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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   3768 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 27, 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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Are gay men actually gay?

What portion of gay men are completely uninterested in women? If there was a highly attractive women who wanted to have sex, what portion of gay men would say no?

Maybe it is my autistic inability to see things from other's perspective but I have a sneaking suspicion that many gay men are gay because grindr is tinder on tutorial mode. I can understand if some of them feel attraction to men but honestly if they had the ability to easily attract high quality women would they really say no?

many gay men are gay because grindr is tinder on tutorial mode

I regret to inform you that a straight man would never speak such a sentence.

You don't put sugar in your food if its missing salt. Unless you irrationally love sugar.

My brother turned down the opportunity to fuck a guy he really wanted because the man's girlfriend wanted to watch, and reading between the lines, that was enough of a turnoff to make the entire process unworkable. That isn't universal, but neither is it unusual or even the most extreme variant. The number that'd turn down direct contact with a woman without another dick in the room is a lot higher.

Conversely, a surprising number of gay men have tried women, despite their best efforts: there was a fun statistic going around in the early 00s that was probably mostly selection effect but ended up with a worrying number of gay men having had their first age of heterosexual intercourse before the average straight man did. Some of that's really sketchy stuff -- Dan Savage's version is worse because he doesn't mention and may not realize it was statutory rape -- but more of it's just that a lot of gay socialization makes dealing with women somewhat easier and a little less 'threatening', along with pressures to appear straight making early relationships (including relationships without a stated interest in sex!) more appealing earlier.

Some of them identify as gay because they tried it and it didn't work: either 'pushing rope', not being able to reach climax even if they could get hard, or they had to lay back and think of England (or their favorite porn star dick). ((If you want a fictional example, look at Meesh's "Passing Love" pages 9-12, cw: het sex, and notice comments empathizing with it.))

But others were physically capable (sometimes with chemical assistance, sometimes not) and it just wasn't enjoyable. They might not turn down a hot woman who wanted sex, but it's not what they'd go with if they had a choice between a hot woman and a hot (or even mediocre) guy, and if the woman was offering for his sake rather than for her's, he might be better entertained with his own hands.

It does seem like there are some truly gay men, but I do worry that a lot of teenage boys who don't have much luck with girls are going to get pressured/persuaded into going gay. I'm not sure to what extent this has already happened.

Indeed men becoming gay/bi/trans will considerably increase given the male dysmorphia dynamic being set by women on the dating scene. However asexuality might increase by just as much, it is still an empirical open question IMO

Anecdata, but the experience gay men have reported to me has ranged from ‘I can recognize when a woman is pretty, but don’t feel attracted to her anymore than to a beautiful sunset’ to ‘I don’t understand what people mean when they refer to an attractive woman’. It has seemed like gay men have tastes in men reasonably close to heterosexual women.

But if so why are so many gays into the twink/femboy aesthethic?

I don’t think they are, actually- I think most gays prefer masculine seeming partners, although not necessarily lumberjacks.

The latter seems very strange to me considering how boy-ish some women can (and sometimes try) to look, and how attractive that boyish look seems to be to gay people.

Femboys get a lot of outsized attention in public awareness, but statistically gay men tend to prefer masculinity, and anecdote suggests that this applies even beyond sex roles (eg, a lot of tops still want a masculine bottom or verse). I think this contradiction arises because a lot of gay men want to themselves been seen as (weakly) feminine more than the general sex role disparity, but that's just a hunch.

On the flip side, even tomboyish women that intentionally bulk up on muscles are pretty fey compared even moderately in-shape men. Often much stronger! But even the bodybuilders are a lot

Beyond that, it's not just (or even mostly) visual appearance. Breasts tend to be a turn-off for gay men, to be fair. But there's differences in texture of skin, of how people sound, and of smell and even warmth. Men are almost always going to be more physically active, even when bottoming, and they're often more vocal. It's... not a small difference.

Femboys get a lot of outsized attention in public awareness, but statistically gay men tend to prefer masculinity

Sure, statistically, but I'm inclined to believe (based on the femboy meme etc.) that gay men are much more likely to be interested in very feminine men than women are.

I think this contradiction arises because a lot of gay men want to themselves been seen as (weakly) feminine more than the general sex role disparity, but that's just a hunch.

I'm not sure about that. In the study you linked, it was the more feminine guys who had a weaker preference for masculine men.

On the flip side, even tomboyish women that intentionally bulk up on muscles are pretty fey compared even moderately in-shape men. Often much stronger! But even the bodybuilders are a lot

Sure, but that's why I was talking about boy-ish women, not manly women. Boys don't have much muscle, they're just not feminine.

TBH your study goes against my expectations so I might have to revisit those.

It’s probably partly just that gay men are inherently a tail population while heterosexual women aren’t.

So, I belong to that portion of gay men who are completely uninterested in women. I have never felt particularly attracted to women in any manner nor feel any desire whatsoever to have sex with them. If a woman propositioned me, I would indeed turn her down. Perhaps it is my autistic inability to see things from others' perspectives, but the idea that women are so impressively attractive to men to the point that men are willing to endure the contradictory and punitive norms around courtship that are placed on them (which is apparent even from an outsider's perspective) is frankly wild to me.

I absolutely think that a portion of people in the rainbow community are reacting to social incentives and there are those who do so in order to extract benefits from the current social environment (non-binary being a popular one in certain circles), but there are people who are exclusively gay.

Maybe it is my autistic inability to see things from other's perspective but I have a sneaking suspicion that many gay men are gay because grindr is tinder on tutorial mode. I can understand if some of them feel attraction to men but honestly if they had the ability to easily attract high quality women would they really say no?

Maybe you are just gay.

Despite all my gripes with dating, the idea of fucking a man, or even a trans man, never occurred to me.

Wh—wha?

Have you ever met a man so hot that you wanted to, say, put his penis in your mouth?

I can say that I haven’t. I’m not rationally opposed to the idea; it seems like something that should be possible. And yet it’s never happened. I have yet to experience sexual attraction to a man.

There are men out there who, feel the same way about women. This shows up in their self-reported experience, in their revealed dating preferences, and also (as @FiveHourMarathon notes) in arousal research.

I've often wondered a similar question: how many gay men are attracted to men but find the idea of having sex with men to be repulsive? Disgust at fecal matter and anything that's touched it or contains it (e.g., rectums) seem to be pretty instinctive and probably evolved because of its association with pathogens. By contrast, vaginas have evolved for penises and, more generally, evolved to be pretty clean despite contact with the external environment (e.g., extreme acidity to combat pathogens; permeable membranes to allow easy access for the woman's white blood cells; constant low-level flushing via cervical fluid, etc.)

I just see no reason to assume that attraction to men needs to come bundled with a desire to... do extremely unhygienic things that go against our instinctive disgust.

Does anyone know gay men who don't want to have sex with men?

There's a decent number who don't want to have penetrative anal sex, although it's a pretty small minority. I don't like considering frottage or intercrural not-sex, and even for people who do anal they're still fun and can be a whole encounter on their own, but some do take to them exclusively. Some of that can reflect health concerns more than preferences -- Crohn's and some related disorders don't play well with bottoming, and not just for the disgust stuff -- but some people just don't like it.

That said, prostate stimulation isn't for everybody, but it's really good if it works for you, and it's not implausible for the how of it working for some men is at least somewhat tied to same-sex attraction.

I was talking about this with friends of mine awhile ago and had an amusing exchange.

Folamh3: You know it's weird, because people act like anal sex is totally unnatural. But no one thinks that oral sex is weird, even though the mouth didn't evolve to be a penis receptacle any more than the anus did. The vagina is the only orifice that actually evolved to be a penis receptacle.

Friend: What do you mean? Why not the anus?

Folamh3: Well, like, the anus isn't self-lubricating, for example.

Friend: Speak for yourself.

(He's straight and was joking, if it wasn't obvious.)

A gay friend once suggested some not-insubstantial minority of gay men only do oral, but I don’t know how common that actually is.

Oral, frottage, intercrural, some fun combinations with sex toys that I don't know have names, there's a lot of options short of penetration. Even for couples that do anal, these play a pretty important role.

As for how prevalent completely avoiding anal is, it depends pretty heavily on how you survey it. I've seen numbers as high as ~30% claimed, but that usually ends up reflecting a survey question like 'recent sexual encounter' or 'in the last x months' that's probably better understood as whether they have regular interest. I'd expect the real number is probably a lot lower: 10% or even 5% seem more realistic.

((There's been an effort to popularize the term "side" for this as a sex role, but a) I've not seen an academic surveys on the identity and b) it's a stupid name.))

Does anyone know gay men who don't want to have sex with men?

I think they're typically referred to as "bottoms".

And... I really don't think it's all bottoms, but from a mechanical standpoint the preparation and cleanup involve dealing with a lot less shit in places shit isn't supposed to be. It's fine for shit to remain in one's ass and it's even designed to expel shit in liquid form (thus can handle other substances reasonably well); said shit is also naturally found around one's ass after shitting and the other fluid typical to sex is more amenable to cleanup. This also applies to straight sex.

Contrast tops; you're going to get shit and maybe blood on and in your dick if you just stick it in without prep on either side, and it's still going to be nasty even if you're wearing that dinky piece of latex (scent still gets through gloves and you're still probably going to get shit on you when you go to take it off regardless of how careful you are). So I really wouldn't blame them for either not wanting to do that, or (and the impression I get from a few other openly-gay posters here) it just takes them a long time to work up to doing it, which, as with straight relationships in general, is probably partially why the average top is a lot older than the average bottom.

(That last dynamic is also probably why you see a lot more "predation"- age gaps just make the tricks work better, and it's not like gay sex has much of a barrier to entry and is likely not, in more of a social vacuum or for higher decouplers- both things men tend to be- as traumatizing or formative as women claim casual sexual activity is. Which is kind of a steelman for double standards and certain kinds of gay culture, but I digress.)

So, a homoromantic asexual? Or a biromantic heterosexual?

I haven’t really chatted about sex preferences with any of the gay or bi men I know. I’m confident they exist, if only because there are plenty of alternate sex acts.

Compare a woman who won’t do anal, even if she’s otherwise pretty kinky.

I'm sure at least one exists, but I haven't heard of anything like that. Gay men generally claim to find vaginas unpleasant disgusting, though.

In my experience, properly gay men don't turn their head at a particularly large pair of tits. They don't proposition women when they get drunk. You don't catch them with straight porn tabs open. If they get crushes or romantic obsessions, they're with other men, not women. They're really just not interested in women. It's not impossible to imagine, women usually aren't that interested in women either.

There are some people who call themselves 'gay' who are attracted to both men and women, but mostly those call themselves bi.

A sexual orientation (of any direction) permeates and forms a lenses for a person's whole human experience. I find myself having a harder time remembering and recognizing people of the gender I'm not principally attracted to, since mentally I'm just not interested. Think of giving a non-football fan Superbowl tickets, if they don't care they might just not want to deal with the traffic. Similarly I could see the 'costs' (emotional, time-sink, etc.) would lead to someone saying no to your proposition.

I'll flip it around. If you're not homosexual, would you refuse a highly attractive same-sex individual who wanted to engage in such activity with you?

Proportions are impossible to speak to, depending on what level of proof you expect to receive. Lab studies show some portion of men are only aroused by images of men. Pornography would be a situation where men have free choice, they can pick a 10/10 woman or a 10/10 man at the same or lesser difficulty, and there's probably a greater proportion of gay porn than gay men. The surveyed proportion of Men who have Sex with Men has held steady over time despite Grindr and a reduction of social stigma.

Anecdotally, I knew a guy who was married, had an affair with a woman, his affair partner arranged a threesome with yet another woman, all three women in this guy's life were fairly attractive. Not long after the threesome he came out as gay, left his wife and ended the affair. He was definitely gay, he have heterosexuality the old college try.

You can play the "but what if an 11/10 asked them" game in your head, but the fact is that there are plenty of gay men who are indeed exclusively gay.

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