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Notes -
Power dynamics are weird. Or at least they are to me.
For the longest time I'd assumed that gay men engaged in a pragmatic and egalitarian division of the passive and active roles so that both people get a fair turn. Because in my mind a kind of intuitive equalising game-theoretical situation would develop where neither would be content to get the short end of the stick over and over and would simply leave. I was surprised to find out that the model is wrong, and that, as you confirm, the active and passive roles rarely swap over. I was more surprised to learn that apparently the passive role is predominant among gays. They're not struggling to find someone to fuck, if anything there's a surplus of those, they're struggling to find someone who'll fuck them. (Apparently a similar situation is common in BDSM communities). As a straight man this is an unfamiliar dynamic. The active and passive roles tend to play out naturally in straight sex. I'm often left wondering why a partner is out of breath afterwards when she's put in about 80% less exertion. If I was holding out for a woman who took a physically dynamic role in sex I'd be setting myself up for disappointment. Women's sexual passivity is such a commonly shared assumption that they frequently criticise men for not knowing where the clitoris is while also neglecting that they've got both hands free should they care to look for it themselves. Men however have to be reminded not to touch themselves in situations that aren't even sexual.
I'm not sure that I expected it to be greatly different on account of the inherently active-passive roles but it's still a disappointment when you grow up fantasising about something vaguely "lady in the streets, freak between the sheets" where the woman can match your sexual dynamism and you find out it's more like "passive in the streets and between the sheets". (And then you look around and notice women pathologically attributing their passivity to men, and that this itself is a manifestation of passivity....)
To formative childhood experiences, even when I was very young there was an intuitive specialness to attractive women. Men were background noise. Big powerful man? I suppose it would be good to be someone like that. Small wimpy man? I suppose it would be worse - unless he has an attractive wife. Image of a woman in a flattering outfit? Entrancing. A naked woman? That felt like discovering magic. If I'd seen a full on porno I would have thought the male lead was incredibly enviable rather than psychologically threatening, you know, if I'd thought of him at all. Reframing the social dynamic as one where you give up and compete with the woman to win the man is incomprehensibly gay. Horny straight men know that horny gay men exist. We know that Grindr exists. Some of us even know that the gay men who exist are keener to get dicked than do the dicking, and that there's a common gay fantasy for seducing straight men. We prefer getting rejected by women.
Getting back to competition informing orientation, the flip side of competition isn't limited to withdrawal. There's also cooperation. I lost 90% of interest in competition just as I hit puberty because that age was when sports stopped being a cooperative activity to generate the most fun and became a narrow contest solely to make number go higher than opponent, which as I saw it sucked all the fun out. And to be clear this wasn't a rationalisation to deal with being bad at sport, I was consistently among the first picks for any team sports and chose to drop out of playing for the school team. While I lost interest in conscious competition I still developed a typical pubescent boy's interest in women. I went and found the fun in drugs and music instead, and the sexual interest was (un?)satisfied with porn. I would have been better served if I'd had it explained to me that I could have competed against myself to achieve objective improvements and crucially that those improvements would in turn have afforded me better opportunities in the realm of sex and dating. Sadly/gladly I was in my late 20s when PUA evo-psych gave me a model that explained the world in a way that better mapped to reality than the blend of romantic stories and latent cultural feminism I'd been brought up with (women don't like arseholes, The One exists, be a modern man, it will happen if it's meant to be, etc).
There are gay relationships where they trade roles sometimes, but it's kind of just a nice thing for the top to do, or something to add excitement to the relationship, but you have to maintain the power dynamic at the end of the day or the relationship is going to fall apart.
I would say it depends on who you are and where you are. If you're 6'2 and 300 lb of muscle, everyone's going to look like a bottom to you, and you're going to look like a top to them. It would be degrading to you to be topped by 95% of the guys you meet. But if you're 5'2 120 lb and fem, trying to top, 95% of the guys you meet will be unwilling to be topped by you. Most guys fall in the middle, and younger guys tend to be more bottom and older guys tend to be more top. I don't think it's true that there are always more bottoms than tops, but it may be true that there are more men who see themselves as bottoms or are afraid to top.
This made me laugh. Yeah, I know, I guess I'm trying to elucidate the more base situation that informs my homosexuality versus any straight man, and the best I can do is point to the fact that I'm afraid to compete with men for female attention so I want to compete with women for male attention instead
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