Homosexuality and Population Control

People are being conditioned that way through brainwashing techniques; coming from the television. No one wants to believe what television is really meant for, but research it.

I'm not sure if anyone watched the grammy's last night, but

Queen Latifah (Ordained for a Day) officiated the on stage marriages of over 30 couples while Macklemore provided the soundtrack to their nuptials.WBLS 107.5

What message does that send? Kids are being taught completely different from what i was taught. This "homosexuality" push, is relatively new. Sure, gays have been around since the beginning, but it's never been promoted the way it's being promoted these days.

reply to post by WonderBoi

Sure, gays have been around since the beginning, but it's never been promoted the way it's being promoted these days.

Right. Back in my day it was illegal. Back in my day we castrated 'em (now there's population control for you). Them were the good old days.
en.wikipedia.org...

"Promoting".
How about removing the nonsensical stigma? How about "they are people too?"
Or are you saying that it's being promoted like this "I'm gay! You should be gay too!" Sorry, it don't work that way unless you're already going that way.

reply to post by Phage

it don't work that way unless you're already going that way.

It works that way, when everybody thinks it should be that way. Roles are being switched, right before your very eyes!!! The masters are good at what they do.

I wish people would stop acting like THEIR WAY, is best for society. As you can see, things are getting WORSE, not better. Homosexuality is a SEXUAL PREFERENCE. Plain and simple.

It's really not that difficult to brainwash people, when you keep flashing images, 24-7. Now-a-days kids are being raised by television. At age 2, they're glued in front of it, being bombarded with messages; changing their genes!

Egigenetics

The term "epigenetics" has also been used in developmental psychology to describe psychological development as the result of an ongoing, bi-directional interchange between heredity and the environment.

Here's more facts for you, about television and where it has lead to!

Mary Kay and Johnny is the first series to show a married couple sharing the same bed. It would be two decades before married couples were again shown sleeping in the same bed. (The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, The Brady Bunch, The Munsters, and The Flintstones will all lay claim to breaking the separate beds doctrine.) May Kay and Johnny is also the first series to feature an on-screen pregnancy. www.bewilderingstories.com...

I could go on and on and on, about the effects of television, but people are too busy being "entertained", to even care. So, why bother???

Here's a good test for brainwashing: I say "priest" you think _______________? Or how about this: I say 911, you think ____________?

reply to post by WonderBoi

I wish people would stop acting like THEIR WAY, is best for society. As you can see, things are getting WORSE, not better.

Worse for whom? I guess the irony of your own statment completely escapes you.

Homosexuality is a SEXUAL PREFERENCE. Plain and simple.

Your opinion... but so what?

I say "priest" you think _______________? Or how about this: I say 911, you think ____________?

Judas (like I said...back in my day). www.youtube.com...
Emergency phone call.

reply to post by WonderBoi


I don't know if you saw it, but besides Same-Sex couples, there were Straight couples, and interracial Couples as well, it was a message of Equality for everyone

"No Freedom until we're equal"

it wasn't just homosexual couples.


As far as "Brainwashing" trust, with all the Heterosexual brainwashing going on people wonder why us Homosexuals are such a small percentage

Homosexuality is NORMAL for some people.

If I were a Freudian, I'd wonder at the constant imagery that displays of common acceptance were somehow being "shoved down our throats." Repressed fantasy ideation, much?

Heterosexuality being the great standard of "life, the universe and everything" that it is held up to be is SURELY not under threat from a few folks getting married on a stage, right?

The great "natural" Circle of Life cannot be so weak as to be threatened by a small percentage of the population finally receiving some cultural support for who they are ... right?

I mean, it sounds like, from this rhetoric, that heterosexuality is about to collapse under the weight of a few people finally starting to be treated like people.

What if, it's not heterosexuality that's in danger from greater awareness and freedom ... what if it is, instead, repressed homosexuality being threatened?

That would explain a heck of a lot of the irrational animus, now, wouldn't it?

reply to post by Astrocyte


Hi Astrocyte, that's an interesting topic you have created. I'm not sure I agree with all your assertions:

As some people have noticed, we tend to draw the thing we fear towards us. This may be due to the priming effect negative emotions have in biasing our attention - cortex - towards the thing that is feared. An example: if I fear experiencing emotions of shame in front of others, my unconscious modules will become “activated” - energized, when I am around other people - in situational contexts that might arouse the experience of shame. In the same way, a kid who has been lambasted about his sexuality will have his FEAR system activated when he sees a man without his top on - and this will, when puberty hits, produce LUST feelings - since one system can prime another system.

Yes the limbic system will be aroused and so our choice of responses becomes lesser; think fight, flight, faint or freeze. If a child who has been teased for his behaviours, learns to then fear the emotions that are natural to him, we cannot assume that those emotions will change from anxiety to lust. Just as not all children who have been sexually abused go onto be abusers.

Now, I understand this fear people have about over-population. But at the same time, I feel it robs people of personal choice when you tell them that “feeling this way makes you this way” - when all the research today shows that the cortex can regulate how primary emotions interact with secondary and tertiary processes. Meaning: the associations that our upper brain areas build - for example, associating LUST + girls - is under our conscious control.

I don't know if lust + girls is under our conscious control. I am not convinced it is a social construct. In fact, I'm pretty certain it's not.

Whats your opinion of this? Should we promote homosexuality as a way to counter over-population? Or should people be given the choice to have (their own genetic) children if they so choose?

Can we promote homosexuality? We could, but I reckon boys and girls would still do what they've always done, whether it was being promoted or not! At the end of the day, it's nobody's damn business who someone else sleeps with. If you can wake up in the morning beside someone you love, then you are blessed indeed.
Sometimes, when you have a think about the researcher, that can give you more answers than the research he does!
By the way, if you're interested in brain plasticity and trauma, have a look at Schore's work. I really like him, you might enjoy it too.

B x

reply to post by WonderBoi

What message does that send? Kids are being taught completely different from what i was taught. This "homosexuality" push, is relatively new. Sure, gays have been around since the beginning, but it's never been promoted the way it's being promoted these days.

Really? You think the ancient Greeks and Romans were coy about their 'liaisons'?

reply to post by OrphanApology

women would find the L Word boring and no fun to watch(still haven't met any straight woman who wouldn't admit that they would go there with at least one of the women on that show).

What show?

I don't understand what you mean by the above. I am a straight woman; I am able to appreciate an attractive woman as just that - but I in no way, shape, or form want to watch lesbians, nor do I want to "go there" with any woman, regardless of how attractive she 'seems'.

???????????? What do you mean by "go there with at least one of the women on that show'?? A television show of some kind?

Also, I'm not offended by gay/lesbians - they can do what they like. But I neither want to "watch" nor "participate."

reply to post by wildtimes


Notice the word "met".

That is an indication of anecdote when you see words like that in sentences.

I haven't met you.

As indicated in what I wrote, I was simply stating my own anecdotal experiences based on the straight women I've met.

reply to post by OrphanApology


Yes, I know you haven't "met me". But I still don't know what "show" you're talking about - and if you've only "met" women who would "do" some random Lesbian, then you must have a fairly distinct group of acquaintances.

I think some women are beautiful - but I don't want to touch them, or have them touch me (with the exception of "warm embrace hugs" for those who are my dear friends, or my mom or daughter. Also, I have very few female friends - most of them I find unpleasant and quite difficult to get along with. Just my 'anecdotal experience'. I like guys. Guys trigger my LUST button - women do not.

I've had lesbian/bisexual women indicate they had "crushes" on me - probably half a dozen - but the idea is revolting. None has ever actually "suggested" we 'get together.'

What "show" are you talking about?

reply to post by wildtimes


Some show called L Word.

Honestly I haven't even watched it save a few episodes so I can't really tell you what it's about other than it has lesbians lol.

Also the women I've known have been mostly through work, which I had met quite a few due to the line of business I was in. It was banking though so again it is anecdotal experience not meant to represent the whole population of the world.

reply to post by OrphanApology


Okay, thanks!
Never heard of it. May I ask what country you live in?

reply to post by wildtimes


United States.

reply to post by Gryphon66


Why would trauma have anything to do with heterosexuality? Reproduction happens in a male-female context. Evolution has genetically hardwired males to SEEK (the primary emotional system) and LUST after females. In some species, it's the reverse (like in Hyenas) where the female seeks the male.

This information is not "learned" but EVOLUTIONARILY coded in our genes.

I really don't see what is so hard to understand about this. Experiments with mice have shown that certain odors - the hair of a cat, for example - produces an unconditioned effect on the mice: once they smell it, it activates the FEAR system - and in fact, they wont move for days because of the trepidation the FEAR response produces.

This must mean that genes code for all sorts of primary emotional behaviors: in small little animals like mice and rats, the smell of a cat or larger rodent produces an instinctive FEAR response. This isn't learned - mice and rats kept in safe environments their whole lives, knowing only safety, will respond with FEAR when a cat hair enters the cage.

Similarly, it is a basic fact of mammalian evolution that one gender will attracted to another gender BY INSTINCT (i.e genes) and not by chance or experiment.

Homosexuality occurs less often for a good reason: it doesn't satisfy the teleological goal of reproduction - this being how evolution moves forward and doesn't stultify.

Do you view homosexual behavior as within biological norms? Do you draw a distinction in your mind between homosexual behavior and homosexual identification? And if so, is there a different "trauma" track resulting in the two related but different outcomes?

You misunderstood what I meant by citing trauma. Trauma is a profound emotional event experienced by all mammals. In humans, it can become most complex. This is because we have these abstract tertiary-cognitive processes and complicated social emotions.

When a boy is shamed by his father about his effeminate behavior, this secondary emotional (in the framework I mentioned above) process - which is essentially negative - will bias his cognitive and unconscious emotional models in a very negative way. Being effeminate does not mean your gay: I played with barbies as a kid. Plenty of boys like to integrate girl toys into their playtime to make things more interesting. My cousin, for example - having two older sisters - always played with barbies. But unfortunately for him, he has a tough-ass, mafioso (not joking) father who humiliated him on various different occasions about his effeminate interests. I saw this on many occasions as a kid, and only as an adult, and as a psychologist, has it occurred to me how inferior he must have felt in his manliness relative to his emotionless and stern, yet very cool, father.

Throughout these early years the child/boy will have built unconscious models about himself based upon what his primary caregivers - dad and mom - have programmed in him. These early experiences accumulate, and over the first years, begin to bias and regulate the types of thoughts and feelings a child will have. When puberty hits and feelings of sexual attraction become more intense and vital, the unconscious models - the FEAR about his manliness - will interact with external experiences.

One could well argue, that in the case where the child was lambasted and chided for being "girly" as a child, will experience a FEAR towards feeling any attraction to men when the occasion arises - such as when they first watch porn.

This is how emotions essentially work. Experiences constantly shape and guide our thinking from one moment to the next. An intense, and consistent criticism of my "manliness" over the early years will create an insecurity - an unsureness - with ones masculinity. This will then bias the attention in the ways I described above; the individual will constantly be questioning themselves - overly self conscious and self monitoring at times when the insecurity becomes provoked by external stimuli: watching porn, at school, at the pool, etc. In other words, before the full-blown sexual attraction to the same sex happens, the unconscious has been shaped and biased by the abuser (the dad, quite often) to avoid the thing that they don't want. At 6, at 7, the emotion works in different ways, but you can imagine that as the child inches closer towards puberty, the unconscious bias evolves to involve the LUST system with the SEEKING system.

I have memories from when I was 13, and my cousin was 11, and we were watching porn in the basement. I remember how focused he was - obsessive, actually - about not wanting to watch anything but girl-girl porn. He said "only fags watch that" i.e. girl-guy porn. Meaning at that age, he had already been experiencing difficult and confusing feelings about his sexuality.

In short, my cousin is gay - I love him, I don't want to change him and he doesn't want to change. But still, I am curious - as a psychologist - at the dynamics that worked between his sisters, his submissive mother, and overly manly, unemotional and physically abusive father: these seem like pretty ideal conditions to produce a boy with homosexual proclivities.

Think about it like plinko - the price is right game. Certain environmental enforcers led my cousin to play with girls toys: dad is almost always absent, so not much of a masculine input. He has two older sisters who dress him up, put makeup on him, a mother who dotes on him - a strong feminine input. This in itself does not incline anyone in any particular direction. What "plinks" him in an insecure direction with regard to his masculinity is his fathers input: berating him about playing with dolls, even though his only playmates are his older sisters - who themselves play with dolls.

To me, this seems like a strong argument for how trauma - the development of a strong insecurity (an emotional scar) can produce feelings that you don't want to have. When you have them, and the cortical (tertiary) areas of the brain are now strongly associated with secondary and primary emotions, you're gay - you developed homosexuality instead of simply being born that way.

Homosexuality has more than one etiology. The fact that it often runs in families indicates a strong genetic/epigenetic influence. But this isn't to say that this is the only way one can develop homosexual feelings. The brains higher areas remain plastic throughout life: meaning one could, if they so wanted, develop homosexual or heterosexual attractions at any age.

reply to post by Gryphon66

The great "natural" Circle of Life cannot be so weak as to be threatened by a small percentage of the population finally receiving some cultural support for who they are ... right?

Conservatives should have greater trust in evolution (or God, the creator of the process of evolution).

Mammals are genetically hardwired for heterosexual behaviors. We simply favor it - it'll always be the case that the majority of people will prefer heterosexual rather than homosexual behaviors.

So I essentially agree with you. Teaching kids to be accepting and tolerant of gay couples, gay marriages, and gays with children, is not going to destroy the natural order - it simply CANNOT undo what took millions of years of evolution.

Our minds - or most peoples minds - will always have a strong unconscious bias towards heterosexual relationships: both because of the promise of siring your own children (a major interest for women in particular), and because women will want it the most, men will be drawn within their influence. This basic nexus - what woman want - and most woman, even liberal ones, want to have children - they simply cannot resist the estrogen/prolactin/progesterone hormones which bias their biology - and thus their minds - towards nurturing behaviors - will keep the natural order firmly in place.

But just as homosexuality happens within the natural order, and homosexuality in itself is a non-violent, win-win situation for the people who want to live that way, it is nonsensical, unfair and cruel to treat them different from anyone else.

As I mentioned in an above post - although the brain is plastic and the secondary-tertiary processes in particular - the most plastic of all - this doesn't mean changing your sexuality is an easy process. It is largely context dependent. And it also doesn't completely "wipe clean" old emotional circuits i.e. homosexual feelings. So, if you've been born this way, have this proclivity, and you live in a world which accepts it as a normal behavior - what exactly is the incentive to change it? There isn't any incentive. So most people - if thy ever bother learning about brain science and learn what I am telling you right now - probably wouldn't care if they could change their brain - because they would ask: why?

reply to post by beansidhe

I don't know if lust + girls is under our conscious control. I am not convinced it is a social construct. In fact, I'm pretty certain it's not.

All the evidence suggests that it is.

This is all based upon the fact that primary emotions occur within the deepest reaches of the brain. This being, in particular, the hypothalamus and the PAG (periaquaductal grey). This is where the most intense feelings are produced in the brains of animals which have these brain areas electrically stimulated. A variety of different experiments have shown that lower brain regions (PAG) are more fundamental for emotional arousal than higher brain regions (hypothalamus, basal ganglia, insula, anterior cingulate etc). This is where Panksepps 3 levels of processing comes in. Primary emotions cannot be changed without damaging those brain areas. But the secondary and tertiary processes can. For example, the amygdala has been shown to be less important to the experience of FEAR than the PAG. The amygdala is a secondary emotional processor: instead of producing fear, it helps the lower brain LEARN WHAT to fear (conditioned responses) - which is why most of the time - but not always - when someone experiences FEAR under an fMRI scan, the amygdala lights up. This indicates that unconditioned fear responses occur deep within the brain PAG/Central nucleus of the Amygdala, lateral hypothalamus - whereas learned fears produce strong amygalae arousal.

But people CAN learn to control their FEAR responses. People CAN overcome and learn to code FEAR + with something else. Someone can have an exhilarating experience (SEEKING) which produces strong dopamine, seretonin, glutamate and adrenaline responses, and this response associated with the thing that was FEARED - jumping from a plane - will become RECODED in the brain. A different emotion - a positive one - supercedes the old one.

Similarly with sexuality. Sexuality, like all the other primary emotions, is processed in the deep brain regions, particularly the hypothalamic tract. Primary emotions are a general FEELING with specific unconditioned associations in the environment evolutionarily evolved that arouse them. In the case of SEEKING/LUST, the normal and usual course is heterosexuality. But in some cases, nature or nurture can intervene and incline the organism towards SEEKING/LUSTING after others of the same sex.

SEEKING/LUST can't be overridden, but the "targets" in the environment which they associate with, which are handled in higher brain regions, likely can be overridden. I failed to mention earlier that Lust + Girls CAN be under our conscious control. Usually, it isn't. Just as a yogi develops the capacity to literally regulate deep brain stem regions/vagal circuits that control our rate of breath, muscle tone, heart rate, allowing them to perform wondrous feats like meditating on frigid mountain tops without freezing, actually producing heat! or going without eating or drinking for very extended periods, etc etc. This is essentially a n example of the neocortex taking CONSCIOUS control over autonomic brainstem areas that aren't normally under conscious control.

The deeper in the brain one goes, the more ancient and vital to survival the machinery. Since sexuality at the level of "choice" is in the midbrain, It is very plausible - given both what we've learned about the brains plasticity, as well as what conversion therapists claim (hate them as we do, they're claims are based in scientific fact) - that sexuality can become a choice - not simply an inbuilt orientation.

The idea of sexuality and choice is a complicated one, as the idea of "choice" doesn't seem plausible until ones awareness becomes aroused so as to widen the range of possibilities.

Free will is a good example. Someone stuck in a bad pattern of behaviors has "free will" - in quotations. Technically, he could inhibit himself from engaging that behavior pattern. But probability would indicate that he will simply continue doing what he does. His free will is highly restricted by previous patterns of behavior.

Mindfulness, however, seems to be the key to establishing FREE WILL, without quotations. It is of course restricted by the choices available, but there now is a definite sense of choice - of what you want - when you've developed your orbitofrontal brain areas that mediate the awareness of mindfulness, which is, the ability to be aware of your awareness.

Sexuality can be controlled when you gain this level of awareness. Just a RAGE can be controlled, and LUST and FEAR and all the other primary emotional systems.

Mindfulness is freaking amazing. It is the KEY that will make this world of ours a better place.

reply to post by Astrocyte


I love your enthusiasm for this! We do hate therapists, but unfortunately... I am one.

I'm going to start by agreeing with you about mindfulness - I teach it to a lot of my clients, and it is an extremely useful tool. I work with children who have experienced trauma and sexual abuse, and for them it is really helpful to have a technique which takes them out of the trauma (which they may be re-experiencing or get 'stuck in') and experience the safety of the 'here and now'. Which does exactly as you describe, re-configures the brain to accept different outcomes for triggers. In other words, emotions can be contained and managed, and so behaviours can change.

You are waaay more up to date than me on neurology, so I will defer to your better knowledge.
To answer your initial question then, should we promote homosexuality: no. No, we shouldn't because it would be unethical, to guide someone's else's choices before they were old enough to understand the implications. Given how little we know about gender and self identity as being identifiable in the brain, I think we should keep out of people's private lives as much as possible.(Unless of course they ask!)
Maybe I'm old fashioned!

Do homosexual people realize it was their mothers that gave birth to them?