Gender, Gender And Mating ( Levay 2011 ) - 1676 Words

â€Å"Little boxes... little boxes... little boxes made of ticky-tacky.† There happens to be a blue one, a green one and a yellow one on the hillside, and they all look just the same. One can imagine that the good ol’ traditional family living in one of these boxes, in Malvina Reynold’s anthem of dismay for suburbia, consists of a cisgender husband and wife, 2.01 children, and a bestial companion (perhaps a cat, a dog, a mistress, a cabana boy, you name it). If natural selection is in this family’s favor, the 2.01 children would be able to find mates of their own and successfully produce children who can continue the familial lineage. However dominant the heterosexual may be in various cultural ethos, historical cultural contexts enforce†¦show more content†¦Based on the life stories he heard, Freud assumed that homosexual men reversed their internal gender role to satisfy the unrequited attraction to their mothers (LeVay 2011: 29). Freud’ s experiences with his clients does not count as evidence for the theory (LeVay 2011: 33). The conflict with the so-called oedipal complex is not a sufficient ground for sexual orientation, since there are many homosexuals who are comfortable identifying with conventional gender types as well as have good parental relationships. One can safely say that parental relationship is not the cause of sexual orientation, but another aspect of life may be. Behaviorist theory supposed that homosexuality is a learned trait from enjoying an initial same-sex experience and re-enforcement from repeated self-pleasuring to that experience (Cameron Cameron; McGuire et al. cited in LeVay 2011: 34). In a sense, homosexuality was deemed as a product filled into an initially virgin child through operant conditioning, as same-sex urges are means for gratification rather than castigation. However, cultural evidence shows that first sexual experiences do not determine a person’s subsequent sexual orientation. Victims of child sexual abuse do not establish their sexual orientation from their first experiences,