Click here to read about Silo and Roy, gay penguins. They were together for six years before they broke up. One of them paired up with a female.

A children’s book, written about Silo and Roy, was apparently removed from the children’s fiction section at two bookstores because it promoted homosexuality.

A same-sex penguin couple, on the right in the picture below, were segregated from the rest of the penguins because they kept stealing eggs.  Sneakily, they would replace the egg with a rock and take the real egg for themselves.  The zoo keepers eventually decided to give them the eggs of another penguin pair who had a poor record of parenting and, the story says, they are among the best parents at the zoo (via Alas).

NEW!  Another pair of male penguins, this time at a zoo in Bremerhaven, Germany, have become adoptive parents (via). Z and Vielpunkt:

These two male storks, living in a Dutch zoo, are raising a chick together. The zookeepers don’t know how they came across their egg, but somehow they did, and now they’re parents! Click here for the story and a video.

About 20 percent of all black swan couples are male/male according to this study:

Carlos and Fernando just celebrated their fifth anniversary (see here):

A museum in Oslo has gained some attention for their exhibit, Against Nature?, featuring homosexual behavior among animals. Check it out.

And here is a link to a story about same-sex pairs (1/3rd of all pairs!) among wild Albatross.

NEW (Apr. ’10)!  Speaking of the Albatross: they mate for life (if they’re lucky, 60-70 years) and this is a female pair nesting in Kaena Point, Hawaii.

Biologist Lindsay Young, who studies this colony, concurs that about 1/3rd of the couples are same-sex.  They also rear chicks.

The New York Times article, from which I borrowed this images, explains that:

Various forms of same-sex sexual activity have been recorded in more than 450 different species of animals by now, from flamingos to bison to beetles to guppies to warthogs. A female koala might force another female against a tree and mount her, while throwing back her head and releasing what one scientist described as “exhalated belchlike sounds.” Male Amazon River dolphins have been known to penetrate each other in the blowhole. Within most species, homosexual sex has been documented only sporadically, and there appear to be few cases of individual animals who engage in it exclusively. For more than a century, this kind of observation was usually tacked onto scientific papers as a curiosity, if it was reported at all, and not pursued as a legitimate research subject. Biologists tried to explain away what they’d seen, or dismissed it as theoretically meaningless — an isolated glitch in an otherwise elegant Darwinian universe where every facet of an animal’s behavior is geared toward reproducing. One primatologist speculated that the real reason two male orangutans were fellating each other was nutritional.

…

Courtship behaviors between two animals of the same sex were persistently described in the literature as “mock” or “pseudo” courtship — or just “practice.” Homosexual sex between ostriches was interpreted by one scientist as “a nuisance” that “goes on and on.” One man, studying Mazarine Blue butterflies in Morocco in 1987, regretted having to report “the lurid details of declining moral standards and of horrific sexual offenses” which are “all too often packed” into national newspapers. And a bighorn-sheep biologist confessed in his memoir, “I still cringe at the memory of seeing old D-ram mount S-ram repeatedly.” To think, he wrote, “of those magnificent beasts as ‘queers’ — Oh, God!”

…

Different ideas are emerging about how these behaviors could fit within that traditional Darwinian framework, including seeing them as conferring reproductive advantages in roundabout ways. Male dung flies, for example, appear to mount other males to tire them out, knocking them out of competition for available females. Researchers speculate that young male bottlenose dolphins mount one another simply to establish trust and form bonds — but those bonds actually turn out to be critical to reproduction, since when males mature, they work in groups to cooperatively gain access to females.

Stereotype threat: The difference in performance measured when the belief that people like you (blacks, women, etc) are worse at a particular task than the comparison group (whites, men, etc) is made salient.

The left side of the bar graph is the performance of blacks and whites on a task (on which whites are stereotypically believed to be superior) when stereotype threat is activated (blacks and whites are reminded of the stereotype in some way). The right side of the bar graph is the performance of blacks and whites on the same task when the stereotype remains unactivated. Note the remarkable difference. This demonstrates the ways in which stereotypes, when made salient, affect our performances on “objective” tests.

From: The Effects of Stereotype Threat on the Standardized Test Performance of College Students by J Aronson, CM Steelel, MF Salinas, MJ Lustina. In Readings About the Social Animal, 8th edition, edited by E. Aronson. Stolen from Wikipedia.

I love this picture!*

It’s a wonderful illustration of the way in which we tend to project a gendered nuclear family model onto animals in ways that make that model seem more “natural” and “universal” than it is. (For the argument, try Donna Haraway’s Teddy Bear Patriarchy.)

Chickens, at least in captivity, do not live in lovely nuclear families like the nice chicken family above. They live in harems with just one rooster and lots of hens. Notice, too, how the hen is looking down (lovingly? maternally?) at her chicks, while the rooster is looking out into the distance (for danger? the protector?). Or maybe he’s checking out all those other “chicks” he gets with.** You know, a man has got to sow his seed. Oh wait, he’s not a man, he’s a CHICKEN!)

Even their bodies match our culturally and historically specific norms. Their height difference nicely matches the ideal in our society for male/female pairs (but not the reality, see here). To take the anthropomorphization further, you can almost see the hen’s fertile hips and the rooster’s strapping shoulders (am I going to far?).

* Unfortunately, I’ve had this picture for a long time and I’m afraid I don’t remember where it came from.

** Did you see that? I managed to get in the infantilization of adult women, um, hens, and the sexualization of young girls, um, chicks.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbcmPe0z3Sc[/youtube] While this video is more activist-y than scholarly, I think it might be useful as a way to demonstrate that our taken-for-granted categories (whether they be based on religion, race, ethnicity, gender or otherwise) are falsely homogeneous.

Here is a link to a website called Hunting for Bambi that says it is “a highly unique, niched, and controversial comical video series that spoofs hunting.” It spoofs hunting by filming men shooting naked women with paintball guns.

You can buy this DVD. Note that the men are in a Hummer.

Here is a link to the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative, a publicly-sponsored marriage-promotion program. The idea behind it is that increasing marriage, particularly among poor women, would decrease poverty and, therefore, welfare rolls.

Here is a link to the parenting section. Among other things, couples will learn “the benefits of marriage” and “strengthening the father-child bond.” Nothing is said about the mother-child bond–presumably it’s just fine. Note also that in the artwork for the page is very gendered–the woman is holding the baby, the male figure is standing over or protecting her. If you go to the photos section (pictures of actual participants), there are pictures of men holding their babies.

It might be useful to read the article “The Marriage Cure,” by Katherine Boo, in the August 18 & 25, 2003, issue of The New Yorker as well–Boo follows several poor black women as they go through the program and try to figure out how to find marriagable men (and it is made clear to them that they need to look for a man, any man).

I’m going to use this in my Intro to Sociology course as a way to discuss the idea that poor women wouldn’t be poor if only they would get married–to anyone.

Jessica Simpson wore a pink Tony Romo (Dallas Cowboys quarterback) jersey at a recent game. In case you didn’t know, they are dating. This was the first time she went to one of his games and actively acknowledged their relationship.

The Cowboys lost. And here’s the fascinating thing: She was immediately blamed for the loss. This photo, where she looks sort of pouty and upset, has popped up everywhere, though there are photos available where she looks happy and is cheering. Here is a Dallas Morning News column addressing the blame put on Jessica Simpson.

These two Jessica masks are available here; the idea is that fans of the teams the Cowboys are playing should take them to games to throw Romo off so the Cowboys will lose (another mask is available at RuinRomo).

This whole story of Jessica causing the Cowboys to lose was a big enough deal that yesterday, while sitting in a restaurant, I saw ESPN announce that she will not attend the upcoming Cowboys game against the New York Giants. FOX News added the story to their website. This is news! In this article, Romo insists he is focused on the game, not Jessica.

This fits in with a long line of women being seen as a threat to men’s performance in male-dominated arenas (sports, the military, and police forces in particular). When I taught Sociology of Sport we discussed how in the early 1900s single women who attended baseball games would be harassed, spit at, and sometimes removed from the game by other fans who felt they were going to distract the players and make them lose. There’s also the long-standing belief that men shouldn’t have sex before a game. Women sap men’s strength (think Sampson and Delilah in the Old Testament), and men who become romantically/sexually involved with women risk becoming weak (i.e., feminine) and failing in the masculine world.

This story might be a good addition to the pictures of pink athletic team jerseys.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

Here is a link to a website sponsored by Tampax and Always about their work with the UN to give pads to girls in Africa, supposedly because these girls miss school each month because they don’t have pads to wear.

Here is a t-shirt you can buy to support the program. It says “Use your period for good”:

The t-shirt costs $21.99. Of this, $1 goes toward the program.

This brings up all kinds of issues–for instance, where does the other $20.99 go? To Tampax and Always? What do these companies stand to gain from this? Positive publicity or lifelong customer loyalty in Africa?

It could also be used as part of a discussion about consumption and activism–the idea we have now that you can just buy something if you want to fix a social problem. If you pick up any fashion magazine, there will be a page or an article in it telling readers they can change the world by buying some product–nevermind that only a tiny part of the purchase price goes to the charity.

For other examples of shopping as activism, look here, here, and here.