Kinky, Kinky Genes

"It's a good thing I'm genetically programmed to like this ... otherwise, I might feel a little silly ..." Image source: Whipped Ass.com.
So I found an article online which considered the notion that dominance and submission behavior might have a genetic origin: a "sex fetish gene" was the way it was phrased in the headline, though the phrasing in the article was at the same both vaguer and more specific: "wired for dominance and submission."

I've always been kind of leery of these claims of genetic origins for sexual tastes. That's because the gay community long ago adopted the notion that gayness was genetically determined way back when. They claimed it was a result of early childhood feelings of gayness, etc., but there was an obvious social agenda item there: if gayness was genetically determined, people did not become gay because they were "converted" to gayness by other gays, as many cultural conservatives have maintained. (I.e., gays are awful sexual predators by nature who must be kept away from our innocent young men through harsh, stringent laws.) It was kind of a "vampire" model of sexuality, and claiming that gayness was genetically determined was the gay community's silver bullet of a response to that claim.

Only problem was, there was no scientific evidence that it was so. In fact, there's a huge scientific objection to it, in the form of evolutionary science. See, the way evolution works in the case of most traits, is that over hundreds of thousands of generations a trait that has a tiny, tiny evolutionary advantage ... say, it gives individuals in the species a one percent advantage in survival ... will eventually be present in 100 percent of the species. It's that slow grinding over thousands or even millions of generations that does the trick, and of course, the greater the advantage, the faster the change takes place.

This is also true for traits that have an unfavorable effect on reproductive success, except that instead of spreading throughout the population, they vanish over thousands of generations. Do you see where I am going? If there was ever a genetic trait that would have a drastically negative effect on reproductive success, it would have to be being sexually attracted to your own gender. No babies there!

I've heard a number of counter-arguments to this point: gayness may be a recessive trait that is carried along by a survival-enhancing dominant trait, gays tend to have children in primitive societies due to overwhelming pressures to do so whether they want to or not, gayness in siblings may have an advantage in that the gay siblings help raise the children of their straight brothers and sisters, etc.

None of it strikes me as a sufficiently powerful argument to deal with the stumbling block that evolutionary theory imposes: the thoroughness with which evolution deals with traits that have very tiny effects on reproductive success makes the overwhelming disadvantage imposed by genetic gayness seem, well ... impossible to overcome. Even if ALL of those factors combined reduced the reproductive disadvantage of gayness from, say, -90 percent to, say, -10 percent, that's still a HUGE disadvantage.

So my own personal feeling is .. I don't know, and I've not seen anything convincing enough to make me "know" that gayness either is or is not genetic.

Now in relation to bondage kink, John Norman back in the 80s took a hell of a lot of flack for claiming that women were submissive and men dominant in the "order of nature" which sounds kinda genetic. I never bought that either, but not on evolutionary grounds, after all, dominance and submission behavior could well be neutral in terms of reproductive success as it occurs in heterosexual couples and I've not seen any arguments, much less convincing ones, that it affects reproductive success at all.

I rejected Norman's line because it claims that since human beings may have certain natural tendencies towards dominance and submission, that every relationship between men and women must be determined by those tendencies. Now this might be true of chimps, baboons and monkeys, which are mostly instinctual creatures, but human beings engage in behaviors that are WAAAAAAY more complex than other great apes and monkeys. We play the banjo. We write computer programs. We write blogs! We don't do any of those things instinctively. By far the majority of human behavior is learned. Being human is mostly about engaging in learned behavior.

It is very evident that in respect to the learned behaviors that define human beings, women are pretty much the equals of men in every way, and should be treated as our equals, even if we did have a natural disposition to dominate them, which I don't necessarily buy anyway (not enuogh hard evidence). This does not mean we can't ENJOY dominance and submission feelings in our sex play, ramping up the differences between the sexes to ramp up our enjoyment of one another. But we don't have to behave like baboons just because we evolved from a species of ape much like baboons. We're humans!

So in my mind, the jury is out on the issue of kinky genes of every description. Maybe overwhelming evidence will come along some day, but in the meantime, I advocate tolerance and kindness. Seems to work out well in lieu of certainty.