'Against nature'
Submitted by Heather on November 26 2000 14:26:57
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A post below about there being a biological argument in favor of heterosexuality made me wonder, in a lighthearted fashion, where such arguments would lead if we started from scratch, rather than try to assess the dangerousness of a single activity. The obvious question facing anyone who wants to know what form of sexuality Nature prefers is what Nature wants. I would say that the evidence is in favor of Nature wanting survival. Nature wants individuals to survive (which is why she gives individuals various methods of staving off death), and she wants species to survive (which is why she gives individuals various forms of reproduction, to continue the species). As I understand it from looking through the sexual health sites, no form of contact sex is complete safe. Even mutual masturbation can result in venereal warts. However, the four most common forms of intercourse (historically speaking) have their relative degrees of safety, which (in my amateurish fashion) I'll explore below. Anal sex. For reasons which will quickly become clear, I don't see any point in trying to determine whether anal sex or vaginal sex is riskier; it's enough to say here that anal sex does pose a high risk, being a penetrative activity. So does vaginal sex. Those of us who have vaginas know that these recepticals are perfect breeding grounds for infections; according to one of the sites I surfed onto, vaginal infections are the leading cause of medical problems in women, and I'm willing to believe that. The very conditions that allow semen to pass through the vagina relatively unharmed are the same sort of conditions that can lead to other "alien" substances making themselves at home. So from the point of view of perfect safety, the vagina is one of Nature's mistakes. A necessary mistake, perhaps, but the design of the human body could be improved upon. Oral sex does not pose as many dangers as anal and vaginal sex, but once again, it is a penetrative activity, and any time penetration into the body takes place, the person being penetrated is simultaneously at risk of being infected (because the skin being rubbed against may rupture) and also at risk of infecting the next penis to visit. Which leaves us with the final most common form of intercourse – again, historically speaking. It may have fallen out of fashion, but time was when it was very popular indeed, and safe sex advocates would do well to bring it back into fashion. It is nonpenetrative (that is, it doesn't enter the inner sanctum of the body) and therefore has none of the medical drawbacks of penetrative sex – it is as safe as mutual masturbation. I am speaking, of course, of intercrural sex – intercourse using the space between the thighs as the receptical. Never very popular as a heterosexual activity (Greek art, for example, shows that vaginal and anal sex were the most popular heterosexual activities of that time), it became very popular in Greek times as a homosexual activity – again, this is evidenced by Greek art and by the multitudinous verses praising the "golden thighs" of boys. Anal, vaginal, and oral sex – all high- and moderate-risk activities – have been popular both heterosexually and homosexually. Intercrural sex has been practiced mainly in a homosexual context. Since intercrural sex is safer than any of the other form of intercourse, it is clear that Nature favors homosexuality. By the way, I realized something else interesting in my search for what Nature wants. Nature, it appears, endows certain female animals with the ability to prevent rape – in certain species, it is physically impossible for the female to have intercourse against her will. For reasons known alone to Nature, Nature has failed to provide female humans with such a safeguard. Obviously, then, Nature is also in favor of human rape. The above arguments are, of course, facetious. I don't believe that "Nature" has a will; I think that the human body takes the form it does, not through design, but through chance. This isn't to say that God might not have known which direction chance would take and planned matters accordingly; I simply don't think that we have penises and vaginas because Mother Nature decided that this was the best way to proceed. This being the case, I don't think much of the argument from biology. Going "against nature" may in fact be the only civilized thing to do in certain cases. Take the case of premature babies – or, to put the matter with biological exactness, spontaneous abortions. For that's what premature babies are in many cases – they're Nature's way of ridding the species of babies that are not physically up to standard. For example, my mother was a premature baby, and she has had health problems all her life. From the biological point of view, she is a liability on the survival of our species. Of course, one could make the argument that a higher form of biology kicks in at this point, one that values my mother's emotional and spiritual gifts over any physical drawbacks her existence may pose to mankind. But at this point I think we have to recognize that we're talking about something very different from the type of "biology" that is used to argue against homosexuality. We're talking about a biology that favors spiritual gifts even when they come into conflict with our physical bodies. I'm stealing this argument from the pro-pederasty speaker in Pseudo-Lucian's Affairs of the Heart. After the pro-woman-love speaker gives a fervently biology-based argument against homosexuality, Callicratidas says: I could barely stifle my laughter when I heard Charicles praise the beasts, and the barren wastes of the Scythians – in the heat of the argument he seemed almost sorry to be Greek. Heedless of undermining his own argument, he did not hide his thoughts by speaking in low tones. Quite the contrary, he raised his voice and fairly roared: "Neither lions, nor bears, nor boars love another male, but their desires drive them solely towards their females." I don't think that St. Paul falls into this error – if you look at the Greek word physis (nature), you see that it means something very different from the modern word "nature" – in fact, it has a meaning closer to that of "reason." Paul's argument is that it is "against nature" (that is, against the Providential gifts afforded by intellect and other human virtues) for men to have sex with men. This is an argument worth tackling on its own; it's enough to say here that it is very different from the "against nature" argument put forward by many modern Christians, which has the same religious defects that Callicratidas pointed out nearly two thousand years ago.
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