact that the fetus originally starts as a female, and then a sort of six to eight week period, a dose of heavy hormones changes the physiology of the body from female to male, but it's only at about three months.
That the mind, that the hormone drench affects the mind.
So it's very, very possible, in fact it's provable, that you end up with a male body with a female mind.
And this is a An over-exaggeration and an over-simplification of what happens in terms of homosexuality, but I think it's just important for us to understand that this could have been any of us, that it's really beyond willpower, and psychological theories are not particularly helpful, at least unless the physiological basis of homosexuality is understood to begin with.
So, it doesn't take a huge amount of imagination to hypothesize that a shortfall in testosterone at the crucial moment in pregnancy might leave an otherwise conventional male with a female sexual orientation.
The result would be an adult man who is quite naturally attracted to other males.
It is possible that a gay gene influences the crucial testosterone levels, but whether that is the case or not, the evidence for this hormonal cause of homosexuality is very, very strong.
And it's not absolutely proven as yet, of course.
You can't experiment on children in the womb.
But, for instance, a study by Lee Ellis has shown that mothers who suffer from severe stress, and stress reduces the amount of testosterone, particularly in women, during the third month of pregnancy produce a higher-than-average incidence of homosexual offspring.
You can't, to prove this, you can't experiment on human fetuses, but animal studies support this biological explanation.
Humans and rats share specific sex hormones and have similar areas at the base of their brains that control sexual behavior, the hypothalamus.
Roger Gorski and his team have demonstrated that a rat's sexual orientation can be changed at will through the manipulation of fetal hormones.
A rat's sexual orientation can be changed at will through the manipulation of fetal hormones.
A male rat deprived of testosterone in its early fetal stage becomes female in its sexual behavior.
No amount of male hormones given in later pregnancy can reverse this behavior.
The die is cast, so to speak.
The animal's brain has been permanently organized into a female pattern.
Now, this should be reversible, right?
Gender by gender. A female rat dosed in the same critical period with male hormones becomes masculine in its sexual behavior.
And again, no amount of later female hormonal influences will reverse this orientation.
Gorski's work suggests that there is a critical stage during the development of the mammalian brain where male or female sexuality is established.
Once the critical moment is passed, no amount of sort of, quote, corrective hormonal interaction will make any difference whatsoever.
The sexual orientation of rats and most probably that of human beings is determined in the womb.
Now, the researchers went on to investigate whether there were any structural differences in Between the brains of male and female rats and discovered an area of the hypothalamus that was seven times larger in the male brain than the female brain.
It's very, very important, if you're interested in ideas and in philosophy, to understand the biological basis of personality so that we don't confuse what is innate and biological with what is choosable and moral.
So, one researcher wrote that the difference between this hypothalamus area between males and females is so big, even in a rat's brain, that you can see it with the naked eye.
And this, of course, is just the area of the brain that controls sexual behavior.
Another quote. Experimental damage to this area produces a marked and significant reduction in masculine sexual behavior.
So, Simon Levey, who's another researcher, announced that the sexually dimorphic nucleus of the pre-optic area within the brain was twice as large in heterosexual men as in homosexual men, which meant simply that gay men presented or possessed a female brain structure.
And this was quite a lot of...
excited quite a lot of controversy throughout the world in the gay lobby, which prefers, for some reason, to advocate that homosexuality is a social construct and anti-heterosexuality and homosexuality are merely a matter of choice and preference, which I don't think is the right approach.
But hey, what do I know? So...
That is that they opposed these sorts of findings that found that there are specific areas within the brain that are different in homosexual men and much closer to the female pattern.
He said that the gay lobby then announced that LeVay's finding had to be wrong because the brains he had dissected all came from gay men who died of AIDS and AIDS can cause changes in the brain structure.
That criticism lost its force after LeVay investigated the brains of homosexuals who had not died of AIDS and once again discovered that they presented a typical female pattern.
These are no longer controversial findings.
So, there's lots and lots of studies which I won't get into here, which I really recommend reading this book.
It's very instructive and very important, I think, to understand this kind of stuff.
So, the power of fetal hormones to determine sexual behavior and orientation is very, very important.
It's true, of course, if we're looking at male homosexuality, that we should see a reverse manifestation.
So the less testosterone a fetus receives, the more female the behavior should be during this critical sort of three-month window.
And such a correlation does exist.
Seventy percent of male homosexuals displayed a preference for girl-type behavior as children.
The first signs usually show when the boy is a toddler.
He will sometimes assert that he is a girl, perhaps favor cross-dressing, and he will frequently prefer the company of girls as playmates to that of boys.
Because he is, you know, this old sort of cliche that he is a woman trapped in a man's body is entirely accurate.
And this, of course, parents frequently try to stop this kind of behavior and sometimes take children for psychiatric treatment, which is like assuming that people who are left-handed are deviant or bad or wrong.
The differences in childhood history between homosexual and heterosexual groups are striking.
But, of course, it's exactly what you would expect if the cause is biological and not societal.
So there have been studies of hand-eye coordination that measure how well the subjects can throw a missile and hit a target.
You know, this old thing, you know, he throws like a girl.
That is something girls are not supposed to be able to throw quite as well as men.
These studies discovered that the homosexual's ability to throw accurately was much poorer than the ability of heterosexual men.
In fact, homosexual target throwing was pretty much like a woman's, which is what you'd expect if it's a female patterned brain within a male body.
There is a sex difference in the structure of the inner ear that is under the control of fetal testosterone.
And lesbians have the male type of inner ear structure.
So when you get hit with this flood of testosterone around three mouth level, it changes the inner ear structure for men as opposed to women, which means that men have different kinds of hearing to a small degree relative to women.
Lesbians have the physiological characteristics of the male inner ear.
So again, this is just to open people's minds and to help people to understand that we're just dealing with biological differences here.
So, the normal incidence of male homosexuality is about 1% to 4% depending on particular studies.
It's not the 10% or more, the 1 in 10 that's often quoted.
The heterosexual is no more part gay than the gay is part heterosexual.
So, if we understand that there's not quite a closed book, but overwhelmingly compelling evidence that homosexuality is merely the dosing of the brain at about three months' gestation, with lower than required levels of testosterone, To turn the female brain into a male brain.
This occurs after the levels of testosterone that occur at six to eight weeks that turns the female body into a male body that we're simply looking at a physical characteristic like hair color, eye color, height, and so on, intelligence.
It's just another physical aspect of the great biological chemical vat that occurs when we're all very young that has a lot to do with how we end up as human beings.
The reason that I wanted to talk about this, I was in theatre school for a couple of years when I was younger, I've had gay roommates, and because they're just wonderful, so tidy, and so civilised.
I wanted to talk about this because there is, of course, quite a lot of anti-homosexual feelings in the world.
This is, I think, a little bit more true in the religious countries, such as America and the Middle East and so on, than it is in less religious countries, because, of course, there's a specific abhorrence and desire to murder homosexuals within the Old Testament, which, of course, is the root of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, the three great Superstitious cults that have amazingly lasted to the modern era, but hopefully for not much longer.
So, let's have a look at some of these studies around how people feel around homosexuality, and then compare that to this growing understanding that it is merely a biological phenomenon.
One study correlates the masculinity profiles of male college students with their attitude towards homosexuals and discovered, unsurprisingly, that the most masculine students were the most anti-gay.
This might suggest that those who argue that macho men fear their feminine side are right, but the survey did not uncover that fear.
Instead, the homophobic subjects complained of gay harassment.
Gays were getting too close or brushing against my body.
Another complained that he was being checked out.
Such homosexual behavior made 42% of heterosexuals move away.
Although it's actually quite common in the gay culture to understand that when you're coming out, if you say that you've never been attracted to your male straight friends, they get affected.
It's kind of funny. A common heterosexual aversion to overt homosexuality is captured in these studies but never commented on.
Instead, the common sense explanation is advised that the most masculine heterosexuals are really gays in flight denial.
Another study reports that 47% of men have a purely negative reaction to gays.
I don't like them. I want nothing to do with them.
I hope AIDS wipes them out.
At least 47% is a minority, but the same study discovered that a further 45% of men were mildly anti-gay.
Their attitude was summed up as, eh, gays don't generally bother me as long as they don't try and press their beliefs upon me.
Right, like gays never experienced that with straight culture.
So if this study is right, then an astonishing 92% of heterosexual males will experience anti-gay feelings if homosexuality is overtly pressed on them.
Yet you can neck with a woman in public, and that's not considered to be pressing heterosexuality on gays.
Again, this hardly suggests an individual aberration, but it begins to look more and more like a common feeling.
And once again, fear does not come into it.
These heterosexual males show no fear of homosexuals, but merely feel distaste or revulsion at a homosexual approach.
And it's not men alone who experience this aversion.
Alan Wolfe, a professor at Boston University, interviewed 200 suburban Americans for a book about the state of American society and discovered that his slice of middle America was happily unprejudiced, open-minded, intolerant.
Yet, he reported, there is one exception to America's persistent and ubiquitous non-judgmentalism.
However much they are willing to accept almost anything, most middle-class Americans I spoke to were not prepared to accept homosexuality.
Wolfe's interviewees used words like abnormal, immoral, sinful.
Sinful is quite obviously biblical references.
Unacceptable, sick, or unhealthy to describe the gay lifestyle.
And other American studies show a similar widespread aversion.
One such study reported that no less than 66% of American adults, male or female, condemned homosexual behavior as morally wrong or as a sin.
A similar result was yielded by another American study, which reported that 60% of adults, male and female, thought that homosexuality in and of itself was no great problem, but it was still, quote, obscene and vulgar.
The same survey suggested that these negative attitudes to homosexuality were associated with, quote, sexual conservatism, anti-feminist attitudes, and a strong belief in male sex-appropriate behavior.
For the gay or feminist lobbies, this is a litany of horrors, but try putting it another way.
So-called homophobia is associated with men and women who lead decent lives, respect sexual infidelity, and consider the male-female relationship to be natural.
These same socially conservative people support the right of homosexuals to attend church, 80%, and their right to conceptual sex in private, 70%.
This is terrible.
This is absolutely terrible.
This is heinous, heinous behavior towards fellow human beings.
And it is specifically rooted in religious prejudice, superstition.
Religion, of course, is just extended superstition, or rather superstition that's inflicted more upon children than upon adults.
There are two prejudices that still exist within the religious communities that are still very, very strong.
Well, three, I guess.
The first is against people of other religions, and specifically contact from those people from other religions with their own children, which of course would simply say that you worship one god, somebody else worships another god, and it's nonsense to say that one is better than the other.
The second is towards atheists.
Atheists face an enormous amount of prejudice in society, as do those who are against the military or against the state as a whole, who are anarcho-capitalists and so on.
There is a statistic that says that only 35% of people would support an open atheist for the presidency of the United States, while many, many more in the 90s would support a woman, a black, or, I can't remember what the other woman, a Jew, probably. So, the hostility that is out there towards atheists and homosexuals is not particularly subtle.
If you are either an atheist like myself or gay, you experience this quite a bit.
It does arise out of a fundamental ignorance, but it also, of course, arises out of religion in that where there is deviance, I mean, you notice this sort of in the Christian right, there's this cookie-cutter approach to how it is you're supposed to look, right?
Overblond, slightly pudgy, and very strange to those who aren't in your particular cult.
There is a kind of mold or a stamp that goes into the religious ideologies or these kinds of superstition because, of course, human beings are supposed to be created in God's image.
And where there are exceptions and biological exceptions to the overwhelming majority of humanity, there is always, always a sort of tinct or an association of sin with that kind of deviance.
So, obviously, if God created man, and the vast majority of men are heterosexual, then to be homosexual is to be sinful, because you're deviating from the template that God breathed into Adam in this hokey puff of life that was supposed to have originated all of these things.
So, this is just another kind of punishment that is exacted or inflicted upon people who have had a very, very difficult life.
Guess or imagine that it's anything other than extraordinarily difficult to be a homosexual in any culture, but particularly, of course, in religious cultures where you fear for your life.
More so, of course, in the Arabic or Muslim cultures than in America, but still, there's quite a bit of fear.
And these men who have simply, through biology that could have happened to any of us, they have no control over this kind of stuff, Any of us could have had this happen to us,
and yet we view, or many of us view, homosexuals as weird or deviant and so on without understanding that it is our hostility that creates a lot of the difficulties and a lot of the personality oddities that we find among homosexual men.
One of them, you go, oh, well, they tend to congregate, and that's unnerving, right?
Well, of course they tend to congregate, because if they're going to get beaten up, I mean, how do homosexual men know whether you're homosexual or not?
There have to be certain overt characteristics that are going to make them feel more comfortable to approach you if they're attracted to you and they think that you might be gay.
Or if they're attracted to you at all, how is it that they're supposed to approach you?
Because they're very much afraid of getting beaten up, or getting thrown out of the house, or getting verbally attacked, or worse.
This is a grave, grave danger.
And this is something which it would really behoove us as sensitive and moral human beings to have some sympathy towards.
Just picture it. I mean, if you're not gay yourself, picture it that every time you were attracted to a woman, if you approached her in any kind of flirtatious manner, or indicated any kind of romantic interest in that woman, that you faced the risk of getting beaten up.
That you faced the risk of being attacked.
Lord knows it was scary enough to approach women anyway, if you're a single man.
Imagine if the stakes were not so much that she just might say no, but the stakes were so high that you might get beaten up instead, or might face verbal outpourings of scorn, have your reputation ruined.
That is an extraordinarily stressful way to live.
It's a very stressful way to live.
The normal tension of approaching somebody in a romantic way, the normal fear of rejection that occurs for all of us, is extraordinarily heightened by the fear of being physically or verbally attacked in response to your romantic overtures.
So naturally, not only is there the brain difference that is quite observable and measurable between male homosexuals and heterosexuals, But there are going to be certain patterns of behavior, perhaps it's the voice, perhaps it's the walk, perhaps it's the attitude, perhaps it's the attention to detail or to dress, that marks you as a homosexual, because that means that another homosexual can indicate a romantic or sexual interest in you without as much fear of getting beaten up.
So, not only are these brain chemistry differences very, very essential, but The signals that have to be put out by homosexuals so that they don't end up trying to date a heterosexual and get beaten up or attacked, those signals also result in particular kinds of approaches.
It's very interesting, of course, that...
It's like if you're some huge, burly racist and you say, well, gee, you know, every time I stalk up and glare at a black man, they all seem so cowardly, they all seem so nervous.
Well, it's like, well, but you're the key ingredient in all of those interactions.
So, the fear and hostility towards homosexuality, which simply arises out of a lack of understanding of the biological roots, Results in an extraordinary level of hostility towards homosexuals, which of course is going to have an effect on how they behave within society.
Anybody who faces that kind of prejudice and hostility, which arises out of a lack of understanding, is going to have effects upon their personality.
And of course, I know this as a libertarian, as an anarchist, as an atheist, as a rationalist, as a philosopher.
I'm very aware of the hostility that the truth evokes.
And deviance, which is not understood and which is considered to be a personal failing, such as homosexuality is a sin, is a choice, whatever, right?
It's deviant, it's unhealthy.
I mean, it's all nonsense. And it's all horrible prejudice.
And I think it's high time that we had some sympathy for our bent brothers and sisters and had some understanding of the fact that they are simply victims of biology.
And even to say victims is not exactly right, because although it is a very difficult thing to be homosexual, The only victimhood that really exists is the victimhood that is imposed upon society through ignorance and a lack of understanding as to what it is that makes up a homosexual, which is not a clinging mother, which is not some sort of loose moral, which is not a desire for instant sex at any time, or any of those sorts of things.
It's just biology. This is like calling dwarfs evil.
This is like calling anybody who's a deviant from the standard template evil.
These things were fine to be written down in a horrible kind of ignorant way in religious and superstitious texts that were written 20 centuries ago, but for us in the 21st century to continue to have these kinds of bigotries and hostilities towards people that we should have a great deal of empathy and sympathy for is absolutely criminal.
So I hope that this has helped open your mind a little bit, if it wasn't already open, about homosexuality, but it is something that we need to have, I think, some sympathy for And hopefully we can grow as a society to the point where we no longer need to have sympathy for homosexuals because we don't attack them anymore.
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