Sex, Aristophanes and Genes

One evening at the dinner table, my two daughters thought they could trap me into giving my impression of homosexuality. They should have known better, having been raised under my tutelage over their lifetimes, that my simple explanations are often preambled by a little lecture.

I told them that I didn’t care much for it, personally, and that they wouldn’t be eating their mother’s cooking right then if I had. I also told them that I have nothing against it or anything else that two, consenting adults wish to pursue privately, as long as it doesn't involve me. 

My youngest daughter has a friend who is a lesbian.  She makes no bones about it and I see no reason why she should. She has been welcome in our home as long as I have known her; she eats with us, discusses her relationships with us and, on occasion, stays for the weekend. My daughter is not a lesbian. She has a boyfriend who is presently working in London. Since we live in Italy and my firearms are in the U.S., he's got little to fear. 

The discussion got a little awkward when the subject of sex arose, though.

I explained to them that there were only two sexes, male and female, and that they were determined by genetics. That's the short and simple science of it. I told them that they had to be careful when dealing with sex, because the word itself can be a simple descriptor indicating the differences of the sums of the structural, functional, and behavioral characteristics that are involved in reproduction between males and females or it can be interpreted as an act leading to, or an act imitating one leading to, reproduction. 

There is a big difference between seeing a person and doing a person.

They then got into the question of "gender identity", which seems to be discussed everywhere these days. My response was that there is no "gender" in science, only sex. I was taught that "gender" is a grammatical term, not a biological term. It has become a common synonym for the word sex, but mixing nomenclatures becomes a problem in science. In the strictest, biological terms, a male or a female doesn't subjectively "identify" as such, they objectively either are or aren't male or female - XX versus XY. Besides, when was the last time you heard someone say,"Let's have gender"?

Aristophanes and the Question of Love

It was at this point of our discussion that I brought up that these questions are not new.  Even the ancient Greeks grappled with trying to understand homosexuality and lesbianism. 

I was introduced to Aristophanes by my father, though not for this question.  He had referred me back to a play the comic wrote entitled,"The Frogs". We were discussing Gresham's Law, which describes how bad money drives good money out of circulation as being first described by the Greek comic in the classical age.  While reading over his collected works, I came across his "Eulogy to Love", within which he adds his theory on the origins of humanity and the creation of the sexes to the vast array already existing in Greek mythology. His view was that we had to understand our nature to understand the various expressions of sexual love.

I described his speech as his attempt to explain why people in love say they feel "whole" when they have found a partner. He asserted that, in the olden days, people had double bodies, with faces and limbs turned outward from one another. They were very strong, spherical creatures who moved by cartwheeling around, instead of walking like we do. 

Back then, according to him, there were not two, but three sexes: the all male couplet, the all female couplet, and the "androgynous" couplet, who was half male, half female. He claimed that the males descended from the sun, that the females descended from the earth and the androgynous couplets descended from the moon. 

For some reason, these creatures tried to climb to the heights of Mount Olympus and "set upon the gods". Zeus wasn't going to stand for this intrusion and thought about vaporizing them all with lightening bolts, but did not want to deprive himself of their devotions and offerings, so he decided to weaken them by splitting them in half, thus separating them into two bodies.

Aristophanes explains that, ever since then, people scurry around looking for their other half and are, in reality, just trying to recover their first nature. Thus, the women who were split from other women search after their own kind, creating lesbians and the men split from other men are looking for their own kind, creating homosexuals. Those that come from the original, androgynous beings are the heterosexual men and women.  We are all trying to become whole again!

(Although he doesn't mention it, I think there was a higher proportion of the "androgynous type" of original beings, else there wouldn't have been so many of them Greeks around to discuss these things!)

Again, my youngest daughter pushed me for a more direct answer. My response was as direct as I could give to her. I told her that I have no business telling anybody what they should think or believe and that everyone should be free to choose whatever happiness they seek. But, there are a couple of conditions to remember.

The first is that the person engaging in these acts must be capable of consent; they must be, at least of an age that would imply they have the mental capacity to understand the possible consequences of their decisions.  The second is that they should not be forced upon another person against their will.  Other than this, since I didn't engage in these activities, any other consideration, such as lifestyle, entertainment choices, church weddings, adoptions and the like,  didn't apply to me and, therefore, wasn't my business.  Choices have consequences and as long as I don't have to pay for those consequences, they are free to do as they wish. There are, however, some problems that society will get sucked into.

If these types of self-serving groups gain control of the machinery of government, they can, through legislation, force their agendas upon an otherwise tolerant society.  We are already see this kind of thing with "gender assignments", the aberrant products of the inner workings of an individual's mind, being codified into law.  Being punished because you used a word that offends someone because you couldn't read their minds is the utmost in insanity. When a person tells you that they are something that they obviously aren't, no matter how sincere their conviction may be, accepting what they say as truth makes you a part of their delusion. 

Now, I'm no fan of Abraham Lincoln, but he did once brilliantly answer a reporter's question who was trying to stump him. 

He was asked,"Mr President, how many legs would a dog have if you called a tail a leg?"

The President responded,"Four! Calling a tail a leg don't make it one!"

We are what are genes say we are; anything else is sheer imagination.