For for the past few days, my “bisexual” and “bisexuality” Google alerts have been overtaken, not with the usual stories of this celebrity coming out or … well usually they’re all just about celebrity comings out, let’s be honest — but instead with stories about macaques.
Why macaques? Well, because of a recently published paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution offering extensive of “same-sex sociosexual behavior” amongst male members of this species of monkeys.
Or in layman’s terms: scientists have just proven that a bunch of boy monkeys are boffing each other, sometimes more than they’re boffing girl monkeys.
This isn’t actually new — as the paper notes, “same-sex sociosexual behavior” has been documented across many species. Despite what some fundamentalists might tell you about sex being exclusively for reproduction, a lot of species have discovered that it feels pretty good, and that engaging in things that feel good with other members of your species can be a social bonding ritual, or a demonstration of dominance, or serve some other useful function. Pansexuality: it keeps communities functioning!
What’s interesting to me, though, is less this scientific finding and more the way that human writers are inevitably projecting human bias onto the research. Though I am too cheap to pay for the actual paper (and too lazy to try to find it online for free), the quotes I’ve seen in media write ups suggest that the research team described male macaques as “behaviorally bisexual;” I find it interesting, then, that Queerty went with the headline “Turns out gay sex might have evolutionary benefits after all, study finds,” and focused, not on the bisexuality of it all, but on positioning this finding as proof that homophobes are wrong when they say that gay sex is unnatural. If it’s good enough for macaques, it’s good enough for humans, right?
Except, like… it’s weird to try to draw parallels between macaque fucking and human relationships, right? I mean I think it’s weird to act like male macaques who are diddling their friends when they’re not impregnating ladies who are in estrus are somehow some money version of the party scene at Fire Island — though for what it’s worth I also think that it’s weird to suggest that they’re a perfect parallel for bisexual male humans, too. Because, like… monkeys are not human. And so much of what makes “gay” or “bisexual” the concepts that we understand them to be is not simple sexual behavior, but an overlay of human culture that imbues that behavior with meaning.
A lot of animals are “behaviorally bisexual” because sexual acts — whether “gay” or “straight” — do not carry the same social weight for animals as they do for humans. They are simply ways of breeding, ways of bonding, ways of dominating, ways of connecting with other members of one’s species. It’s humans who feel the need to turn these basic, animalistic acts into the basis of identities — and while there are both good and bad aspects of the that impulse, we should at least understand that it’s a human impulse specifically.
Primate-behavior research wants to be free
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KNlkOfVtXcZZssVvf8bdYkaWtXtjtoZg/view?usp=sharing