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LadyPact -> RE: Monogamy? (3/9/2016 8:21:13 AM)
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ORIGINAL: UllrsIshtar
You can eliminate the nature vs nurture to some extend. When you look at cultures with different nurture, and you see what people end up doing you can draw at least some conclusions about how much is nature and how much is nurture.
What you see in humans time and time again -not just when it comes to sexuality, but when it comes to any kind of topic where nature vs nurture is off debate- is that humans seem biologically programmed to NOT be homogenized.
Yes, we do tend to have that weird independence/rebellious streak, which tends to make us even more interesting. Even if we talked about twins, who really should have the closest 'nurture' possible, and share the same DNA blueprint, they can have different personality characteristics.
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By this I means that: no matter what the cultural norm is, MOST people seem to fall in the middle of adhering to that culture norm. But on either side of the bell-curve, you're also going to find people who deviate by the norm, either by extreme adherence to the cultural norm, or by deviating from it.
I don't want to stick my foot in my mouth here, but this is why I said I find monogamy to be the cultural norm in the US. From that societal norm, we get all of the other neat deviations, because it's mixed with all of those different attitudes and preferences. I still think it would be cool to research why.
(Trimmed some.)
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When it comes to sexuality, most people again will fall in the fluid middle... they'd be able to be either straight or bi, either monogamous or poly, either kinky or vanilla, all depending on what the cultural norm happens to be. Whatever they're nurtured towards is what they'll end up being, and in a different culture, their sexual orientation could have ended up being something else from what it currently is.
Oddly enough, I phrase this differently because I see a lot of people as "optional". (You have to work with me a bit on this one.) Let's go back to Kinsey. Yes, I know it's outdated. [:)]
As a very limited model, Kinsey proved, at least behaviorally-wise about sexuality that you are right. Zeroes and sixes do exist but the bell curve works, even with people. The problem with Kinsey is the results are skewed because the nature of the volunteers were those less strict with certain behaviors. If the same study happened today with different attitudes, or if the pool of research were different, we'd get a different result. We'd still have a bell curve but the scale has the potential to be different.
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Then there's the people who fall on the extremes. They will be driven to either extremely adhere to the cultural norm, or to completely divert from it.
The question is: is it their sexuality that's programmed or is it their need to adhere/divert that's programmed.
Exactly one of the points we can't prove.
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In other words: is somebody born programmed to adhere, and so if they grew up in a poly culture, they would be extremely poly, whereas if they grew up in a mono culture, they would be extremely poly. And if they're born to divert, they'd end up poly in a mono culture, and mono in a poly culture.
OR
Is somebody born poly, and if they grew up in a mono culture, they'll end up automatically falling into the 'divergence' category, while if they grew up in a poly culture, they'd end up falling into the 'extreme adherence' category.
I tend to think it's the firt one, which means that somebody who ends up extremely poly in a mono culture, does that because they're biologically programmed to divert from their nurturing. So in a sense, while it's the nurturing that shapes the end result, it's also biologically inevitable that they would be end up deviating from the norm... which norm they'd end up deviating from just depends on the culture, but 'outsider' type people would probably ended up being outsider type people, no matter what nurturing they received growing up.
I tend to think the problem that we have here would be which part of nature. Sexuality nature or personality nature? Either could go back to biological roots, so it's a stalemate of sorts.
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So far, we haven't found a single species that's actually sexually faithful though. While there are animals who pair up for life, we have found that in all of them, between 10% and 40% of the young are not genetically related to the male that's raising them.
What we think of as pair bonded, or 'monogamous' animals cheat. They cheat quite a lot actually.
They also cheat in very predictable patterns: females will only cheat with males then are more desirable biologically (stronger, prettier, more fit) than the one they've got. They may have to settle for a 'lessor male' raising their young, but they're try to get the best genetic material for those young they can get.
Males, on the other hand, will cheat any chance they get. It doesn't matter if the female is worse or better than the one they've got, if she's letting him mate her, and he's fairly convinced his partner won't find out, he will.
Just personal opinion, but people are the same way. I have no problem with the OP's definition of monogamy for her. It works for the people that it works for... Until it doesn't. I don't have it in me to sit here and say that everybody who goes out and cheats on their monogamous partner was really just poly underneath. From the data we have just from the message boards, do you really see it that way? Now we have to mix in other factors, so we have more variables. At some point, there just aren't enough integers.
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