A question for homosexuals

I came across this line in another post;

Obviously people who aren't partial to vaginal intercourse have sex drives.

However my question is this;

Do homosexuals suppress the innate instinct to procreate?


Of course there's always the option to adopt, which many do, but what about the urge to produce offspring with a partner? How does one deal with the fact that that isn't an option? Or is it just something one doesn't think that much about?

 

It's an interesting thought. I don't understand it myself (I'm not gay) but I believe it was this reasoning that once led to the belief that homosexuality was a disease. I know my grandfather believed that until he died.

I don't believe it's a disease, but what does happen to that apparent natural instinct?

 

Women who are unable to bare children, for whatever reason, at least have science (in vitro fertilization) on their side.

However when someone is gay, they don't have the same options. So I was just wondering if it becomes an accepted fact of life, or if some still have that desire to procreate.

 

Many gays and lesbians do procreate. Thanks to artificial insemination - it's simply a question of choosing a willing "partner" (a very close friend of the opposite sex), and the result is a beautiful child.

QP

 

That's true.

I watched a special on CNN a few months ago about two men who were married and they decided to do that.

It was really cool to see that that option is available for gay people these days.

It is however a very expensive procedure and is not an option to many couples due to financial constraints.

I was just wondering how some deal with the urge to have a child, if for whatever reason they can't.

Edit: I didn't see you had written this;

 

I don't think its an instinct that is neccessarily repressed. Its still present; it just can't be made into a reality so gay men learn not to dwell on it much in the same way that a woman unable to procreate learns to deal with it.

I've often wondered if homosexuality is a form of natural population control. Speaking strictly from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense for nature to produce a certain percentage of homosexuals in a population to control the number of people able to procreate. Maybe homosexuality is a natural instinct much in the way that procreating is also a natural instinct.

 

That's an interesting thought.

The sleep cycle of human beings used to be much shorter than it is now. Thousands of years ago men slept much less than humans do today because they hunted by moon light when their prey was sleeping.

It's thought that once this wasn't necessary anymore nature changed our biological clock, making it so we slept longer as a way to protect us from things like depression (from having too much spare time), whereas when we were hunters our days were filled, spent trying to survive. But once we developed tools and everything else, we didn't need those extra hours anymore. And so our instinct was to sleep more and be tired earlier in the day.

Natures way of helping us along.

 

imo:
2/3's of why there are gay people is because animal instincts in humans are extremely diminished, almost to the point of non existant the more they age. humans become in a different way than other animals do, due to consciousness. instincts are replaced. instincts were in place to protect one's self and family in scarce environments, and knowledge, the large reduction of scarcity, and population has greatly made instincts obsolete. a being without instincts, and with knowledge of affection and such, why must one oblige structure previously based on scarcity and growth?

the other 1/3 is a physic or result of population, what others would say "natural instinct" but i don't view it as nature or earth telling us what to do.

 

I did not know that; very fascinating, especially the part about longer sleep cycles being nature's way of controlling depression.

not to hijack the thread, but the need for sleep is a subject thats always fascinated me..do you know if humans still cycled through the same 90 minute stages of sleep that we do now, or if that was drastically different?

 

Sleep has always fascinated me too. We're still not actually sure why we sleep. It's long been thought that it is for mental and physical rejuvenation, but many studies suggest that isn't necessarily true.

I once read about a study done in which people's sleep cycles were rolled back 20 minutes night after night until they were on a regular sleep cycle of only 5 hours night. Most of the people who underwent this experiment functioned absolutely fine and most reported an increased good attitude overall due to the extra time they had in their day. Though once the study was done they went back to 7-9 hours sleep.

Once they were used to the 5 hour cycle none showed any real signs of cognitive impairment or physical changes.

From wikipedia;

Randy Gardner holds the scientifically documented record for the longest period of time a human being has intentionally gone without sleep not using stimulants of any kind. In 1964—as a 17-year-old high school student in San Diego, California—Gardner stayed awake for 264 hours (eleven days), breaking the previous record of 260 hours held by Tom Rounds of Honolulu.[1]

Gardner's record attempt was attended by Stanford sleep researcher Dr. William C. Dement. Gardner's health was monitored by Lt. Cmdr. John J. Ross. Accounts of Gardner's sleep-deprivation experience and medical response became widely known among the sleep research community.[2][3][4][5]

On his final day, Gardner presided over a press conference where he spoke without slurring or stumbling his words and in general appeared to be in excellent health. "I wanted to prove that bad things didn't happen if you went without sleep," said Gardner. "I thought, 'I can break that (Peter Tripp's 1959) record and I don't think it would be a negative experience.'"[6][7]

Gardner's sleep recovery was instrumented by sleep researchers who noted changes in sleep structure during postdeprivation recovery.[8][9] After completing his record, Gardner slept 14 hours and 40 minutes, awoke naturally around 10:00 p.m., stayed awake 24 hours, then slept a normal eight hours.[10]

When asked how he did it he replied, "It's just mind over matter." The "health issues" he supposedly experienced as written on that wiki page are as far as I know not true. I have a textbook that came out after he did this and he apparently suffered no real problems and his counting and cognitive ability was fine.

If you're interested in more on the subject check out Kleitman's Sleep Deprivation Study of 1922, it was one of the earliest done on the subject.

Also check out Circadian Sleep Cycles /Free-running sleep-wake cycles.

Interesting fact: Three other animals that require the same daily amount of sleep as humans are the rabbit, the guinea pig and the pig.

 

So you think that the majority of people who are gay are gay because our human instincts aren't as strong as they once were?

Does this mean you think an increase in the number of gay people is likely the longer mankind is around?

Animals in the wild have been known to partake in homosexual behaviour, yet they procreate as well. If the human instinct to procreate was really that strong wouldn't homosexuals have children and then go back to being homosexual? But if they did this, what does it mean about their sexual orientation? That could be threatening to the ego. Perhaps the instinct to procreate is replaced by the desire of ones sexual preference.

If the innate desire to procreate was that strong, everyone would have children. Obviously our sexual preferences mean more to us now than they could have in the past. Hence the ability to not have to procreate.

The desire to procreate is replaced by the desire of one's sex drive as having children is no longer man's only real goal.

 

When I was young and in Catholic school school I absorbed the self hatred that many of my generation felt. I really wondered about having children watching them grow and become part of my life and yet a completely seperate person too. I wanted to nuture and raise kids but realized that as a gay man it wasn't gonna happen. While still burdened with self hatred I decided that it was best if someone as foul and worthless as myself not bring a child into the world. What if the kid was as fucked up as I was. It would have been wrong and I had already committed enough wrongs just by existing.

I ended up discovering kids who had been abandoned to the state. Kids that needed anyone to care for them because an orphanage was their only other choice. I adopted seven sons over the course of 30 some years. All have done well in their lives and I have left a heritage born not through my blood but through my soul.

Do I wish I had my own flesh and blood child... No. I could never have produced any finer than the sons who came to be my own.

 

uh no. im not saying everyone in the future is gay. haha. just the consciousness of preferring, liking, and accepting grows in general helping express one's wants and such.

yeah i think what humans look for love/affection/family-wise has transformed through time, because of our growing consciousness. it started as instinctual to procreate, then it's slowly transitioned to the concept of love, and i think in the future, concepts of love will diminish into a contentness of just general affection.
so yeah anyways, i've never really wanted kids since i was little. maybe wanted them when i liked to play house in elementary school, but besides that never wanted kids.

 

i've never felt a need to produce an offspring. that's one thing.

other thing is that sex drive and procreation, as closely related as they are, are two very distinct needs. we don't have sex primarily to have babies (show me a man who, while having sex with a woman thinks "need to make babies! need to make babies!" in his head. that's fucking ridiculous). we all have sex primarily to feel pleasure. sex is an innate instinct that has survived through the course of evolution as a mechanism for the survival of species, yes. and it has survived precisely because e.g. we, human beings, constantly want to experience that pleasure. if that pleasure wasn't involved in it we wouldn't go around wanting to stick our penis into other people's body cavities. the pleasure is what drives us, not the outcome of babies. just like any certain species isn't necessarily aware of the fact that it fights for its own survival in this world (insects, plants, fungi, animals, etc) or that while they're following their basic drive to feel good they're reproducing themselves. only we, human beings are fully aware of that fact, and for some of us it might be difficult to differentiate the outcome from motive. so there's really no conflict here. one can want to have sex without ever feeling the social need to have kids and have a family.

 

my brother used to work for DSS and part of his work was spending time with foster families and their foster children. He grew to know many of these families intimately and he said the only foster parents he thought were really decent parents out of all his case loads was a homosexual couple. They openly expressed to him how much the experience meant to them because they weren't able to reproduce.

 

Im not gay, but I am infertile. Which is something that has only really started making me unhappy for the last year or so. I never wanted kids, and never saw myself as the type of person that would want them. But recently the fact that I cant have them has caused me to have feelings of grief and sadness. This is however tempered by a feeling that I wouldnt want to bring a child into this world. Knowing what a harsh, and cold heartedly cruel place it can be. I think Meliai made a good point. That some gay people are actually just naturally suppressing their want of children, the same way that an infertile woman does. I often wonder if all those years when I said I didnt want children was just a way of me coping with the fact that I cant bear them naturally, or whether that was how I really felt. I guess I'll never know.

And I agree with Meridianwest. To state that heterosexuals main goal when they have sex is a need to procreate is just stupid. Its mostly done for personal pleasure, not for procreation. Most of the gay people Ive heard speaking about this, state they don't want children. So the fact that they cant have them, is neither here nor there. Which is a shame, as I think lots of gay people would make better parents than some heterosexuals.

 

I'm not sure about the length of the sleep cycle but from what I've heard we have always been a species that has had a percentage of us awake and mainly active during the day and a percentage of us that are mainly active at night. Its a quality that has led to the success of humans as a species. This is still persistent through today which is why some have 9-5 jobs and some overnight shifts. Morning birds and night owls...

 

I can't help but believe a humans instincts are catered for what they can or cannot do, so gay people wouldn't 'long for children', quite like a heterosexual person might. It's like hunger, it's an instinct to be hungry

some people might fancy crisps, the others chocolate. So, with sex- you can argue some may well do it for the child bearing quality, others because they just want a bit of a hump.

I know a gay couple who have adopted, and they have never once expressed any dissatisfaction with not being bale to have kids themselves, and I assume that's because they always knew they couldn't- the 'instinct' never existed.

 

i think this assumption is faulty and ridiculous. it's really the other way around. our species would've never survived if we weren't creatures that thrive on pleasure (i mean at least all the mammals here, not just humans). the survival of species follows from us wanting to experience pleasure. i doubt there even exists such a thing as an innate 'instinct of procreation'. it's a societal construct and a consequence of our intelligence. animals don't have it. they have no idea what procreation is. an animal is incapable of connecting the two events of sex and production of offsprings in her mind. to her these are two unconnected happenings. and we all know animals have sex drives, regardless of the fact they remain ignorant of procreation. and we are animals, a little different, but the result of the same evolutionary process. and we have sex drives, like animals, and a desire to have kids (in most ppl's cases) unlike animals. so we definitely didn't get the presumed 'instinct of procreation' from our ancestors. which leaves it a conscious desire of an intelligent mind.

the source of survival of species is the innate sex drive. procreation is the consequence, not the source of this instinct.

 

While I agree with some of your post, I don't agree that animals don't have any idea what procreation is. I think they do know what it is and I think they know the importance of it for their species survival.


And for the record those words you quoted we not mine. They are another poster's from another thread and I don't agree with them.