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There's a specific type of news story that works like a Rorschach test for whether you believe in the official version of reality that institutions present, or the messy, underground reality of actual human beings. The recent case of Dr. Samuel Stefan, a colorectal surgeon at Queen Alexandra Hospital in Cosham, is a perfect example. The headlines are all about a "doctor struck off after stripping naked in a toilet and propositioning a colleague." It's framed as a story about a predatory surgeon and a bunch of shocked, innocent victims.
But if you actually read the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) report with any kind of awareness of how the modern world works, you'll spot a massive hole in the story where a very popular yellow-and-orange smartphone app should be.
The tribunal tells us that Dr. Stefan had been "chatting to a colleague online" even though they were "unknown to each other." They arranged to meet in a toilet. The colleague, we're told, thought this was a "mutually convenient place" and "did not plan to have sex" with Dr. Stefan. When the cubicle door opened to reveal a naked surgeon beckoning him over, the colleague was "shocked, numb, and scared."
Let me just pause here to appreciate the absolutely wild level of benefit-of-the-doubt the MPTS is giving this situation. We're apparently living in a world where the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service believes that two men who've never met, after chatting on some unnamed internet platform, regularly arrange to meet in a hospital toilet cubicle to do... what, exactly? Exchange sourdough starters? Talk about the finer points of laparoscopic mesenteric excision? Compare notes on the hospital's pension scheme?
If you follow the link to the actual MPTS ruling, you'll come across gems such as:
Sounds silly?
Sorry, Mr. A, it sounds retarded. But I'm impressed at the chutzpah. Maybe he wanted to apply mouthwash to your cock too, to be extra safe. You "get to know each other" in public toilets in much the same way that "Netflix and chill" involves ardent attention to the best of the Silver Age of television.
Of course, there was catfishing involved:
Unless the "online platform" was LinkedIn and the "chat" was about a job opening in the proctology department, there's exactly one reason why two men who don't know each other arrange a meeting in a toilet stall. That reason is Grindr. And the main purpose of a Grindr meeting in a toilet stall is definitely not a "mutually convenient" chat.
The tribunal's choice to just accept the colleague's claim of shock at face value suggests one of two things. Either the MPTS members are literally the last three people in the UK who don't know what a hookup app is, or they're putting on some kind of elaborate legal performance where everyone pretends the "victim" was just an innocent bystander who stumbled into the world of public sex by accident.
If you're a man and you arrange to meet another man in a toilet stall after an anonymous internet chat, the "naked" part of the reveal is usually what "meeting" means. The idea that this was some kind of ambush on an unsuspecting guy requires us to believe in a level of innocence that would make a Victorian governess look like a hardened cynic.
And yet, this is the story the tribunal went with. Why?
Maybe it's because the legal system just doesn't have the right words for "misunderstood sexual subcultures." In the official world of the General Medical Council, there are only Doctors and Patients, or Harassers and Victims. There's no category for "Two guys who tried to have a quick hookup during a shift, but one of them got cold feet or thought the other was being way too weird and decided to blow the whistle to save his own ass."
To be totally clear, Dr. Stefan sounds like a nightmare. The report lists other incidents where he tried to kiss colleagues or repeatedly touched the genitals of junior doctors on the wards. Groping people while they're trying to do their rounds isn't a "misunderstanding of subculture." That's just being a sexual harasser. If the tribunal wanted to strike him off for the ward-groping alone, they would've had an open and shut case that didn't require them to pretend a toilet meeting was some kind of platonic coincidence.
But the toilet incident is the one in all the headlines. It's the "deplorable behavior" that the public finds most shocking. And because it's the main charge, the tribunal has to treat the colleague's story as the gospel truth. They have to believe that a grown man walked into a toilet to meet an internet stranger expecting a perfectly normal, non-sexual encounter.
This creates a really weird set of incentives. If you're a junior doctor and you get involved in some risky, slightly unprofessional behavior (like meeting a senior colleague for a hookup in the hospital)*, and it goes badly, your best move is to claim you had no idea what was happening. You have to play the "shocked and numb" innocent to avoid getting caught in the fallout from the other person's misconduct. The tribunal, meanwhile, has to go along with this performance because admitting otherwise would mean acknowledging that NHS hospitals are places where people have complicated, messy, and sometimes illicit sex lives.
The MPTS is obsessed with "public confidence." They mention it specifically: "The Tribunal was of the view that public confidence would be undermined if Dr. Stefan was permitted to practise."
Public confidence is a weird thing. It's rarely based on actual truth, it's based on keeping up a certain appearance. The appearance here is "The Medical Register is a Sacred List of Saints." If the tribunal admitted that Dr. Stefan and his colleague were probably engaging in a common, if risky, gay subcultural practice, it would mess up the appearance. It's way better for "public confidence" to pretend that Dr. Stefan is a lone predator lurking in toilets, jumping out at innocent men who were just looking for a "mutually convenient" place to stand around.
Why did such a murky outcome where neither the primary accuser or the defendant come out smelling of roses collapse into such a binary outcome? We might prefer thinking about it as legibility, in the same sense as Seeing Like A State. The state and its institutions (like the GMC) need the world to make sense in a certain way. A "predatory doctor" makes sense. A "messy situation involving two men, a hookup app, and a complete disaster of professional boundaries on both sides" doesn't make sense. It's too complicated. It raises too many questions about what else is going on in those toilets. It suggests that the hospital isn't just some sterile place of healing, but somewhere humans with hormones and smartphones actually exist.
(And absolutely don't ask about what happens on the beanbags, the ones in the mess)
Watch what happens when you try to tell the truth:
"Dr. Stefan and Mr. A met on Grindr for a bathroom hookup. When Dr. Stefan turned out to be older and a different race than his profile pictures, Mr. A got uncomfortable and left. Later, when Dr. Stefan was under investigation, Mr. A decided to protect himself by claiming he never intended a sexual encounter."
Now what? Now you have to ask: Is catfishing someone on Grindr professional misconduct? Is meeting a colleague for bathroom sex professional misconduct, or only if one person changes their mind? If Mr. A was also planning to have sex at work, does he also get sanctioned? What's the standard? How do we enforce it?
This is all rather inconvenient. Messy.
So the tribunal goes with the version of reality that makes the most sense in their framework, even if it's the version that makes the least sense to anyone who's lived in a city in the last twenty years. They treat the colleague's "shock" as a medical fact rather than a legal move.
We should also think about the "timeline concern" the panel mentioned. Dr. Stefan was already under investigation for the toilet incident when he allegedly went on to grope people on the wards. This is where my sympathy for the "he was just a guy on Grindr" defense completely disappears.
If you're a surgeon and you've just been caught in a toilet cubicle with your pants down, and the GMC is breathing down your neck, the rational response is to become the most celibate, professional, and invisible person in the history of medicine. You should be the guy who won't even look at a colleague's thigh, much less touch it.
The fact that Dr. Stefan apparently kept making unwanted advances while actively under investigation suggests a level of impulsiveness or lack of reality-testing that's genuinely incompatible with being a surgeon. Surgery is all about extreme impulse control. It's the ability to stand still for six hours and make movements measured in millimeters. If you can't stop yourself from grabbing a junior doctor's genitals while the medical board is literally in the middle of deciding whether to end your career, you probably shouldn't be holding a scalpel inside someone's abdomen.
So yeah, the guy had to go. Getting erased from the register was the only possible outcome. Even if there's no evidence that he was a threat to the general public (or an incompetent surgeon), he certainly was a menace to any nearby twinks, and not a great colleague.
(This is dry British understatement, before someone gets their knickers in a twist)
But I still can't get over the toilet thing.
I keep imagining the tribunal members sitting around a mahogany table, reading the transcript. One of them says, "So, he met a man he didn't know in a toilet stall. Why would he do that?" And another one says, "The witness says it was a mutually convenient place. Maybe the library was full?" And they all nod seriously, recording in the official judgment that this was a believable and logical chain of events.
There's a real cost to this kind of institutional blindness. When we force people to lie about the context of their lives to fit into the "victim/predator" binary, we lose the ability to actually regulate professional behavior effectively. If the NHS wants to stop people from having sex in the toilets, they have to admit that people want to have sex in the toilets. They have to deal with the reality of workplace culture, the stress of the job, and the way technology has changed how colleagues interact.
Instead, we get this whole show. We get a "Digital Reporter" (are there any analog ones left?) writing about "deplorable behavior" like we're still living in 1955. We get a tribunal that pretends Grindr doesn't exist. And we get a medical register that's "protected" from a man who was clearly falling apart, but for reasons the tribunal is too "proper" to actually spell out.
Dr. Stefan didn't show up to the hearing. He offered no remorse and no attempt to fix things. He's basically vanished from the profession, likely on a one way flight to Romania. Maybe he figured there was no point in showing up to a trial where the fundamental premise of the "crime", the toilet meeting, was being discussed in language that had nothing to do with the reality of what actually happened.
In the end, the system worked. A surgeon who didn't have the basic judgment to function in a professional environment was removed. The "public confidence" has been "maintained." But as I read the article, I can't shake the feeling that the only person who's truly "shocked, numb, and scared" is anyone who expects our public institutions to have even a basic understanding of how modern humans actually live.
Queen Alexandra Hospital will keep on functioning. The toilets will stay "mutually convenient" for all sorts of activities. The GMC will keep striking people off using the moral language of the mid-20th century. And the rest of us will keep reading these articles, squinting at the space between the lines where the real world, messy, sexual, and mediated by technology, is hiding in plain sight.
It's a comfortable fiction. It's a world where doctors are either saints or monsters, where toilets are just places for quiet reflection, and where online chatting between strangers is always leading up to a polite conversation about the weather. It's a world that doesn't exist, likely never has, but it's the only one the MPTS knows how to deal with.
*It's worth noting that Stefan was a SHO/Senior House Officer. That's an antiquated but commonly used term, and it absolutely doesn't mean a doctor very high up the totem pole. That doesn't necessarily mean that he wasn't senior to many people, but they'd have to be interns of one flavor or another.
Updated version on Substack, with a few juicy extras.
You might say gay men arranging to have sex with each other in a toilet shows how disgusting gay men are, but I'm pretty sure it shows how much women class up the sexual experience. There would be a 10000x increase in straight couples having sex on oily cardboard in alleyways if women were down with it.
I never planned for so many of my sexual encounters to be on high thread count Egyptian cotton sheets in nice clean rooms but I'm glad women are there to carry the load on this one.
EDIT: I just remembered a story. A friend of mine was visiting my city. He was staying in a nice hotel. The next day his girlfriend was scheduled to arrive and they would go back to his hotel room. So, that morning he made his bed and scattered rose petals on it to dial up the romance. He then met up with his girlfriend, had dinner and drinks and took her back to the hotel room. The bed was not how he left it! Apparently, housekeeping had come in, seen the clumsily arranged rose petals, seen the shitty way he made the bed, and undid the whole thing, made the bed so that it was crisp and perfect and then more tastefully scattered the rose petals.
I like to imagine that the female hotel housekeeper couldn't even bear the thought of his girlfriend being fucked on messy sheets.
I can only hope your buddy left a nice tip. That kind of thoughtful approach to hospitality is on the outs.
Now, personally, I'm not "disgusted" by gay male sexuality, at least not in the usual sense. It's more confusing to me, I can no more relate to the desire to have my back blown out by a hairy Greek bull than I can to the idea of getting off to a woman's armpits. I am also deeply jealous, buggers live the straight-man dream, as much sex as they can stomach with an unending cock carousel a single swipe away. A mid gay man gets ten times the action of a top 5% straight dude, with 10% the hassle.
So, I'm not sure that gay men find each other as attractive as straight men find women.
More story time: when I was younger I thought I could be gay and got really wasted one night and visited a gay bathhouse[1]. And there were men everywhere in towels making eye contact each other considering hooking up. All you had to do was meet and go to one of the many rooms nearby to fuck. And it was NYC so everyone was fairly attractive and fit. It was actually as efficient a system as it could possibly be. But something I noticed was that there was actually much, much less hooking up than you'd expect. Don't get me wrong it was a den of depravity, but men would cruise past one another for a long, long time before they found someone they wanted to actually have sex with.
I'm very sure if it was a room of half men and half women, every woman wearing a skimpy towel that was at least as fit and put together as the gay men in my bath house were, would be propositioned 5x a minute.
Gay men can be sex pigs but there's some other dimension to having sex that's clearly more complicated than
if attractive man then sex.You may be interested in the infamous Red Means No review from last year’s contest.
If those are the stats for orgies, perhaps the bathhouse was pretty competitive.
That was... something. I have been around the block a time or two, but orgies where you pretend-rape women are a tier of degeneracy I have never really seen before.
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Fair, though the median orgy has the failure mode where the average attendee is unattractively old or ugly or gives off psycho vibes.
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Can’t say I’ve been to a gay bathhouse, but I’ve been to plenty of gay clubs. Sometimes it’s to go meet a girl who’s with her gay friends, because I couldn’t talk her into ditching her friends and coming over. Sometimes it’s me who brings the group to a gay club because I’d like to shake off a gay friend or gay friends of a girl I’m trying to bang.
I’m actually way more down to meet a girl who’s at a gay club with her gay friends than at a regular club with a mixed group or just her girlfriends. Gay friends play the least defense and are the easiest to shake off.
Sometimes a girl’s straight male friends will befriend you, especially if your presence occupies a potential cockblocker—the girl you're trying to bang—in which case you all suddenly become mutual grassroots wingmen. However, sometimes straight male friends can be more hostile or territorial. Understandably so, as oftentimes they’re subsidizing the bill or splitting it with the other guys in the group. Few guys would be happy about sponsoring a girl’s night out only for her to get poached away to poundtown by some other random guy. However, there’s a limit to how overtly they’re willing to try cockblocking since they don’t want to look like a jealous cuck. They’ll eventually leave you be as they see you’re not that easily outmogged and go off on their own quest to get laid.
Girlfriends are more of a double-edged sword, more feast or famine. Girls care more about the opinions of their girlfriends than straight male friends. If girlfriends wish to try to cockblock, they’ll be way more shameless than straight male friends in doing so. They’ll stick to the girl you’re trying to bang like gum and help pester and shit-test you to death. They may even try to pressure you to pay their bill. Girls don't have the burden of performance that guys do and girls have automatic social currency that guys don't, so girlfriends can throw hissy fits and manufacture drama to cockblock you in a way that would be social kamikaze for a straight male friend. On the other hand, if girlfriends are flirty with you, it can skyrocket the girl you’re trying to bang’s attraction toward you thanks to female mate-choice copying. Additionally, the girl will then be more willing to leave with you to get you away from her friends.
But yeah, I too have Noticed that the vibes of gay clubs tend be to tamer and less horny than what straight men might have in their heads as a stereotype. I’ve chalked it up to gay men having more of an abundance mentality than straight men.
For a straight guy, if he doesn’t strike while the iron is hot with a given girl, who knows when the next opportunity might come with a new girl. For a gay guy, the next nut with a new man is always around the corner. The gay guy is also more likely to have recently gotten laid, perhaps earlier that same day or night. He might still be recharging, still in the refractory period from his last romp.
The sense of urgency is different between straight and gay men. It’s always two-minutes-left-in-the-4th-needing-a-touchdown for a straight guy trying to seal the deal with a chick he hasn’t banged yet. For a gay guy, it’s always pre-game warmups.
Being a gay man is like a superpower. Operating under a permanent state of post-nut clarity if you so choose, but otherwise still having the mental hardware of a man—plus the time, money, energy, and headache saved from not having to deal with women in sexual/relationship contexts.
It's a plausible theory, but why go to a gay bath house if you have post-nut clarity? They're not even bath houses in the traditional sense. You'd hate to just chill out there if you're not trying to get laid.
A gay bar or gay club is still fun even if you're straight and not horny. A gay bath house is not.
Speculating off your description of the NYC bathhouse you attended and my background vibe:
Even gay clubs, including those in NYC, generally aren't open 24/7 (much less having a decent crowd 24/7). Why not just chill out at a gay bathhouse on occasion in your free time? If some guy catches your fancy while you're chilling, you have the option of flagging him down for a session in one of the side rooms. If not, not a big deal, there's always some other day.
I meant "bath house" is doing a lot of work. They're not, like, a sauna and a hot tub and other spa things. This one was just a shower area and also hallways to rooms. No real place to chill.
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I can only encourage self-discovery.
Now, you have to remember that gay men are satiated! The regularity with which Genghis Khan fucks his bountiful and bodacious harem might start off strong, but will inevitably taper due to boredom. On the other hand, if you suddenly gained access to the lady's quarters, you'd spray seed while the sun shines, or some other incredibly mixed metaphor.
This is a rare occurrence. Fit gay men can go to a bathhouse whenever they feel like it. Hetero men in the former scenario would make the most of it with a scarcity mindset, gay men might well be bored and there just to do something more interesting than rubbing one out.
Same reply as for @Sloot
https://www.themotte.org/post/3442/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/398788?context=8#context
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