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army1987 comments on Holden's Objection 1: Friendliness is dangerous - LessWrong
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If you want more on the subject of how people think about sexuality, try Straight by Hanne Blank. She tracks the invention of heterosexuality (a concept which she says is less than a century old) in the west.
If part of CEV is finding out how much of what we think is obviously true is just stuff that people made up, life could get very strange.
The word is likely that recent, but is she claiming that the idea of being interested in members of the other sex but not in members of the same sex as sexual partners was unheard-of before that? Or what does she mean exactly?
It's a somewhat complex book, but part of her meaning is that the idea that there are people who are only sexually interested in members of the other sex, and that this is an important category, is recent.
How could such a thesis be viable, when so much of the historical data has been lost?
There's more historical data than you might think-- for example, the way the Catholic Church defined sexual sin in terms of actions rather certain sins being associated with types of people who were especially tempted to engage in them.
There's also some history of how sexual normality became more and more narrowly defined (Freud has a lot to answer for), and then the definitions shifted.
A good bit of the book is available for free at amazon, and I think that would be the best way for you to see whether Blank's approach is reasonable.
The introduction is a catalog of ambiguities about sex, gender, and sexual orientation:
All of these are fair enough, and I've only read the introduction, but I don't have a lot of confidence that she goes on to resolve these contradictions in Less Wrong tree-falls-in-a-forest style. Instead of trying to clarify what people mean when they something like "most people are heterosexual," I get the feeling she only wants to muddy the waters enough to say "no they aren't."
I think her point is closer to "people make things up, and keep repeating those things until they seem like laws of the universe".
A possible conclusion is that once people make a theory about how something ought to be, it's very hard to go back to the state of mind of not having an opinion about that thing.
The amazon preview includes the last couple of chapters of the book.
The book could be viewed as a large expansion of two Heinlein quotes: "Everybody lies about sex" and "Freedom begins when you tell Mrs. Grundy to fly a kite".
I don't recognize the quotes.
If so, then her point is more specific: "people made heterosexuality up." But I don't see how this can be supported. Every human being who has ever lived came from a male-female sex act. That has to serve as a lower bound for how unusual and made-up heterosexuality is.
I'll check it out.
Edit: By the way what I can see of the amazon preview is pretty heavily redacted, and doesn't include any complete chapter.
The abstract property that people we categorize as heterosexual have in common has existed, as you imply, for as long a members of bisexual species have been preferentially seeking out opposite-sex sex partners.
The explicit category in people's brains is more recent than that.
I mean, every human being who has ever lived came from a sex act between two people who were in close physical proximity, but that doesn't mean that the category of "people who prefer to have sex in close physical proximity to one another, rather than at a distance" has been explicitly represented. Indeed, I may have just made it up.
What do you mean by this? It's incorrect to say that people haven't noticed until recently that it's very common for men to seek out women for sex and vice versa. It's also incorrect to say that people haven't noticed until recently the exceptions to this practice.
Technically, given our modern technology, this is no longer true; though throughout most of human history this was indeed the case.
OK, but I think to say "almost every human being who has ever lived..." would be a misleading understatement.
When giraffes mate in such a manner as to produce viable offspring, is that "heterosexuality?"
If yes, why do male giraffes frequently engage in same-sex behavior when nearby females are not in oestrus and receptive to their advances?
To clarify: the term "heterosexuality" doesn't necessarily mean simply "male/female sexual contact." Humans have been doing that for as long as there have been humans. Humans have also been doing same-sex sexual contact for as long as there have been humans (this is not a controversial idea given the huge number of animal species that do, inclusive of our near relatives), but the phenomenon of people being defined as, or identifying with the terms "heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual" is quite recent and cultural-contextual.
Mating such that offspring may be viably produced is a piece of the territory. "Heterosexuality" is a label on one particular map of that territory, and its boundaries and name don't necessarily represent the reality accurately.
The map itself is part of a larger territory. Handshakes only occur in certain cultures; that does not mean there is no such thing as a handshake.
One more question: Why do people find it so interesting that some animals form same-sex pairings?
Your second question is very interesting! I don't know why asking it is contingent on a "yes" answer to your first question, which is tiresome.
If you like, I'd be interested to hear what you mean by these phrases in more detail:
The quotes are from Heinlein's "The Notebooks of Lazarus Long" which were sections in Time Enough for Love. In theory, they're the wisdom of a man who's thousands of years old. If you pay attention to the details, it turns out that they're selections by a computer (admittedly, a sentient computer) from hours of talk in which Lazarus Long was encouraged to say whatever he wanted. He could be mistaken or lying. He's none too pleased to be kept alive for his wisdom when he'd intended to commit suicide.
He may or may not be a mouthpiece for Heinlein.
Oh, so her thesis is that in the west, orientation-as-identity dates back to 1860-ish. I can imagine that being defensible. That's way different from what you originally wrote, though.
You see, the first thing that came to mind was Aristophanes' speech in the Symposium, which explicitly recognizes orientation-as-identity and predates the Catholic Church by a couple centuries.
Thanks for the cite.