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Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 2, 2023

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?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Why are gays over-represented in the arts and creative fields? Even in tech, I go to an artsy coding meetup and it's hosted in an LGBT space. I go to a discord of people building interesting things and they're 50% furries.

I would presume there's a biological/psychological explanation, if the effect is even real, but it's hard to find good answers. My first guess would be the same loosening of priors that allows for creativity also loosens the heterosexuality prior; but then why gay and not bi?

Male bisexuality is heavily stigmatized among women. Even many women who call themselves allies and post about their support for LGBT rights would find it a turnoff to learn a man sleeps with other men. Female bisexuality on the other hand, is so common (at least among my demographic of Zoomer yuppies) that it wouldn't signal much of a loosening of priors at this point. So it's mostly gays who have their own communities now.

Male bisexuality is heavily stigmatized among women. Even many women who call themselves allies and post about their support for LGBT rights would find it a turnoff to learn a man sleeps with other men.

I wonder how this would be different if women had perfect transparency into whether a given bisexual man’s solely a top versus if he’s gotten or sometimes gets TOPPED.

Few things give women the ick like submissive men. Bisexual men are a threat to women in that they could “trick” women into having sex with them, men who might sometimes get sexually dominated by other men.

However, I could easily see chicks giving a pass to a Spartan warrior-looking guy who only tops. yes_chad.jpg: “My testosterone levels are so high that other men look like women to me, how did you know?”

I’ve never thought about it in those terms but I think to most women it’s just that their reputation is that bisexual men will always cheat on you with other men and/or leave you for a man when they finally have their mid-life crisis. Most women know someone whose boyfriend or husband left them to come out as gay, even in progressive circles among younger people. That obviously has a psychological impact.

I don’t think it’s directly about physical attraction with regards to top/bottom role. If you look at Yaoi fanfiction largely written by women that involves gay sex, both the ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ in these fictional pairings are usually considered as very attractive in their fandoms, it’s not usually that the ‘bottom’ is a stand-in for the woman in heterosexual sex as you might imagine. In Call Me By Your Name, Timothee Chalamet plays a bisexual character (as does Armie Hammer), but it still seems heavily implied that he’s a bottom in his relationship with Hammer’s character in my opinion. That didn’t seem to dent the attraction of so many young women to him.

In general, the kind of bisexual men women are attracted to are more likely to be tops or vers, but this is because bottoms are more likely to be very camp / very effeminate, and thus less attractive to women as male partners. But I don’t think handsome bisexual men have ever had problems attracting women, at least not since general acceptance of homosexuality, even if they’re open about it and even if polling technically says otherwise (I think it’s women picturing a stereotypical camp catty man and thinking he’s not hot, not picturing a hot guy who happens to be bi), and that the main issue is the feeling that he’s going to leave for or cheat with a man.

Male bisexuality is heavily stigmatized among women.

... is it? I'm intrigued. Is this intuition from life experience or do you have numbers? And if it's the former, may I know generally where you've lived/worked/read_posts and received these experiences? This will help me formulate my models of the world. But I understand if you'd prefer to remain more private than that.

As a bisexual guy, there's absolutely a stigma. I've even met bisexual women who say they won't date bisexual men.

Hard numbers are harder to come by. Cosmo had a poll a couple years back that suggested 2/3 of women would immediately write off a bi guy, but of course that's Cosmo. From personal AB testing on OLD platforms, I'd say that overstates it significantly. Listing being bi on the profile dropped inbound like rates by ~1/3. That's in a liberal area and conditioning on women who like my vibe, so you shouldn't take it as the ground truth either.

One interesting thing I found from that test is that women from conservative foreign cultures seemed less opposed to it than the general population and mostly just didn't want to hear anything about it. My theory is that they select for other traits and the entire "fucks men" thing doesn't play much of a role in their attraction process so long as you don't throw it in her face.

Another aspect is that, once you've already met and established a connection with someone, most women just take a day or so to digest it if you wait to reveal it. It's less a deep filter and more of a shallow first pass filter.

I know I’ve seen this opinion before, but likewise, I’m not sure where.