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The ‘Kathoey’ or Ladyboy designation is a more honest way of categorizing both very effeminate / camp gay men and most ‘straight’, feminine transwomen (HSTS in Blanchardian typology).
Transwomen of a kind are obviously very common. I understand there is still some social discrimination, but probably 70% of Sephora sales assistants in Thailand are ladyboys/transwomen/kathoey/your preferred term here. This is even more common than in Seattle, which I wrote about previously. In my local Sephoras (London Westfield - Shepherd’s Bush NOT Stratford, please - and Soho on Broadway I guess) there are some transwomen and a large number of very feminine, makeup wearing gay men, but something about the experience in Thailand just underscored to me how similar the two are.
It reminded me of a pioneering British local TV documentary I’d written about before, produced in the 1980s about gay life in London in the 1930s. One of the things the men make very clear is that the gay community, such as it was at the time, consisted entirely of camp, effeminate men who were to the man, in terms of sexual role, bottoms. Often they described each other, semi-ironically, with female pronouns or roles (queen etc) which are still used by many camp gay men today. The tops they had sex with were not considered part of this community. In a very real sense, they were not considered gay at all, even and perhaps most clearly by the men they were having sex with.
This wasn’t a legal distinction - a ‘top’ was still committing a crime at the time under British law in having sex with another man, and would flee the night club in the event of a police raid all the same - but it was a clear social one. The femme men themselves didn’t have sex with each other (this is, at least, implied in the documentary), only with the ‘straight’ or ‘topping’ men whom they solicited in clubs, parks, outside barracks and so on. More broadly, the sexual and communal landscape the men discuss seems to be by far the most common way in which human societies have historically understood effeminate or camp males who are primarily sexually attracted to other men. The ladyboys don’t have sex with each other for the same reason that the gay ‘queens’ of 1930 London didn’t. And then men who have sex with ladyboys - or who had sex with those men in the thirties - aren’t or weren’t gay in the same way that they were. That isn’t to say they’re straight, or not bisexual, or not anything else, but it’s clearly not the same thing. The modern Western gay identity, in which tops and bottoms (and indeed lesbians and gay men) are grouped together is essentially a consequence of the civil rights movement and AIDS crisis; it is ahistorical and unusual compared to all historical treatment of non-mainstream forms of gender and sexual identity.
Blanchard’s key contribution to the understanding of transsexualism was that he acknowledged - based on his own practice - that homosexual transsexuals or HSTS and autogynephilic transsexuals or AGP constituted two clearly defined, vastly different populations of males who identified with womanhood or female-ness. HSTS fundamentally existed along the spectrum of camp male femininity, expressed both sexually and generally. As I understand it, the gay man at Sephora who wears a skirt, a full face of makeup and speaks in a camp, exaggerated feminine voice is - even if he is not on hormones - considered a kathoey in Thailand. And this makes sense - camp femme gay men who are sexually submissive, may wear drag etc and HSTS transwomen are often divided solely by the extent to which they are committed to presenting as female (that commitment ultimately expressed in medical intervention), and nothing else in terms of dress, presentation, sexual preference, interests and so on.
The reason why Blanchard is controversial is not his categorisation of HSTS, of course, but its inverse. The non-HSTS, the top-who-transitions, the man (often in Blanchard’s own experience) who decides after 30+ years of normal heterosexual life, marriage, children, relationships with only women etc, that he is actually a woman, is not part of this long continuity of effeminate homosexual males. He is something different, something new, something comparatively unusual. He is a product, it seems to me at least, of modernity. In naming the autogynephilic transsexual man, Blanchard acknowledged a sexual identity largely divorced from sexuality (consider that many if not most AGP are attracted to women at least before heroic doses of female hormones, meaning their sexual identity is not a key part of their transition). The AGP male is closer to the archetypal modern fetishist (I won’t name examples because inevitably that will devolve into a pointless argument), except that the object of his attraction is inverted. His motivations for womanhood are completely different to those of the HSTS, but our understanding of trans identity doesn’t allow us to acknowledge this essential difference.
If an argument one occasionally hears about clearly differentiating HSTS and AGP is that it is impossible to tell the difference, I think the Thai example is a good counterargument. Perhaps someone else can correct me if I’m wrong, but I find it hard to believe that these transwomen are particularly interested in lesbian relationships with ciswomen. They are, of course, interested in relationships with men, with males, because they are gay males, but that is about it. They have their own bathrooms (at least in some Thai malls and bars I saw clear male, female and other (with the gender icons overlapping) bathrooms, which seemed - above all else - reasonable.
I think I understand AGP as a phenomenon (for a loose value of understand, nobody has a strong grasp on what causes it at a mechanical level). It seems like a good way to describe and conceptualize a large chunk of trans people, and I know many who willingly endorse it as an accurate model of their internal cognition.
What I'm confused by is MSM who prefer "feminine" men. Naively, you'd expect that they'd want the most masculine gay men they could find. If you like femininity that much, why not just sleep with women? Why seem out "passing" transwomen or ladyboys or twinks or...
Hmm. Now that I've articulated this, I can only shrug and say that human sexuality is messy and complicated. Firstly, we have bisexual men, who might be willing to sleep with both men and women, but find it easier to sleep with other men. Solve for the equilibrium.
Second, even straight men have diverse tastes in women. Some like girly-girls, others, like me, are Tomboy Respecters. If I was making the Perfect Woman in a lab, she'd be a man (in terms of personality and interests) who just happens to be in a woman's body. Well, +2-3 SD of being nurturing and caring, but the point stands.
I feel like the butch and femme dynamic among lesbians is similar. While I get the feeling it is a lot less prevalent as a dynamic in modern lesbian spaces in the West, I have seen plenty of Tumblr posts where lesbian women fawn over tall, muscular women presenting in a mannish style, so there must be something to it.
My best guess is that the human brain generally tries to detect two things in mates: man/woman and masculine/feminine (or perhaps dominant/submissive.) In most people they are attracted to a congruent set (man+masculine/dominant or woman+feminine/submissive), but a minority of the population end up attracted to an incongruent set (man+feminine or woman+masculine.) This is why a small percentage of men love the idea of Amazon warrior women, or orcish women. And why you get some gay men attracted to femboys, and some lesbian women attracted to butch lumberjack women.
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I think you came to the answer on your own.
Another element that 2rafa doesn't mention, but I think gestures in the direction of, is the whore/madonna split. There's some fraction of bisexual men who see women as beautiful angels deserving of devotion, nothing as icky as raw sexual lust, but see twinks/femboys/trans women as essentially fallen women by default, and therefore worthy of sexual instrumentalization. Add to that the fact that the folks in this group are often unironically eager for sexual instrumentalization in a way only a minority of cis women are (and even then, they need foreplay and trust first), and well, the opportunity to derive gains from trade (my favorite of all Scott's jokes) emerges.
As I wrote a few months ago:
There's also a bit of the "cis women are so awful, hoeflation is abysmal, women are terrible whores who don't know how to please a man" -- I'm not pulling these out of my own head, these are things I've been told by people in this orbit -- both on the offering and the receiving end of this kind of transaction. There's an element to this subculture that's kind of the male version of political lesbianism.
This very dynamic actually showed up on the motte once, several months ago:
I think of this memeplex as the "strong independent man don't need no woman" imaginary rebellion, but of course it involves consorting with men, because for these guys somebody's gotta appease the sexual appetite they're angry at women for not satisfying.
As I wrote back then:
Almost uniformly, trans women of the HSTS/transmedical bent are massively and uncompromisingly angry about the whole thing, and a decent amount of the discourse around trans chasers is trying to imprecisely talk about this dynamic. Obviously, "you're my substitute for a real woman because real women are hoes and I'm looking for the poophole loophole" isn't exactly what this demographic has in mind when they talk about wanting romantic attention from men. In particular, they tend to strongly dislike gay culture, to which this dynamic is directly adjacent, and if you'll excuse a purile pun, into which it penetrates without commitment.
Some fraction, however, of femboys, crossdressers, and twinks are more than happy to play along with it though -- especially if it means they pull a straight man. Or a "straight" man.
(AGPs, however, are obviously not particularly interested in men anyway, and themselves have kind of a madonna/whore thing going on -- where women are madonnas, and men are whores, and they wanna be madonna: "like a virgin." Some of your confusion may have to do with the fact that the West often glorifies and literally angelifies women as innocent and fundamentally decent, in ways that the rest of the world doesn't, and we're now dealing with the cultural fallout of a world in which this is colliding with women attaining positions of power.)
Whenever this discussion topic comes up, I always wish I had a "summon gattsuru" button. I usually understand... at least half of his posts, but on this topic he's far more familiar with the terrain than I am.
This is true but it doesn’t answer the specific question of purely homosexual gay tops attracted to femme men. That a bisexual top would be attracted to feminine men is comparatively unsurprising, both feminine men and most women present along the femme continuum. That a purely homosexual gay top attracted to relatively masculine or male-presenting men wouldn’t be attracted to women is likewise unsurprising, since this is a man who is physically attracted to maleness and masculinity. But a man who enjoys dominant penetrative sex with feminine-presenting men but is unattracted entirely to women is harder to explain.
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I'll caveat that my tastes are ... unusual, and a lot of the part I can relay aren't necessarily representative, and those that are representative are going to reflect more 'masked' environments (eg, tumblr, blahaj programmer world) than unmasked ones (eg, furry fandom stuff).
To some extent, although from inside my personal experience is less about who was worthy, and more about who could have a thing done, in a way that worked successfully. I haven't exactly had an easy or good time in gay dating spaces. But I don't get the same 'learn a foreign language' feeling.
I like to use the metaphor of the dishwasher here. Most people who've loaded a dishwasher end up with The One True Way to do it. Getting into a long-term relationship, you're going to find out that some people do things in crazy ways: forks facing up in the silverware holders, putting bowls on the top rack and cups on the bottom, running it on a daily basis even if it's almost empty, so on.
That's definitely part of it, but there's also a lot of ugly physical ramifications about Guys Who Think Transwomen Are Always Up For X. The central argument that trans activists bring up is the guy who's post-nut-clarity devolves into horror or even violence, but you can usually get the admission that, in the modern era, that's at least unusual (especially outside of sex work), or where the chaser is only interested in trans women as seen on porn. There's still a lot of room for disagreement, and when a sexual partner's change of presentation or mutability of presentation is part of the attraction to start with, even honest and well-intended trans chasers that are genuinely interested in a longer-term relationship can be Trouble.
At the most overt and crude level, someone that's explicitly interested in trans women qua "chicks-with-dicks" is going to have a really complex negotiation if their sexual partner wants or has had bottom surgery. Someone that's really focused on the idea of being pegged by a real penis is going to have problem with a large number of trans women who, even if they're planning on keeping their dick, don't particularly want to penetrate anything with it and definitely don't like having someone focusing on it. There's a lot of stuff that's built around the fetish and isn't actually built for the person. There's a lot of sissy and sissification stuff that's really common in gay porn and you might think would be catnip for the actual-AGPs, but a sizable number of trans women (even some actually-AGP ones!) find so overtly mocking that it puts them entirely out of their rhythm.
(tbf, because most of it is mocking the sub, just in a way a cis sub gay guy's going to like; for those not too squicked out by the content, contrast tyroo as a trans sub take and vonepitaph as a cis sub take.).
And that goes far beyond sex stuff itself. Like people who chase Asian women, you get some chasers that think that trans-femininity is going to mean a ultra-submissive barefoot-and-in-kitchen trad-wifing that doesn't seem to actually be that desired by that many trans women.
There's also the gay culture problem and 'quality' problem, where a lot of 'discrete masc tops' are... just not very good people or physically appealing in the market-for-lemons manner that plagues a lot of dating spheres. I still think they layer on top of that first one, though.
((This can go the other direction, although for obvious reasons FTM complain about it less since guys don't bitch like that. For all the 'bonus hole' porn out there, there's a lot of trans guys who either don't want to or physically can't take a dick there. There's a lot of gay tops that really like the idea of breeding someone, but actual ramifications of a working reproductive system squick them the fuck out. And the ramifications of a near-inevitable hysterectomy put massive pressures on romantic development. The 'bisexual' guys who treat FTMs like dyke-breaking do get a lot of complaints, and with pretty fair reason imo.))
Are those ramifications like "if you think about it that's not really a man, because by virtue of breeding it's evidently a woman, and women are squicky", or more like "the sex part sounds hot but the last thing I want is an actual baby, babies are squicky".
Sometimes, but more... with some warning about more explicit detail than you'd probably want to know:
Pregnancy concerns specifically get complicated. There's a lot of ways to avoid them pretty effectively, and some gay guys are under the (not entirely correct) impression that just being on testosterone is itself effective birth control. But you do see some who are really into the idea in fictional contexts and get grossed out because an IUD isn't perfect.
((And they tend to be polarizing for trans guys, where either it's something out of Alien as a fate-worse-than-death, or they get out of high school with an exact number of kids that they want. But I have met a few exceptions who like the idea but aren't sure they're ready for it, a la Daxhush, and there's a lot of cis woman who have similar divisions, so not sure how much of that's downstream of trans stuff as how much is downstream of the whole progressive culture.))
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pls breed. no pregnant, only breed
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Hm. I guess this is one of the lines in your posts that I find hard to parse... could you expand on what you mean, with the "who could have a thing done" thing?
Yeah - that's what I was gesturing at with the "cis women are bitches, I'm going to date a *trans-*woman" protests. I think there's some level of belief some folks have, as in the motte post I quoted, that dating trans women is a kind of Konami code to unlock "super extra real hardcore femininity mode" and get the goods that cis women aren't giving them.
That said -- I recall once reading a reddit thread where a trans person actually endorsed that framing to a degree, to many upvotes. I tried to find it, but alas I couldn't. If I recall correctly, it went something like:
That was definitely surprising, and went contrary to my understanding of how such things tend to go.
Uh... sorry, trying not to get too prurient.
There's a lot of scripts and modes of discussion that occur between potential or new romantic partners. They vary a lot between the sexes and sexual orientations. At least in my experience, the ones for a man going after women, or propositioning sex within an existing but new relationship, are kinda a mess, filled with minefields and potential miscommunications and active hostility. It's not that the gay versions are always easier to read, or always work, or avoid costly side effects, or are even that different -- I've got my horror stories, it's definitely easy to swing and miss, and that's on top of the alcoholism problems.
The straight scripts seem just fucked.
I might want to invite someone over for tea and some good cardio regardless of gender, so it's not seeing the women as Madonnas and the men as whores. But I can probably come up with a plan, even a likely-doomed plan, for the latter. Even inside established relationships, there's a lot of expectations that men initiate sex or perform desire, but only in the ways that the women want done to them, and that's a list that is neither well-documented nor consistent.
Can't find it, but it's certainly a believable result. The median chaser-trans interaction is probably pretty rough, but ultimately, they are just guys with a lot of focus on a kink. That doesn't necessarily make them bad people, just a potential trouble that has to be negotiated. Part of why the discourse gets so toxic in reddit environments is that it's something that should be solvable.
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I suppose it's like drag; that's taking certain elements of femininity and exaggerating them to the nth degree (and hence why some old-school feminists don't like drag).
Some MTF do go the hyper-feminine, everything pink and sparkly, skirt go spinny! route, so if you're a straight guy you're getting the "womanly woman" stuff without the "treat me like a person not a pair of tits" demands (or at least I imagine that's the perceived attraction; someone who is delighted to be treated as a pair of tits, because that chimes with their notions of what being a woman is about - the physical attributes of femininity).
To be fair, I have seen some cis women doing the same "treat me like a brainless dumb bimbo who is perpetually stupid and perpetually horny" stuff and I have no idea why they do it, even if it is some kind of 'I'm selling porn to subscribers' model where this is the product the consumers want. But there we go.
Some cis woman 'bimboization' is about not wanting to be responsible for her own desires (or missteps) or cognizant of her own fears or shame, especially in written formats. Not a common kink, but neither is it anywhere near as rare as you'd think. For cis guys who like the kink, it seems more about ease of access and forwardness of desire.
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In addition to the other answers, which make good points, I think there’s an aspect to male top psychology that enjoys the sexual dominance or humiliation of other men specifically. Many tops, after all, aren’t bisexual, something that can’t fully be explained by the ‘gay sex is easy’ meme when many entirely homosexual tops are traditionally handsome and masculine men, good conversationalists, friends with many women etc who could easily find female partners at least on occasion.
You really, actually, genuinely have no idea of male sexuality, do you? If a man can't reliably have at least two different partners in the same day, that man is a failure.
Wat???
I’m serious, what on earth do you mean?
The main thrust is that "at least on occasion" is pathetically bad and is not a refutation of anything.
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Any man can have two partner in the same day (even women ones), a loser trucker can have two truck stop whores in a day. That’s not what it’s about.
You are not autistic to require clarification of the lack of explicit payment, so I can't see any good faith reading of your reply.
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I suspect there is some novelty to “chicks with dicks”. I imagine there’s some small population of transsexuals that are indistinguishable from women (except for extremely close inspection) who also have a dick. High sex drive or otherwise perverted men may find that interesting. Of course there’s a spectrum to the chicks with dicks and the men who experience them. But it seems pretty simple to me.
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I always had the impression that there is a real category of men that can be described as "attracted to women and femininity, but finds actual women too alien", and therefore prefers male sex/life partners who they can actually empathise with/relate to/theory-of-mind. Relatedly, futanari (so much material reading as "it would be hot if a woman did/experienced this, but it requires having a dick"). On the other side of the aisle, lesbians who are into butch/masculine or (in East Asia especially) "prince-like" handsome women also seem to be a thing, which I'd readily analyse in the same way. (Mirroring futa, perhaps, mpreg?)
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While it is probably not intentional, the term homosexual transsexual would mean different things to different people (because some would consider a trans-woman who is into women homosexual (e.g. lesbian), while Blanchard considers the trans-woman who is into men the HSTS), and is thus probably best avoided. I am open to formulations which are less clunky than 'transwomen who are into women'.
I think that there are some trans women who want titties so that (more) men will want to fuck them (which includes your Thais), and some trans women who love titties so much that they want their own. The latter might ideally want a ciswomen partner, but might find that few women are attracted both to tits and dicks. I imagine trans for trans is more of a pragmatic strategy in the absence of interested ciswomen. Of course, the ones who are into men don't have this problem because men as a collective will pretty much fuck anything with a pulse.
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I think an arrangement like that would calm down all the qualms about "men in women's bathrooms", except that a proportion of trans activists would scream and cry over that. It would be discriminatory, it would be harmful, it would encourage dysmorphia! It would be denying trans women are real women and trans men are real men! It would be forcing men (trans) and women (trans) to share a bathroom and didn't you just say you didn't want men in women's spaces? And if the majority of the population answered "well yeah, we don't think you are really a woman or that person is really a man, but we'll be polite about calling you 'ma'am'" then that would cause more explosions.
I’ve hardly ever seen a gender neutral bathroom in all the European countries I’ve visited, apart from the occasional accessible bathroom available to all. I don’t think it’s realistic to retrofit all public toilets everywhere to have a separate gender neutral section, just for a tiny percentage of the population. Maybe a law could mandate it for new builds or substantial renovations, but that’s going to take multiple decades to be widespread.
Personally I’m a trans woman and I switched to using the women’s bathroom after I started getting too many stares, and the occasional comment saying I was in the wrong place when trying to use the men’s. No one has made a fuss about me since, and I’ve gone to the loo with female friends and chatted with people in there too. As far as social issues go, it’s a ridiculously minor one.
A lot of new builds around here just have a pile of individual, gender-neutral cubicles accessible from a hallway, which I find to be great (but tbf we have a fair amount of space -- it's definitely less compact, and I'm sure there are other concerns, although whether you think forcing men to share in female-toilet-queues instead of having an express lane is undoubtedly its own culture war in the wings).
I share your experience with bathrooms. I just use the one where I get fewer (in fact no) weird looks. I default to the separate gender-neutral disabled bathroom if it's available, and hope I don't inconvenience any disabled people too much. Otherwise I've had nothing but good experiences using the women's bathrooms, including chatting with other people in the queue about the movie we just got out of or whatever. Hopefully people aren't secretly bothered. Changing rooms are a different story and way more difficult to figure out; so far I just avoid any activities that involve changing in public.
That said I do see the concerns around breaking down norms around biologically male people using women's bathrooms. It presents a lot of opportunities for bad actors.
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I'm not sure I completely understand, but it sounds like your point is that your typical trans-identifying-man is insincere.
Maybe not the typical one, but there sure are some online specimens who very much look like "this is a fetish" and "part of my fetish is forcing you to treat me like I'm a girl even though we both know that's not the case".
I'm thinking of the specimen who made little TikToks or other videos about how (s)he was being stabbed! through the heart! every time they were deliberately and maliciously misgendered!
Except that (1) it was all waitstaff and servers who clearly were English as a Second Language speakers who were doing the 'deliberate' misgendering (2) this was SF, baby, so how could they tell you were a Real Woman and not a gay guy in drag or a non-binary personette dressing femme today? who would be highly offended if you called them "miss" and not whatever their neopronoun of the moment was and (3) this specimen was trying to get misgendered so they could do their shocked, appalled, hurt and stabbed little act for views (the language was suspiciously always the same, almost like a script, about being stabbed in the heart).
So yeah. Some people, it's a fetish.
FWIW I think it's pretty typical. For me, what gives the game away is things like (1) trans-identifying men frequently dress in an exaggeratedly feminine style, which can be contrasted with an average woman who doesn't constantly wear skirts, dresses, heels, and so on; (2) trans-identifying men display sexual attraction to women at a rate far higher than biological women; (3) trans-identifying-men frequently choose women's names which are associated with young women, as opposed to women who are roughly the same age as the trans-identifying man.
All of this interest in sexuality and sexual attractiveness is consistent with the trans-identifying man being into the sexual fantasy of being a sexy attractive woman. As opposed to just feeling like a woman.
The other thing is that it's relatively common for straight men (not trans-identifying) to fantasize about being a woman. In my day, a lot of those men, known as "transvestites," would cross-dress, not because they thought they were women but rather because they got off on pretending to be women. This fetish is sufficiently common that it's reasonable to assume that it plays a big role in the modern trans phenomenon. Especially since the ubiquity of pornography is desensitizing a lot of people to sexual stimulation, making them seek out more strange and intense stimulus.
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The complexity of inter-homo-binary-transitional relationship terminology makes it difficult both to track and to discuss [the man-who-liked-men-before-becoming-a-woman-who-likes-men, vs the 2/5/17 other combinations]. Maybe German style additive word construction would be better than the standard Greek derived combinations.
The major difference of AGP would appear to be the A. Auto.
The weird bit is firstly that, while I can't speak for them, it's a fairly uncontroversial idea that heterosexual women can be as aroused by being an object of desire as they are by direct observation of what they desire. Apparently this is a very common theme in popular women's erotica.
Secondly there's the complication of what gay men want versus what they can offer. Like your example of the camp, openly gay queens who don't have sex with each other. Why not? Because they don't want a faggy queen, they want the kind of highly masculine man who... has gay sex with faggy queens. I believe the phenomenon persists in the preponderance of bottoms vs tops, and their ideal fantasy partner being a straight man. If masculinity is what gay men are attracted to then logically they should masc-maxx, but if femininity is what masculine men want then it would make more sense to trans-max, so that they can "go straight" to fulfill their gay fantasy of straight sex. I've never looked at gay porn but I have a hunch it focuses a lot more on blue collar bodybuilder types than on lisping waifs with frilly cuffs.
And then we have the AGP, who fetishises women to such an extent (a very male hetero mindset) that they become maximally feminine (a homosexual characteristic in men) so that they can embody themselves as their own object of desire (a female hetero mindset, maybe?) in their own eyes, the eyes of a heterosexual man. It's a muddle.
This is where grouping all men who have sex with men as a single “gay” monolith goes wrong.
This kind of man exists in very high numbers, they just aren’t open about it. Go on Grindr and you’ll find that there’s no shortage of “discrete” tops who love twinks and femboys, and not enough supply to meet the demand.
Today a large number of gay men do actually masc-maxx, but just because you can look masculine doesn’t mean you can act masculine. Even if you convincingly manage to imitate masculinity, it’s still just a façade. Two partners pretending to be something they’re not in order to stay attracted to each other is just sad.
But again, there’s multiple kinds of gay men. The very feminine “faggy queens” are highly likely to transition today, not because they want a masculine man, but because they want a man who’s attracted to them as a woman, which they’ll never get if they masc-maxx. It’s not just about how you see your partner, but also about how your partner sees you.
But the vast majority of gay men today are absolutely fine with their partner seeing them as a man. I’ve seen quite a few gay couples where it’s just two regular looking guys, generally a bit fruity sure, but not excessively so and not enough to turn each other off.
Who manages to act masculine in a fallen world where the Secretary of War has a makeup studio in the pentagon, the president loves broadway musicals, and the Bears QB paints his nails?
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No doubt, just trying to tease apart the alignments, misalignments and re-alignments. The potential combinations multiply rapidly.
Fair play, I was under the impression it was the other way around. Maybe that's a function of their discretion. But then why the discretion?
Well firstly the “top shortage” is greatly overstated anyway. Most statistics suggest that for gay men, it’s about half vers, quarter tops and quarter bottoms, within a few percentage points.
But the men who are exclusively into twinks and femboys are almost all bisexual, and bisexual men have a lot to lose by being out. A large amount of straight women would not date a bisexual man, their masculinity would be questioned by their peers, and a lot of people believe bisexual men don’t even exist and that they’re just gay and in denial.
By being on the down low, they can have their cake and eat it too: continue dating women as a straight man, have access to easy, promiscuous sex (relatively speaking), and not deal with having to explain anything to anybody.
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The general complaint among the, uh, supply is that the demand is high, but extremely low-quality, even by gay hookup culture standards of quality, precisely because the demand is from people who are principally heterosexual, and probably have deep roots in heterosexual culture -- including, possibly, a wife. Therefore they're exceptionally flaky/indifferent/uncertain, leading to the kind of debasement I discussed in my other reply to you as a desperate attempt to lock-down any reasonably qualified leads. So I'm not sure this is a lopsided market in the way you're suggesting; it's more of a matching market where neither side seems to be happy. Cf all other dating environments.
However, by far the most common kind of pairing you find for this type of person is actually femme-to-femme, both because the masculine options are so low-quality, and because some meaningful fraction of this group is bisexual or AGP. In our earlier discussion on this topic, I was talking about this sub-population; when you assumed I was talking about transmasc-transfemme pairings, I was actually confused! When you said that transitioning "is weirdly common among men willing to openly date trans women," well, that wasn't surprising or confusing at all to me, and it was interesting to see that it was confusing to you.
IMO, trans women who try to date men are, for obvious reasons, often pulling from the pool Blanchard described as "gynandromorphophiles", which are often also AGP. Gender transitioning, for this pool of individuals, is often both appealing in the AGP sense, and appealing in the sense that it gives them "skin in the game" that establishes cred among bisexual trans women who treat cis men with suspicion.
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Yeah, there is that whole category of "men who have sex with men" but don't consider themselves gay. I suppose it's the very old distinction of "if you're doing the penetrating/getting your cock sucked, you're a man but if you're getting penetrated/sucking the cock you're female-coded".
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As opposed to continuous tops, also known as homeosexuals
Spelling/grammar corrections and puns; two things of which I will never tire!
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Well, I laughed!
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Attraction to someone in particular being attracted to you and being attracted to a fantasy of yourself as a woman are two quite different things, in my opinion.
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I agree with the distinction, I disagree that it's new, but the expression technologically is.
Human sexuality is pretty broad and subject to a lot of social context. In many societies today, homosexual contact isn't considered gay for the top. This is historically the case, from ancient persia and greece on to modern afghanistan. There is a typology of feminine gay men, but there is also a typology of hyper-masculine bisexual men. The modern agp phenomenon is just the latter run through modern technology, legal codes, academic cant and social hysteria. Several thousand years ago, olympic athletes and professional soldiers who liked a bit of dude wouldn't pretend to be chicks, they'd just join the Sacred Band or whatever. Le Monsieur had special armor made so he could assault cities in a dress.
The only thing that's new is the religious and legal aspects of the metaphysical claims made by these dudes.
? My understanding is that the lumberjack-type gay men, while outnumbered, are not the same thing as AGP transgenders.
There's several takes on what exactly AGP are, but the lumberjack-type bearded gays are not one of them. I'm personally partial to the idea that they're mostly newish, a product of endocrine disruptors, and historical examples of AGP like Elegabalus are severe mental illness, with things like the hijras and other third genders being something totally different. But there's another school of thought which merges the phenomena.
Elagabalus reads more as camp fem gay rather than AGP.
Reads more to me as a puppet of his grandmother and mother, who plotted to get him elevated to the throne and then granny later instigated his assassination and replacement with a more acceptable to the people cousin, another grandson of hers. I definitely get the feeling granny wanted him weak, so she could control him, and that the internal family power struggle (maybe mom felt that as mother of the emperor she could oust granny as matriarch of the family) was behind his fall. Having him concentrate on being the priest of the Sun God Elagabal, with the practices associated with that, instead of consolidating his hold on the army and the politics of Rome, was one way of ensuring that the reins of power stayed with granny.
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The bisexual top phenomenon is real and distinct, but it’s not the same as AGP even if it overlaps with it. If you want to be a hyper masculine gay man who fucks men, this is after all a desirable gay niche today, at least as far as I understand it. Certainly there is no incentive to transition.
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Historically, it would also come with significant changes in one's legal status to pretend to be chicks and be taken seriously as such.
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Blanchard’s theory is true in the sense that AGP and HSTS populations exist, but it’s overly reductive in the sense that they’re not the only categories of trans people out there. Of course, it was more accurate than the previous view at the time which would lump them all together in a single one.
I don’t think AGP males are a product of modernity - the only thing that’s new is ability to transition using hormones and surgery, and to do it openly without it being instant social and professional suicide (not that there are no social costs now, but it’s completely different to say, the 1950s).
Men who are sexually into wearing female clothing and find the idea of being a woman erotic have probably been around since the earliest proto civilisations (see François-Timoléon de Choisy, who probably lied about seeing the royal family dressed as a woman, but not about being aroused by wearing a corset).
A trans identity that’s truly the product of modernity would be the autistic, nerdy, often terminally online kind (both trans masculine and trans feminine). A 50 year old masculine married man with children who transitions after years of hiding his crossdressing habit from his wife, is not the same as teen for whom transitioning is an escape from the social and physiological pressures of their biological sex. Body dysmorphia, sensory issues, discomfort with heterosexual norms, etc. would be the primary motivations - maybe those individuals would have been celibate monks or nuns in the past, when monastery life and asceticism was a viable alternative to the normal life script.
It’s very clear when you look at a significant proportion of trans masculine individuals, their goal seems to be more to “not be a woman” rather than to be a man. The same exists for males too - see this post by Duncan Fabien which made the concept click for me.
Agreed.
Reminds me of "Attunements", a story written by Eliezer Yudkowsky's ex-wife that compares having children to being infected with spores that rewrite your life goals.
But being afraid of one's values and personality being altered by parenthood or puberty seems to me a little ridiculous? Both are fundamentally natural parts of our lifecycle, and the alternative is to remain stunted forever.
The funny thing about puberty is that it's presented as a phase that you go through when really, in physical terms at least, childhood is the phase and so-called "puberty" is the enduring stable state.
The thing about puberty is that, in our social script, its onset coincides with compulsory education, which is a very artificial (and extremely harmful) environment. How an adult will behave once they graduate can indeed be very different from how they behaved while they were still studying, the same way people in prison behave differently once they get outside.
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I'm curious, what would your typologies of trans people look like, if you were to describe the different categories you've seen?
One thing that I often like to note is that the Blanchard typology misses an important detail, which is that "men who find the idea of being a woman erotic" isn't exclusively a thing for men attracted to women; it's in fact extremely common among men attracted to men. So the idea of lust for women being misdirected into self-lust for the state of being a woman has never struck me as an exhaustive explanation for the crossdresser-to-trans pipeline, or even the primary one.
I think there's a mode that's almost something akin to vagina-envy, where the default attraction for most men is to women, and therefore attaining womanhood is a means of becoming the archetypal appeal to the male gaze. I've certainly known people who've seemed to fit that bill.
That said, I don't know that the general public would find this cluster more sympathetic than the AGPs -- there are often a lot of immensely sexist assumptions baked into their idea of what attaining womanhood to appeal to the male gaze would look like. You know, "I exist to serve men, my body is a means of satisfaction for men," often combined with an intense desire to appeal to bisexual or bicurious men by insisting on their willingness to debase themselves for men in ways cis women will not. What exactly that debasement might entail is left as an exercise for the reader.
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I agree that the "autistic, nerdy, often terminally online kind" of trans person is in a category of its own compared to homosexual males or archetypal AGPs. I also think the etiology behind trans-identification in females is completely different from that behind trans identification in males. "Gender dysphoria" isn't a condition like "lung cancer" or "depression" which affects males and females in the same way, and diagnosing males and females with the same condition hides more than it illuminates.
I've been thinking about this a lot. As much as people criticise Catholic institutions, they were a very effective Chesterton's fence for a particular kind of person who felt uncomfortable in their own skin and wasn't terribly interested in forming romantic relationships. It makes me sad thinking about all the young women who've gotten double mastectomies they'll likely regret, who would've been perfectly happy as nuns if they'd been born a couple of generations earlier.
A couple of generations here meaning what, 600 years? The convents were dissolved in the Anglosphere in the sixteenth century, and the kinds of elite families producing trans ‘sons’ have never been Catholic.
It’s also inaccurate to point to mid-20th-century convents and monasteries as performing a warehousing function; they were high status institutions that recruited widely from a broad spectrum of the population and tended to reject overwhelming oddballs. If you go back to the pre-Pian church you saw lots of upper class women who didn’t fit in sent to the convent so they don’t have to deal with men(and autistic or downright odd monks), but this was well on its way out by the time of living memory of the boomers. The post-Pian reform RCC overproduced clergy and religious beyond its ability to accommodate, there were things like shortened formation periods to try to cope; this changed with Vatican II, of course, but it wasn’t really for unusual people- although warehoused Sheldon Cooper types in the monastery were part of the story of the reformation.
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Of course, there were sects of nuns that got double mastectomies anyway. But maybe not all of the trans-adjacent women would join those.
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Reading that essay, it appears that Duncan's primary error is that he over-values the 10-year-old-self. Liking transformer robots and looking like Jimmy Neutron is no more optimal than liking the process of sex just because liking the process of sex comes later.
It’s not about either preference being more optimal, or consciously valuing the 10 year old self more than the present self. It’s about sexuality being this uncontrollable compulsion that’s suddenly injected in your brain, and in people like Duncan (and I, before I transitioned), it doesn’t feel like it’s “you” that likes or wants sex.
Like I’m absolutely fine with my preferences shifting across time, discovering new hobbies, becoming a mature adult with a mortgage and a pension fund. But in my case, a preference for sex didn’t feel like I tried something new, liked it, and consciously decided to keep doing it. It felt like there was an alien invader in my brain that I had to pacify so I could get back to doing the things I actually liked. I didn’t actually want sex in the way that my biology was pushing me to want it. It felt like losing control over who I was, in the same way someone might suffer from binge eating when stressed - a completely different experience from being a foodie who occasionally overeats when they go to a very good restaurant.
Most people don’t seem to have trouble integrating their sexuality into their selves. They see their sexual preferences as “theirs”. Maybe something about being autistic can lead to your sense of self crystallise too early and prevents you from tolerating changes, or maybe it causes a mental separation between the self and “base” desires, I don’t know.
But at the end of the day, my happiness and quality of life is enhanced when I take medication that lets me feel like my sexuality is on my own terms.
I can relate a lot with this, which is precisely the reason why I consider the trans-movement so scary. I've written about me & my wife's childhoods before: https://www.themotte.org/post/1794/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/311570?context=8#context
In short, this is what puberty is like for many of us, sadly. Before puberty, you might look at teens with hate and disgust. During your own teenage years, you feel like shit and hate yourself. I dunno who said this, but male puberty is like being given a completely out-of-control wild horse, against your will, and you have to tame it or else it will trash your place and piss of everyone. And it takes years. Hell, I still regularly get pissed off at my sexuality. Female puberty is different, but no less difficult.
But at the end, as an adult, you've done the work and it has simply become a part of you. You're different now, sure, but trying to forgo that transformation makes about as much sense as a caterpillar not wanting to become a butterfly because it's too different from the life it has gotten used to.
Not saying that there are exactly zero people who have so massive problems with their biological sex that medication or other changes might become a reasonable option, but in about 99.999% of cases if a teen asks "I feel uncomfortable with my sex, what should I do?" the correct answer is trying to help them find ways to become more comfortable with their body and realize that there isn't just exactly one way to be for each sex, and that a lot of stuff is, while certainly strongly correlated with sex, actually mostly superfluous for it.
I was fairly similar to you in that I eventually mostly accepted my situation after 2 years or so of puberty. The problem was when I opened Pandora’s box again and tried things outside the default heterosexual male experience, and the same feelings came back up, because holy crap what do you mean I don’t have to take care of this annoying wild horse that’s always at risk of trashing my place?
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I'm very much a cis male, but I do find this relatable. In some ways the impulses of male sexuality are annoying and distracting rather than fulfilling.
But in my case there are a lot of hypotheses that can easily explain it without reference to an etiological mismatch: religious upbringing, teenage dissatisfaction, but especially being inundated with feminist memes from tumblr when I was young, that have me walking on eggshells to know what's helpful. In a sense you could say that every superegoistic (to borrow without endorsement a Freudian term) influence on me has been about how my sexuality could go wrong, so it's very, very hard for me to intuitively know where it could go right. It's a lot easier to eject sexuality from your conception of the self if you see it as corrupting rather than enlivening. Repression and/or viewing sexuality as egodystonic seems like a common result of that kind of pressure, as it sometimes is for me.
I do wonder if some of the 'flight from masculinity' you talked about some men having has to do with that; the male sexual role asks much, and in modern times with limited and radically contradictory guidance, and I think it's much harder for men these days to understand who they're supposed to be than it might have been in the past. I feel like I have to be a different man to different people, and in particular how I have to relate to women romantically and -- especially -- in the bedroom in order to please them is profoundly distinct from how I am in every other avenue of my life. I have a hard time integrating those things. I actually think this is much more common than you're suggesting.
I've been meaning to write an effortpost on how male sexuality and male romanticism align or sometimes don't align, but I'm often reluctant because, as much as my posts here are highly confessional, I worry about exposing too much of my internal gears to culture war analysis, and anyway I'm concerned about reinforcing the belief that men are walking sex pests whose sexuality is inherently disordered rather than simply a biological urge that you can deal with in a healthy or an unhealthy way.
I’d love to read more about your perspective and experience on this! Growing up I felt like I was the only one having trouble integrating male sexuality into my sense of self, and standard narrative, from my peers, media, parents was just completely alien. Obviously I gave up in the end and went with the nuclear option, but maybe there would be a world where I didn’t had if the discourse was different.
Or maybe not. I didn’t even have the external pressures you described. My upbringing was irreligious and vaguely sex-positive, and I grew up before Tumblr was even a thing back when “boys will be boys” was still used unironically as an excuse. I’m not sure the problem is lack of guidance. I was already uncomfortable being told the default heterosexual dating script, and if was told explicitly by society that as a man, I must be (all the things that were the opposite of my personality and desires), I probably would have given up much earlier.
What happens if you don’t put on the mask and just stay who you are when interacting romantically or in the bedroom?
I feel like you’d be missing out on so much if you can’t be authentically yourself with your partner. Sex when you’re just acting out a persona in order to please your partner… that just means you’re both getting cheated out of real human connection, no? What’s the point then?
Hey Rae, I took my time with this response because I wanted to get it right. February, like @OliveTapenade said, was gender month on the motte, and it seems like February won't be much different.
A Portrait of Urquan
I wouldn't say that I struggled to integrate male sexuality with my self identity, but more that I struggled to reconcile my personal sexuality and experience of the world, which I've always experienced as male or as cis-by-default, with what was expected of me by society. I've never experienced gender dysphoria, or felt that my penis and the various things which one might endeavor to do with the penis, were strange or foreign to me.
Now, I do have some personality traits that are commonly considered more 'feminine', and have created tension for me in male friendships. I don't enjoy competitive hobbies, like team sports or multiplayer video games. I'm not socially dominant, I don't enjoy teasing-as-bonding, and I tend to be more of a listener in a conversation. It's frequent that after hanging out with someone or going on a date, the other person will say, "Wow, I really talked your ears off, didn't I? I'm sorry I monopolized the conversation."
I enjoy feelings-talk as much as ideas-talk, and my preferred mode of social bonding is to be with one person, or a small group, and listen to how they tell the story of their life, what moves them, what kind of dreams they have, what they care about, what the meaning of life is to them. I enjoy deep chats about life and meaning.
It's a frequent occurrence that any time I try to hang out with male friends, they will proceed to play some kind of competitive local multiplayer video game like Mario Party, Super Smash Bros, in the old days Halo, etc. I will often be sitting off to the sidelines because I don't enjoy that kind of experience, and it's been a real tension in male friendship groups I've been a part of that I'm the odd one out, people try to include me, I reassure them that I'm enjoying watching... it's kind of like when you invite your girlfriend to a hangout with the guys and she ends up playing with the dog. That's me, but I'm one of the guys.
When I play video games, I prefer to immerse myself in the story, build a character that I give a backstory to, and use creative tools in the game to express my character's position and identity in the world. Stardew Valley (which a friend once described as "such a girl game") is one of my favorite games of all time. I see video games as interactive stories and creative expression tools, not mechanics in which to demonstrate mastery. I play games on story mode.
Basically the only social experiences that leave me with a feeling of satisfaction are one-on-one, deep chats. I enjoy laughing and having fun with people, but I just am a very intense, and very private, person, and I enjoy bringing other people into my world, and seeing what their world looks like to them.
Love According to Urquan
As I've shared before on the motte, my model of intimacy and relationships is deep and passionate. I see romance as a means of seeing oneself in the other. It's not principally about resources or even sex-qua-sex, but about being close to someone in the special way that romance brings you close. I don't know how to describe it or break it down. There's a je ne sais quoi to romantic intimacy that I can't describe to people who've never experienced it. It's not lust, it's the desire for union of the soul, where someone else becomes an extension of yourself. It's butterflies and it's the feeling that you've entered the kairos -- the special time, the appointed time, when even going to work and doing boring work things feels buoyant. Where the world feels enchanted and beautiful again, the way it always felt when I was young.
When I was a teenager I wrote this:
Oh - and I'm also into classic poetry. Can't you tell?
The main tensions with the male social role I've had have been that I struggle to "slot in" seamlessly to male social groups, as I've suggested, and that I've struggled to find the kind of intimacy that's meaningful to me. A lot of flirting includes the very kind of social engagement that I find unintuitive or unnatural: playful teasing, inexplicit boundary testing, displays of bravado and confidence, sexual confidence. But if it's supremely creepy to begin a conversation with a woman by saying you want to sleep with her, it's massively more insane to begin a conversation by saying, "I'm looking for the kind of love that makes the world beautiful and I want to merge our souls together." But that's what I've always looked for: someone to whom I can expose the reality of my capacity for passion, someone whose eyes I can stare deeply into, someone whose vulnerability and pain I can absorb and comfort.
Because I see love as a means of intimate union and mutual vulnerability, I come into tension both with the expectations of men and of women. In general, men find that kind of thing to be 'girl-talk,' suitable for 'chick-lit,' the kind of thing you invent to reassure your girlfriend, not a mode of thought you inhabit for yourself. Women find it, in men, somewhere between "impossible to find" and "impossible to exist," and there exists few to no kinds of reliable signals that can communicate to a woman that's what you're looking for. Because establishing a relationship where those concepts make sense requires early-stage flirting and dating, I've often felt like I have to suppress the very motivation that drives me to seek intimacy in order to engage in meaningless banter and playful teasing. That doesn't feel like me.
There's also the sexual shame element, I personally am low in sociosexuality, and I find the idea of having sex with someone I don't know well to be deeply uncomfortable. I've done it, but always with regret and a feeling of emptiness and being used that made me want to scrub my body with such an immensity of soap that my skin would burn. So I feel like I've often swam massively against the current, having to compete with hookup bros in a market for lemons, and facing skepticism from women who expect from me a kind of sexual bravado and indifference to social convention that feels totally foreign to me.
I don't see any of my traits as incompatible with being a man. I just see them as incompatible with the carrots and the sticks that surround the socially-constructed model of what a man is. That kind of model is obviously based in reality -- men really do prefer playing multiplayer games together instead of talking about their feelings, as my own experiences would attest -- but what men reward in other men, and especially what women reward in men, operate according to a certain pattern which isn't necessarily my own.
Queer Theory-ing Urquan
There's a stereotype of gay men among normies that they're sensitive, moody, artistic, poetic, romantic boys who just need a well. Accordingly, I was sometimes bullied as a kid for being 'gay' in that sense. This stereotype shows up all over popular culture; one of the more absurd examples is "The Battle of Schrute Farms" from The American Office, where this purported Civil War battle is actually a gay commune, described thus:
In other words, if you're a pacifist, if you're artistic, if you like poetry, if you're not socially dominant, it logically follows that you really must want to suck cock. Seems we have some professors of logic down at the university of science who put a lot of thought into that one.
Our scripts of masculinity have taken everything found "unmanly," bundled them into an archetype, and slapped the label 'queer' on them. The Romantic poets of the past who wrote elegies about their romances with women would be labeled as the queerest queers who ever queered by our modern views of gender, even among progressives. Maybe especially among progressives, for dumb reasons.
Supposedly I'm doing "queer theory" right now, but if you actually sit in a university classroom where undergraduates try to use queer theory as an interpretive lens for historical literature, it's basically the least queer-theory interpretation possible because it consists of viewing any friendly or intimate connection between men as homoerotic. Postmodernism consists of incredulity toward metanarratives, except of course the metanarratives where everybody's fucking gay.
(I will give them the theater kids, though, the majority of the theater kids at my high school were gay or lesbian. I will also give the bisexuals Shakespeare if they wish to have him.)
Maybe such feminine traits are more common among gay men than straight men -- I don't know -- but I do suspect that whatever such traits exist are themselves ground down by
the cock and the whipthe carrot and the stick that gay men have to face, where intimacy is damnable heteronormativity and hookups are liberatory. You will suck the cock after five minutes of chatting and you will like it.I'm principally attracted to women, though with a limited ability to find very femme men attractive (stereotype fulfillment?). My youthful explorations of the gay social scene gave me the impression that, there, I'd find it much harder to locate the kind of intimacy I actually find valuable. It was like looking for love in a world filled only "with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls." What I think Ginsberg missed is that the ecstatic sexual world is as much a part of Moloch as any number of demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses!, or indeed granite cocks!, to those who do not fit its rigid vision of freedom.
Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
I can understand why someone with a personality such as you've described about yourself would find gender transition appealing. The default for an AMAB individual with an attraction to men is the gay social scene, which amplifies most of the very things I find discomforting about the male sexual role into almost a comedic parody. I note with almost existential irony the fact that the ultimate immoral mistake for a man to make when flirting with a woman is to send her an unrequested dick pic, while gay men treat dick pics almost as the equivalent of a hello. I'd be interested if @gattsuru has a more nuanced take -- my own experiences of the gay social world were basically college activists and horny college twinks, and they... have their own peculiar way of things.
I don't know what sensitive men like me are supposed to do, or what the world expects of us. We are strange to men, and invisible to women.
(Edited to add: Exhibit A. See what I mean about carrots and sticks?)
The Masked Urquan
Now, let me answer your direct question:
Well, the honest answer is, "nothing happens," and there is no "bedroom" in which sex would happen, regardless. At least in early stage flirting, I have to go outside my comfort zone to get to the point where I could be more like myself.
But as for the second part, I guess it's partway related to the fact that I've dated some more... kinky women. My imagined model of a sexual encounter is very personal, very intimate, low and slow, "I love you so much," kissing, holding each other while going at it -- that sort of thing. I've had that, and I value it a lot. That's typically the "porn for women" script, and it's what stereotypes tend to assume women want from sex.
But stereotypes often also assume that women just... don't want sex that much at all, which isn't true. In the post-Fifty-Shades era, it's pretty clear that a decent chunk of women like dirty, kinky, dom/sub, rough, dirty talking behavior in the bedroom. That's the element that felt more foreign to me when I first encountered it. I never had as much trouble as the "Yeah...you like that, you fucking retard?" guy, but it definitely was hard to adapt to it.
But I feel you, sex is for me about 'real human connection,' just like you said. I guess I've tolerated that stuff because, well, it really turned them on, and women are hard enough to please sexually that if something just does it for them, I'm happy for the opportunity to give it. In the post-orgasm-gap-discussion world, the assumption that vaginal intercourse to completion on male terms constitutes the sex act has collapsed, and you're pretty much obligated as a man to do something that isn't necessarily your #1 thing in order to please your partner sexually.
I hope that answers your question. Obviously I'm exposing some vulnerable things on the forum here, but you've been open with me and I felt compelled to return the favor. If anything stands out to you, I'm happy to elaborate to an extent.
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Yeah, but crossdressing/transvestism was not considered the same as transsexuality until we got the idea that it was all transgenderism and that was an entire separate identity of its own. The modern notion of "identities" and especially what I'm seeing online with trans issues that if you are not 100% X then of course you must be Y is what is unique, and what is driving all this.
Before, if someone was crossdressing for whatever reasons (and they're not always erotic/fetish ones), you are correct - it was something to be hidden, something considered shameful. Now, it's a protected identity that you can be proud of, now you can crossdress 100% of the time! And all you have to do is say that really you are a woman. Maybe you go on hormones, maybe you don't. You can still be sexually attracted to women, just say you're a lesbian.
Indeed, again from what I'm picking up at second- and third-hand, the push is on to shove people into adopting it as an identity: you don't just feel better psychologically when dressed and behaving as your feminine anima, it's an identity and you are trans.
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What occasioned this reflection?
For what it's worth for me, I'm not wholly convinced of the Blanchard typology, if presented as something like a law of nature, but just extensionally I find it has the ring of truth. The two basic categories he lays out - I think of them, perhaps a bit crassly, as the more-gay-than-gay camp, and the heterosexual camp, that is, the one so obsessed with/attracted to women that they want to become one - can be roughly applied to trans women that I've known. It may not be wholly perfect, but it feels close enough that I hear Blanchard's descriptions and think, "Yeah, I've seen people like that" and "Oh, just like this other person I know".
I agree that it has the ring of truth. Where I think it collapses some is that:
The technical term for this cluster is “sissy.” Don’t look this up unless you’re looking for NSFW content.
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Quillette did a series talking about, among other things, social contagion among boys. I agree that there's a lot of heavily sexualised, fetishised social contagion, but with younger boys there's also the anime-influenced variant, which, though sometimes about sex, is also sometimes a longing for a kind of 'soft' world full of coddling and gentleness.
I'm in this picture and I don't like it.
Never considered gender transition, though. I think my cohort was a bit too old for that. I'm also enough of a weirdo that I'm suspicious of putting myself in any category, even the weird ones, which I guess was protective.
I do increasingly notice it in these kinds of, for lack of a better term, autistic, socially inept, geek-intellectual kinds of spaces. That's a demographic that naturally tends to inhabit a kind of fantasy world of the imagination, and online it is easier and easier to disconnect from a sense of one's own physical body. Reinventing yourself as an imagined cute girl - pretending to be the thing you want - seems easy. I'd be lying if I said I didn't understand it, though it is a helpful reminder that, as FiveHourMarathon says and I've commented also, the grass always seems greener on the other side.
I think the answer is probably some combination of firstly male role models, affirmation of masculinity, or just implicitly communicating to these boys that a man is a good thing to be, and that manhood is possible, attractive, and in reach for them; and secondly, just getting out and touching grass. Getting off the computer and doing real, physical work in the world makes you more aware of your own body. Successfully doing things with your physical body feels great and is inherently affirming. Some level of fantasy is healthy, but the kind of obsessive, body-negating, self-fleeing fantasy that you get in these demographics is poison.
I think this is the "draw the rest of the owl" kind of problem.
Another issue is that a lot of people who grow up with these sorts of traits have trouble making friends, especially in youth. I think the cause of the kind of fantasy we're talking about is a disconnect from the social world as much as from the physical one, and atypical traits make that more difficult. Motion/body disconnect is often part of a syndrome with social phobia; I myself often have experienced a kind of hyper-body awareness in certain social situations that are particularly anxiety-provoking, where you kind of move manually and are dissociated from the normal coherence of your body, like when you consciously start to control your breathing -- as you are now, that I've mentioned it. That's common among people with social phobia.
I think masculinity is fundamentally a good thing, but I think there is a real tension between the broad male phenome -- the sum of all the ways in which men are like -- and various models of masculinity. A common underlying set of traits is hierarchical competition, or resource provision, or physical strength... but the issue is that many, if not most, of the ways we describe the social role of men are in some sense zero sum, and in such an environment there will be social defeat. IMO, a great deal of the extremely online stuff we see is caused by people who have suffered (or perceive themselves to have suffered) social defeat trying in some sense to construct a social hierarchy where they can win. See, for instance, NEETs playing competitive online games.
I think the main issue with any model of masculinity is that it's typically enforced in one of two ways: the carrot of women's attention, and the stick of men's violence. You can see that, for instance, in the military, where boot camps, strict regimentation, and obsessive hierarchicalism force men into a mold. In World War I, the British government ran a program allied with prominent suffragettes in which women gave unenlisted men white feathers in a shame ritual calling them cowards. I hold that one of the major reasons the USA became unable to run a successful conscription campaign for the Vietnam War is that the military lost the support of young women, who began rewarding rebels against the system with adulation for their courage. The same I think is true of gang violence in minority neighborhoods; men enforce compliance with guns, and, often, the women from these communities reward status in organized crime with attention. You get from men what men enforce and women reward.
So any model of masculinity and positive male role models have to have women and girls on board. The issue is that, in the West, it's not clear what women and girls are on board with, and in fact the dominant social mode of discussions of masculinity are to discuss its abberations and possibility for harm, or occasionally to praise men for doing things according to what women desire of them (and not praising them for being masculine on its own terms). The people who do talk about masculinity on its own terms are often selling their own inane fantasy, like the bodybuilder RAW MEAT influencers. The social inflection behind "man" as a category is incredibly negative; it's no wonder to me that some young men are going, "well, that's not me! Teehee!"
I don't think it's just about wanting to be with women, but I also think the kinds of men we're talking about place a high premium on being seen as fundamentally good by women; the "creep" designation, in a sense the white feather of the day, carries so much stigma precisely because "being a threat to women" is considered deeply wrong by both men and women writ large, for good reasons. But I think young men feel like there's no stable and broadly-recognized way to do this. Sometimes religious subcultures do a better job at this than the secular world -- I often noted when I spent time with the young Catholics group at my college that the men and women got along much better than those outside, and generally considered each other trustworthy and worthy of respect -- but it's not guaranteed, and in a world where the Church is optional as a social institution and increasingly at odds with secular assumptions, "just leaving" is an option that many people are going to take. As, obviously, transitioners tend to do.
The grass, of course, is never greener on the other side. I never struggled with gender identity issues -- clearly I'm a man, the idea of being a woman seems nebulous and foreign to me, and has no appeal. I know enough from having female friends that women are entangled in their own thorny world of backstabbing and status competition about which I'm not jealous. Even if someone could transition perfectly, magically, I don't think that men would find women's social world astounding or grand in the way they imagine.
Certainly if I think about the way I've encountered some of this, there's, albeit usually in inchoate form, a desperate attraction to or craving for the feminine, and a sense that the masculine is ugly, violent, repulsive, brutish, or otherwise undesirable. The confused, sensitive young boy knows that he does not want to be his image of 'a man', which is probably a heavily jock- or pop-culture-inspired vision of a brute, and that he is attracted to things that are soft, gentle, and female-coded. But he cannot exist in a predominantly female space as a man, because he has come to see masculinity as, by its mere existence, a kind of violence or degradation upon that space. He wants the innocent and feminine, but sees himself as something that cannot coexist with that. He probably also has a Scott-like terror of engaging with women, of expressing male heterosexual desire, and so on. His picture of femininity and of women's lives is highly idealised - he's not actually hanging out with or spending much time with girls, and therefore does not know what they are really like. But he knows the glittering facade, and he wants it.
The result is a drive to purge himself of masculine traits, to expurgate the taint by any means possible, in the hope that through reinventing himself (possibly with chemical or surgical assistance, at the higher end), he can get himself out of this cursed category, and enter the idealised female one. This is how I interpret some of the drama you sometimes get around women's spaces, or businesses or services for women - there's a kind of trans woman who needs to constantly press into those spaces, for the sake of constant affirmation that, yes, he really has left masculinity behind entirely. The deeper you are into the process of transition or feminisation, the more important it is that every last sign of acceptance be validated, every last scrap of the male be rooted out and denied.
There's a lot of personal variation in this, but I do thus see, in my experience, a kind of performative misandry that you sometimes get in toxic trans spaces. (This is, it's fair to say, entirely AGP as a phenomenon.) It doesn't always present very strongly - sometimes just in the form of casual jokes about how male things are gross - but sometimes it does a lot more. I usually try to be charitable, on the basis that someone who has spent years and a great deal of effort trying to appear less male is not going to be a big fan of male-looking things, and it doesn't need to mean any actual malice towards men, but I've come to think there's a bit more to it than that. Masculinity is the problem, in this world.
To me one of the ways around this or out of this has to be via promoting a positive model of masculinity, but there are a few issues here. Firstly, it can't be just a dudebro model, so to speak. These boys already know they don't like that. There have to be ways to be strongly masculine and capable that are nonetheless in some way sensitive, courteous, intellectual, compassionate, and so on. Those are good traits and they need to take on appealingly masculine forms. Secondly, it has to be approved of by women. Female approval does matter. Now this probably isn't as hard as it actually sounds, because most real women do like men, but remember that the boys in this position don't have much contact with actual women; and also the media is a very unhelpful distorting factor here. But regardless, it must be something that women like.
Unfortunately, put like that it's obvious what the failure-state is - it's feminist messaging about 'good men', the kind that feels corporate and sanitised and frankly just wussy. It's that Gillette ad that everyone hated. So perhaps to this we should add a third requirement: it should be something that men themselves like. It has to appeal to men. If it feels like being lectured by an HR lady, it won't have any traction.
Recently I read an essay by Oliver Traldi about the portrayal of masculinity, and female sexual desire, in films, and in particular about the role of the 'monster'. It's fair to say that the monster, the compelling, sexually charismatic brute, is something that the sensitive boy flees from. I cannot blame him for that; I don't want to be the monster either. But there is nonetheless something in many women that thrills to imagine just a bit of the monster. Just a bit. Is reconciling those desires the problem? That the attractive, desirable man is supposed to combine two impossible things, firstly the polite, obliging, non-threateningly capable man who does everything a woman wants, and secondly, the powerful, dominating, or ravishing man, who makes the woman feel like the object of this compellingly rough desire? I'm a bit skeptical here because I think it might be rolling together the diverse desires of many women together into a single uber-woman, and then acting confused when they turn out to be contradictory, but even so, I am very struck by his conclusion:
Maybe so. And if so, then I feel like what's going on with plenty of boys - certainly something that was going on with myself, though fortunately I never took the trans path (thank heavens I grew up before trans was a thing among teenagers!) - is that they struggle to find a way to unite their desire for the feminine with their identity as the masculine. Maybe they need a bit of what Eneasz Brodski talks about - liking and valuing the feminine, as the feminine, yet without seeking to become the feminine.
Maybe we need more honest-to-goodness complementarianism, that Robert-Jordan-esque understanding that the male and the female need each other, that they complete and enhance each other, and recognising and even loving that difference is the only way forward.
But maybe I'm just a cranky ageing Christian romantic. Who knows?
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I believe this to be true right now in our very fucked up social reality, but there's a ton of historical prescription for how to remedy this.
Male only small groups.
The last remnants of this today are found in the military. You can be totally average across the board and even below average in a few things and still be considered to be a "good marine" if you just get the basics right; show up on time, clean uniform, clean rifle, Yes Sir, No Sir, can exeucte orders. You may not ever progress up the hierarchical ladder, but you can still enjoy the esteem of your peers and superiors within the group because you're a net benefit, however small, to the overall group mission.
Hyperindividualism turns this "collective net benefit" into an adversarial ranking in which you are competing both with the defined "enemy" (who is preventing you from accomplishing your mission) and within the group itself for status.
People bemoans the lack of "loyalty" from companies to their employees, even long tenured ones. It's worth noting that this concept was its strongest when the workforce was still strongly majority male.
Illegal, thanks to women.
Remember, men are in societal surplus right now; and thus they are too weak as a class to check the inherent sociobiological/instinctual interest of women to destroy all other avenues that aren't "competing for woman's affection".
(Which, I will point out, is a common complaint from men about women who demand access to those spaces).
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If you’re comparing being a heterosexual man to a heterosexual woman, sure. But if you’re a relatively effeminate male and primarily attracted to men, it’s very hard to feel like the grass isn’t greener on the other side. The “carrot” doesn’t look appetising and the idea of an escape from the “stick” of masculinity seems very appealing. The reality of transition is different from the ideal of course, but that only further increases the feelings of envy.
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There’s also another aspect to this. Today there is broad consensus among most single men that dating as such is a big pain in the neck. In the old days, however, when the word ‘dating’ had a slightly different meaning and was generally understood not to entail sexual acts, it was specifically meant to be fun.
Did men who weren't Chad ever like dating?
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This does track, rather frustratingly, with my experience. I like meeting people and talking to people, and I like women, obviously, but I do not like the experience that we have packaged together and called 'dating'.
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Explicitly refuting the "men are evil" messaging pervading society and those pushing it would probably be a plus too.
No, it really isn't. Maybe there are some people for whom that is true, but not everyone finds this affirming.
Not every instance of labour feels life-affirming, obviously, but I think I would stand by the idea that some level of physical accomplishment is affirming. We're embodied creatures, and doing things with our bodies feels good.
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One of the most common memes among men online is that women have it insanely easy. One can easily see the trap that a confused man could fall into.
It has also been happening the other way around for decades. This phenomenon is not without social context.
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I suppose that I think the TERF treatment of HSTS is unnecessarily harsh, but that such a judgment requires a clearer categorization.
My impression was that radical feminists don't particularly care about HSTS individuals. Radical feminists are concerned with women and their experiences, so male homosexuality is not really on their radar.
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How so? In my experience, most TERFs are far more sympathetic to homosexual trans-identified men than they are to AGPs.
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