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A (potentially former?) staffer for allegedly Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Maryland) is making news for filming gay sex in the Senate hearing room. He also, allegedly, yelled "Free Palestine" at Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio).
I include the last sentence only to clarify the full context for a statement the staffer posted on his LinkedIn about the matter:
I'm struggling with his statement because it seems like the "filmed sex tape at work in the Senate hearing room on Amy Koobuchar's desk" is more of the issue here than the staffer's sexuality itself, but the language used insinuates that he is using his sexuality as a defense for an act that straight people also probably could not have "gotten away" with.
The utter lack of understanding of consequences is also throwing me a little bit. Culture war discussions about sexuality dip into accusations of degeneracy and pleasure-seeking not associated with, necessarily, love that this video emulates. This video will of course be used to further those accusations onto "all gays" instead of the particularly privileged ones who work in the Senate.
That seems pretty common, though. There is quite a bit of "but it's OK when straight people do it, bigot" directed at opponents of gay pride parades and the like.
Obviously the uncharitable explanation is that gay men are all perverts, but that's not the sort of thing that, well actually I guess it could be a quality contribution if you put enough effort into it, but it usually isn't and I don't particularly want to do it. It's also not a particularly interesting explanation. I think it's more productive to discuss what the charitable explanations are- not because I like gays, but because they're probably not all just evil, that's rarely a good model of anybody.
Instead I think there's an experiential gap. Gay male culture is simply accepting of things within itself(very public displays of sexuality, harassment-ish behavior, teen sex, extreme promiscuity, etc) which are controversial to verboten among straight people. I think that neither gays nor their straight allies are aware of both sides of this- gays that it's not considered acceptable to simulate sex in public in the straight community, straight allies that the gay community doesn't care about such things or understand why anyone would. And obviously that has relevance for gay pride parades- a bunch of straight people parading down main street doing the exact same things would get arrested for indecent exposure and public nudity, and I don't think the pro-pride-parades side is willing to acknowledge that. But it also has relevance for all sorts of other things; the gay stuff in schools is controversial, but sex ed was hot culture war when it was "sometimes when a mommy and daddy love each other very much....", too. And in the current case, waving identity about like a shield probably will not save his job, but it might allow him to get a job at some LGBT NGO or other, because there's just a big experiential gap about how big of a faux pas it is.
Gays aren't some isolated hunter-gatherer tribe. They understand the prevailing norms regarding public sexual behavior just fine. Without such an understanding, having sex in a Senate hearing room wouldn't even be appealing. It is only exciting because of its transgressive nature and the risks involved.
So we're back to homosexual men in particular being especially sexually deviant--not just in their choice of partners, but also in their general propensity to trangress sexual norms. Personally, I'm inclined to see this as mostly just the expression of male sexuality unconstrained by females, but it also probably has something to do with homosexuals being a privileged class who have built an identity upon transgression. Perhaps this is partly where the "but I'm gay" defense comes from--to deny a gay man his sexual transgressions is inherently homophobic.
Of course, you could no doubt find heterosexuals who would engage in similar behavior, but proportionally many more gays seem to be up for it.
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Last year I watched the movie Cruising (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruising_(film)) from 1980 (well worth a watch if you haven't seen it, it's stylish, thrilling and unpredictable). The film concerns a serial killer active in New York's gay community, so to track him down Al Pacino goes undercover, spending night after night in leather bars and inhaling poppers. The scale of the perversion he witnesses (e.g. looking on with barely concealed revulsion as a man, lying supine on a table in the middle of a club, gets fisted by another man while a captive audience watches) affects him psychologically and makes it impossible for him to perform with his girlfriend.
I was telling my brother about the movie and he said "I reckon there are a lot of very mainstream progressive types who really believe that gay men and gay couples are no different than straight men and straight couples aside from the objects of their attraction, and if they knew the kind of sexual behaviour which was seen as completely normal in the gay community, they'd be horrified."
The film was criticised as homophobic both during production and upon release, to the point that gay activists tracked down where the location shooting was taking place and blew air horns nearby so that the audio would be unusable. Watching the film, I honestly wasn't sure why it inspired such ire. I don't think it's homophobic to correctly observe (as Cruising does) that promiscuity, casual sex and chemsex are extremely normalised in the gay community. Most straight people (and lesbians) have never had sex in a bathroom stall with someone they met ten minutes earlier and whose name they don't know - but if you were a gay man and you said you'd never done that, in my experience most gay men would look at you like you'd two heads.
The 22-year-old Onion article comes to mind: "I'd always thought gays were regular people, just like you and me, and that the stereotype of homosexuals as hedonistic, sex-crazed deviants was just a destructive myth."
The median gay man could, if he so wished, live a life of sexual abundance and satisfaction that would be beyond the wildest dreams of at least a 95th percentile heterosexual male in attractiveness. Having sex in a nightclub bathroom with an attractive stranger is the highlight of your life; for me, those are Tuesdays. This was a concept I put to use in the day, transitioning her group to a gay nightclub if I needed to shake-off the gay friend(s) of a girl I'm trying to bang.
It's not uncommon, nowadays, in various spheres of the internet to see young straight men wishing they were gay, both ironically and unironically and anything in between; as well as gay men of varying ages gloating and/or being relieved that they don't have to deal with and jump through hoops for women in romantic/sexual settings: "Look what they [straight men] need just to mimic a fraction of our power."
We may be at an interesting time where a greater percentage of young straight men wish they were gay than where young gay men wish they were straight.
Zero chance of that getting published today lmao
I'm kind of surprised they haven't taken it down. Maybe nobody actually works there any more and it's just ChatGPT working off a "pretend you're a writer for The Onion" prompt.
I distinctly recall seeing an Onion article years ago with the title "Taylor Swift successfully crosses over into masturbation fantasies of non-country music fans" or similar. I looked for it a year or two ago and couldn't find it. I wonder if Swift's legal team sent them a cease and desist.
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I realize I'm a bit of an outlier when it comes to sex, but does this really appeal to many straight men? That sounds more like a nightmare to me and I didn't think I was that much of an outlier.
"Highlight of my life" is putting it too strongly, but there's no question that having sex in public adds a great deal of excitement, especially if the girl is attractive and you don't know her very well (especially especially if it's the first time you've met her).
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Are you forgetting the beautiful stranger part? I feel like you are thinking with the wrong head, which is to say your actual head, which is not the head most men would think with in that kind of situation. Of course, most men will never be in that situation too, which only increases my belief they'd do it, because they know they won't get another chance.
No, the stranger part is the biggest reason it's not appealing to me.
I'm sorry if this is inappropriate, but do you not think that might be an outgrowth of the fucked up things that happened to you in prior relationships with women? The way I viewed the hypothetical - a proposition from a beautiful stranger that becomes the highlight of your life - we are talking about the kind of hot that short circuits critical thinking. Not knowing someone is usually not enough of a concern to cut through that.
(Edit: fuck I'm an idiot, there's also the possibility you didn't read the hypothetical that way, I'm sorry.)
It looks like I'm the outlier around here though, based on the other replies in this thread. Personally I think it's demographics based - we'd get a different response if the motte skewed younger, more progressive or richer/poorer.
Not OP, but maybe? Though I think it's more likely to be a result of attachment style in general -- I never had interest in casual sex even before I had trouble dating. While I certainly have insecurities that having sex with a stranger would prod at, I also value my relationships with other people very strongly, and I don't find any value in sharing something as intimate as sex with someone who I don't know.
Wait, like the sink? So just out in the middle of the bathroom, with not even a stall door keeping you away from just anybody being able to walk in? That makes the hypothetical more appealing to you?
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I’m with you on that. Hot girl looking to shag? I’ll do it anywhere she pleases. Doing it in a forbidden place is also hot and the kind of crazy story you’ll be able to score points with your peers on later (depending on your peers of course).
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Yes. You are an outlier.
To me, having sex with an attractive woman in a restroom, even in otherwise ideal circumstances, sounds like it would be at most 50% as enjoyable as the same encounter on a bed or a couch.
Should I start identifying as a demisexual?
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Huh. I'd expect it to be the sort of thing that's a 'fantasy' more in the porno sense than the 'would actually do personally if the opportunity knocked' one. Leaving aside longer-term issues like sticking your dick in crazy, and assuming that it's the woman's knees that are going to suffer from tile, there's a lot of pragmatic arguments for the discerning exhibitionist casual-sex seeker to head almost anywhere else (up to and including the proverbial Volkswagen Bug from Clerks).
The same for me, if we magically assume that no bad consequences will happen, then "nightclub bathroom" alone would be massive negative.
I can find worse places and situations, but almost anything else would be better.
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Generally speaking, I think the hypothetical seems unappealing to a straight man because the kind of woman who would agree to this kind of scenario can, with high probability, turn your life into a nightmare.
If we magically assume that no bad consequences will happen, then "nightclub bathroom" alone would be massive negative for me.
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Actually, the hypothetical is unappealing to me because it's fucking in a literal restroom and not, like, on a bed or something.
Plus I like to cuddle afterwards.
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Uh... it's definitely something that exists among gay men and is more common, but there's a sizable portion of gay (and bisexual) men who are don't do it, or are even grossed out by it. Even among the casual gay sex set, there's a lot who are just fucking around with their entire distributed friend (and friend-of-friends) group, as often as there's people who devote themselves to making Number Goes Up.
((That's especially true for the sort of behavior in the film. Even among sadomasochists, fisting is not an entry-level behavior.))
That tendency to conflate a tail of the demographic with the whole demographic with little but a disclaimer on the front side was not the only contemporaneous frustration with Cruising -- the film's conclusion is open-ended, but a pretty common read is that the exposure to gay clubbing has turned the viewpoint character, for example.
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I think that's part of the story -- there are very few equivalents as extreme as the Folsom Street Fair in het worlds, and those that exist aren't as well-known.
On top of that there's further complications because a lot of gay-specific interests are different than het-specific ones. I'm hoping the gay male interest in exhibitionism is at least partly an artifact of having to hide more modest and SFW sexuality, but it's absolutely more common as a gay male interest. While exhibitionism might be unusually vulnerable to causing undesirable results for passerbies due to its own nature, a good number of others are just weird. Pup play ends up in a similar boat. They're weirder because they're things that are less common (or nearly unheard of, for pup play) in het circles. But there are kinks that go the other direction.
On the gripping hand, I'm not convinced that in a world where camera phones were invented a decade earlier, we would have avoided sex tapes of Bill Clinton ruining a cigar. A lot of the late-80s early-90s Civil Rights Act feminism, for all I complain about its more recent excesses, was in response to employers forcing employees into (het) sex and other sexual behaviors in public. For a less disquieting example, simulated sex in public actually does show up in a lot of adjacent straight contexts -- Mardi Gras may have less literal fucking in the streets than the Folsom Street Fair, but it still has a lot of public grinding, as do certain dance clubs. That exhibitionism is a more common kink among gay men doesn't make it nearly-unheard of among straights or women.
That’s like saying a demented walmart manager chopping my arms off with a chainsaw constitutes discrimination and a hostile shopping environment. The intention behind this bizarre categorization is to paint the benign and mundane with the same brush as the criminal and abhorrent, requiring ever increasing state monitoring and control.
They should never have accepted that argument from a sex-neg rad-fem who refuses to distinguish between rape and intercourse.
This is the real ‘cultural marxism’ conspiracy to destroy normal human interaction. A "feminist theory of the state"? They should be more subtle next time.
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Who was that senator or other guy who, went caught about doing naughty naughty, went on the attack with "I am a gay American"?
Lemme see if I can look him up - Jim McGreevy, that's who.
I'm used to politicians having enormous egos and no shame, but a mere staffer is pushing it a bit.
I don't think it's even that, it's the "how do I get away without admitting fault" reflex at work and he's diverting attention by "This is about my sexuality, isn't it, bigots?" If he was BIPOC/trans/female etc. he'd try that too, because if he fesses up that yeah, he did get his ashes hauled over a desk in the Senate hearing room, well that's not going to help him. I don't know if a criminal trial could be possible here (what exactly is illegal to do in that place?) but certainly maybe a civil trial? Anyway yeah his job is gone, this is all just damage control to make the firing as soft a landing as possible: don't press charges and there won't be a counter-suit about discrimination on a protected status.
I suppose if there is video evidence that shows yes indeed it's him and yes indeed that is what he is doing, there's no chance of getting away with " I love my job and would never disrespect my workplace" as a denial, unless he wants to claim it's all AI deepfakery? For some political agenda, but then again who cares enough about a staffer to do that?
Wrong on two counts. He was Governor of New Jersey. And that wasn't an attack, that was his resignation speech. McGreevy was actually reasonably honest for a New Jersey politician (a low bar to be sure). Sure, he was having gay sex behind his wife's back, but when his gay lover tried to blackmail him he turned the fucker in and resigned. Wikipedia doesn't mention the blackmail, but neither I nor the New York Post has forgotten.
I didn't remember his exact job description, and there was another scandal round about then about some other politician flying in his mistress (or flying off to see his mistress) on the public dime or something.
But I think "okay yeah I was not alone having an affair while married, it was with another man not another woman" is not defensible by claiming "I am a gay American". What is that but a counter that the only reason you are being chastised is due to your sexuality? No, politicians who get caught in affairs with women are also held to the same standards. You're not having to resign because you're gay, it's because you were fucking around and cheating on your wife, and you don't get to play the martyr here.
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One easy escape is to just say that most men are perverts, but straight men are usually checked by the preferences of women. I don't think that's a complete explanation, but I do think it's mostly true and goes quite a ways towards explaining many of the differences between gay, lesbian, and straight sexual behavior and promiscuity. When I consider how I would have behaved in my early 20s if I had a group of attractive women that were on the same page as me, yeah, it would probably be about how the typical gay guy spends their early 20s.
If you look at actual (past or present ) patriarchal societies they don't have the straight equivalent of gay pride parades. In fact public displays of sexuality are more taboo than they are in the West. So I don't think it's the preferences of women that are keeping men from allowing public orgies.
I might be the wrong audience here (not a big fan of the pride concept in general) but it seems to me the most pro pride people tend to be straight females…
Noticed this too and confuses me. Even if they normally would react to sexual aggressive/leering men with "thats creepy". Maybe they feel like a tourist viewing a pack of lions on a safe Safari?
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Patriarchy doesn't mean "imposed by men on women" It means men take the role of leaders. Like most culture it's primarily transmitted from one generation to the next through women teaching their children. I think it's wrong to model it as maximizing what men want although that is basically how unsophisticated feminists use the term.
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I think this is a misunderstanding of patriarchy- it's the dominance of specifically older men. Younger men do not typically benefit under a patriarchy; patriarchal men prefer the interests of their daughters to those of their potential sons-in-law when those diverge.
You can model patriarchy as a straight man-woman class conflict, but you'd just be wrong. It's patriarchy, not andrarchy. And indeed, a lot of the supposed "feminist victories against patriarchy" were actually driven by younger men smashing systems of patriarchal control intended to keep them from creating scandals with young women; the sexual revolution* in particular was more young men rebelling against their elders with women along for the ride than it was driven by women.
*I'm referring to the second one, if it isn't obvious, but I do think that you can make a coherent case for the first sexual revolution being driven by the desires of returning soldiers more than by early feminism.
Yep. I'd take straight up honest to goodness matriarchy where we are ruled by 60+ year old grandmas over the current status quo, and I personally wouldn't expect there to be any significant difference between a proper patriarchy or a proper matriarchy.
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I think there's something to that but it's still not that women are the ones discouraging high male sex drives, in that case it would be older men reigning in younger men. Though really I think the dynamic is less old vs young it's more that men of all ages have an interest in stopping their female relatives from being pumped and dumped for a variety of reasons. Like if a young man became the patriarch of a family because his dad died young he's not going to let other men sleep with his unmarried female relatives just because he's young and also wants to sleep around.
On the one hand you could say that younger men are harmed by the patriarchy since they don't get to sleep around as much but on the other hand they don't have to worry that their bride has a high body count because her family wouldn't let that happen. It's mutually beneficial in the same way that speed limits are: it limits my freedom to drive at 120mph through a school zone but the upside is that neither can anybody else.
That's just women arranging for the older men to control young men on women's behalf. Women are still ultimately responsible for it.
Based on what? Women have quite a lot power today and they aren't using it to stop younger women from sleeping around.
Because of ideological blinders, though. It's not grannies that have that power; it's specifically credentialed feminists.
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Active attempts to degrade the pool of people younger women would normally be sleeping with (through the standard attacks on young men) is still an attempt to stop this.
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