Death befor Dishonor!

You talk here as if every one's body chemistry is the same. Given modern science yours is an unusual notion.

Different body chemistrys might lead to varying strengths of the homosexual bond. From extremely strong at all times to non-existant.

I personally have encountered the situational effect. After 3 months in boot camp the guys in the shower started looking good. It was very strange. Three days later we graduated. Whew. None the less a person with a different body chemistry might have a much lower threshold. Like 10 minutes.

Much of the homo, and drug hysterias may be based on differences in body chemistry.

Republicans ought to give this stuff up before it is proved to be pure prejudice. Americans don't like prejudice (mostly).

M:

You deny your own point--put any of us in an all male environment and we'll start singing show tunes. Take us out and we forget it ever happened. Except for those who are disordered.

Here's an interesting point from the dominance article:

"The alternative is to squabble endlessly about who ought to be in charge. In one study, researchers left the pecking order in some chicken flocks undisturbed. But they deliberately unsettled other flocks week after week by removing whichever bird had struggled to the top. The flocks with undisturbed hierarchies not only did less bickering but also ate more food, gained weight faster, and produced more eggs."

I've found this to be true in corporate settings. A company I worked for went through the whole flat organization/empowerment paradigm in the 90s, everyone is empowered to talk to/e-mail everyone else, drive authority down to the workers, blah, blah. It sounds like such a positive thing in concept. But without clear lines of authority to prioritize work and resolve conflicts, people have to fight it out among themselves. I think it adds more stress, uncertainty and ambiguity to the worker. Hierarchies are good, they remove uncertainty and ambiguity. Workers can concentrate on work, and leave the power struggles up to their bosses.

Oh crap, not again...

I remember a lot of analogies to animals used to justify homosexuality and the like. Before bonobos (bisexually promiscuous), it was dolphins (ditto). (Note: Dolphins had a rep as more intelligent and "spiritually evolved" than humans -- maybe because they never developed the atom bomb or Vietnam -- and bonobos were touted as "humanity's closest biological relatives" in contrast with the much more violent chimpanzees.)

I actually had this pickup line used on me: "Science has proven humans are naturally bisexual and promiscuous; you're just in denial. (And if you'd just let me demonstrate --nudge nudge wink wink know what I mean know what I mean...)"

Said guy trying to get into my pants had just come out of the closet after accepting homosexuality as his personal LORD and Saviour and was witnessing away. (The only way to describe his change was a religious conversion experience.)

Dennis Prager said that Judaism defined the only non-sinful sex as between man & wife, distinguishing between male and female; before this (in pagan times) the only distinction was "between penetrator and penetrated".

After I broke contact from this "born-again bi" and kept my ears open, I noticed a pattern in the news of his sexcapadesr: whether he was screwing a male or a female, over or underage, he always had to be the one on top doing the penetrating.

Lucky for Professor Dunbar he put a 'likely' in there.

There are primates who squirt two days of milk into their young and then go off for two days to forage.

Try suggesting that to your wives.

One conclusion of darwinism is that nothing one species does can be used to explain, still less to justify, what another species may do.

That's because, duh, they're different species.

Homology does not mean identity. If in fact homosexuality is homologous in any two species, which would be hard to prove.

Call me a hopeless romantic, but I've been in all-male societies, and as time went on I did not notice how much better looking the other guys were. I just noticed that they scratched a lot.

Monastaries?

That example, at least, would seem to suffer from self-selection issues.

That all mammal male brains start out female, and become female only though an extremely complex process that, even if it operates at the 6-Sigma level, has plenty of room for error, would tend to suggest that since God made the process, God also made the gays.

Jeff:

They're all self-selecting populations. When there are no women around straight men will get jiggy with other men.

Ummm--list time I checked, boys got sent to boarding schools; similarly, many men were pressed into naval service.

I have been in environments without women around--neither I, nor the other guys, got the tiniest bit jiggy.

I know it is a time-honored journalistic tradition to generalize from personal experience, but perhaps you should refrain from doing so here.

Wel of course we all deny it later. It's repellant.

After MoDo wrote some gushing article a few years back about the sexually liberated Bonobos and how we humands should be more like them, I wrote her and suggested she experience their tenderness firsthand by trying to mate with one.

What'd she say?