homosexuality as a norm

According to recent scientific research, more than 450 different kinds of animals engage in homosexual activity. St Thomas Productions has taken this research, and combined it with never-before- seen film footage, to produce this compelling and groundbreaking documentary. Animal Homosexuality explores the various ways homosexuality is expressed in the animal kingdom through courtships, affection, sex, pair-bonding and parenting. A covert revolution has been taking place in nature, and has gone unnoticed until now. With the help of scientific research, international stock footage and location shoots all over the world, Saint Thomas re-examines and revises the fundamental paradigms of nature.

This ground-breaking video on homosexuality interests me personally most for the light it sheds on sexual division of territory and herds and the role of marriage in land-tenure. From dolphins through sheep through impala and bears, many other species live separate lives except for mating time. Thoughtful people will ask themselves when bonobos, gorillas and chimpanzees began to live in mixed-sex territory. Orangutans still don't. And when did we humans?

This multi-species homosexuality documentary was published on Jan 8, 2016 on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYdcvRe7ox8 Authors : Bertrand Loyer, Jessica Menendez, Stéphane Alexandresco [1]

The documentary also sheds much needed light on the nature of marriage and land-tenure

This ground-breaking video on homosexuality interests me personally most for the light it sheds on sexual division of territory and herds and the role of marriage in land-tenure. From dolphins through sheep through impala and bears, many other species live separate lives except for mating time. Thoughtful people will ask themselves when bonobos, gorillas and chimpanzees began to live in mixed-sex territory. Orangutans still don't. And when did we humans?

Indeed, societies currently exist where women have separate villages from men and have done so as far back as anyone can remember. Cohabitation in such cases is ephemeral and women generally rear children very young children, with sons going to the father's village after the age of around six years old. It seems likely that this was the human norm in places where loss of territory for one reason or another did not cause competition for territory between the sexes. In such societies it is difficult to imagine the kind of co-dependency we see between males and females, and indeed, same sex, in our own society.

In Roman law on the European continent, male and female lineage continues, with the male and female sex inheriting from their parents equally, thus bringing separate assets to marriage. In Anglophone countries the rules hark back to the Viking nobles of the 9th through 11th century, with only males allowed to inherit land, and most women utterly dependent on men for shelter. These rules have been visited upon India and parts of Africa and Pacific Islands, with predictably disastrous results.

Only recently did the practice of wives inheriting from husbands come in as a kind of compensation, although not nearly as good as having one's own land to start with, and possibly more beneficial to banks and lawyers in the long run. Marriage then carried the bonus of property rights for the 'other woman' and made 'adultery' that much more of a serious transgression than it is under Roman law in modern Europe, because it also implied dispossession of the first family's children. Women still own far less land than men, and far less wealth, but this could not always have been so and history generally reveals different early practices. (See Sheila Newman's Demography Territory Law series for more on this.)

Sexual division of land, different gender pathways, and kinship restrictions on marriage to beget children, also combined flexibly to limit numbers. This is the subject of The Rules of animal and human populations.

Same-sex marriage

Of course, the subject of same-sex marriage is currently very prominent, so the film is most interesting for the background it gives to this in natural history. I would like to see land-tenure brought back into discussions of marriage, where it used to take the forefront. The ideal of marriage for love is only a recent political innovation, according to my learning. L'amour courtois (romance) which was popularised in Europe in the late Middle Ages was expected to take place outside of marriage. Marriage was reserved for the legal purposes of defining and allocating land-tenure and inheritance.

In the 1970s there were feminists who talked about women and men having separate land, which also implied separate female and male inheritance. We rarely hear about this very important alternative anymore. Such ideas, mostly based on anthropology made anthropology unpopular. It has been replaced with an unscientific kind of development-aid studies. The acceptance of male-female marriage, cohabitation and co-endebtment, with a male-female couple working to pay off a house that one person could have payed for a couple of generations ago, probably prefers that we forget about this simpler, more independent way. Indeed, a cursory search of the internet has failed to yield any examples of 20th century feminism calling for a return to female and male land-rights. Please comment on this story if you find such a reference.

NOTES

[1] Producer(s) : Saint Thomas Productions, France 5, France 3, Canal+, National Geographic Channels
Running time : 11x52 mn
Format : Digital Beta, Super 16mm
Distributor(s) : Saint Thomas Productions