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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   33213 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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I'd quibble a bit about 'perfectly normal'. Even for Grindrites, cottaging isn't a standard behavior, and I'd bet a sizable amount of money that >50% of gay guys haven't cottaged ever, and a smaller bet that around 80% either haven't or have only done so rarely and in non-central examples (eg, screwing in the restrooms of a gay club after you've danced with the guy for ten minutes). In addition to the safety and privacy concerns, or the various problems of preparation, it's also just a hilariously uncomfortable kink, and there's ways to execute on the kink side without busting your knees to hell and back.

But I could believe it's a 10-20% thing, and it's a slang that most gay guys either know or know under a different name, so it is a quibble. And there's a lot of other less-immediately-squicky stuff that's still definitely very far from the Hallmark-style "love is love" gay life-as-greeting card. I think there's ways to make these things compatible -- there's more than a few self-identified 'sluts' with lower body counts than the average straight guy and saccharine-level relationships with their husband, who enjoys orgies or partner swaps a couple times a year with the same close friends -- but that's not all of the sluts, and not even interesting to many of them.

cottaging isn't a standard behavior

It’s obviously standard enough that there’s a word for it.

Not a good criteria, there's a word for eating excrement and a word for obsessively eating dirt, but neither are standard behaviors.

In high school there were half a dozen terms for crazy sex acts that I’m sure none of us had ever performed but we did talk about them quite a bit.

‘Furry’

Eh... in the sense that if a sizable minority of a population does something, you probably will end up with a (recognized) word for it, maybe? But then it's 'standard' for men to get fucked by other men, because we have the word 'gay'. Even for definitions of standard where that's not wrong, it's not really clear.

((And there's a lot of things we have words for that are pretty uncommon, but I don't think we need to dive down the vore hole now.))

I never liked this argument. There are lots of words for things few people (if any) have ever done. We even have standard terms for hypothetical situations which have never come to pass and probably never will.

I never claimed that a majority of gay men engage in cottaging. By "perfectly normal", I merely meant that it's a concept that most gay men could be assumed to be familiar with, and which most would consider unworthy of comment if it came up in conversation.

That's fair, and why I put it as a quibble more than any real disagreement. I have had people who assumed it was so common as to be a rite of passage, so it's something I prefer to have more specifics about.

That's fair.

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