Sexuality and American Culture

Or, rather, the truths it didn't.

I can say with conviction that Thursday's excursion to the New York City "Museum of Sex" was the first and most likely the only time that I will have ever received porn as an academic assignment.

Not surprisingly, it was a fairly pleasurable experience.

But beyond the obviously titillating aspects of the museum, primarily in the gift shop and on the second floor, its feature exhibit surrounding "The Sex Lives of Animals" was a novel and revelatory experience in itself. While I readily recalled from AP Biology much of the information displayed regarding the varieties of sexual and mating behavior within the animal world, never before had I received in my education the full scope of it, never had I learned of its broader implications on a larger scale, and never had I been prompted to consider it from such a particular point-of-view. After reading the introduction to the segment, however, on various animals' homosexual behavior, I realized that these shortcomings in my scientific education were certainly no mistake.

That discourse on homosexuality would be carefully censored even within the modern scientific realm would come as no surprise to Michel Foucault. I, however, trusting in the sciences as I do, had foolishly expected them, at least today, to be objective in disseminating the truths of the natural world. 

Apparently not. 

While my high school teacher and textbook discussed in detail the mutable nature of sex among certain species of fish, as well as the homosexual nature of certain species of lizards, these attributes were spoken of only from a strictly Darwinian point-of-view; that is, they were mentioned only if part of a distinct reproductive strategy. The whiptail lizards, for instance, are homosexual, in a way, simply because they are all female, and thus by mimicking male-female mating, they are, in effect, preparing to reproduce asexually. I remember everyone in my class finding this very interesting, although we never learned about the Bonobo Chimpanzees, whose female members are actually more prone to engage in homosexual behavior than hetero. And why do they do this? Purely for the hell of it, it seems. Well, no. Not really. What they are actually doing is strengthening their social bonds, which can be more of an evolutionary advantage than Darwin, himself, had anticipated or that many of his contemporary subscribers like to admit. But that's not all. The female chimpanzees clearly derive sexual pleasure from this activity, as they are observed to be having what we ladies would undoubtedly recognize as orgasms. So there you have it. Homosexuality is natural, it occurs in various species, it can have a direct reproductive goal, but it doesn't have to. What does that say?

Well, it at least explains why I didn't learn about this in Catholic school.