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I actually disagree and I wonder if this line is just propaganda that millennials have been fed our whole lives.
It seems to be that a large percentage (30%, 60%, 90%?) of gay men truly enjoy being deviant. The gayness is part of their expression of being counter to normal behavior. Many seem to lament the mainstreaming of gayness having taken a lot of the fun out of it. Deviant, abnormal sex is explicitly part of the appeal.
I'm sure there are some, but celebration of deviancy is often a reaction to being stigmatized. If you're an American homosexual older than ~30, you grew up in an environment where casual homophobia was virtually guaranteed even in fairly liberal environments. Much of the point of Pride was(/is) to be in-your-face in reaction to people telling you to stay in the closet (or die) because you were a moral abomination.
See also: Taliban fighters complain about having to work in an office instead of waging jihad. There's always going to be some people for whom the struggle was a source of meaning and excitement. The normalization of homosexuality means less interest in flamboyantly transgressive behavior as a show of defiance and more PTA meetings.
Bro.
I feel their pain.
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I wouldn't rule out the possibility that there are a lot of straight men who would be deviant if they could get a woman down with it.
I've spoken with a middle aged straight man who admitted to me he was constantly fantasizing about some pretty out there fantasy fetish scenarios involving his wife, but who knew from the few times he had brought them up that she would never come around to trying any of them. Who knows how many people are in marriages or relationships where they quietly settle for never getting the deviancy they crave?
We often only know about historical fetishism due to (possibly libelous) accounts of rulers with fetishes. Who knows how old some popular internet fetishes were historically? Maybe gay guys are more likely to bring up their deviant desires, and thus more likely to find someone at least game to try them out.
Where gay men have deviant sex with one another, straight men are balls deep in weirdo niche porn and gooning for hours.
Degeneracy finds a way. There's still a case to be made that solo, self-destroying degeneracy is Less Wrong (lulz) than inducing others to degeneracy with you.
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Sure, lots of gay men enjoy being deviant, no argument here. But I'm curious how many straight men would be as deviant as that, were it not for a dearth of willing participants. I would hazard a guess that most straight men who've watched porn have watched and masturbated to pornographic videos depicting deviant sex acts that they've never had the opportunity to perform themselves. I would likewise hazard a guess that most men watching these videos would jump at the chance to perform these sex acts IRL if the opportunity presented itself. Like, if you were to conduct a survey asking straight people "would you participate in a gangbang if the opportunity presented itself and there was no risk of contracting an STD or impregnating someone/being impregnated?", I suspect the proportion of men who would answer in the affirmative would vastly outnumber the proportion of women (which is appropriate because... well, you get the idea).
Likewise, look at the kind of shit exceptionally wealthy men get up to (Arab princes, Epstein's clients etc.). You could interpret this as proof that wealthy people are all perverted sociopaths, or that power tends to corrupt; alternatively, you could interpret it as evidence that most straight men have fantasies that would strike the average woman as deviant, and only the sufficiently wealthy have the purchasing power to make their fantasies a reality.
At the same time, there are enough women to maintain the market for their own brand of sexually deviant books as well, yet we don't hear about men who have women waiting in line for a sliver of their attention.
Wait, actually, we do. They are called cult leaders. They swim in poontang. I don't know if having fantasies about jacking minotaurs off makes it more likely that the same woman will join a cult, though.
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Hypothesis: Some portion of men we (and they themselves) would call gay are not so much gay as hypersexual. If you want to have anonymous bathhouse group sex and gloryholes, men are just your only option. They are more accurately bathhouse-sexual than anything else and the gender of their partners more or less just follows as a consequence.
For the most part, market forces are such that if you can have sex with men you will have sex with men. In the same way that if you're neutral between shopping at Target and shopping at Neiman Marcus, you'll probably buy all your clothing at Target.
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Sure, but that understanding (which I agree is the correct one) would, if adopted, have negative effects on the interests of:
scoundrelsbathhouse-sexuality provides broad cover for most bedroom activitiesWhich has the ultimate effect of no group really wanting to be less wrong about this until they're forced by bad luck to address a bad actor.
When was it possible to do this with women too?
Around 1970.
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I think you're describing bisexual men. If someone is equally attracted to both genders, but one of them is much easier to grab a hold of than the other, it makes sense to go for them first and then settle for women when you want to get married or go for the more socially acceptable option.
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