On Sat, 4 Dec 1999, phil osborn wrote:
>
> Fact is that males of most mammalian species - especially "higher" mammals -
> will copulate with just about anything. When I was a kid, I watched our
> neighbor's small dog copulate repeatedly with our big black tomcat. The tom
> apparently got something out of it, as he permitted it for several years.
I once watched our pet poodle (male) attempt my mothers leg, needless to say she was not pleased. What was interesting was that if you left the poodle alone for an extended period he got very excited when you returned and that excitement often translated into sexual arousal. And of course you have various sites scattered around the internet dedicated to what people on farms with only a couple of TV channels to watch will do for entertainment.
It was interesting passing through Amarillo, TX last year (on one of my cross country jaunts). One of the bartenders in a local country & western dance club told my brother that there were only two things to do in the town -- dance [presumably as a prelude to doing the horizontal mambo] and get drunk. Of course Amarillo makes for an interesting case study as on the very same trip I happened to be reading "The Secret Mesa: Inside Los Alamos National Laboratory", and there is a paragraph in the book about the factory in Amarillo that dis[assembles] our WOMD. Connecting the dots it became obvious that that was what the huge assembly of buildings and lights just NE of Amarillo was that wasn't on any of the maps. It is also the shadow that the town lived under which was enlightening in reflecting on the bartenders comments. { Wishing to elevate myself to the level of the more erudite members of the list, it seems like this may be an interesting example of "Carp Diem" (sieze the day). }
Getting back to sex (which is why those of you reading this message are reading it, oui?), it seems that Gina's comments regarding an increase in homosexuality in high density populations (e.g. cities) deserves some exploration. Presumably in any "social society" (human, primate, canine) there are behaviors that are "acceptable" and those that are "unacceptable". In a normal population there will be individuals at the extreme ends of the spectrum (e.g. nymphomaniacs & celibates). In a small community the peer pressure will tend to push these outliers towards the center. However in a large population congregation, such as a city, you have an opportunity for the outliers to create a large enough "society" that it is capable of resisting pressure from those of a different perspective.
So the development/acceptance of alternate sexual behavior patterns that occurs in cities may be nothing more than a social phenomena that occurs as a result of sufficient numbers of similar individuals that one can effectively resist peer pressure to be "normal".
Robert