2003! So not too recent, but then the same assumption still pervades the human evolution of homosexuality perspective (and much of the literature on nonhuman same-sex sexual behavior, which is what I was actually reading to inform at the time).
About one in five women experience attractions toward other women (Calzo, Masyn, Austin, Jun, & Corliss, 2017; Dickson, Paul, & Herbison, 2003; LeVay, 2010; Savin-Williams, Joyner, & Rieger, 2012). Such attractions constitute an evolutionary puzzle because they appear to impair reproduction.
Homosexuality in both sexes appears persistent in spite of its reduced fitness differentials relative to heterosexuality in both Western samples and one non‐Western one 5, 6, 7, 8.
Incidentally, I have looked at those sources, and they date from 1978, 1981, 1995 and 2014 respectively--and the recent 2014 one is the Samoan paper (warning in it for pleeeenty of misgendering: I can't quite tell what the actual respectful form of address for the community under discussion is but I am very sure it ain't this). It's specifically studying fa’afafine Samoans who appear to identify on a transfeminine spectrum vis-a-vis a sample of what we would probably call cis straight men who are "exclusively gynephiliac."
The 1995 paper makes no comparison of relative rates of fecundity between its queer female samples and matched heterosexual controls; it doesn't even appear to have measured fecundity in any real way and used convenience sampling.
The oldest two sources, both by Bell and Weinberg, are books, not direct primary sources, and I can't be arsed to haul myself down to the PCL stacks to verify what they do and do not say about whether the queers actually incur any reproductive cost just now. But given the time at which they are writing... I'm skeptical.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2018-12-22 05:14 pm (UTC)On the other hand, here's a line from Apostolou and Christensen, 2018, which kicked off a lot of (deserved) annoyance earlier this year in The evolution of same-sex attraction: Exploring women's willingness to have sex with other women in order to satisfy their partners:
Or this quote from Burri, Spector and Rahman in 2015:
Incidentally, I have looked at those sources, and they date from 1978, 1981, 1995 and 2014 respectively--and the recent 2014 one is the Samoan paper (warning in it for pleeeenty of misgendering: I can't quite tell what the actual respectful form of address for the community under discussion is but I am very sure it ain't this). It's specifically studying fa’afafine Samoans who appear to identify on a transfeminine spectrum vis-a-vis a sample of what we would probably call cis straight men who are "exclusively gynephiliac."
The 1995 paper makes no comparison of relative rates of fecundity between its queer female samples and matched heterosexual controls; it doesn't even appear to have measured fecundity in any real way and used convenience sampling.
The oldest two sources, both by Bell and Weinberg, are books, not direct primary sources, and I can't be arsed to haul myself down to the PCL stacks to verify what they do and do not say about whether the queers actually incur any reproductive cost just now. But given the time at which they are writing... I'm skeptical.