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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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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.

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.