Originally posted 2022-02-12 13:00:32.
The ‘nature or nurture’ debate has been central to the discussion of sexuality for over two hundred years. In brief, the nature school believes that human behaviour is largely inherited, while nurturists believe it is the result of experiences in childhood, particularly in our interactions with our parents and siblings.
The nature or nurture argument over sexuality spreads out into other areas of thought. So let’s examine it.
What does ‘nature or nurture’ mean?
The nature school is sometimes called ‘Essentialism.’ It is fundamental to the Christian concept of Original Sin, which insists that we are not sinners by choice or because of our background, but because we are human. We might well sin by choice in later life but in Christianity we are born in sin. That is how it is possible for a newborn infant to be a sinner, in the eyes of Christians, even if she has done nothing other than suck her mother’s tit; sin is innate to being human. However, human nature, so hated by the Constructionists, is not seen as a flaw by the nature school but rather the source of our strength. It is what binds us together and makes us human, for better or worse. By choosing to reject sin we take control of our lives. We are still sinners, but it’s like the way an alcoholic is always an alcoholic, even if he dries out completely. We can stop sinning, if you like, but the original sin remains. Our nature is that of sinner and Christ came to absolve us of it.
This idea is central to that most dangerous of cults, islam, where is is believed that ‘nothing happens but by the will of allah;’ thus completely negating the concept of Free Will and resulting in the stagnation of islamic cultures. However, Christians should remember that similar beliefs are central to their cult, they are just largely ignored today; but that was not always so.
Nurturism is sometimes called the ‘blank slate’ or tabula rasa. It was fundamental to men like Rousseau, an eighteenth-century philosopher whose thinking gave rise to many of the social movements we know today. There is no doubt that Rousseau was challenging the central notion of Essentialism, that everything is pre-ordained. In many ways it is a development of the idea of individual autonomy, which informed the cultural revolution of the era and gave us the Enlightenment. Nothing is written and we are all able to shape every detail of our lives independently of the past. Today this point of view is commonly known as ‘Constructionism’.
As with many Philosophical debates, here we run up against the messy nature of the the Human Condition. Observation — often somewhat disregarded by philosophers — tells us that humans are not so easy to categorise and that we are influenced, in our lives, by both Nature and Nurture. This is something we need to be aware of; for example, the great Pragmatist philosopher John Dewey wrote:
The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.
In other words, no matter what our Nature makes us, by our own effort we can change. Discussion of Psychology and of human sexuality all too often makes assumptions that change is not possible, whereas in fact it very much is; consider the Briggs-Meyer Fallacy, which attempts to explain all human behaviour in terms of binary opposition. Clearly we must recognise the fundamental binaries that do underpin biology but these are not necessarily prescriptive of behaviour. If that were not so, then Transsexuals could not exist; but they do.
Nature or nurture in Sexuality
Nobody really thought about sexuality until the nineteenth century. Sex was something one did, that was all. Even behaviours that might be called homosexual today, were not considered in those terms, then. In Shakespearean England, well-to-do men often had cross-dressed boys, frequently actors, as mistresses. Artisans had their apprentices, who, at least in some cases, also provided sexual comfort. It was regarded as normal for a man of taste to be attracted both to feminine boys and young women but the culture was firm: a man could only penetrate and must never be penetrated.
Indeed all of the Bard’s women’s roles were written for and played by boys, who were lionised for their feminine beauty and were available for extra-curricular activities after the show. The Angelina Jolie of English theatre in 1600 was a pretty adolescent boy — who was likely a courtesan. Similar practices were prevalent elsewhere, in Imperial China and across the Americas and Asia.
Even when the green eye of public morality focussed on these activities, it did not see a personality type or a sexuality; it saw a behaviour, to wit, buggery — anal penetration. All laws in the West that are today claimed to have been against homosexuality, were actually against the act of anal sex, especially between two males — although in fact, they applied just as much to such sex between males and females, indeed even between a man and his wife, although this was rarely enforced. Other laws forbade, essentially, promiscuity and ‘fornication’ but again, these were specific acts. The issue of what sexuality was driving them was never discussed. Whether or not one approved of such goings-on, the nature or nurture debate was not rehearsed.
Kafft-Ebbing and Ulrichs.
That changed in the nineteenth century with the arrival of Psychology, which has ever since spent a lot of time considering both sexuality and nature or nurture. Richard von Kraft Ebbing and Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs, both Germans, were early into the fray and took opposite sides in the nature or nurture debate. Both focussed on homosexuality, a concept which been lately invented by Karl-Maria Kertbeny (actually Bengkert.) This word replaced a range of others, such as catamite or sodomite.
Homosexuality was considered by both to be a mindset that comprised more than just the act of sex itself, but a range of desires, preferences and appearances as well as behaviours, which could be attached to individuals to categorise them. It was an expression both of Sexuality and Gender, such that Homosexuals were invariably feminised and Lesbians the opposite.
The question was whether this was the result of nature or nurture
Krafft-Ebbing believed that Homosexuality was a kind of contagious mental disease and that the purpose of Psychiatry was to help people to resist and overcome such ‘unnatural urges.’ He believed that it was caused by a debauched lifestyle and morality. On the other hand, Ulrichs, himself a Homosexual (by the understanding of the day) insisted that it had nothing to do with such things but was innate; that Homosexuals were born with a sexuality that did not match their physical sex.
Immediately we see the nature or nurture dichotomy: Krafft-Ebbing was a nurturist and Ulrichs a naturist. The former believed that human behaviour was written by our experiences and crucially, our will, while the latter believed that we were pre-programmed to behave in certain ways. If Homosexuals could not help being as they were, as Ulrichs believed, society should not punish them for it.
These two positions define nature or nurture in this context and remain vital across a range of social issues today.
Sexual Inversion
In order to support his claim of ‘born this way’, Ulrichs looked at characteristics other than the act of sex and saw that Homosexuals had many in common. As well as being attracted to men, they tended to be small, lightly built, naturally graceful, feminine in manners and to exhibit marked neoteny. They were often artistic or creative; they could be musicians, painters, dancers. Their tastes were, by any measure, refined and they had usually been extremely feminine as young children. Together, he argued, this meant that Homosexuals were fundamentally different from other men, that they were in fact ‘normal women who inhabited the bodies of men.’
Ulrichs called this ‘Sexual Inversion’. It became the standard view and was most deeply researched and explained by the English writer Henry Havelock Ellis in his massive work The Psychology of Sex (six volumes, 1897-1910.) The concept of Sexual Inversion has never been scientifically disproven and indeed, over the years since it was formulated, more and more evidence has accrued to support it.
Ulrich’s observations are as true today as they were then. In his model, only the sexually receptive partner, in sex between two males, was necessarily a Homosexual. This was axiomatic. Homosexuals were feminine and sought masculine, conventional men, often (frequently specifically) married ones, as sexual partners, with whom they would invariably play the receptive role. Those partners, when they found them, might have been guilty of buggery, where this remained a crime (France had repealed these laws after the Revolution,) but otherwise they were no different from other men: they penetrated.
Freud and Jung
Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung were the founders of Psycho-Analysis. Jung was actually a student of Freud but later rejected his ideas. At root, this was because Freud was a committed Constructionist and Jung an Essentialist. The nature or nurture debate in many ways defines their positions.
Freud believed that neuroses were the product of nurture, especially in the relationships between the child and his or her parents and siblings. For boys, the most important of these, in the earlier phases, was that with their mothers and for girls, with their fathers. In order to be balanced adults, boys had to let go of their attachment to their mothers and instead ‘become’ their fathers and vice versa for girls. (Obviously, this is a crude description of Freud’s ideas; he may stop rotating in his grave now.)
Therefore, all mental issues, disturbances and neuroses had their roots in early experiences — in nurture; they were Constructed.
Jung began believing the same but soon moved away and fell out badly with Freud. He came to believe that there must be an innate stimulus for behaviour: nature.
Both men were Classically trained; they had to be, in order to attend University then. Indeed, when I attended school in Scotland, one still had to be able to read and write in Latin, to be considered for a University place there. This requirement was only dropped in the mid 1970s. In the nineteenth century, the demands were for a much higher standard and Jung seems to have taken Classicism to heart more than Freud.
Jung looked into Classical literature and found that it was all about particular types of people. He called these ‘archetypes’. For example, Perseus was a Hero; so was Jason. Often they had a god for a father (the similarity to Jesus should not be missed.) Achilles was a Warrior; so were Hector and Ajax. There were many archetypes, King, Queen, Hero, Rebel, Trickster, Sage and more. Jung thought that these reflected personality types he saw in his patients and this suggested to him that these were innate, since they had been described for so long. He was therefore an Essentialist; he believed in human nature.
Wolf-packs
Today, sadly, there is less awareness of Classical literature, but a popular archetype model, though one often misunderstood, is the wolf-pack. Hierarchies exist in both male and female wolves, but in males, there are three basic types: Alpha, Beta and Omega. There is only one Alpha, a small number of Betas and many Omegas. Betas are powerful individuals who support the Alpha but might replace him if he fails; on the other hand, while Omegas are individually weak, they are collectively powerful and an Alpha who wishes to retain his position must keep them on his side.
These strata, the Alpha/Beta one and the Omega, are not established by nurture, but by nature. It is their innate nature that makes some wolves more dominant than others.
This archetypal structure and the nature or nurture question itself, can be transposed to humans. In politics, an Alpha is always under threat from individual Betas who might oust him. To keep power he must use not only his own strength and aggression to subdue them but also the collective power of the Omegas, which is greater than that of the Betas because of their numbers. So on one hand the Alpha must frighten all the others, but on the other, be magnanimous towards the group. This is why we call some people ‘natural leaders’: they are dominant by nature but popular with the group. Niccolo Machiavelli understood this principle very well.
Jungian psycho-analysis depends on an understanding both of Archetypal models and their interrelations and also of the individual. Indeed, the archetypal method was never intended to be prescriptive but rather diagnostic. Jung sought to help his patients to understand themselves better and to resolve conflicts in their own lives, not to pigeon-hole them.
Interpretive psychology
Both the Freudian and Jungian systems were interpretative. They were not based in statistics, but in the individual story and the analyst’s interpretation of it. During the 1930s, however, this approach was increasingly rejected on the grounds that it did not produce repeatable results. It fell short, for example, of Karl Popper’s demand that science should be falsifiable. That Popper was not a life scientist and his ideas were inappropriate there, was ignored.
Because of this, another model was proposed, called Psychometry, the statistical science of measuring mental capacities and processes. It was soon widely adopted in the USA and its influence spread after WWII.
Alfred Kinsey
This new, statistical approach paved the way for Dr Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956,) arguably the most influential post-war Western sex researcher, though his methods have long been challenged. Kinsey was an entomologist and had spent years collecting and classifying fruit flies. He was an ardent Evolutionist and used his studies to great effect, at a time when Evolution was still regarded as ‘controversial’ by some. By definition he was an Essentialist.
When he decided to study human sexuality, he approached it in a statistical manner, as a biologist. He developed a scale of sexuality from 0-6, with 0 being completely heterosexual and 6 being completely homosexual. His decision to do this was arbitrary, not based on observation and instead on ideology, and the subsequent work appears to have been an attempt to shore up an unsupported hypothesis. Nevertheless, his scale and similar ones based on it remain in use today. His influence, especially in the USA, was immense and still is; not, unfortunately, for the better.
Kinsey’s work reinforced the idea that Homosexuality was innate and this was somewhat overplayed by popular media interpretations of it. At a time when Homosexuality was still regarded as a mental disorder and had become a political issue, this was understandable, though it tended to obscure the nuances of the work itself. In the nature or nurture debate Kinsey, whether he intended to or not, strongly reinforced nature.
More support for nature
In the 1960s, new evidence came to light, from laboratory studies, on the influence of prenatal hormone delivery, which found that excess testosterone pre-birth tended to make female rats behave more like males. This had already been noted in the phenomenon of the ‘maverick,’ a cow that was born as a twin with a bull calf. These tend to be aggressive and hard to control, like bulls.
In the lab studies, it was also found that added oestrogen in utero caused male rats to act like females, raising their posteriors to other males and so on. Over the years since then, many such studies have been carried out and all suggest the same thing: prenatal hormone exposure has a significant effect on adult behaviour. Sexuality, in other words, is innate, a function of nature.
However, there is another form of Homosexual on clear display in Southeast Asia, who appears less determined by Nature and is significantly affected by environment and peer pressure, that is, Nurture. In the Philippines these are called Late Bloomers because, while a significant number of ladyboys appear around age five, another group appears around fifteen; these are not a continuum but are two discrete cohorts. This was confirmed in 2018 by a study in Cambodia.
The older group, which is found everywhere alongside the younger one, shows no evidence of cross-gender behaviour in childhood, completely the opposite to the younger group. While that younger group’s behaviour almost certainly is informed by Nature, that is, congenital Sexual Inversion, this is not apparent with the older group, who ‘discover themselves’ later.
The explanation for this, which was posited by Professor Ray Blanchard, was that these individuals were Autogynephilic, that is ‘attracted to the thought or image of themselves as women.’ This might work in a Western context, but not so well elsewhere. First off, Late Bloomers are almost always androphilic, and while that might be explained by Blanchard’s concept of ‘pseudo-bisexualism,’ how does that apply to a male who lives life all day long, 24/7 as a woman? How is her sexuality ‘bi’ when she expresses no sexual interest at all in women and instead, is man-crazy? This sounds much more like an acquired form of Homosexuality. Another issue is that the early-appearing type, who are normally considered to be classic Sexual Inverts, also exhibit strong Autogynephilia.
It has been suggested that some sort of scale of variation or crossover exists between the batang bakla and later bloomer types, but this has not been researched. In practice we are left with the dichotomy of ‘the small pretty ones are the batang baklas, that is, the congenital Sexual Inverts and the tall striking ones are late bloomers, who have an acquired form of Homosexuality.’
The New Gay Man
Towards the end of the 1960s a new male Homosexual movement became prominent in the USA, often called the ‘accommodationists’ or the ‘assimilationists’. They believed that if they assimilated into society by appearing to be masculine males, they would be accommodated by it. Much of the thinking behind this came directly from Benedict Friedlaender, a German pederast whose ideas had been adopted by the Nazi party and particularly the Hitler Youth. They appear to have been brought to the USA by emigré academics. However, Kinsey was also important because in his research he pointedly ignored gender performance and focussed only on sexual practice. This allowed the Accommodationists to play down the association between Homosexuality and femininity.
This new movement also followed Kinsey in seeing homosexuality as a function of behaviours and not of personality type. Indeed it rejected the model — still dominant all over the world and showing no sign of attrition — in which Homosexuals are feminine males and Lesbians masculine females. The former were attracted to masculine males and the latter to feminine females. Crucially, they are not attracted to others like themselves.
Professor Shmuel (Sam) Vaknin has proposed that this form, central to the New Gay Model, is not a form of Homosexuality as previously understood at all, but instead a form of auto-erotic narcissism in which the individual is attracted to himself, but in the form of a masculine male. This neatly explains the ‘clone gay’ scene and would relate to other, similar forms of auto-eroticism, like Autogynephilia, the male infatuation with himself in the form of a woman. It would be appropriate to call this Autoandrophilia, to follow the model. It seems to cause subjects, who might otherwise feminise themselves, to instead hyper-masculinise themselves, with varying success.
The new model — prevalent only in the West — destroyed the fragile base that the traditional Homosexual males, who were all feminine, had been struggling to build up. The devastation caused by the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s was perhaps the final nail in the traditionalist coffin. This was because it was believed — a belief encouraged by many in politics and the Media — that HIV/AIDS was a highly contagious disease spread by Homosexuals, and so, they were to be avoided, ostracised or worse. (*1) Hiding their innate femininity and adopting the slogan ‘We’re just like other men but we love each other’ took the heat off them and a New Order was formed, which I call the New Gay Man.
Under this regime, no femininity was to be allowed under any circumstances and homosexual males had to behave as if they were as masculine as heterosexual ones. Over the next three decades, the New Gay Model became dominant in the West, to the point that, certainly in Academia and middle-class society, the older, feminine model had been suppressed.
Outlawing Femininity
In his takeover strategy, the New Gay Man had outlawed femininity and any reference to it, but this created a problem because it clashed with the older theory of Sexual Inversion. The New Gay Man at once wanted to promote the innate nature of male homosexuality but reject the effect that should have had on gender. Instead of homosexual males being feminine, which they had been time out of mind, now they had to perform masculinity.
The New Gay Man was in a cleft stick; he wanted his sexuality to be innate, but he rejected the consequence of that, which was that he should be feminine, in order to attract masculine males. In other words, he wanted to have his cake and eat it.
To accommodate this, he turned to Plato via Friedlaender. Plato believed that ‘like attracts like’ Today, the West remains the only part of the world where homosexuals seek other homosexuals as partners. Everywhere else, the idea would be considered risible. Sexuality is almost universally seen as the attraction of opposites to each other. Gender performance allows homosexuals to appear to be girls and so attract the men they desire.
The dichotomy
This is where the nature or nurture dichotomy is thrown into sharp focus. We all know that opposites attract; this is natural. But the New Gay Man, because he wanted to conceal his natural femininity, sought to appear to be a masculine man. This is clearly a Constructed position; it is effected by grooming within the New Gay Man cult. As a result of the conflict this provokes, New Gay Man apologists have had to adopt a pretence that attraction is only to sex and that gender is immaterial.
Gender is a mate attraction system.
However, gender is a mate attraction system. It is why peacocks are brilliantly coloured and peahens are plain. In terms of nature or nurture, are peacocks as they are because of the way their mothers brought them up? What about in humans? Do girls grow breasts because of their upbringing? Do men grow beards for the same reason?
No, female humans are beautiful in order to attract males. Beauty is the expression of feminine gender, which is designed to attract men; so the performance of beauty is a deliberate statement of sexuality and more, sexual availability — which is why feminists, who are often butch lesbians, so hate it. At the same time, masculinity is optimised to attract females (and not other males.)
The New Gay Man seeks to pretend that, uniquely of all mammalian species, masculine men are sexually attracted to others of the same gender. To do this he protests that his orientation is all about attraction to penises. It is ‘same-sex attraction.’ That doesn’t exist, since attraction is to gender, not sex, but if he can sell that snake-oil, then he thinks he can normalise what is clearly not a natural phenomenon.
Sexual Inversion and Gender
Sexual Inversion causes a general shift towards the feminine, in males and towards the masculine, in females. This may be innate or congenital, per Ellis, or it may be acquired. In many cultures, recorded for literally millennia, Sexually Inverted males presented as women. This often involved castration, to prevent adult masculinisation. These individuals were Transsexuals as we should understand them today, but note, they were not necessarily congenital Sexual Inverts. In Rome, for example, slave boys were castrated to feminise them on their masters’ whim. The same happened in the Ottoman Empire..
In any case, by the late 1990’s feminine homosexual males had been all but erased from popular culture in the West. But then a strange thing happened, which only goes to prove the old adage ‘You can’t buck Evolution.’ Suddenly, increasing numbers of sexually inverted males and females began to seek to live in accordance with their sexuality. That is, Homosexuals lived as woman and Lesbians as men. This drove a coach and horses through all the theories about sexuality that the New Gay Man and his allies had concocted.
Transsexualism
Transsexualism in the West had become noticeable even before the 1960s, especially in parts of Europe. The southern nations of Portugal, Spain, southern France, Italy, Greece and Turkey all had significant, if largely ignored, populations of Transsexuals and Transvestites.
Transsexuals generally showed a consistent profile, one we have seen before. They tended to be small, lightly built, were neotenous and attracted to men, if they were male. Perhaps most importantly, their cross-gender identification appeared in early childhood and remained ‘insistent, persistent and consistent’ through puberty, when they also developed their attraction to men — if they had not already done so. These measures confirmed that they were Sexual Inverts, at the extreme end of a scale.
To put that another way, all Transsexuals were Homosexuals first. In Brazil, the saying is ‘Behind every travesti is a viado;‘ in the Philippines ‘Behind every ladyboy is a batang bakla.’ In order to be a Transsexual, one must be Homosexual.
Hostility and stealth
Because of the hostility they faced in the West, on the one hand from societies that were hostile to male femininity and on the other from the masculinist New Gay Man and his allies, these individuals, historically, tended to hide. They ‘woodworked’ and lived in ‘deep stealth.’ Instead of trying to assimilate into society as men, they did so as women, often marrying heterosexual men and vanishing from sight, always taking care never to reveal any clues about their past.
Recently, however, and as a result of an increased awareness of current ‘trans’ issues — most of which actually affect non-homosexual females — Sexual Inverts have come under the spotlight. These, if they live as women socially and take the appropriate hormones, I call them True Transsexuals or just Transsexuals. Unsurprisingly, the New Gay Man and his associates, including some Autogynephilic transvestites, have reacted viciously to the resurgence of a group they thought they had completely erased.
All Transsexuals are Homosexuals
The New Gay Man is hoist by his own petard. He seeks to claim that he is as he is because he was ‘born that way.’ His sexuality, therefore, must be innate, not acquired. In other words, he proposes an Essentialist explanation, not a Constructionist one. By doing so he implicitly accepts the idea of Sexual Inversion — something he has been trying to sweep under the carpet these last five decades.
More, he must accept that there is no fundamental difference between a Homosexual who presents in a pseudo-masculine manner and a male Transsexual. Perhaps there are degrees of variation but at root, they’re the same thing, they just look different. This truth causes the New Gay Man great cognitive dissonance.
So where do you stand in the nature or nurture debate? Please comment.
*1 Having lived and enjoyed a full romantic and sex life with a ladyboy who was HIV Positive for six years, and still testing negative myself, I can attest that HIV is much less contagious than many assume. A little care and basic precautions will protect you. I think the reasons it hit the ‘gay’ community in the West so hard was the outrageous promiscuity of the group and their habit of switching sexual roles.
