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PaperclipPerfector
8hr ago
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Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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I'm digging women's hockey this olympics, for the obvious patriotic reasons. I'm actually thinking it's a vastly underrated women's sport: the level and pace of play actually makes it more watchable than the men's, the girls are pretty and normal. It's much more entertaining than women's soccer, and the players are much easier to like than women's basketball.
But at any rate, the culture war angle interesting to me: lesbians have fallen off hard as a sexual fantasy, while at the same time homosexual men have surged, compared to when I was young.
At twelve in boy scouts, there was a common dirty joke: Right (index finger inserted into thumb and finger loop), Wrong (two index fingers bumping into each other), Fun to Watch (two thumb and finger loops bumping into each other). This more or less reflected the common understanding of homosexuality at the time (and our painfully stupid understanding of sex): two guys hooking up was disgusting and bad, two women making love was maybe not normal or moral but boy was it hot. This was reflected in media like The L Word (which my painfully square sister loved), episodes of shows like Sex and the City, etc. A woman could dip her toe in gay, or be turned on by lesbians, without it permanently scarring her as a partner, the male gaze was happy to absorb the content. Gay men were almost never eroticized, they were generally treated as jesters or sexless, gay sex took place exclusively off-screen. Lesbians reached acceptance through straight male and female masturbatory fantasies, gay men through pushing what was really happening as far out of mind as possible.
Compare to today, where Heated Rivalry is such a hit that seemingly every woman is flicking the bean to it, and women's hockey appears to be doing it for real and no one cares. Heated Rivalry has a huge following for the fantasy of maybe, what if, somehow, there were two gay guys in the NHL and they were actually good at hockey? Where we have like a dozen confirmed lesbian couples in the olympics playing against each other, and I'm not seeing any dirty fantasies about it. We've lost the raunch culture, the male focused Vulgar Wave of entertainment. There's not the Bulldog Briscoe to bark lasciviously and yell "hot" after every mention. What culture seems to be saying is that we've gone from Right Wrong Fun to Watch, to Right Right Who Cares.
Is this a fall-off in the lesbian fantasy in particular among younger straight men and women? Is it a fall off of male sexual power versus female sexual power? Is it the painful wokism of modernity? Am I just not looking at the right media?
Come on boys, let's get out there and RETVRN to tradition and objectify some female athletes when the pads come off!
Hypothesis: greater visibility of openly gay women has made the lesbian fantasy seem less appealing.
I believe lesbian porn is still being produced at the same rate as always. It usually stars heterosexual women, many of whom also shoot boy/girl scenes, and who look just as conventionally feminine as you would expect any heterosexual female porn star to look. (I once saw a YouTube clip in which lesbians watched lesbian porn intended to appeal to a heterosexual male audience and ridiculed how silly it was: for obvious reasons, no actual lesbian has long fingernails.) For heterosexual males, the essence of the lesbian fantasy lies in watching two hot, conventionally feminine women with high sex drives have sex with one another. No straight man wants "realistic" lesbian porn i.e. two butch women with crew- or pixie-cuts, both dressed like lumberjacks, neither wearing any makeup, having sex less frequently than even straight couples do.
In the past, when homosexuality was more stigmatised, a typical straight man might legitimately not know any out lesbians (sure, he knew tomboys, but he probably just assumed they were all straight, as indeed most of them probably were). With no real life examples to compare it to, he was free to imagine the lesbian fantasy as he wished, and perhaps even believed that the modal lesbian couple really did consist of two conventionally feminine women in a relationship with one another. (This even makes sense from an experiential perspective: if you've been told that lesbians are just like every other woman with the idiosyncrasy that they are exclusively attracted to other women, it's reasonable to assume that lesbians look and behave like the modal woman, this idiosyncrasy aside.) Outside of porn, this belief might have been reinforced by representations of lesbianism in popular culture: the depiction of a lesbian wedding in Friends was seen as groundbreaking at the time, but nowadays they'd probably catch flak for casting two straight women in these roles (both of whom were attractive in very conventionally feminine ways). Thus, when the typical straight male in the 90s heard about two women having sex with one another, he would either picture a) two average straight women; or (depending how much of a fantasist he was) b) two very attractive, conventionally feminine women. Either way, this mental image is going to be very far removed from what the typical lesbian relationship really looks like, and a lot more appealing to the modal straight man.
But with the greater visibility of out lesbians in popular culture, even a straight man who doesn't personally have any lesbian friends is far better acquainted with what the typical lesbian looks and behaves like than his equivalent in the 90s would be, which is bound to colour the fantasy. A straight man in the 90s would hear about two women having sex with each other, envision two attractive, conventionally feminine women having sex, and think "wow, hot". A straight man in 2026 hears about two women having sex with each other, his brain immediately goes to Ellen DeGeneres or Megan Rapinoe, and he thinks "ew". Knowing what the real thing looks like destroys the fantasy.
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