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And now the prude-right now decided to chastise the game for having an optional sex scene between similarly-aged teenagers because they might be gay(ish)? After the first one was attacked by the left for bawdiness and delighting in masculinity.
The transparently pretextual nature of this stuff is hilarious.
It establishes a best-bro relationship in the first game and gives you the option to put it in his butt in the second one. I feel like that's a pretty big change in the game's central themes.
I don’t know, actually. There’s been at least a hint of homoeroticism between Hans and Henry before. Nothing that couldn’t be passed off as “locker room banter”, but it wouldn’t be the first time that young men going to war together and getting up to mischief might do a bit of fooling around.
The fact that social embrace of homosexuality has tinged every intimate relationship between men with ‘a hint of homoeroticism’ is one of the biggest black marks against it in my view.
Not only is every close relationship tinged with ‘Sam and Frodo must be porking’ style analysis but (innocent) touch is very good for people - it releases oxytocin, it’s how we bond. One gender is now largely deprived of it.
It’s a strange story that doesn’t make all that much sense. Why do we care? Why can’t we be close friends anyway? I mean, I’m not too worried about :
appearing gay even though I’m not
turning gay by closeness with a male friend, and
even if I could somehow turn gay like a frog, it wouldn’t be the worse thing in the world. It has few costs and some advantages.
Also, you would expect that in a society with open accepted homosexuality, there would be less people in the closet. So the straights are far more likely to actually be straights than they used to be, and there should be less need to prove straightness.
Random other theories to explain the relative lack of intimate male friendships:
general atomization and screentime making friendships more difficult
male-male friendships and all-male spaces being perceived as misogynistic and discouraged by modern society
female homophobia
I don't mean 'no homo bro' or turning gay, I mean not wanting to send signals to a friend that I don't want to send. Being physically touchy with a girl my age would signal interest, and would be read that way. Due to social change, it's now similar with men. If I don't want to send that message, I can't do that thing. It's not something you decide for yourself.
I have close male friends, of course, but I'm not physically touchy with them beyond a hug on meeting.
All may be relevant. Few things in social life have only one cause.
But you know your friends, you don't have to worry about ambigous signals, like with a girl you like. He knows you're not gay, you know he's not gay, "not that there's anything wrong with that", so what is this fear? It seems paranoid. And somehow, if we recriminalized homosexuality, and then we found ourselves in a situation that resembled homosexuality, so objectively our situation would be more dangerous, that's when we could relax? It's very strange, counter-intuitive reasoning.
People aren't so simple. And who said anything about fear? Doing X would convey signal Y, and I don't want to convey Y. The kind of physical intimacy that was de rigeur a couple of centuries ago (somebody linked this) is not ambiguous these days, that's the point.
I suppose I could sit my friends down and give them a sort of autistic manifesto along the lines of, 'I'm totally straight and I know you're totally straight but I don't think men touch each other enough now so let's cuddle (no homo)', but for the entire 90's we laughed at such behaviour exactly because it was regarded as a classic sign of closeted homosexuality.
It's like selling stocks: if a founder sells a big chunk of their stocks in their successful startup, it signals that they think it's peaked. It doesn't matter what signal they want to send, that's the signal it sends, and everyone including them knows that that's the signal it sends, so they can't sell without sending that signal.
In olden times, homosexuality ('sodomy') was something that was commonly agreed to take place far off and among degenerates like sailors. The average person didn't think about it from week to week. I'm not arguing for recriminalising homosexuality, I'm arguing for vastly reducing its visibility outside select subcultures. In the last 50 years, we made a decision to prioritise visible harm to small minorities over the potential for less visible harm to 95% of the population; that was understandable at the time but I don't think it's aging well.
I'm not accusing you of homophobia or any other phobia, it's just that I don't see more to this theory than correlation: yes, gay pride parades are correlated with a decline in male intimate friendships. Tornado damage also increased.
The mechanism making it a causal relationship doesn't work. why do I care that my friend could think that I'm a closeted homosexual when I'm clearly not ? A closeted homosexual can perfectly provide all the duties of a friend - he would be a bad husband, but that's not the friend's problem.
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