Homosexuality, what are its causes?

Philosophy Forums Psychology and Mind
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How much of homosexuality can be explained by one or more of the following: paraphilia, auto-eroticism, fetishes, sexual abuse or very blurred boundaries during key developmental periods in childhood, comorbidity influence from other conditions such as gender dysphoria or autism spectrum-related confusions about self-identity, influences coming from society, media or peer groups, environmental factors such as hormones in foods, or certain genes or gene mutations?

This is a serious topic. Those of you who are gay or have gay friends or family, maybe you can share some insights here.

Clearly the biological and social norm is heterosexuality, for obvious evolutionary reasons. Most people are sexually into the opposite sex. But there are also lots of people who have very weird sexual obsessions, fetishes, etc. and I tried to explain some of how this can occur in another post here due to what is called excitation transfer theory.

Carleas made a good point once that homsexuality can have other supporting reasons for existing socially, since sex itself cannot be reduced entirely to its utility for procreation. Sex has other socially-relevant utilities beyond this, so homosexuality and all the other non-standard sexual orientations and practices may find usefulness in these other areas. And of course there is the whole “love is love” angle that simply wishes to explain homosexuality entirely in terms of being literally no different from heterosexuality. A person just happens to have attraction and love for members of the same sex, nothing to see here.

Unfortunately for that simplistic happy view, this is a philosophy forum and philosophy requires that we see explanations, causes, understanding. This is pretty easy to do with regard to heterosexuality. But deviations from that norm must be accounted for. I want to examine all possible causes or influences that may contribute to a person becoming gay. This is purely for my own understanding and to improve my ideas, getting my mind to align more accurately with truth. I have nothing against gay people personally, in fact I find homosexuality interesting. The supposed moral badness of it according to Christianity and traditional American social norms has more to do with enforcing the proper sexual norms, which is a centripetal kind of force maintaining a standard of health and fitness for the group as a whole. Behaviors that tend to harm the group in terms of its health and fitness will naturally become subject to various sorts of pressures and forces keeping them at a minimum. The actual “morality” of homosexuality doesn’t concern me, any more than the supposed morality of sex in general. Sex itself doesn’t become a moral issue until some degree of harm is being caused, at least that is how I see it.

So let’s try to keep this topic focused more objectively and scientifically in terms of possible causes and influences for why a person might be gay, and not about anything morality-related.

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Is that the same as “exotic becomes erotic”? (nm, I remember now… something about coping with trauma by turning it into something pleasurable, right?)

I think that^, coupled with trauma related to power imbalances between the sexes, may contribute to gender dysphoria, and preferences unrelated to reproduction.

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@HumAnIze have you read about the older brother effect? The more older brothers a boy has, the more likely he is to be gay.

One possible explanation of the relationship might be a social / nurture thing - something about having an older brother makes it more likely to have experiences that lead to homosexuality, perhaps - but the older brother effect is commonly believed to have another, biological reason for why it would produce gay men:

A mother’s body during pregnancy may react differently to a new boy after having had previous boys.

According to 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. This would leave some regions of the brain associated with sexual orientation in the ‘female typical’ arrangement – or attracted to men.

The article also gives a good reason to think that the older brother effect is not social in nature, and is probably entirely biological:

This is because the effect is present regardless of whether or not the older brothers are raised in the same family environment with the boy. There is no effect when the number of older brothers is increased by adopted brothers or stepbrothers.

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Interesting. Are you/science saying normal differentiation produces heterosexuals?

A lazy google scholar question produced this answer:

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Homosexuality is a sexual perversion created and caused by the lower and defeated males of Mammalian Hierarchies.

Naturally, there is one Alpha, the Dominator, the one who penetrates all else. Then there are lower males, who share different levels of being violated (emasculated, effeminated, made “womanly”).

It really is that simple.

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I don’t know what you mean by that, so I don’t know. I think you can take the Wikipedia article at face value though, and just see that it’s saying it’s an immune response. If you want to call that “normal differentiation” then thats up to you.

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Well … if you think I’m calling it normal differentiation, I’m not, and neither is the article. The claim is that the immune response leads to abnormal differentiation due to something on the level of an autoimmune disorder, implying normal differentiation (without disorder/interruption) is heterosexual. Unless you have reason to doubt the findings of the studies referenced by the article?

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Most men aren’t gay, so it’s pretty clear and uncontroversial that normally, the sexual differentiation process for males results in heterosexual males. I don’t think anybody disputes that most men aren’t gay.

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I wonder how possible it is to suss out genetic, non-genetic environmental, and willful determinants of preference?

For example, one has nicotine receptors and a genetic history of nicotine addiction, but grows up completely oblivious of the existence of tobacco, tobacco products, or vapes & sh**—will they still develop a 2-pack-a-day … “preference”?

Another has a history of zero addiction, comes from a long line of boring people, and decided they wanted to smoke… They smoked more even when they didn’t need it yet, SO THAT they would need it. What a twat, right??

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That’s very interesting, thanks. Interesting about the mother’s own immune response being a possible contributing factor. This older brother thing also fits with the fact that the older your parents are when you are conceived, the more new random gene mutations they will pass onto you. This is mostly the case with fathers over the age of 40 or so, but there is a similar if smaller effect from mothers too. Logically, since younger siblings would have been born to parents who were older compared to when their older siblings were born, it could have a multiplying effect when taken with the older brother Y-chromosome thing.

That also raises the point that most likely most or maybe all factors mentioned thus-far in this topic are contributing in small ways, and these can have multiplying interactive effects with each other. Basically influences pushing in similar directions but from more than one source.

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I wouldn’t rule out the “monkey see monkey do” effect, either.

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I read something a year or two ago, that the more sons a father has and lords over, the more frequency of emasculation occurring to the weakest male of the litter. These tend to be the ‘Effete’ males of society. Because not only do they have a virile, masculine father to compete against… but they have older, stronger, healthier brothers in front of their inheritance to compete with.

Weak males tend to take up feminine traits and strategies, like, becoming overly-attached and bonded to the Mother figure.

Or women in general, aka. Simping.

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Completely plausible, but then you would expect adopted boys with older brothers to also be gay at increased rates - they don’t seem to be. Boys with older brothers from the same mother are more likely to be gay.

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Maybe if the father was genuinely strong and not fake-strong (“lording it”), the son wouldn’t have said “eff that”?

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There are definitely Epigenetic factors at play. Having biological children affects testosterone levels of the entire family, which might explain why Orphaned children or Surrogate parenting have different outcomes of effete qualities.

For example, if a white family of 7 adopt an orphaned black son with high Testosterone, that’s going to create a different dynamic than an 8th biological son who is already at the back-end of his biological Father’s virility.

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Are these defined by those who “lord it” (devalue, disempower), by any chance? Can’t imagine for what they might be overcompensating??

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Think about Masculine competition for a minute… violent, physical aggression, evoking fear.

In families with lots of males, a strong male father, masculine older brothers, who’s going to get bullied around the most, if not the youngest or weakest male heirs, correct???

It’s not complicated to understand, right?

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From my position, any male who bullies another male is attacking their own internal insecurities. Don’t know what else to tell ya.

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Young male boys compete because of their testosterone, and bullying can be simplified into asserting dominance and control over others, “having fun”. This is likened to Psychopathy too. It’s not abnormal.

You just don’t understand, because you’re a girl.

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It doesn’t register as “strong” to me.

To me, strong is not an unstable person, but one who brings/exudes stability.

They only act out to extinguish a fire.