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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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the average gay man doesn't have anywhere near 100 sexual partners in his life

What's the right number? I suspect the distribution is bimodal, with one peak around where hetero males are, and another peak way out there - maybe over 100, if tales told on the internet to be believed (yes, I know, but these tales are way different from hetero men tales, by orders of magnitude).

Most meaningful studies I can find give a median closer to 10-25, which is significantly higher than heterosexual couples but not by an order of magnitude or more. You can find some higher estimates, but the highest numbers (100+) are generally selecting from prostitutes, brothel workers, and bathhouse addicts in San Francisco (see Bell and Weinberg, often referenced by anti-gay groups, which was almost 1/4th prostitutes), and those in the 50+ range usually reflect heavily urbanized areas and less severe but-still-significant selection pressures.

((There are some issues with the lower-end of the scales; these end up distorted by younger people who haven't had sex with any men yet and may not ever, which gets into some complicated philosophical questions. Some studies, especially earlier studies lump in bisexuals with gay men, and more recently there's the complex question of non-practicing or at least not-practicing-with-partners gay men. And obviously the lifetime sexual partner count of a specific person at a specific time can be different than the total number they'll have over their lifetime, though overlooking that difference is present in AFAIK all data sources.))

Some people suspect that this number has skyrocketed very recently, in the current day usually pointing to grindr. You can get 70ish by selecting solely from people using grindr, but I'm... skeptical that this is closer to Average Gay than to the San Francisco Bathhouse Fanatic.

The high ends are pretty extreme and bad in a lot of ways and it's definitely a chart with a long tail, but even most people who style themselves as mansluts don't get or even aim anywhere near there. Beyond the sheer logistical problems (insert Clerks joke here), it's literally a full-time job, and once you've found a good top there's a lot of good arguments against going back to the the sea.

The very high ends do exist and there are people who make it a major life's goal to get their body count as high as possible. For pragmatic reasons that's a lot more oral (and I suspect that they aren't the most precise about avoiding repeat customers or 'donations'), but as weird as the 2k+ numbers when examined closely are, they're not obviously lizardman numbers, and not just because most furry scalies are tops that don't really kink onto this stuff.

Why would it be a full-time job? If you're a person that doesn't do committed relationships, and given an active sex life of ~30 years, having just one partner a month - which doesn't sound like a full time job at all - would already take you to 360 partners. Of course, that's over the (active) lifetime, so median would be half of that? Still 180. All you need is a culture that allows you to hook up with a new partner at least once a month and of course the availability of the new partners. I think currently, grindr or other ways, that isn't much of a problem? Of course, that assumes a person absolutely averse to long-term relationships (which btw is the opposite of almost every homosexual person I've ever met, but I don't pretend my sample is in any way representative) and if you look at all the population the key metric would be how many are actually long-term and short-term people. But by itself, "it's a full-time job" doesn't seem to hold water here.

It's not so much time spent sucking dick directly, so much as the availability of new partners that's a pretty significant limitation, especially if you aren't extremely open in your standards and preferences and/or living in a gay mecca. It's not my thing, but the amount of effort involving in setting up mushes, orgies, or just convenient conventions where there's going to be a lot of room parties is kinda surprisingly difficult! Other just redirect their career around opportunities, like working in a travel-focused field with a lot of on-location downtime.

The high ends mentioned here are in the thousands, not the hundreds.

For many of the men at that high end, it likely is a literal full-time job.