Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Uh oh. I wasn't trying to prompt an instruction manual.
I'll caveat what I've said before with the point that I don't really engage with the gay community much any more, and when I did it was more of an experiment due to loneliness than it was a serious desire to build a world there. I think you could technically call me bisexual, but the number of men who do anything at all for me is very small, and very highly selected as the most feminine group among those. Basically the sort who you could sort of squint at and imagine they're a woman.
The kind of masculine disgust towards the effeminate and the flamboyant that you see in gay men like self_made's brother and the other gay commenters here was never true of me. Even limiting to that group, a 10/10 on my scale is about as attractive as a 3/10 woman, and that's being generous. I find true masculinity actively repulsive, and still cannot describe how even straight women could possibly find men attractive, despite understanding they have every mechanism of natural selection on their side. Given those limitations, and my romantic orientation that contrasts with what you typically find in the gay community (even if subcultures that are more assimilatory exist), the project was always rather statistically doomed to failure.
If anything, I'd say I identify more with the gynandromorphile concept that rae once discussed than with bisexuality-re-bisexuality, and I can't distinguish passing trans women from cis women in my patterns of attraction. That said, I do not experience autogynephilia and find the concept rather strange.
That's the actual takeaway I had from my college experimentation (my moral and visceral opposition to casual sex were pre-existing, though it strengthened them). Given such inclinations are fairly despised by straight men ("faggot"), gay men ("tourist"), and trans women ("chaser") alike, I had limited opportunities to act on it and ended up just dating cis women with whom my pattern of attraction was well-trod and socially legible. I broke some hearts along the way, and so some element of my subsequent interest in the topic is trying to find the right sequence of words so I can explain to myself, to the cosmos, to no one and to everyone, that my desire was never to hurt anyone and I was just lonely, lovelorn, and surprised by what I found in places I never expected to find it, and I broke hearts because I was afraid I would pull someone truly close and then devastate them in a worse way if I turned out to be wrong about myself.
Hm. I'm not familiar with any changes in the term's significance since around 2013 or so, but I dated a girl in school who unironically called herself that. And genuinely every woman I've ever dated has said words to that effect -- my current girlfriend jokes that she wants her children to have "your juicy brain genes." I'm not the sort of person that goes around bragging about IQ, but the thing that is statistically unusual about me is verbal intelligence, so it's not really surprising to me that people who went, "that guy is special" all identify the same trait in me as the most attractive one. But words, of course, are both my gift and my fortress, and the instrument I use to connect is the same instrument I use to hide.
Maybe it means something else now, but back then it meant something like, "attracted to intelligence as a personality trait more than other features (but not exclusively)." Some people are like that.
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