Heterosexuality Isn’t Natural
Photo by satya deep on Unsplash
It’s something said over and over again by conservative pundits. “Why Homosexuality is Abnormal?” goes the title of Michael Levin’s infamous article, which was published in 1984 inside the well-known philosophy Journal The Monist. “This paper defends the view that homosexuality is abnormal and hence undesirable — not because it is immoral or sinful, or because it weakens society or hampers evolutionary development, but for a purely mechanical reason.” He then goes on to talk about how the penis just fits into the vagina. “They are just made for each other,” he writes, purely academically, of course.
For centuries, whether using science or religion, people have used the philosophy of the time to justify their disgust of queerness. This conservative meme, however, is not rooted in biology. We have no evidence indicating that homosexuality is abnormal, and more than that, we have no evidence to indicate that heterosexuality as an identity is natural either.
One of the common arguments LGBTQIA2+ people will use to counteract the claim that queerness is unnatural is to bring up the diversity of sex and gender within the animal kingdom. From mating to parenting, there are documented instances of same-sex behavior in nearly 1,000 species, and many where sex doesn’t happen at all. Animals don’t have sexual orientation in the same way humans do, but claiming that same-sex activity is unnatural is patently false.
Male giraffes, for example, engage in an overwhelming amount of same-sex activity. Herds are mostly segregated by sex, and while in male herds (and sometimes even not within them), male giraffes will often engage in a ritual where they curl their necks around each other and rut — a process called “necking.” As Adam Rutherford writes in Humanimal: How Homo Sapiens Became Nature’s Most Paradoxical Creature — A New Evolutionary History, “… robust conclusions are elusive. But it does appear that the majority of sexual encounters in giraffes involve two males necking, followed by anal sex. Not all necking encounters result in attempted or successful mounting, but in many cases, the necking males spar with erect unsheathed penises.”
That sounds pretty queer to me.
Gender is also very fluid in the Animal Kingdom. Animals like the Banana Slug are entirely hermaphroditic (i.e., they have working gametes associated with both males and females). Many animal species have a minority of individuals in their populations that share a combination of these two organs, though they are not always functional. This gap is partly why the term hermaphrodite is offensive to humans, and the label intersex is used instead. There has never been a documented case of a true human Hermaphrodite (i.e., where they have both working ovaries and gonads). To claim otherwise ties into a painful history beyond the scope of this article.
Additionally, some species experience a process known as sequential hermaphroditism, meaning that they start as one sex and transition to another. Clownfish, for example, live in sea anemones with a group of small males and two mature fish of both sexes. If the female dies or is otherwise removed, the mature male clownfish will shift into her new role as the adult female. The second-largest male will then rapidly grow into his new role as the sexually mature male.
There are also animals such as the Spotted Hyena, whose sexual anatomy goes against what we humans typically perceive as male and female. The Spotted Hyena has a penile clitoris, which is the name of a hypertrophied clitoris in the shape of a phallus. They also have fused-together labia that resemble a ballsack. Female Spotted Hyenas pee and give birth through this penile clitoris, making it difficult to tell males and females apart from genitalia alone. As zoologist Kay E. Holekamp writes in 2011 for The New York Times: “every once in a while, a hyena fools us, and an individual believed to be a male for two or three years one day shows up nursing cubs at the den!”
Usually, this is where the conversation ends. Queer people will claim that the idea of “queerness being unnatural” is false, and we will go about our respected days, obliviously to the fact we can go further in the debate. Straight people are so sure that their lifestyles are correct that we never place them on the defensive. We do not ask if “straightness,” or the idea that our species is naturally inclined to confining itself exclusively to opposite-sex pairings, is the natural way to go?
And I am sorry, the evidence does not support that position.
Let’s return to the animal kingdom again. One of our closest living relatives is the Bonobo. We share 98% of our DNA with them. They are great apes located in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Their existence seems to contradict the classic Darwinian meme that nature is a competition or a “survival of the fittest.” Bonobos are a matriarchal society that centers on communication in a lot of what they do. This doesn’t make them free from aggression (especially in captivity where food dynamics are different), but they are less violent than their chimpanzee cousins. As Melissa Hogenboom writes in BBC:
“While chimpanzees tend to be more aggressive and manipulative, bonobos are much more gentle. In fact they are so gentle they often express their affections towards many members of the group with sex, the so-called bonobo handshake.”
Sex is a core facet of how their society operates. It is used to defuse tensions during high-stress events like pre-feeding. Bonobo sex can get quite animated, and like with humans, it often involves same-sex pairings. In the words of Jack Hitt in Lapham’s Quarterly: “All bonobos frequently have homosexual sex — the males being quite fond of hanging upside down, face to face, from a tree and engaging in what the gay community calls frottage (some primatologists call it “penis fencing”; to most teenagers, it’s better known as dry humping.).”
Our other living ancestor is the Chimpanzee, with whom we also share roughly 98% of our DNA. They are admittedly more patriarchal than the Bonobo. Chimpanzees are territorial and violent. As the lead author of a study published in Nature in 2014 wrote: “We found that chimpanzees sometimes kill other chimpanzees, regardless of whether human impacts are high or low, whereas bonobos were not observed to kill, whatever the level of human impacts.” Chimps have been known to guard resources and do not have sex for pleasure as Bonobos do. In fact, outside of the narrow period that female Chimps can conceive, male Chimpanzees do not seem much interested in sex at all.
Even here, however, this Spartan image of Chimpanzee heterosexuality is not as clear-cut. Chimps have been known to engage in same-sex activity. As authors, Brookera, Webb, and Claya write in their paper Fellatio among male sanctuary-living chimpanzees during a period of social tension: “…chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) are also known to engage in same-sex sexual behaviour across multiple contexts (Savage-Rumbaugh & Wilkerson, 1978). Pan same-sex sexual behaviours include mounting, genital touching, and rump-rump touching (de Waal, 1988; Goodall, 1989).”
Again, that sounds pretty queer to me. Evolutionary biology is not on the side of heterosexuals. We have two options among our closest living relatives — a queer as f@ck matriarchy and bicurious bros, and neither one of them is particularly straight.
And of course, our understanding of evolutionary biology is only coming into focus now because our society’s own homophobia has severely limited our study of animal sexuality. Not too long ago, people would literally censor their findings of same-sex activity in the Animal Kingdom because it was seen as improper. When, for example, zoologist George Murray Levick researched the world’s largest Adelie penguin colony in Antarctica from 1911 to 1912, he omitted his findings of the penguins “astonishingly” depraved sexual activity. These included having sex with dead females, young penguins, and apparently, equally shocking, other living males. It would take 50 years before this knowledge was rediscovered.
Sometimes this bias does not just lead to direct censorship but structures how we perceive the knowledge we do observe. The scientific community did not embrace findings of the Bonobo for over two decades because it contradicted widespread assumptions about evolutionary biology and human nature — i.e., that we are “killer apes” in the mold of the Chimpanzee. As primatologist Frans de Waal told Jack Hitt: “It was totally ignored. When something doesn’t fit your thinking, the best way to deal with it is to shove it out the window and ignore it, and that’s what the scientific community did for about twenty years.”
It also bears mentioning that humanity is itself very queer. I will not go into too much detail in this article, but historically, you can develop countless examples of people violating the “straight” ideal of sexuality and gender. There have been queer people recorded in every major empire that has a historical record to observe. Queer kings have led nations. Queer writers have written poems and novels that inspire people for generations. Queer icons have been Gods and other vital aspects of mythology. There are so many counterexamples that it's almost like queerness is natural or something.
Polling data also shows us that the overall percentage of the population that identifies as LGBT is growing in many countries. A recent Gallop poll had the number of self-identified LGBT Americans jumped to 5.6% of the overall population and nearly 15.9% for Generation Z (1997–2002). We see a similar generational shift in France, Germany, and many others. This generational gap indicates that social factors may be driving this shift.
As stigmatization of queerness lessens, more of the population is simply doing what feels right, and that should tell you something about humanity in general — heterosexuality is not our natural state.
While heterosexual sex will probably continue indefinitely, heterosexuality as an identity is a social construction that has nothing to do with biology. There is nothing to indicate that our species gravitates to heterosexual sex exclusively as a matter of survival.
The Animal Kingdom is a crazy hodgepodge of various survival mechanisms. Contrary to conservative opinion, you do not need to have heterosexual sex exclusively for an animal species to propagate its line. Giraffe males have way more homosexual sex than they do heterosexual sex, and yet their species has survived for millions of years.
In fact, when we look at our closest living ancestors, the less grounded in “nature,” this conservative argument appears. The Bonobo engages in many different types of sexual activity, and to a much, much, much lesser extent, so does the Chimpanzee. Many animals are like this, including humans.
Heterosexuality as we know it is a social construction that has formed outside the realm of biology. It is a product of society, and like all things in society, it can change.