I don’t believe it!
A university academic has criticised David Attenborough’s wildlife shows for not featuring enough gay animals.
Oh, come on, now, you’re taking the piss. I’ve slept a month and it’s April 1st, yes? No. Apparently not.
Three of the veteran broadcaster’s shows are identified in a new study as perpetuating the notion that animal relationships are predominantly heterosexual.
Presumably because they are predominantly heterosexual. If they weren’t, the species would die out and pretty quickly too. Homosexuality is an aberration and yes it does happen in nature, but to contest the idea that animal relationships are predominately heterosexual when quite clearly they are just that is taking absurdity to absurd levels.
I do hope we haven’t paid for this pointless “study”. My cynicism is suggesting that we probably did.
And, no, I don’t plan to start “celebrating” diversity, no matter how much of this dreadful propaganda is shoved down our throats. Tolerance is plenty good enough.
“the notion that animal relationships are predominantly heterosexual.”
Well human relationships are predominantly heterosexual too. With only 10% (being generous) being gay (which is a short cut term to include those who are lesbian, queer, trans, bi, or curious) and more like 1% being actively gay then that matches the definition of predominantly – doesn’t it.
And for a prof to not know how to look up words in a dictionary is say something about the quality of our education system.
An animal cannot possibly have any concept of “gay”. The term has become a Human descriptor for a particular type of Human sexual behaviour.
On behalf of my domesticated animals I wish to claim third-party offence at this unacceptable stereotyping.
It is against Animal Rights to be directly compared with Humans and this blatant stereotyping is “Specist”.
Let the games begin…
There are idiots, there are stupid idiots and then there are complete fukwits!
“Study” Obviously carried out by queers with an agenda.
” I am not queer! I only shag FEMALE sheep!”
Erm, the academic in question is merely a Senior Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the University of East Anglia. He is not a biologist and is in no way qualified to make any sort of statement of this kind. His research interests are, I quote:
“My teaching and research focuses on popular television forms, in particular comedy. I’m especially interested in the sitcom, both historically and institutionally, as well as its national and international inflections. My other interests are the relationships between media/culture and identity, especially related to nation, region, and class.”
…Nothing about biology or even sexuality there at all. I am in fact a strong supporter of gay marriage, so I say this without any kind of political bias: why on earth should we care about a throwaway remark by an obscure researcher in an irrelevant field? Was it really that slow a news day?
The prof may be only a professor of watching the telly (you can get a qualification in any old cack these days) and his comments are clearly bunk. However, he got this bunk published in the European Journal of Cultural Studies, so some people will take it seriously. There is a vociferous minority who will seize upon this to further their agenda. I for one do not want to have gay propaganda rammed down my throat when I watch a wildlife programme. Frankly, I don’t want to see it at any time. Tolerance of homosexuality is right and proper. Thereafter, I would prefer people to keep their sex lives to themselves.
I note that this academic works at the University of East Anglia (as in hacked emails), where apparently you have to talk bollocks to get a job.
And a damned fine job he has done.
It was noted as long ago as the 1960’s that some animals had same-sex relationships. (Early work by Peret Scott, observing waterfowl)
It is now known that all mammals do this.
But, as with humans, it is somewhere between 2% & 5% of the population – often depending on stress levels.
I think he (the “academic”) did it deliberately, to stir people up – the idiot
We appear to be cursed by an entire generation of digital thinkers: something is either true, or not true. There is no nuance. No shades of grey – despite a certain novel – in debate and discourse.
“You’re either with us, or against us.”
The more fanatical advocates of gay ‘rights’ aren’t even the worst such examples: try entering a debate about anthropogenic effects on climate without being branded a “climate denier” – term that is so insulting as to make sensible debate effectively impossible.
And we also see it in British and US politics. The latter has become so bad that even Republican Party members have realised they’re only turning themselves into an international joke. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/13/bobby-jindal-gop_n_2121511.html ).
Sod Shakespeare: we need to add Critical Thinking courses to the national syllabus.
Re. the original topic:
There are many studies of the brain, particularly in fields like cognition, that have exploded the notion that there’s such a thing as a “normal” human brain. It’s a spectacularly complicated organ. Thanks to the way both DNA and natural selection work, we’re almost all *mutants* to some degree. That’s what procreation creates: we mix about 50% of one contributor’s DNA with 50% of the other, shake the cocktail, and see what happens. (Miscarriages are quite common as a result of this.)
We can, broadly speaking, come up with an “ideal” model of how our brains are supposed to work for the most part, much as physicists have invented the concept of an “ideal gas”, but there are many good reasons why no two people act and think exactly alike. Anyone who has read Oliver Saks’ seminal books on what are, fundamentally, people with faulty brains, will appreciate this.
The evidence that homosexuality is caused by a developmental difference in the brain (i.e. it’s nothing to do with how you’re brought up) is effectively unassailable – http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7456588.stm . Basically, homosexuality is a *disability*.
That “dis-” prefix is deliberate: the primary “natural” purpose of every mammal on Earth is to procreate. Homosexuality prevents this. While we may, at an intellectual level, discuss the pros and cons of technology-assisted conception, such as IVF, or social alternatives like surrogacy, the key point here is that homosexuality is a *mutation* (in the medical / genetic sense) and one that would, if nature were allowed to take its course, remove itself from the gene pool in due time.
And that means we should *tolerate* homosexuality in much the same way as we tolerate people with congenital blindness, a fanatical devotion to Simon Cowell, or Type 1 Diabetes.
It’s clear that homosexuality won’t produce progeny, so it certainly isn’t “normal” in a social context. But it’s not “evil” or “wrong” either, because neither of those terms are antonyms of “normal”. The correct term is “abnormal”. Or, if you prefer, “different”.
(We don’t see “Quadraplegic Pride” or “Chronic Blindness Pride” parades, so I have little tolerance for “Gay Pride” parades: flaunting and advertising a disability isn’t wrong as such, but it *is* weird.)