Wildlife Documentaries Should Show More Gay Sex, Academic Study Says
Wildlife documentaries should show more homosexual activity in the animal kingdom, an academic study complains.
These documentaries should be showing "a wider perspective on animal behavior," Dr. Brett Mills says, according to The Independent.
Mills, a senior lecturer at the School of Film, Television and Media Studies and the University of East Anglia in Norfolk, U.K., published his study, "The animals went in two by two: Heteronormativity in television wildlife documentaries," in the February 2013, issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies.
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The study examined three wildlife documentaries which aired on BBC – "The Life of Birds," "The Life of Mammals" and "Life in the Freezer" – and concluded they portray animals as heterosexual too often. Focusing on portrayals of animal sexuality, monogamy and parenthood, Mills found that "how such activities are repeatedly represented draw on normalized human notions of such behavior."
How animals are portrayed in documentaries matters, Mills writes, "partly because normalized discourses must be drawn on in order for programs to make sense of the behavior they present, but mainly because animal behavior is commonly used as evidence for 'natural' forms of human behavior."
In a blog post for First Things, David Mills (no relation), executive editor of First Things, argues that the study implicitly makes the common mistake of confusing the word "natural" meaning "who we really are and how we ought to act" with "natural" meaning "found in nature."
What happens in the animal world "doesn't mean anything for human life and morals," Mills writes. In nature, Mills observed, animals engage in gluttony, theft, adultery, paternal abandonment, and occasionally kill each other, even their own kind. All of these would be fine for humans, too, if one assumed that natural, as in found in nature, is the same as natural, as in how we ought to act.
David Mills closed with a reference to Proverbs 26:11: "As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly."
