So difficult to keep up! (Re: Memeber of the religious right running morally amuck)

As a matter of interest, were you trying to be funny here, Rahvin?You just reminded me of a visit (just out of curiousity, of course) to the notorious banana bar in Amsterdam many years ago.

Thanks for the info. I've often wondered what research scientists get up to in their spare time.

I think you'd be surprised, Phat, if you took a poll of EvC members at how many of both sexes have enjoyed anal sex.I was first introduced to it when I was twenty, back in the dark ages, by a German girlfriend who was a few years older, and who particularly liked it, along with many other interesting things.If two people are enjoying something, it's fine.Perhaps you should suggest an experiment to your other half.You never know, you could end up opening interesting new avenues this way, so as to speak.

Now I understand what that quote means to you. You've brought new meaning to this topic's title.

Not necessarily. If someone had been involved in the case in the O.P., for example, manslaughter through negligence might come into the question. So next time you're tying Mrs Phat up into an exciting position, take care.

I suspect that rates of tendency or inclination towards homosexuality won't vary cross culturally, but rates of expression will. Surveys would require equal honesty in all cultures, and I don't see how that could be guaranteed.Anonymity doesn't guarantee truth. Would the dead man who is the subject of this thread have been honest to himself if asked to fill in a questionnaire on his sexuality, I wonder?

I'm happy to take your word for it. If I were faced with the problem of determining what percentage of the population of Egypt is homosexual, I wouldn't know how to go about finding out. But then, I'm not an anthropologist.

The anus could have evolved a secondary function as an alternative way for couples to have penetrative sex. For use during pregnancy and when there were already a plenitude of young children in the family/tribe. Nature's contraceptive. That's speculation, I know, but it might explain why penetration of the anus can be enjoyed by the recipient as well as the penetrator.Looked at that way, it might explain how the vagina would be the easy fit first choice, but the anus (and mouth) viable seconds.If same sex relationships played a role, bonobo-like, in our ancestors, and sexual bonding between males helped a group to survive, then the "pleasure feeling" anus would also be selected for due to that reason.I agree with you that "natural" vs "unnatural" arguments are fairly pointless. It is actually natural to our species to invent and make tools, and to build up sophisticated high tech. cultures, in the broad sense of the word, otherwise we wouldn't have done it.In the narrow sense of the word, meaning perhaps our biological nature stripped of culture, I think that both the mouth (lips particularly) and the anus probably do have evolved characteristics that are directly related to sex, as do breasts (obviously), so if people are obsessed with what's "natural", they should just go ahead and use whatever comes naturally to them!Fingers, on the other hand, are very useful in sex, but it seems unlikely that they've needed to evolve in respect to it. We could speculate about the extra length of the middle one if we wanted to.In all cases they're secondary functions, and the penis and vagina could be said to differ in that respect, because their primary functions are reproductive. We could have a pissing system without them.The whole system provides quite a good argument against intelligent design. Who would put a sewer in the middle of a pleasure garden?