Snapshots from the last days of June: New York governor Paterson participated in the Gay Pride March in the City. In Malaysia, opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim was accused by an aide of participating in homosexual acts, which are punishable by up to 20 years in prison in that country.
I thought Florida governor Charlie Crist was being ironic last week when he ended his New York Times Magazine interview with Deborah Solomon with the words: "Stay tune" after being asked how come he could not find a woman in Florida... (see previous post) On Thursday he announced that he had proposed to a 'lady' from New York, a 38 years old divorcée with two young children. They plan to marry soon. The father of the two kids must have been delighted to learn that governor Crist was thrilled with the prospect of helping raise them... The governor's father told a reporter of the Miami Herald the amazing: "Charlie's been more serious in this relationship than I've seen him in a long time with a young lady." We are all reassured.
I also thought that seahorses were an hermaphroditic species. That was the reason why - he explained in his book, Art and Sex in Greenwich Village (Caroll & Graf, 2007) - Felice Picano named his gay publishing venture SeaHorse Press. But no, they are not. This is one of the things I learned in Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People (Joan Roughgarden, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2004, 474 pp.). I had bought the book several years ago when it was published, after reading an interview with the author, a professor of biology at Stanford University who is also a transgender woman. I had left it in Miami. It is very stimulating intellectually and it somewhat disrupted my summer reading plans... The subject is sexual diversity. After defining ubiquious terms like male, female, masculine, feminine and gender, Part I, Animal Rainbows, is about sexual diversity in animals. We are told everything we wanted to know about "the means of sexual reproduction", female-only species, species with more than two genders, hermaphrodites, same-sex relationships, etc, "spanning many styles of bodies, family organizations, and patterns of bonding between and within sexes, each with its own value and its own internal logic." The text is full of lively (often ironically anthropomorphic) descriptions of many fascinating animal species. My favorites are: the bush babies, nocturnal squirrel-like primates from central Africa, which copulation is unusually slow, lasting one to two hours; the seahorses where the female places her eggs in a male's pouch, the eggs are fertilized there and the male becomes 'pregnant'; male vampire bats hanging belly to belly licking one another, both with erect penis; and of course the bonobos, our closest cousins, with their extensively documented same-sex sexuality. Joan Roughgarden's conclusion is that Darwin's theory of sexual selection (but not natural selection) is false. She suggests a new theory which "accommodates variation in gender and sexuality. It envisages animals as exchanging help in return for access to reproductive opportunity, producing a biological 'labor market' for mutual assistance by employing reproductive opportunity as currency. This theory proposes that animals evolve traits that qualify them for inclusion in groups that control resources for reproduction and safe places to live and raise offspring."
Part II, Human Rainbows, deals with human development and includes extensive discussions of all variations in sexual behaviors, orientations, gender, anatomy, etc. In the end you have to admit that you get confuse... For example, motivations for transgender expression vary along a spectrum spanning from gender identification to fetishism...
The shorter, less convincing, Part III, Cultural Rainbows, is dedicated to a survey of gender and sexuality variation across cultures and through history.
Overall Evolution's Rainbow is an exciting reading.
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I was happy to see that one of the books I took with me for the summer break was mentioned this week among the summer books recommended by the Financial Times (together with a full review): The Story of a Marriage. I will come back to it.
2008.07.06