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Notes -
Jeez, straight online dating must be soul crushing, I had a roomate in college who would just send a dick pic and have instantly like 5 guys climbing over eachother to try and get in his pants. He had different dudes with him every other week.
On one had: yes, certainly.
On the other hand, it's not necessarily great shakes for homosexuals, either, depending on their goals. Online "dating" is pretty effective at facilitating hookup culture, whether straight or gay--it's just that straight hookup culture is just as paywalled for average-to-below-average males in other contexts as it is online. Gay hookup culture is something else entirely.
I had a gay student some years ago (pre-Obergefell) who dated like a mid-20th century Baptist. He didn't want to have a bunch of anonymous group sex, he wanted to find his soulmate and get married. He went to a gay bar once, and the third time someone that night greeted him by grabbing his crotch, he left and swore never to return.
I have no idea what the actual ratio of "just the sex, please" men to "approximately the sociosexual desires of a rural church girl" men is, in the gay dating pool. But it seems clear that online dating is much, much easier for the former than the latter. The ratios are presumably different in the heterosexual scene, but the shape of the problem seems about the same.
I have some friends in this category. They’re miserable.
My understanding is that “I don’t have sex until we’re committed” is incredibly rare among gay men, though not nonexistent. Even very monogamous gay men apparently are very sex-forward. Perhaps this shows how small biological differences can be amplified by culture and market dynamics.
It is mildly funny to me, in a “this is ironic” way, that sending dick pics is the cardinal sin of straight flirting — we even had a longtime user quit the motte because people weren’t sufficiently condemnatory of it — but in gay dating you’re shamed if you don’t send one. There seems to be something in the male nature that just goes, “here’s my penis.”
This is why as a trans woman I am so glad to be out of the gay dating scene and why the "why don't you just be gay instead?" argument never worked for me. Gay men have all sorts of expectations like having sex on the first date, being OK with unsolicited dick pics (pressuring you to send one back is absolutely real), going from 0-100 sexually, and that whole vibe of sex being more like fun (they literally call it play or fun) than something that requires a deep emotional connection to work. I found straight/bi men are generally more understanding when you make it clear that that's not what you're after (if they're manipulative, it's at least a sign of knowing what you want).
I recall you had a post a while ago where you said you’d dated both men and women. Did you develop a preference for men, or how did women fit into this?
Well, I guess all I can say is, join the club. We don’t have fun prizes but there are occasional butterflies in the chest. And you get a stamp on your card when someone says, “you’re sweet but I don’t see this going anywhere.”
Interesting. I’d never considered that being played could actually be preferable to sex-forward behavior, but I can see it. I guess gay men just didn’t even make an effort? Just, “oh, no dick pic, seeya?”
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