COVID came first. So maybe they didn't have the correct thoughts in their heads then. The massive criticism they received during and after COVID seems like it would cause exactly this.
hop
1mo ago
Of course the response to monkeypox was different from COVID. Monkeypox:
- had no hope of overwhelming the health system
- killed zero people in western countries
- wasn't novel
- wasn't airborne
- had a pre-existing vaccine stockpiled that was proven to be effective
Obviously treating monkeypox as anything as bad as COVID would have been absurd.
Separately
Was the government supposed to tell gay men to stop having sex?
Yes
The government has learned the hard way over and over again that that doesn't work. Both in abstinence-only education of teenagers, and the HIV/AIDS reaction of adults back in the 80s, telling people how to behave in private doesn't work. It wouldn't have mattered anyway. Gay men did largely stop hooking up after it became apparent what was happening; monkeypox takes a while to present symptoms after infection.
You seem to be a little aggravated that the government got COVID wrong but you are.. also a little mad that they got monkeypox right.. because it feels unequal?
hop
1yr ago
That doesn't solve the problem.
A. Workers will simply commute between the small towns, wherever they can get a good job, and will use whatever roads allow them to do that. The number of people who do this will be high; the area will effectively be a big sprawled-out metro area with too small a tax base to support the highway network.
B. Businesses don't want to sprawl. They benefit from agglomeration. source 1, source 2
I don't even assert that my opinions are objectively correct
my post reflects the way I see things
I think that this is why no one critically engaged your post for the first week. People objected only after it got listed as a quality contribution. Once that happened things were different. According to naraburns, the top two curation criteria are Did I learn something from this post? and Are others likely to learn something from it? And that was the problem: people were learning things from a post that was based on opinion- a post that had had no critical responses at all to challenge it nor any context setting up your, umm, interesting psychological uniqueness. If someone had said, "Here is an interesting example of how someone with fearful-avoidant attachment orientation views gay relationships" then we would have had a great post. But no such context was given.
I don't personally see most of the things in either of your posts as being informed by experience but rather as being informed by a more naive worldview
I provided something better than experience: I provided evidence in the form of cultural words and phrases like "power bottom" which people have heard that support my point. There are more like "Bossy bottom". You can buy shirts and pillows with that written on them. Those wouldn't exist if your worldview was correct. I also described emergent phenomena in Grindr and Hinge. You must have ignored all of this in order to assert that our posts are informed not by experience but naivete.
(continued from previous sentence) that serves to paper over the less comfortable parts of the homosexual experience that many people have to live with.
Seeing as the context here isn't conservative countries, I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. Based on your other post I assume that you mean bottoming and being submissive. I also don't know what "many people" is. With respect, this is pretty strongly reading as internalized homophobia. You've already hit a few of the things on that list and I don't know you very well.
I think that your framing of the three concepts (position, activeness and dom/sub) as well as the rest of your and @gattsuru's comments are characteristic of being colored by experiences specific to one moment in time in one geographic region (namely the present day USA/Western Europe or somewhere with massive US/Anglosphere influence) much more than mine are.
Except for the last five words of that sentence I absolutely agree! Both of our worldviews are common in particular places and times on Earth. So the important question is Is someone right? And if so, who is right? First we need to know the question. @curiousagain's post here uses some particular words like root cause, parasites, genetic birth order, thirst, testosterone, beards, body hair, muscle mass, aggressive, and violent. It is obvious that the context of the question is innate human characteristics devoid of as much outside societal influence as possible. So where should we look in order to see how gay people live when left to their own devices? When they are free to live as they want and let their culture develop free of outside pressure and influence as much as currently possible? The answer to that is obvious: the anglosphere.
What if we completely ignore the context of the question and say, 'In any context or location, how do gays want to live?' The answer to that, too, is closer to the way gays live in the anglosphere than the way they live outside of it. The way gays in the U.S. live today certainly isn't the 'final form' but it is closer to it than in the UAE. I strongly believe that the only reason to feel involuntarily "degraded" by bottoming is if you are taught to feel that way. It isn't the default. That means that as middle eastern and other cultures become more accepting of gays, they'll eventually start viewing position, activeness, and dominance with my nuance rather than as one concept with your lack of nuance.
I think that homosexual relationships in Turkey and the UAE, for example, help illuminate homosexual relationships everywhere.
I'm all ears. Also the goalposts seem to be on the move.
That post shouldn't be on the list in my opinion. @naraburns Too much of it is objectively wrong. Homosexual relationships in Turkey and the UAE should not be presented as universal.
Beyond that particular post, the quality of the discussion in that thread is abysmal because too many people, including aiislove, are mixing up the concepts of position, activeness, and dominance, and in other cases using words like "role" with ambiguous meaning. I tried to clear it up here but I don't know if it will help.
For anyone arriving here from the Quality Contributions thread, please know that a lot of this post is wrong.
The writer has distilled three different concepts into just two, and incorrectly described those two. The three concepts are:
-
Position (top/bottom/vers/side)
-
Activeness/Passiveness
-
Dom/Sub
Position describes only the non-literal position when having sex: the insertive partner, the receptive partner, either, or neither. Note that it does not describe who is physically on top or physically on the bottom. I acknowledge that this is an American-centric view; I will address this below.
Activeness/Passiveness describes who is really doing the work when having sex. It's almost definitely the person who is physically on top just due to physical constraints.
Dom/Sub describes power play. This is a kink which is not particularly abnormal but still not common in gay sex, just like straight sex. Dom/Sub play may not involve actual sex but rather other acts.
There is some shorthand lingo that you have probably heard that hits more than one of these categories. "Power bottom" is one such word: a bottom who likes being the active partner.
The three categories described above are separate for a reason. Power bottoms exist (and are common!). Subby tops exist. The reality is that some people just really like or really dislike receiving anal sex and that is apparently very separate from how active they like to be in the bedroom. It is also different from how much control they like to have in a dom/sub scenario.
Specific things that the parent commenter got wrong:
In many languages, the terms for top and bottom are more translatable to "active" vs "passive," (aktiv vs passiv in German) for example.
The fact that some languages do not have enough nuance to accurately describe sexual relations does not imply that sexual relations lack that nuance. It is inevitable that those languages will eventually develop that nuance if they haven't already.
It is strange and disorienting to see a bigger, stronger, taller guy be bottom to a smaller, weaker, shorter guy. It happens but it is weird.
The disorientation described here is not universal. In countries where gay people are well accepted like the United States, Canada, and the U.K., big masculine bottoms are very common as are tiny twinky tops. There is almost no correlation between sex position and body type. As a result, no one assumes position based on the size of the person. You have to ask. This is why "position" is a field most people fill in on Grindr and a defacto behavior has developed on Hinge where many men set their gender on Hinge to (for example) "Man↗️" to let people know they're a vers/top (in this example).
(continuing) It is basically against the way of nature.
This sentence alone should pique everyone's BS-meter.
Homosexual relationships that last are nearly always ones where the top has legitimate, physical, material claims to being the top over his partner. Gay relationships always fail when the bottom is sick of being the bottom, or he believes the top isn't worthy of being the top anymore, or the top starts doubting his ability to be the top.
This is absurd. Gay relationships succeed or fail for the same reasons as straight relationships: communication, trust, mutual respect, mutual interests, ect. Tops don't get to be tops because they are "worthy", they get to be tops because they enjoy topping, the same as for straight people. The rare case of two tops dating is trivially solved by having an open relationship.
to be made a bottom of a man who doesn't deserve it, is horrible and degrading beyond the regular degradation of bottoming for a man who you do respect
Ultimately this sentence is the perfect encapsulation of the problem with the post. The writer feels that bottoming is degrading. In gay-accepting society, it isn't degrading at all. A person with the mindset that bottoming is degrading is not going to have an open mind toward accepting that people fall outside of this framing. If we want to have a discussion about culture in predominantly Muslim countries then we can do that but it is inevitable that gay relations there will trend toward using the nuance with the three categories I described above. People used to not know that homosexuality was a separate concept from transgenderism. But now we do. Societies tend toward more nuance.
Gay men are afraid of losing more than straight men. Our egos can't bear to be rejected by women so we create a new game within our own minds where we can become the object of affection of other men, who we know are horny so it seems impossible to lose.
We're teetering on the edge of an impolite discussion about mental health so I'm just going to stop here; I don't think it would be necessary or helpful to keep piling on.
Please just be careful about who you trust and what you believe on the Internet. The parent post sounds insightful but it's really just deep insecurity colored by experiences specific to one moment in time in one geographic region. I hope that the pseudo-insight isn't what led to this being listed as a Quality Contribution.
hop
1yr ago
It attracts talent and that talent generates wealth. If you found Twitter in Houston, it would absolutely do worse than Twitter founded in San Francisco (a la 2005 when San Francisco was liberal).
People who are natural out-of-the-box thinkers are going to gravitate to places where they're allowed to occasionally do out-of-the-box ("degenerate") things in public and private. And that nature is going create those economic powerhouses when they go to work.
You are showing signs of a victim complex.
The COVID lockdowns existed in and only in 2020. Monkeypox in the U.S. went from May to October 2022. The world was back to normal when Monkeypox happened; there were no COVID lockdowns or even distancing expectations to violate.
Yes, you missed that they self-locked down without being told by authorities and contained the outbreak by themselves. Sex parties all got cancelled and the vast majority of gays stopped hooking up.
I understand if, looking from the outside, you didn't see any of that. And I understand that you may resent that red-tribe was told how to behave and blue-tribe wasn't. But it's important that you not ignore the very rational reasons for the difference: blue-tribe self-locked down during both COVID and Monkeypox and red-tribe didn't. Red-tribe had to be told. Separately, Monkeypox is simply vastly more mild. Even the seasonal flu is more dangerous and yet there are no flu lockdowns.
No they weren't- you made this up. There was nothing strict about churches shutting their doors. It was voluntary compliance. Just like you made up the notion that protests had an "explicit" exception. They didn't. This, along with your mis-remembered covid/monkeypox timeline is why I assert that you are falling to a victim mentality- you are severely mis-remembering history to fit your pre-existing victimhood narrative.
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