Friday, July 10, 2009

Since everybody is discussing homosexuality these days - reports of gay penguins exercising their right to adopt children and article 377 pottied, flushed and disinfected in everybody's mouth and in everybody's morning newspaper - why should I be left out. After all, I have a metabolic requirement to be cool too - and my blog needs to be more happenning (that, incidentally, was the word a friend used to describe what I was not when I told him that I spend most of my leisure hours at home pressing 'j' on google-reader instead of 'partying'. Well, that wasn't quite the word he used; the word he quite used used was 'socializing').

A few years ago, the news that the first homosexual tigers were observed in the wild, made it to the front page of the Times of India, and it seemed to have a sort of an appeal to wannabe post doctorates of the sort who ran an experiment on fifty or so couples feeding the husbands different diets on different weeks, and feeding the wives the resulting cum, and doing a regression line analysis plotting the taste of food of the men on the X-axis, and the taste of food (oopsie!) of the females on the Y-axis. (You may not believe me, and might like to check on this yourself, but it was a research project conducted by some university somewhere).

Tigers are mostly solitary creatures, and the chances of one of them finding a fuck may be small given their current population - thanks to project tiger and Chinese medicines - providing me enough justification to undermine the hullabaloo over Columbus' discovery of gay tigers.

A more recent non-human homosexual observation was made on a gay penguin couple. (Oopsie! Apologies. Blame that on an unconscious grammatical error, without any ill feeling towards the observer. The Corrected sentence should read something like, "Human observation of non-human homosexuals, aka gay penguins). BTW, just in case you are wondering if this has anything to do with 8mm films, they didn't go through the American Board of Film Certification to get themselves 13X rated. What made it even more interesting that the gay penguin couple adopted and raised a penguin chick.

Jokes aside, what is extraordinary about this incident is that these gay penguins shouldn't have had any difficulty in finding a mate of the other sex who was ready to copulate with them. Why, then, did they choose to remain gay?

I haven't been able to find the answer to this question, and I doubt if scientists have. But is this the only question to be answered? There are a couple more. Is homosexuality a product of the mind - a mere matter of taste (acquired or otherwise), or does it have a deeper genetic root? And if it does have a, either partial or total, genetic root, is it a wide-spread phenomena that happened throughout the history of higher animals to a certain percentage of the population, or was it always a stray phenomena arising out of genetic aberrations, which were to be soon eliminated out by natural selection?

Perhaps a clue might lie in this question. Is homosexuality totally meaningless in creatures in which fertilization is external, rather than internal? Have the plants, frogs or coral polyps found any parallels of the homosexuality which has been observed in us mammals, which we are yet to observe, recognize or understand?

7 comments:

Abhijit said...

All said and done, i have a very simple issue with the whole concept of trying to justify homosexual behaviour, or to nullify its justification.

so what if there are historical instances spewed throughout the world or not, through the myths and legends and the religious stories...so what if it were a choice as opposed to a genetic program or if one insists, a bug in the genetic program? how do these peripherals change anything in the bigger scheme of things?

the answers to your question are perhaps not available yet, but are you asking the right question?

Unknown said...

Abhijit, we're not trying to justify or nullify homosexuality. We are just trying to understand it. Just as we are still trying to understand heterosexuality.

Rathi Sudhakar said...

I think it is an interesting take on the subject. So far we have been so narrowed by our prejudices that not much scientific thinking has gone into this subject. It is only in the recent past that scientists are trying to understand this gene or gene make up.
A twist to this tale came about when I recently read this article in Times of India that the Y chromosome could be disappearing and taking with it the whole male species ;)(Google, Y chromosome disappearing)

We have lots to learn about ourselves and we will take a long time and maybe things will happen faster than we learn about them which can result in the big picture being totally different from what we think it is !!

Jagdish Chander said...

I read somewhere that sexual preferences are formed very young, mostly in the infant stages. Just like how some kids are boisterous and some are real quiet.

What I dont understand is why cant the hetero folks leave the homo folks alone. It doesnt bother me if my neighbour is a doctor/fireman. Why should his sexual preference be a botheration.

krishna said...

i dont understand y all religions r against gays..??

Unknown said...

Most religions considered sex as an instrument to procreate - something that God created - and something that should only be used in the way God desired it.
In fact, some religions went so far as to proclaim that only sex in the missionary position (man over woman) was morally correct - apparently the chances of fertilization in the missionary position are more.

So according to most religions - sex is not for enjoyment but for procreation and should be used only when required, and only in the manner prescribed. :)

You might know that in medeavel times the church issued decrees against bathing everyday. One theory is that such a decree came when Turkish baths started spreading in Europe, and the bath was no longer just a place to bathe - but also a place of enjoyment, often along with women.

Srobona RC said...

Hmm..as far as I am concerned, if it is consensual, any ones sex life or preferences is their own issue. Each to their own. If it is not being forced on you, why bother.