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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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I don't think my views are very romantic at all and I'm surprised you interpret them that way. Maybe my language is too extravagant. I think male sexuality is very cold and aromantic. If anything I view it more akin to Moto Hagio's hysterical melodrama than Mishima's idealization. Actually I remember a post you made positing that men relish competition and I replied that we don't, I think in my post above you can see a kind of loathing of hierarchy and competition I hold which I contrast with Japan for example where male competition seems nonexistent and cooperation reigns. (This is not true across all of Asia by the way, South Korea is much more competitive than Japan for example). I would prefer a situation where there is a legible hierarchy of men which seeks cooperation among each other, and phenotypic diversity is a major confounding variable toward ever achieving this. (This doesn't have to be racial or ethnic at all, either, if there is a situation where everyone born after 2026 grows up to be 7 feet tall I'd see this as a similarly problematic situation, but that isn't the state of things.)

You bring up a lot of various situations in the first two paragraphs which I could spend a lot of time refuting or agreeing with point by point, and if I had all day I'd be happy to, but instead I'll summarize my viewpoint and let you infer the rest as it relates to your specific questions.

Basically, when you are a young man, you experiment sexually with others, hopefully. Most of the time you will be in a submissive role in sexual encounters. This includes any act of sex and may not involve anal sex at all. The less confident man typically assumes the bottom role. Usually you are having sex with older or more socially superior men, so your bottoming does not confer a sense of degradation in it: you are, as a male, happy to be having sexual contact with someone. But at a certain point you do- and should- start to feel irritated when you're drawn into sexual encounters where a lesser man is sexually dominant over you. You will begin to feel this by, say, your mid twenties. When this begins to happen, you can either switch to being prominently a top, and avoid situations where you are being topped by inferiors. Or, you can do the worst thing possible, which is continue to be a bottom and refuse to see yourself as a top and chase after only men clearly superior to you. I describe this as the worst thing possible because you become a full grown man desperate to be topped by a superior. Never mind every inferior man below you. Nothing is more pathetic than a 6'2 35 year old cowboy desperate to be topped by a 6'4 37 year old cowman. This is not even appealing to the cowman: to know that his 6'2 cowboy can't top a 5'10 20 year old because he isn't brave enough is ridiculous.

An adult man who can not move on from the bottom role is like an adult man who has not been potty trained. It makes him look bad, it makes his top feel weird, it makes the bottoms around him feel worse about themselves.

To illustrate this better, here is the female version of the situation. In 7th grade, I went on a class trip. There was a girl in our group of 7th and 8th graders, let's call her Jasmine. She was pretty, thin, and had big boobs. If she wasn't the hottest girl in our group, she was the second hottest girl in our group. Everyone knew it. But as soon as you talked to Jasmine, all she could talk about is how ugly she is, and how fat she is. It didn't matter if you told her she was thin and pretty, she just told you she was fat and ugly. Everyone else on the trip was fatter and uglier than Jasmine, so we all hated Jasmine. The 35 year old bottom (or the 45 year old bottom, or the 55 year old bottom, or god forbid the 60 year old bottom) makes every other man around him look and feel like shit. If this socially superior, masculine guy is a bottom, none of us are worthy of topping. Great.

I hope that answers your question. Basically it is bad hygiene- mentally and socially, to be stuck in a bottom mindset. The best relationship between two men is when both act as tops, the bigger top raises up the smaller top, there is mutual respect and understanding between the two. Even though one is superior he should not act as impossibly so, he should offer help and encouragement to the next in line. No one is "just a bottom and born a bottom forever" or whatever, this is basically tragic gay thinking born out of Karl Ulrich's conception in the 1800s of homosexual identity being an innate trait rather than homosexuality being an action which is a more broadly held belief across cultures whereas the modern identity framing was politically useful for liberation movements in the west throughout the 19th century to today