closet men: "Wake up," she cries. "Men and women are different."
THE CAUSES OF MALE HOMOSEXUALITY
A man develops a sexual preference for women because his brain develops in a certain way. It develops in a certain way because
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testosterone produced•by his genetically determined testicles alter the brain inside his mother 's womb in such a way that later, at puberty, it will react to testosterone again: Miss out on the genes for testicles, the testosterone burst in the womb, or the testosterone burst at puberty—any one of the three—and you will not be a typical man: Presumably, a man who develops a preference for other men is a man who has a different gene that affects how his testicles develop or a different gene that affects how his brain responds to hormones or a different learning experience during the pubertal burst of testosterone—or some combination of these: The search for the cause of homosexuality has begun to shed a great deal of light on the way the brain develops in response to testosterone. It was fashionable until the 1960s to believe that homosexuality was entirely a matter of upbringing: But cruel Freudian aversion therapy proved incapable of changing it, and the fashion then changed to hormonal explanations. Yet adding male hormones to the blood of gay men does not make them more heterosexual; it merely makes them more highly sexed. Sexual orientation has already been fixed before adulthood: Then, in the 1960s, an East German doctor named Gunter Dorner began a series of experiments on rats which seemed to show that in the womb the male homosexual brain releases a hormone, called ,luteinizing hormone, that is more typical of female brains. Dorner, whose motives have often been questioned on the grounds that he seemed to be searching for a way to "cure" homosexuality, castrated male rats at different stages of development and injected them with female hormones: The earlier the castration, the more likely the rat was to solicit sex from other male rats. Research in Britain, America, and Germany has all confirmed that a prenatal exposure to deficiency of testosterone increases the likelihood of a man becoming homosexual. Men with an extra X chromosome and men exposed in the womb to female hormones are more likely to be gay or effeminate, and effeminate boys do indeed grow up to be gay more often than other boys: Intriguingly, men who were conceived and born in periods of great stress, such as toward the end of World War II, are more often gay than men born at other times: (The stress hormone cor-SEXING THE MIND
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tisol is made from the same progenitor as testosterone; perhaps it uses up the raw material, leaving less to be made into testosterone.) The same is true of rats: Homosexual behavior is more common in rats whose mothers were stressed during pregnancy. The things that male brains are usually good at gay brains are often bad at, and vice versa. Gays are also more often left-handed than heterosexuals, which makes a sort of sense because handedness is affected by sex hormones during development, but it is also odd because left-handed people are supposed to be better at spatial tasks than right-handers. This only demonstrates how sketchy our knowledge still is of the relationship between genes, hormones, brains, and skills."
It is clear, however, that the cause of homosexuality lies in some unusual balance of hormonal influence in the womb but not later on, a fact that further supports the idea that the mentality of sexual preference is affected by prenatal sex hormones. This is not incompatible with the growing evidence that homosexuality is genetically determined: The "gay gene " that I will discuss in the next chapter is widely expected to turn out to be a series of genes that affect the sensitivity of certain tissues to testosterone.27 It is both nature and nurture:
It is no different from genes for height: Fed on identical diets, two genetically different men will not grow to the same height: Fed on different diets, two identical twins will grow to different heights. Nature is the length of the rectangle, nurture the width. There can be no rectangle without both: The genes for height are really only genes for responding to diet by growing. i8
WHY DO RICH MEN MARRY BEAUTIFUL WOMEN?
If homosexuality is determined by hormonal influences in the womb, then so, presumably, are heterosexual preferences. Throughout our evolutionary history, men and women have faced different sexual opportunities and constraints: For a man casual sex with a stranger carried only a small risk—infection, discovery by the wife—and a potentially enormous reward: a cheap addition of an
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extra child to his genetic legacy. Men who seized such opportunities certainly left behind more descendants than men who did not.
Therefore, since we are by definition descended from prolific ancestors rather than barren ones, it is a fair bet that modern men possess a streak of sexual opportunism: Virtually all male mammals and birds do, even those that are mainly monogamous. This is not to say that men are irredeemably promiscuous or that every man is a potential rapist, it is just that men are more likely to be tempted by an opportunity for casual sex than women: Women are likely to be different: Having sex with a stranger not only encumbered a Pleistocene woman with a possible pregnancy before she had won the man 's commitment to help rear the child, but it also exposed her to probable revenge from her husband if she had one and to possible spinsterhood if she did not.
These enormous risks were offset by no great reward. Her chances of conceiving were just as great if she remained faithful to one partner, and her chances of losing the child without a husband 's help were greater. Therefore, women who accepted casual sex left fewer rather than more descendants, and modern women are likely to be equipped with suspicion of casual sex: Without this evolutionary history in mind, it is impossible to explain the different sexual mentalities of men and women. It is fashionable to deny such differences and to maintain that only social repression prevents women from buying explicit pornography about men or that only socially paranoid machismo drives men to promiscuity. Yet this is to ignore the enormous social pressures now placed on men and women to disregard or minimize differences between them. A modern woman is exposed to pressure from men to be sexually uninihibited, but she is also exposed to the same pressure from other women. Likewise, men are under constant pressure to be more
" responsible, " sensitive, and faithful—from other men as well as from women. Perhaps more out of envy than morality, men are just as censorious of philanderers as they are of women; often more so: If men are sexual predators, it is despite centuries of social pressure not to be: In the words of one psychologist, "Our repressed impulses are every bit as human as the forces that repress them:""
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But what exactly are the differences between men and women in their sexual mentalities? I argued in the last two chapters that men, for whom the reproductive stakes are higher, are likely to be more competitive with one another and therefore are more likely to end up wielding power, controlling wealth, and seeking fame.
Consequently, women are more likely to have been rewarded for seeking power, wealth, or fame in a husband than men are in a wife.
Women who did so probably left more descendants among modern women, so it follows from evolutionary thinking that women are more likely CO value potential mates who are rich and powerful.
Another way to look at it is to think of what a woman can most profitably seek in a husband that will increase the number and health of her children. The answer is not more sperm but more money or more cattle or more tribal allies or whatever resource counts: