“egalitarian” position. In aquatic animals such as Gray Whales, West Indian Manatees, Bottlenose Dolphins, and Botos, males rub their penises together or stimulate each other while rolling and clasping one another in constantly shifting, fluid body positions that defy any categorization as “mounter” or “mountee.” Reciprocal rump rubbing and genital stimulation—found in Chimpanzees and some Macaques—also renders meaningless a dominance-based view of homosexual interactions. When two males or two females back toward each other and rub their anal and genital regions together, sometimes also manually stimulating each other’s genitals—which one is “dominating” the other? Or when a male Vampire Bat grooms his partner, licking his genitals while simultaneously masturbating himself, which one is behaving “submissively”? By the same token, Crested Black Macaque females have a unique form of mutual masturbation in which they stand side by side facing in opposite directions and stimulate each other’s clitoris—again, because of the pure reciprocity, it makes little sense to interpret this behavior as expressing some sort of hierarchical relationship between the partners.
Genital rubbing, masturbation of one’s partner, oral sex, anal stimulation other than mounting, and sexual grooming occur among same-sexed individuals in more than 70 species—yet virtually all of these forms of sexual expression fall outside the realm of clear-cut dominance relationships.89 These more mutual, reciprocal, or dominance-ambiguous sexual activities are commonly found alongside homosexual mounting behavior in the same species—but the former are typically ignored when a dominance analysis is advocated.90 Ironically, another entire sphere of homosexual activity eludes a dominance interpretation—any same-sex interaction that is
A final indictment of a dominance analysis is that the purported ranking of individuals based on their mounting or other sexual behavior often fails to correspond with other measures of dominance in the species. Male Giraffes, for example, have a well-defined dominance hierarchy in which the rank of an individual is determined by his age, size, and ability to displace other males with specific postures and stares. Homosexual mounting and “necking” behavior is usually claimed to be associated with dominance, yet a detailed study of the relationship between these activities and an individual’s social standing according to other measures revealed no connection whatsoever. Mounting position also fails to reflect an individual’s rank as measured by aggressive encounters (e.g., threat and attack behavior) and other criteria in male Crested Black Macaques, male Stumptail Macaques, and female Pig-tailed Macaques. In only about half of all male homosexual mounts among Savanna (Olive) Baboons is there a correlation between dominance status, as determined in aggressive or playful interactions, and the role of an animal as mounter or mountee. In male Squirrel Monkeys, dominance status affects an individual’s access to food, heterosexual mating opportunities, and the nature of his interactions with other males, yet the rank of males as evidenced by their participation in homosexual genital displays does not correspond in any straightforward way to these other criteria. Among male Red Squirrels, there is no simple relationship between aggressiveness and same-sex mounting: the most aggressive individual in one study population indeed mounted other males the most frequently, yet he was also the recipient of mounts by other males the most often, while the least aggressive male was hardly ever mounted by any other males. This is also true for Spinifex Hopping Mice, in which males typically mount males who are
In fact, multiple nonsexual measures of dominance often fail to correspond even among themselves, and this has led some scientists to suggest that the entire concept of dominance needs to be seriously reexamined, if not abandoned altogether. While it may have some relevance for some behaviors in some species, dominance (or rank) is not a fixed or monolithic determinant of animal behavior. Its interaction with other factors is complex and context-dependent, and it should not be accorded the status of a preeminent form of social organization that it has traditionally been granted.93 Primatologist Linda Fedigan advocates a more sophisticated approach to the role of dominance in animal behavior, eloquently summarized in the following statement. Although her comments are specifically about primates, they are relevant for other species as well:
We often oversimplify the phenomena categorized together as dominance, as well as overestimating the importance of physical coercion in day-to-day primate life … . An additional focus on
Considering the wide range of evidence against a dominance analysis of animal homosexuality—as well as a number of explicit statements by zoologists questioning or entirely discounting dominance as a factor in same-sex activities95—it is surprising that this “explanation” keeps reappearing in the scientific literature whenever homosexual behavior is discussed. Yet reappear it does, even in several studies published in the 1990s. As recently as 1995, in fact, dominance was invoked in a discussion of mounting between male Zebras, and this explanation still has enough currency that scientists felt compelled to refute it in a 1994 account of homosexual copulation in Tree Swallows. In looking through the many examples of the way that this “explanation” has been used, it becomes apparent that the relevance of dominance is often asserted without any supporting evidence, then cited and re-cited in subsequent studies to create a chain of misconstrual, as it were, extending across many decades of scientific investigation. Again and again, early characterizations of homosexual activity as dominance behavior—often hastily proposed on the initial (and unexpected) discovery of this behavior in a species—have been refuted by later, more careful investigations of the phenomenon.96 Yet frequently only the earlier studies are cited by researchers, perpetuating the myth that this is a valid characterization of the behavior. For example, in a 1974 report that described same-sex mounting in Whiptail Wallabies, a zoologist referred to dominance interpretations of Rhesus Macaque homosexuality even though more recent studies had invalidated—or at the very least, called into question—such an analysis for this species.97
At times, the very word