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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5404 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 22, 2023

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That's a great article, thanks for linking to it. Actually, homosexuality in the Middle East and Islamic cultures (and Greece) has been really interesting to me and something that I've been trying to demystify for myself and that has informed a lot of my viewpoint above.

For context, I'm a white American but I've spent a small amount of time in Greece, Turkey and the UAE. So by no means am I an expert, but during my travels I have dated and interacted with men and have had some really interesting experiences. The messaging we hear in the west, over and over, is that the Middle East is extremely homophobic, that they stone gays, throw them off buildings etc.. But in my experience, men in Islamic cultures are even more predisposed to homosexual behaviors than men in America or Europe are. I believe it's a combination of men from the Middle East being more egoic and drawn to gratifying their ego in a more shameless way than we are raised to do in the West*, and the natural consequences of a highly gender segregated society where the rules around heterosexual sex are very strict. As you've gestured at, it seems that a sort of makeshift "prison sexuality" abounds in the Middle East. And it is overt: in one instance, my cab driver was hitting on me, he was not shy at all; I refused his come ons because it was weird even though I did find him hot. I went to a restaurant and the guy I sat next to gave me his number and halfway through our meal his friend showed up who was definitely a homosexual, and there are entire areas of Dubai where 95% of the people you see on the street are men. Indeed, I've been all over the world and never experienced more men hitting on me randomly than in the Middle East. I can only imagine that homosexual behavior abounds in these areas, but to identify as homosexual is where people in the ME/Islamic cultures draw the line.

tl;dr "All" gay people in Saudi Arabia are bottoms and act effeminately, and they pick up straight men to penetrate them in hook ups.

That's not exactly how I would characterize the gist of the article. The conclusion I drew was that basically, gay identity is a western/globalist import, and the identification of an individual as a homosexual, itself, is what people object to in these cultures: whereas the pre-globalist position in the Middle East is that you're just a regular person like everybody else who happens to have same sex habits sometimes. And frankly I think this position is so much more relatable to my experience. I'm not gay because I was just born this way, I'm gay because I looked at straight sex, and couldn't conceive myself as having sex with a woman, but I can't escape the allure of sex so I am drawn to performing sex in a way that is unaligned with straight sex: basically I want to do the same thing that straight people are doing, but I'm a man attracted to men so it's going to look different. This is all a bad, rambling version of the point Foucault is trying to make when he pointed out that homosexuality changed in Western society from being a thing people did to something that people are, and that Islamic societies are still operating on the earlier "thing people did" version of the concept, and the "thing people are" version was helpful for gays in the west but has unintended consequences for people when they get imported into other cultures.

So: It's not that all gay people in Saudi Arabia are bottoms, and act effeminately, it's that there are certain people in SA who are adopting western/globalist concepts of what homosexuality "is" and "looks like," interacting with the "straight men" who are really just the old school pre-globalist guys who sometimes have homosexual relationships, but that don't identify with a "gay" label.

And from other research I've done, outside of the modern west and outside of situations where there are just absolutely no women around anywhere for extended periods, most homosexual relations are like this.

Yes, precisely. But actually, it also operates like this in "situations [with] absolutely no women around." (not sure if that's what you meant to say?) Indeed, I think the situation is even more pronounced in "prison gay" situations.

Bottoms don't want to be tops, and tops are only doing it because it's harder to find a woman to hook up with.

I suspect that many bottoms do want to be tops but are afraid to try. But it's more complicated than that. I think most guys aren't total tops or total bottoms, I for example prefer being a top especially in LTR situations but at the same time if there's a guy who I think is really hot I really don't mind if he tops me if he's confident and really able to do it well. Tops topping men because they can't find a woman seems plausible as I've stated above.

Do you have any sexual desire for women? Does seeing a conventional attractive naked woman do anything for you?

No. When I was very young I would masturbate to images of naked women but I rather quickly realized my attraction was really only to men. Recently I have gotten in the habit of watching straight porn occasionally, but only when it's bisexual or cuck porn where the male is the focus. I like to see beautiful women for aesthetic reasons outside of porn but I have no desire to pursue them. I could imagine having sex with a woman if I really believed she liked me, but I can only ever see this happening realistically in a desert island situation where there were no men for me to sleep with instead.

*and also, perhaps, a predisposition to homosexuality/pederasty: See Richard Burton's concept of the sotadic zone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton#Sotadic_Zone

Fascinating stuff. A lot of what informs me was reading Different by Frans de Waal, which is a biological look into sexuality/gender and compares the human experience with chimps and bonobos, as well as this excellent page about the science of gender and sexuality. Quoting one part:

To study childhood gender nonconformity, researchers have conducted retrospective studies, which interview large numbers of gay and straight adults about their childhood. UCLA psychologists interviewed gay men, lesbians, straight men and straight women (198 in each group), recruited from the general population; and they found that those adults who remembered playing baseball between the ages of 5–8 included 57% of the straight men, 49% of the lesbians, 28% of the straight women, and 19% of the gay men (Grellert et al., 1982).49 A more recent study looked at how consistently pre-gay boys differ from pre-straight boys in Turkey, Brazil, and Thailand; and researchers here found that pre-gay boys were less likely to be interested in sports and more likely to associate with girls and girls’ activities than pre-straight boys (Cardoso, 2009).50 More ideal (but harder to do) are prospective studies, which begin with children as children and then follow them into adulthood. The best-known study of this kind was done by UCLA psychiatrist Richard Green (1987) between the late 1960s and early 1980s, which included 66 feminine boys and 56 other boys, matched for other variables. Most of the feminine boys would have preferred to have been girls, some even appearing transsexual, while the control group was generally selected (i.e., not necessarily for being “masculine”). Green interviewed the children and their parents during the boys’ childhood and adolescence periods. At the end, he found in the “other” group (the 35 whom he was able to follow to the end) all turned out heterosexual. However, among the 44 markedly effeminate boys (whom he was able to follow to the end), 33 became homosexual or bisexual, and 11 heterosexual. Although some of the feminine boys did turn out to be heterosexual, still in 75 percent of these boys a marked femininity in childhood was a predictor of homosexual or bisexual interest in adulthood.51

All of the homosexuals already being effeminate in childhood strongly makes me think men being exclusively attracted to other men is caused by some early biological process, possibly genetic but likely because of low testosterone during certain stages of pregnancy. There is also research into domestic sheep showing that about 8% of males will exclusively mount other males, they aren't interested in females, and that this may also be caused by a certain brain region not developing properly because of lack of testosterone during a certain stage of pregnancy.

But what you've said has given me a lot to think about. I think it's obvious the full reality of human sexuality is very complex and far from solved.

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