Alternatively, some kind of meta-level mechanism to reduce competition over women in the community, ultimately improving its collective health and well-being.
> gay son
This is a dangerous stereotype that is equally harmful to people of any sexuality, I'd encourage you to correct it. Most of the gay folk I know personally tend towards the athletic end of the spectrum
Did you mean to imply that effeminate -- showing characteristics more associated with females than males -- was at the other end of a spectrum from athletic?
Agreed, the terminology used by the parent comment was a bit strange, but I got the idea of what they meant.
They were talking about an effeminate skinny type of a male compared to a very masculine athletic "macho man"-looking type. In terms of celebrities and purely their appearances, think of young David Bowie vs. Arnold Swarzenegger.
I guess the parent comment simply conflated athleticism with masculinity, but that's just an aspect of it, and not all kinds of athleticism are inherently "masculine" (think yoga or acrobatics or figure skating).
One would think that standing by your choices and not trying to hide then away, would be the assertive and self-confident approach. If your friends are really so fickle as to think less of you based on the TV shows you watch and the love you show for your wife, are they really worth keeping around?
My best friend died in his 20's. So, I have a cynical view on friendship.
It's very time intensive to find new friends and filter out the one's that don't make the cut. Not to mention the awkwardness that comes with breaking up with the one's that don't make the cut.
Building up a new circle of friends where I live now took some time, and was initially kicked off by reconnecting with a childhood friend. A huge positive is that we're all mid-30s to mid-40s and more mature, less concerned about outward appearances, so it feels more real and down to earth.
Just being able to be yourself in the company of others is refreshing, because you can relax and lower your guard.
Round of beers, one friend asks for a diet soda? Sure thing. Heck, I have a standing agreement with another friend that I'll bring him a soda even if he asked for a beer and I think he's had one or two too many, because he knows he has a tendency to drink a bit too much. He'll grumble about it, but because we've talked it through, he knows I'm looking out for him.
My best friend is a huge metalhead, but also loves sugary J-pop with a burning passion. And nobody thinks less of him for it. We don't believe in guilty pleasures, you like what you like.
Honestly, and I know this doesn't apply to everyone, I would rather have no friends at all if I couldn't be 100% myself around my friends :-)
Liking Jane Austen is effeminate?
Yup, sounds like a Grindr bio all right.
Because I’m pretty sure that homosexual men aren’t overall more like heterosexual women than they are like heterosexual men, at least in terms of appearance.
You could say the same thing about long-haired men. It doesn’t mean you’re implying that any other traits are more feminine, because the one trait in question is already biased female.
> By default, let’s assume that homosexual men have the same distribution of all other traits as heterosexual men
In some ways, homosexual men might very well cluster away from females, even more so than heterosexual men.
Aren't we back to what the person I was originally replying to would describe as "dangerous stereotypes"?
The point I was trying to make is that the only thing you can say about homosexual men without invoking stereotypes is that they are attracted to men. And in a statistical sense, that is a feminine characteristic.
"Women" and "Men" are words that we associate with observable characteristics. They are extremely messy, so much so that there isn't even one characteristic in all of the many dimensions that we would all agree evenly cleaves the "Men" set from the "Women" set. And yes, most observable characteristics are far more shared than not; that's why it's easier to tell a human from a cat than it is a man from a woman.
Please, stop trying to enlarge my claims. The idea that males and females form clusters that could be described as "neat", or that the distribution of any human characteristic is Guassian, are extremely large claims that should be backed up with evidence. I don't know how they even made their way into this discussion.
To restate: Male homosexuality can be described as a trait that male homosexuals share with women. If we assume the default about all other characteristics, i.e. that they are distributed in the same manner as they are in other males, then that would mean homosexual men are ever so slightly skewed female in distribution. That's it. Note that the "if" clause isn't a claim I am making, it is simply a proposition on which the argument is predicated. If it is false, the argument no longer stands. I am not making any judgement about that claim, I am only building on it in the hypothetical universe where it is true.
I do agree with the very narrow premise of your original claim:
> Isn’t “being attracted to males” a predominantly female characteristic in animals that reproduce sexually? On the “sexuality” dimension, do not gay men fall closer to the female cluster than the male cluster?
I don't, however, agree with your later claim:
> By default, let’s assume that homosexual men have the same distribution of all other traits as heterosexual men. In N-dimensional space, they are biased slightly away from dead center of the male cluster towards the female cluster because of the female bias of the attracted-to-men trait.
I would hold that this isn't true, because I would suggest that N here is extremely large, and in many of those dimensions, homosexual men are skewed away from women, even more so than heterosexual men. I do not know what those dimensions could be - perhaps something as esoteric as "Testosterone Levels", "Median Household Income", "Toxic Fathers", "Suicidal Ideation", "Substance Abuse", or "Gut Microbial Diversity". In some dimensions, homosexual men are probably hypermasculine. In N-dimensional space, humans as a whole are probably indistinguishable, let alone homosexual or heterosexual men.
I do not agree either with the claim:
> The point I was trying to make is that the only thing you can say about homosexual men without invoking stereotypes is that they are attracted to men. And in a statistical sense, that is a feminine characteristic.
[...]
> To restate: Male homosexuality can be described as a trait that male homosexuals share with women. If we assume the default about all other characteristics, i.e. that they are distributed in the same manner as they are in other males, then that would mean homosexual men are ever so slightly skewed female in distribution. That's it. Note that the "if" clause isn't a claim I am making, it is simply a proposition on which the argument is predicated. If it is false, the argument no longer stands. I am not making any judgement about that claim, I am only building on it in the hypothetical universe where it is true.
Yes, the only thing we can say about gay men with certainty that distinguishes them from straight men without invoking sterotypes is that they are attracted to men. It does not follow, however, that they are alike in every other way. On this singular dimension, yes, male homosexuals are shifted towards females. However, the original top level comment that we're responding to had used terminology suggesting gay men == effeminate men. Your initial premise is right, but only if we regard attraction as the defining characteristic and discard everything else. If we expand that definition to N-dimensional space as you did, then no, it's very likely not true, because of all the many ways in which gay men are probably shifted away from women.
You know that a homosexual not are "effeminate males" ? Man, try to revise these stereotype that you have.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/study-says-brains...
Edit: apparently my assumption was correct, per the commenter in question elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26076929
I would suspect, though I haven't seen any studies, that some fertility treatment steps unintentionally have mass-sorting properties similar to the barrier diffusion Uranium enrichment technique used in the Manhattan Project.
You know that homosexuality it's very know to happen on many animal species ? It's not a "novel mutation"
But if that were true, it must succeed sometimes. Evolution doesn't select for things that don't work. We should see an equally strong correlation with sex of offspring and birth order. We don't.
One possibility is that the effect reduces the harmful effects of sibling rivalry by making second sons more empathetic. However, this is basically a random guess — there are so many variables in biology that it could be a million other things instead.
There is a correlation in the opposite direction between sex and birth order, but that could be explained with a slight variation on the upthread hypothesis; instead of trying to bend things toward girls and sometimes failing with an effeminate boy, one could speculate that it is “trying” to bend things toward boys and sometimes succeeds incompletely, resulting in an effeminate boy.
(“Trying" in this case meaning nothing having to do with intentionality, but merely the effect of the process for which it was selected.)
Is there any reason to believe that gay men are more empathetic?
I still think it's a bit unlikely that there's a meaningful connection to be had there, but I wouldn't be totally shocked if I were proven wrong.
From Wikipedia:
> The mechanism is thought to be a maternal immune response to male fetuses, whereby antibodies neutralize male Y-proteins thought to play a role in sexual differentiation during development.
The article states even interrupted pregnancies are thought to generate this response.
That said, it would be very interesting if the body did actually count and take measures to keep things even.
The reproductive system doesn't "want" anything any more than your immune system "wants" to fight viruses and invading pathogens.
Why couldn't a similar mechanism be at play here?
It doesn't require a tally, it just requires that the body stores something that correlates with number and gender of previous children. Like, say, indefinitely retaining genetic material from each of them. Which, you know, mother's bodies do:
“Not only fetal cells, but also fragments of fetal DNA can be present in the maternal circulation indefinitely after pregnancy. This finding has practical implications for non-invasive prenatal diagnoses based on maternal blood, and may be considered for possible pathophysiological correlations.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12107445/#:~:text=Not%20only....