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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Mav (talk | contribs) at 21:13, 6 January 2002. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

I'd like to see some references for the anthropological study of homosexuality. It seems to me that every one of the alleged "forms" of homosexuality also exist in heterosexuality. --Dmerrill

My intuition tells me that this article is pro-homosexuality. Was that the author's intent? --Ed Poor

Who knows. Who cares, as long as it's NPOV.

- also, the statistical estimate of "percent of the population that is gay" has been changed on this page a few times. Can anybody get us a hard cite for a number here?

Seconding the latter! The best way to counter endless arguments and suspicions about bias is to contextualize assertions by saying such things as, "According to a widely-cited survey by so-and-so, N% of Americans are homosexuals. There have been a number of attempts to estimate the percentage of homosexuals worldwide, such as..." Etc. --LMS

By the way, re "People whose sexual desire and activities are strongly channelled toward members of their own sex are a minority of the population (variously estimated to be anywhere from 2% to 10%)." Of what population? --Yours for scientific precision, LMS

Why on earth should americans be specially mentioned? Should we specially mention every single country where there has been survey's percentages? ;) arcade

Concerning the Greek additions:

I remember from a program I saw on the Discovery Channel (which doesn't constitute proof, BTW), that young men in Classical Greece where almost expected to engage in peer-to-peer homosexual activity so as not to defile the female population with pre-marital sex (a bride HAD to be a virgin at that time).

This peer-to-peer male sexual activity was in addition to the type of relationship described in the article and it was expected to end upon marriage to a virgin bride (although, in later life, the man could take on a eromenos).

Can someone verify this? I don't like posting additions to articles based upon what I saw in a single TV program. Maveric149

I don't remember such from the book, but I now found that there are in fact in the book photographs of ancient Greek vases with pictures of homosexual conduct between youths. But most are between erastes and eromenos. This book does not give the answer to your question. It shows how different that society was and proves some weird details, but can not give a complete view.

OK -- I leave this on the back burner until I am able to find substantiation.Thanks! maveric149

Ihave a contribution to make, but it diverges significantly from the tone of the current article. Since I do not have a big investment in the topic, and have not worked on this page at all, I would like to present it here, and ask others to decide if and where in the article it would best be placed.

Many people in Western societies today speak of "sexual orientation" as a unified and actual thing. Over the past thirty years anthropologists, historians, and literary critics have pointed out that it in fact comprises a variety of different things, including a specific object of erotic desire, and forms of erotic fulfilment (i.e. sexual behaviors). Many scholars have argued that "sexual orientation" and specific sexual orientations are historical and social constructions. In 1976 the historian Michel Foucault argued that homosexuality did not exist as such in the 18th century; that people instead spoke of "sodomy" (which involved specific erotic acts regardless of the sex of the actors) as a crime that was often ignored but sometimes punished severely. He further argued that it was in the 19th century that "homosexuality" came into existence as practicioners of emerging sciences as well as arts sought to classify and analyze different forms of sexual perv

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ersion. Finally, Foucault argues that it was this emerging discourse that allowed some to claim that homosexuality is natural, and therefore a legitimate "sexual orientation."

Foucault's suggestions about Western sexuality led other historians and anthropolosts to abandon the 19th century project of classifying different forms of "sexual" behavior or "sexual" orientation" to a new project that asks "what is "sexuality" and how do people in different places and at different times understand their bodies and desires? For example, they have argued that the famous case of some Melanesian societies in which adult men and pre-pubescent and adolescent boys engage in oral sex is not comparable to similar acts in the United States or Europe; that Melanesians do not understand or explain such acts in terms of sexual desire or as a sexual behavior, and that it in fact reflects a culture with a very different notion of sex, sexuality, and gender. Some historians have made similar claims about so-called homosexuality in ancient Greece; that behaviors that appear to be homosexual in modern Western societies may have been understood by ancient Greeks in entirely different ways.

At stake in these new views are two different points. One is the claim that human sexuality is extraordinarily plastic, and that specific notions about the body and sexuality are socially constructed. The other is the fundamentally anthropological claim of cultural relativism: that human behavior should be interpreted in the context of its cultural environment, and that the language of one culture is often inappropriate for describing practices or beliefs in another culture. A number of contemporary scholars who have come to reject Foucault's specific arguments about Western sexuality nevertheless have accepted these basic theoretical and methodological points.

SR

The above paragraphs by SR are a great general discussion about sexual orientation.! Assuming they are either public domain, or the work of SR, they should be added at the end of the sexual orientation article. maveric149