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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   24764 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025

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People who have sex (verb) with people who are are the same sex (noun). Also throw in people with same-sex attraction.

Those two definitions are going to sometimes return conflicting signals. One definition is essentially the definition of a crime or a sin, a thief is someone who takes something that isn't theirs. The other is the definition of a predilection or a disease, a kleptomaniac is someone who constantly desires to steal things. Conflating the two definitions leads to communications breakdowns.

A frat boy who wakes up still drunk and drives his lifted Jeep Wrangler home and kills a moron cyclist riding his bike at 4am* is a killer, in the sense that his actions caused the death of another, and he is guilty of the appropriate crime of manslaughter. But he isn't a killer in the sense that a hitman or a gangbanger is, or even in the sense that a Navy SEAL who has never committed a crime** is a killer. We learn nothing about the frat boy's (literal) killer instinct or bloodlust from his drunk driving disaster, it has little predictive value as to the risk that he will kill again. Vehicular manslaughter, as a crime of killing, is mostly non-predictive of a tendency towards killing in other situations. Similarly, special categories exist, killing in the military is poorly predictive of killing in civilian life.

Normally these two definitions of gay will work together. If you want to have sex with a dude, your attraction algorithm probably contains other dudes. But having never been to Thailand or spoken with a ladyboy customer, idk what their attraction algorithms look like. Certainly I doubt most of the gay men I know want to have sex with a post-surgery (breasted) tranny.

*Me

**lol

So your argument is basically if they have implants its not 'gay'?

No my argument is that a guy who is attracted to a tranny prostitute with good tits is more likely to also be attracted to Sydney Sweeney than he is to be attracted to Jaxson Dart; so calling him gay would generally fail as a predictive model of the world, he isn't likely to act like the other people I call gay.

Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is knowing it doesn't belong in a fruit salad.

I think you've thrown out the baby with the bathwater. If my uncle had wheel's he'd be a bike. People who have homosexual sex can be defined as gay. I think its silly to needlessly add qualifiers. It is LGBT* except guys who top dudes with implants?

It just depends what you want to use the word "gay" to mean. If you want to indicate a certain variety of sinner, then it's best to use the "screwing anyone with a Y chromosome even once, in any manner, regardless of context" definition. If you want to try to describe a group of people with similar attributes, then calling people attracted to Traps gay isn't really very useful, they don't share attributes with most of the rest of the group.

I think this is the crux of the argument, my definition is activity and attraction based. And for record, since you mentioned sin, having a same sex attractions is not a sin to most people. My definition was quickly written, and I'd throw in consent, and full knowledge as caveats as well.

I think you're using the word to describe people fitting what your definition of gay is. I don't know what attributes you consider in your definition.

I'll expand, can you talk gay? Or dress gay? Sure that sort of description only has meaning because societal connotations and associations with people following the definition as gay. You can talk/dress gay without being gay. You can be gay without talking/dressing gay. Try changing the word and its doesn't make sense to use the attributes as gate-keeping mechanisms. Example: Can you talk/dress American without being American? Can you be American without talking/dressing American?

To be clear, I'm not really attached to either definition, I think the word "gay" is inconsistently used and applied, such that using it in conversation or argument to exclusively mean either the act/sin-based or identity/attraction-based definition is likely to run into snags when two people are using the word to mean different things. Without clarifying our definitions all we're going to achieve is shouting our definitions at each other, so I asked you to clarify what definition you are using to get the conversation moving more productively.

Personally, Homosexuality and sexual orientation is something that I'm intellectually struggling to define at this point. I really don't know what I think Homosexuality is. The "Born This Way" argument seems to have been more or less abandoned, repealed without replacement, by the LGBTQWERTY types. Not long ago Posner would cite the "helper in the nest" theory when writing an opinion on gay rights, the Born This Way theory was a keystone to the entire gay rights movement. Now, it is treated as either an assumption or an irrelevancy, but it isn't even part of the catechism anymore. When I ask woke friends of mine, queer themselves, what the current theory of homosexuality is in this month's issue of The Gay Agenda, they shrug and say idk it doesn't really matter anymore.

Alternatively, homosexual behavior is a pure choice that anyone can make. That doesn't feel right to me, as there is no situation in which I would be attracted to a male, I can't imagine a situation where it would occur to me to engage in homosexual activity. I can imagine most things that I don't like being appealing in some context, Islam or Hockey or beans on toast or genocide, but homosexuality I can't imagine. So there clearly must be some genetic difference between me and the men who are gay. But no one seems interested in telling me what anymore.

Idk, it's something I'm pretty lost on at this point if I stop to think about it.

If we can't define what it means to be a woman, that means we don't know what gay means either.

I think we can define what a woman is. Do we define the correct human physiology by the edge cases?

I dislike discussing this because it feels to me pretty consistently that we have lost the language to describe consensus reality.

"We" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here - there's a significant portion of people who if you held their feet to the fire would be able to tell you what a woman is, but for one political or social reason or another can't define it any more than they can describe what Peace in the Middle East looks like, or the steps necessary to get to fully automated luxury gay space communism. If the political right is using "what is a woman" as a political gotcha to get their opponents twisted in knots to avoid saying what they will face consequences from their allies over, who is the we? We don't describe correct human physiology by the edge cases, mostly because doctors are a necessary health function, but we define plenty of other things by edge cases, including when it can be used as shorthand for communicating much more complex ideas.

Anyone who has ever been a teenager could tell you there are about fifty things "gay" can be appended to that have nothing to do with homosexuality.

You are correct that without sex determination, then the definition of gay is meaningless. But my point is that attraction to a same-sex for some is non-trivial. I think there is a word that describes this same-sex attraction: gay.

When I was younger, gay was the word kids used for everything lame. I remember listening to NPR (Moth radio?) where a woman gave a story where her father came out as gay and she and her mother then become advocates for gay marriage, and the storyteller said she never used the word derogatorily. I think signaling political correctness as a child? To me bullshit. It didn't pass the sniff test for me.

But as I've grown up, the word gay isn't used for lame anymore and just is a synonym for homosexual. In my teenage years the word gay seemed to be trending away from the youth slang for uncool, for political correctness purposes.

I think we can define what a woman is.

Can you really? Because I don't think you can, or rather, what you define as 'woman' is wrong.

A woman is 'one whose social role is to be the bottom in the relationship', as contrasted to men which are the designated tops. This was true up until the early 20th century, though early efforts to limit bottoming to women have existed since roughly 1000 BC (that's what the 'you must only fuck XX chromosome-havers' Abramic law does).

There are some valid reasons to do this; if you force this kind of bottoming on future designated tops (as opposed to sexually mature women only, where the technology to make this state of affairs untenable would come about around 1900 or so) they won't necessarily work properly after that. And you need your future tops willing to die to maintain your society, so if you make it so they won't, then enemy men eventually come and fuck you. So we'd expect cultures with that meme to dominate.

Now, you'll probably complain, and argue that a woman actually means 'XX chromosome-havers', but you'll need to explain to me why that state had to be imposed rather than the default state of nature for human beings. You'll also note that my definition covers all edge cases [including the men who act as women anyway, or fags for short] while you're forced by angry women/bottoms to equivocate about chromosomal abnormalities and pregnancy.

future designated tops

I see that your pure and elegant category immediately starts getting caveats. This is because the category is bad.

Are you sure you aren’t just working through some mommy issues?

A woman is 'one whose social role is to be the bottom in the relationship', as contrasted to men which are the designated tops. This was true up until the early 20th century, though early efforts to limit bottoming to women have existed since roughly 1000 BC (that's what the 'you must only fuck XX chromosome-havers' Abramic law does).

The meaning of the words conventionally translated as "woman" (primarily gyne) in ancient Greece did not include teenage boys. The universe of socially acceptable sexual bottoms did. The Romans were closer to your model, admittedly.

This is the John Mearheimer offensive- realism theory of gender. Just as that theory can describe Ukraine / Russia but fail to describe relations between Switzerland / Germany, your understanding I assume rejects all equal partnerships between two people? I do not think this is a useful way of thinking on relations between people.

I find that while your definition (and other your theories on gender and sex) might seem intuitive and elegant to you, it also appears to only be useful to you, or at least to have little use beyond a certain kind of elegance. It's like I'm looking at someone trying to code golf gender and sex relations.

The former not so much, the latter you're spot on. Definitions are motte-and-baileys of their own, to be used and discarded like weapons, as necessary. e.g. I say what I like and judge everything based on what's useful to me, words are not useful as tools of mutual understanding but more useful for signaling allies and allegiances.

We just last week had a lengthy argument in this place over the definition of "Nazi", the definition of which is self-evident to normies. It's a boo-light for political ideologies people don't like, not a meaningful description in any sense the way it's used.

I've never mentioned chromosomes. Imposed by the state? You're thinking boils down to me to be the motherfuckers and the motherfucked, don't bother getting male and female involved.

My only point is that only the sex (noun) of the person you have sex (verb) with can determine whether one is gay. The word gay I, and I think most other people, define as synonymous with homosexual. Maybe you and others are getting on baggage with word gay, to me its neutral.

You're thinking boils down to me to be the motherfuckers and the motherfucked, don't bother getting male and female involved.

Yes. There's really no other reason to do otherwise.

You can only talk about the third category, those beyond that dichotomy, if this foundation exists.

Pretending that top-gays and bottom-gays are the same actively confuses the issue, but we've been pretending top-straights and bottom-straights are the same orientation for a while now so it's only natural we'd use that language/model for everyone else too.

As for "but most other people use these categories", well, most people do what I've described instinctually [whatever they are] and most of the other definitions are intellectual navel-gazing. They don't need to think about it, they just do it.

bottom-straights

Ahah, could you elaborate on the characteristic of this supposed demographic, so people outside of yourself could derive meaning from this term?

The top/bottom dichotomy is often generalized to describe demeanors rather than just sex acts at which point it becomes synonymous with dom/sub. Most bottom straights are women and most bottom tops are men but some women, dommy mommies as they might be referred to, are flocked to by males who crave the oblivion of submission.

The overwhelming amount of time this is just 'women' (as in, what someone from the 1800s would recognize as one).

Men can be this as well, but they generally need to find the rare [female] compatible with that state or the relationships break due to orientation mismatch.

And, like, what would distinguish a straight man as a bottom?

For clarity, is the male portion of this category as broad as anyone who like to bottom for people of the opposite gender, anyone who wants to bottom for people of the opposite sex, men who want to bottom for anyone with breasts, or just specifically men who like to get pegged by women?

Can you really? Because I don't think you can, or rather, what you define as 'woman' is wrong.

A woman is 'one whose social role is to be the bottom in the relationship', as contrasted to men which are the designated tops.

I'm sorry... and you're telling him he's the one with the wrong definition of 'woman'?

Now, you'll probably complain, and argue that a woman actually means 'XX chromosome-havers', but you'll need to explain to me why that state had to be imposed rather than the default state of nature for human beings.

I think I can just say "no, it didn't".

I think I can just say "no, it didn't".

if it didn't you wouldn't need a law telling people not to do it

A woman breaking the "no dick-riding" law (or would that be a "no pegging" law?) is still a woman, she's just a woman who's breaking the law.

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