Nature shows the way

[asterroc]

Not only is homosexuality entirely natural, as evidenced by penguins, wolves, seagulls, and more, but so is divorce as evidenced by supposedly ever-faithful swans.

Comments

[erin-trying.livejournal.com]

Don't forget masturbation! That's natural too! My mom hates it when I bring that up.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Oh right, bonobos! How could I forget them in a discussion of animal sexuality?

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

And parrots.

Or so I've been told. Ahem.

I can't remember if I posted it, but there was a really awesome thing on wtf_nature a while back, about sexual "perversions" in the non-human world. And #1 on the list was monogamy, for its rarity (especially if you think of it in terms of "life-long, only one partner EVER" monogamy).

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

True, I've had a cockatiel do so. And is it bestiality if a non-human tries to mate with a human? Or if one non-human species tries to mate with a different one?

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

One of the funniest things I ever read via Savage Love was about this topic. It wasn't a regular column, but a HUGE and I mean VAST list of examples he'd collected over the years and posted online. There was one story about a budgie that made me just about fall out of my chair laughing.

I think it's only bestiality when it's person on non-human; all the rest of it is, I don't know, interspecies sex? (We don't need a fancy term for it since it isn't us doing it.)

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

And only if the instigator is the human, I presume, since I wouldn't call a bird humping my foot or a dog humping my leg bestiality.

[q10.livejournal.com]

it's cool and all, but i don't know what this naturalness is supposed to show in terms of social values. Bonobos also engage in activities that we'd probably call pedophilia and incest, and behaviors that would be naturally described as forcible rape are observed in a number of kinds of animals, but most of us, rightly, don't generally take those observations as legitimizing those behaviors for humans.

mind you, i have no objections to homosexuality, divorce, and masturbation - i just think that the ‘entirely natural’ thing is pretty weak evidence either way.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I personally agree with you. My reason for posting this is that some people say that homosexuality, etc., is/are unnatural, while in reality they are not. On the other hand, some people say it's bestial, so yeah, I don't personally think it's a good argument.

[q10.livejournal.com]

i think that in those instances ‘unnatural’ is being used in a sense that simply doesn't mean ‘unattested in the natural world’ - basically that as used it means something like ‘especially repugnant or disconcerting’. compare ‘If thou didst ever thy dear father love... Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.’, from Hamlet: although killing one's siblings willy-nilly is not especially adaptive, fratricide is far from unheard of among humans and presumably among a variety of other types of animals, and both Shakespeare and his audience probably knew this. likewise, i think most of us wouldn't object to describing the behavior of a human who made a practice of killing and eating her sexual partners as ‘unnatural’, but of course there are plenty of animal precedents for such conduct.