Originally Posted by
Danne
I know. Hence the quotation marks. I wasn't saying that the individuals in question said to themselves, "I don't like hunting because it's manly, and therefore I shall try feminine gardening instead." They said to themselves, "I don't like hunting, just because I don't like it. Maybe I'd like gardening instead?"
This depends entirely on the society. Some were equal. Some had divisions of labor. And in any event, again, that's not the point I was making.
I'm fully aware of how evolution and natural selection work, thankyouverymuch. Things happen randomly, by chance, and sometimes they're beneficial, and sometimes they're disadvantageous, and sometimes they're not anything at all. I wasn't saying that we developed homosexuality intentionally, I was just refuting what Superglucose said about how it would be disadvantageous. There are plenty of advantages. Assisting in the development of agriculture may have been one of them. Or it may not.
Oh, and it wasn't an article, it was an excerpt from Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk: A Study In Social Evolution by Edward Carpenter (1921). And it wasn't just about the development of agriculture, but also of medicines, musics, arts, etc. Basically the section was saying that people with non-traditional gender identities turn their creative energies away from traditional roles (i.e. hunting and domestic stuff), which leads to the development of new ideas, etc. Though I haven't read the book in question, and it's a little old.