On today’s episode of Walt Right Perspectives I speak with the brilliant Nina Power, who recently resigned from Compact Magazine after her ironic private messages from an edgy alt account were leaked as a consequence of legal proceedings.
I was just watching an episode of Soft White Underbelly with twin prostitutes. One of them describes this absolutely insane encounter with a John where he tries to take the condom off and she goes completely ape shit on him. When Walt mentions needing to “slap a guy in the face”, I thought of this story. It gives me the idea that there is a class dimension to these behaviors. Expressive, openly aggressive behavior is coded low status, associated with prostitutes, poverty, lack of education. With this in mind, it makes sense that educated women don’t want to slap a guy in the face.
It prob depends on her deportment/presentation... if she's very educated then it might go in the opposite direction and code "love interest from 1940s movie" which most guys would find it hot. There is something so classy and timeless about slapping.
Ofc, I agree. I point out the class dimension because it’s important to identify the particular social modifier that’s impacting the prevalence of the behavior within a certain population. Like, it could be middle class and upper class women aren’t slapping guys because they are scared or they are low agency, but it could also be because they are avoiding doing things that will incur them social penalties. For example, I have a high status Israeli friend and she is aggressive (she would totally slap a guy in the face) and gets a lot of social penalties for it. A LOT.
My thought is most mid and high class women don’t want to endure the social penalties of being aggressive because they are status seeking. In order to bring this back someone would need to make it look like a high status behavior. And differentiate it from low class aggression.
Most middle and upper class women go their entire lives without experiencing physical violence of any kind. By experiencing I mean: committing it, receiving it, or even witnessing it. I grew up working poor and have gotten (amd given) everything from hurt feelings to black eyes to mimd concussions. Even for me what POCs see on the regular is pretty shocking. I suspect that for most women from these social classes, physically striking someone is unthinkable.
What is the best way to change the incentive structure do you think? Can men consciously reward women for slapping us while punishing alternatives?
It may sound ridiculous but I feel like the average UMC woman these days mostly pushes off men by talking like an HR lady which dudes find a lot more offensive than slapping bc it's so inhuman and connotes disgust in a much more powerful way. For most of us slapping would be a huge step up from HR lady freeze, which to my mind should be the thing that actually should elicit social stigma.
Paglia mentions this WASP vs Southern European/Irish catholic divide in many of her talks. As you know, she comes from an Italian family where the women are hot and expressive. WASP culture is cold and passive aggressive. imo its going to be very hard to change this cultural attitude completely, its a cultural inheritance thats super embedded into signalling mechanisms of northern european derived cultural groups. Some sort of cultural innovation has to be made that can still be authentic to this culture but also has the same function as a slap in the face.
I would like to see a new sex n the city type show where women demonstrate different social norms around dating that are coded high status. This show would need to innovate new behaviors, and should use different characters to represent different strategies. Like a more high risk/high reward character who goes for the slapping, and the more agreeable character who learns how to use more french-style cues to say no, etc etc. I think high status escorts would be great for research. These women have all sorts of tricks to stay elegant but also keep things within bounds.
one character who dating for the husband, another who likes high status men/ not a home maker(one of your mistress/sluts, Walt), and some characters who demonstrate how bad the current state of things are man-hater-HR manager type who can't get laid even though she's hot, etc etc
I’m imagining being slapped in a public setting as opposed to being deluged with HR lady talk and the former is definitely worse. I can bog her down with verbal diarrhea too, but being slapped makes you look like a turd.
Really good episode. This is the first time I've ever listened to Walt's podcast, and I made a point of listening to this one specifically because I was familiar with Nina from the Compact podcast. I'll definitely be returning here to listen in the future, and I applaud you for treating Nina as the opposite of radioactive in the immediate wake of her attempted cancelation. It was nice, too, hearing Nina more fully expatiate on her beliefs in their own context instead of only incidentally as they relate to a topical news story as she did in her regular role at the Compact podcast.
That being said, I don't understand how anyone as unwedded as you are to traditional religion or Dark-Enlightenment-type ideology can say that for a man to tacitly admit his homosexuality by starting a sentence "My boyfriend and I..." is on the same spectrum of sexual offense as a man in a trenchcoat flashing children on a playground. In saying so you sound as deluded and word-obsessed as a left-winger claiming that Robert Downey, Jr. doing blackface in Tropic Thunder is at an extreme end of a spectrum of racism at the other end of which sit the Middle Passage and KKK lynchings. Ask a mother whether she'd rather her son come home from kindergarten telling her two fully dressed adult men casually walked past the playground hand in hand on their way to the store or telling her that a man showed up with a laptop and played them porn or flashed his penis at them. She knows the difference and so does anyone else who prioritizes the wisdom of experience.
I don't particularly know why, but just like every JFK conspiracy-theorist prefers his own unique account of how the assassination took place with its own unique strengths and weaknesses, so too it seems that every e-right thinker feels obliged to put forward his own bespoke theory about the optimal necessary level of political and social repression for gay men, each of which inevitably leads us to be treated as rapacious biohazards at worst or pitiful, second-rate people at best, and I'm not sure why you sink to that level. You're putting forth the notion that there's a scale of public sexuality, from verbal acknowledgment of a significant other by name or by neutral terminology like "boyfriend" all the way up to public sex or rape, where a given homosexual act is always escalated one level above the otherwise identical heterosexual act, and for what? I can't imagine you think your heterosexuality or anyone else's is teetering on a knife's edge and will collapse completely if exposed to the idea that a gay man is alive and unafraid for people to know that he's in a relationship with another man. You're making an attempt to reimpose a decades-dead taboo even without a constituency for that taboo's reimposition, and it's odd.
As a gay man with a boyfriend myself, I can tell you with total certainty that there is no gratifying twinge of transgression I get from informing someone that, e.g., "My boyfriend usually enjoys horror video games but he didn't really like that one." It's a statement of reality, not a fetishistic attempt to provoke revulsion or unease. Nor do I think virtually anybody hears that two men are dating and immediately imagines the two of them having bareback sex. I'm presumably even better than you are at imagining men having sex, and I have never met another gay couple and involuntarily imagined them in the act. This seems like a problem for a certain type who can't get sex off his or her mind, and it's patently unfair for me to bear their burden in any respect. Your concern smacks of the Victorians renaming chicken breasts and thighs "white meat" and "dark meat" because the mention of a dead animal's breast or thigh was enough to conjure a living human's equivalents in the hearer's mind and thereby incite sexual frenzy.
also to offer some context my best friend is gay and I don't rly have any disgust impulse towards gay shit myself, I grew up on 4chan and became desensitized to ppl spamming gay porn all day
It's more that I am very annoyed by how women and most gay men have stigmatized male heterosexuality in lots of onerous ways (age gap discourse, shaming guys for asking out their waitress, moralism about the male gaze etc.) because Lisa Simpson straight women have a mental image of gay men as all being Pete Buttigieg types even though the median one has hundreds of sexual partners
you misunderstood what I was saying, I don't think homosex is comparable to pedophilia.
my position is that homosexuality is morally and socially comparable to something like being into BDSM or having a foot fetish and absolutely doesn't deserve any exalted status as a protected class that people need to "tolerate" any more than other fetishes do
a guy saying "my boyfriend..." is to my mind equivalent to a guy saying "my kitten" or "my sugar baby" or a girl calling her boyfriend "daddy" in public... it advertises sexual nonconformity in an exhibitionist way
and if nonconformist straight people aren't allowed to advertise their nonconformity in certain situations gay people shouldn't be arbitrarily granted that protection either
Yes, it is the opposite case—there is no distinction made between a straight man having a consensual relationship with a coworker 5 years younger than him and him dating his 16 yo step daughter. This is the point.
I've read your previous essays that touch on how you think sexuality should be handled and I think you're correct about Lisa Simpson-esque women imposing onerous limits on male heterosexuality that do very little to protect women from predation. I think you're especially perspicacious for realizing that the taboo against age gaps is way stronger *now* than ever before and that the impending victory of the "MAPs" (a term that only exists on right-wing Twitter) is not in the offing. But you detract from those points by saying that gay men should be socially sanctioned for using "my boyfriend" in a sentence in public.
As for homosexuality as a fetish, all I can say is that if you think homosexuality is like being into redheads or tattoos or feet, then your mental model of homosexuality is poor and wanting.
I don't have any particular horse in the race as to whether they should be socially sanctioned. Though I have personally expended significant political capital to ensure Based Gays are accepted in spaces I personally control, so there's that.
On a wider cultural level, until gay guys stop siding with Lisa Simpsons and start going to bat for sexually nonconformist straight men I am not going to take their side on a difficult wedge issue like surrogacy, nor will I shed a single solitary tear if the Trads ever seize power and force gays back in the closet.
If I'm able to remain in the closet without telling strangers how I deviate from the norm then gays can do the same. If gays are permitted to broadcast their practices to all and sundry and hold hands in public (let alone walk around in assless chaps) then my girlfriend should be able to call me daddy at Publix. There is nothing more obnoxious than someone who insists *his* particular brand of deviance deserves special social protection while mine is worthy of ostracism.
Anyway yes, I reject wholesale the modern notion of "sexuality" (in terms of a same sex preference) as being meaningfully distinct from any other type of prohibitive and nonprocreative sexual preference. There is zero moral difference between a guy who can only get hard for men and a guy who can only get hard if the girl has cute feet or if he ties her up. In either case it's a *non-procreative sexual compulsion*.
Hell, I could very easily make the argument that the latter deserves a lot more charity because it's actually adjacent to procreative sexuality and doesn't obstruct it in the way homosexuality does. But I don't take that position, both to be charitable to my gay friends and because I'm not a fan of naturalistic thinking in general.
But I am nonetheless quite rustled that modern society has actually *turned this on its head* and tried to sanitize homosexuality in this Corporate Memphis longhoused way while aggressively stigmatizing any display of heterosexual male thirst, let alone public displays of nonconformity. And the vast majority of gay men have completely gone along with this.
Anyway if you want to insist gay stuff is 100% normal and in no way distinct from heterosexuality and simply be triumphalist about your current cultural supremacy among Lisa Simpson straight women then go ahead. But you should understand that a ton of straight guys deeply resent you beneath the surface and just don't say anything bc it would incur shaming from women. You should likewise recall that popular culture can change incredibly quickly and that fanatical religious revivals happen all the time.
There's going to be a point when you'll need Barstsool straight guys standing up for you to Trads, and we're not about to forget how we were treated in the Bad Times. Just something to consider.
Regarding the overarching point about the nature of sexual orientation, we’re going to have to agree to disagree, but I can’t help but say that reducing sex and sexuality to “getting hard” completely ignores the obvious and important romantic and personal dimension to sexual orientation. Maybe relationships and sex are all about getting hard for you, but they’re not for me. I have a feeling your gay friends would agree with me.
You also don’t seem to realize that something you think is normative and acceptable—you entirely chastely holding hands with your girlfriend in a Home Depot, for instance—WAS CONSIDERED DEVIANT once upon a time. There’s no way you would have had social approval to do that in, e.g., 1850. That you’re willing to state that as the baseline case of totally acceptable normative male sexuality reveals that you in fact are willing to advocate for your preferred form of deviancy against a historical backdrop of nonacceptance.
As for the tyrannous reign of the Lisa Simpsons, I actually don’t think gay men have had any role to play in this (as I said, very baleful) development. You say that gay men are in league with women in policing straight male sexuality. This strikes me as completely and patently false. We don’t, as a rule, take any interest in what you guys do with women, certainly nowhere near as much as taken in our sexuality historically. You and I are both on Twitter, and I’d be shocked if you ever saw gays policing age-gaps or the like whenever Leonardo DiCaprio is in the news; I certainly haven’t. You talked to Nina about the stigma against cold-approaching women; we don’t have a term for that and we certainly aren’t conspiring with women to make cold-approaching impossible. Now: if you mean that we contribute to that by voting for Democrats, then fair enough, although there’s the obvious historical contingency that they were more doggedly willing to fight for us when others wouldn’t. I’ve wished that weren’t the case even more than you do, especially when I was single and looking to date: it would have made my life a lot easier. Either way, all I can tell you is that I’ve stuck up for my straight friends and for the straight men who have been stigmatized by HR types when the situations have arisen, and I plan to continue to do so because it’s the right thing to do, not because I fear that they harbor some deep hatred of me that they’ll vent by voting for the nonexistent integralist movement that stands no chance of coming to power.
Walt - if a guy is living with, is emotionally bonded to and fucking another man and he’s trying to refer to that man, then what should he call him? Partner? Pool boy? … boyfriend?
he can say boyfriend all he wants! I am no puritan
but if he then objects to my girlfriend calling me daddy in public he is an enormous hypocrite and becomes my adversary
gay relationships are not equivalent to hetero relationships and society should obviously treat them differently in some circumstances
when you pursue a homosexual relationship you are choosing to be a sexual nonconformist and this means accepting that in certain contexts (esp around religious/old people and particularly children) you aren't going to be tolerated and have a social obligation to be more circumspect
same principle as lifestyle BDSM or swinging or sex work or polyamory or sugaring or being a furry etc. All of these things are a huge part of your identity and will color the nature of your relationships in a way that sometimes feels very burdensome to repress in public.
But on some level that is a necessary part of civilized existence and if you don't accept that you must accept that you will occasionally be hated by lower openness people who perceive you as a weird exhibitionist.
This analogy feels weak to me. I think the issue is the promiscuity (and by extension, the increasing prevalence/normalization/celebration of kink, which is always reflective of emotional issues) not the homosexuality. Like, Aella is just as gross as bathhouse culture or the 50 dude gay train, but Aella is an exception, not the rule.
This is why gay marriage enjoys wide support, but tolerance of egregious displays of gay sex practices (eg Pride) is minimal at best and enforced only through fear of being labeled homophobic. Gay marriage proposes to norm/contain the excesses of gay male sexuality through commitment to monogamy (though it often doesn’t work like that in practice).
Wow, an appreciater of Ivan illich who thinks men and women should get along w recognition of their differences? Coming from the left and being against pharma and for clean food and living?! Glad to make your acquaintance!
Thanks for following me so glad I saw you. We are kindred spirits I would say, being called a biological determinist in women’s studies classes in 2006 at Dartmouth while studying mainly geography I would say historical materialism and being a mushroom witch. Discovering Ivan illich and Alf Hornborg, The Power of the Machine. I think I’m a little younger than you but not much. Ended up marrying into a big Mexican family gut drove me to have my kids somewhere sane for little kids, multigenerational gendered family space that knew how to take care of babies (which I def did not be born into). Now my 13 year old daughter thinks I want to set society ‘back 30 years’ cause I tried to offer some nuance to the project 2025 hysteria and also point to that I am not for ‘gender affirming care.’ Meanwhile my 14 year old son who is into guns and mma used to confuse me for an ecosnowflake because I’d go to holy war for wild spaces if I could find one and assumed being kind of right-vitalist would be the opposite of mom, which might protect him from being a drug addict tho it def makes him a ‘dick’ currently, but I’ll take it. lol. Loved the interview.
Fascinating conversation. I just ordered your box off Amazon. Thank you for putting yourself out there on some really complex and frankly dangerous topics.
Walt, I think you underestimate women's sexual desire in a marriage and why. Asymmetrical polyamory isn't going to work for many elite couples, especially when they include high body count women who have a storied sexual past before marrying an elite guy who doesn't care, because those women are going to want extramarital sex, too. They don't desire their husbands less because they desire *sex* less, they simply desire *him* less. They get bored, too, and a more effective way to go about something like that would simply be mutual discretion rather than simply *his.*
The only guy I ever responded to on OKCupid (I'm old) was one with a very, very, obnoxiously long profile page. Just throwing that out there. Get your female friend to write a bio.
Host assumption that china wants to conquer ‘us’ so we have to take amphetamines is kind of nuts… china lived parallel and separate and doing its thing for millennia
On the teensex stuff, aren't kids today having way less sex? Doesn't ubiquitous porn lead to fewer sexual relationships entirely? I was a bit surprised to hear it discussed as porn culture translating to early frequent sexual encounters. The data suggest the opposite.
I was just watching an episode of Soft White Underbelly with twin prostitutes. One of them describes this absolutely insane encounter with a John where he tries to take the condom off and she goes completely ape shit on him. When Walt mentions needing to “slap a guy in the face”, I thought of this story. It gives me the idea that there is a class dimension to these behaviors. Expressive, openly aggressive behavior is coded low status, associated with prostitutes, poverty, lack of education. With this in mind, it makes sense that educated women don’t want to slap a guy in the face.
It prob depends on her deportment/presentation... if she's very educated then it might go in the opposite direction and code "love interest from 1940s movie" which most guys would find it hot. There is something so classy and timeless about slapping.
Ofc, I agree. I point out the class dimension because it’s important to identify the particular social modifier that’s impacting the prevalence of the behavior within a certain population. Like, it could be middle class and upper class women aren’t slapping guys because they are scared or they are low agency, but it could also be because they are avoiding doing things that will incur them social penalties. For example, I have a high status Israeli friend and she is aggressive (she would totally slap a guy in the face) and gets a lot of social penalties for it. A LOT.
My thought is most mid and high class women don’t want to endure the social penalties of being aggressive because they are status seeking. In order to bring this back someone would need to make it look like a high status behavior. And differentiate it from low class aggression.
Most middle and upper class women go their entire lives without experiencing physical violence of any kind. By experiencing I mean: committing it, receiving it, or even witnessing it. I grew up working poor and have gotten (amd given) everything from hurt feelings to black eyes to mimd concussions. Even for me what POCs see on the regular is pretty shocking. I suspect that for most women from these social classes, physically striking someone is unthinkable.
Completely. This is so on point.
What is the best way to change the incentive structure do you think? Can men consciously reward women for slapping us while punishing alternatives?
It may sound ridiculous but I feel like the average UMC woman these days mostly pushes off men by talking like an HR lady which dudes find a lot more offensive than slapping bc it's so inhuman and connotes disgust in a much more powerful way. For most of us slapping would be a huge step up from HR lady freeze, which to my mind should be the thing that actually should elicit social stigma.
Paglia mentions this WASP vs Southern European/Irish catholic divide in many of her talks. As you know, she comes from an Italian family where the women are hot and expressive. WASP culture is cold and passive aggressive. imo its going to be very hard to change this cultural attitude completely, its a cultural inheritance thats super embedded into signalling mechanisms of northern european derived cultural groups. Some sort of cultural innovation has to be made that can still be authentic to this culture but also has the same function as a slap in the face.
I would like to see a new sex n the city type show where women demonstrate different social norms around dating that are coded high status. This show would need to innovate new behaviors, and should use different characters to represent different strategies. Like a more high risk/high reward character who goes for the slapping, and the more agreeable character who learns how to use more french-style cues to say no, etc etc. I think high status escorts would be great for research. These women have all sorts of tricks to stay elegant but also keep things within bounds.
one character who dating for the husband, another who likes high status men/ not a home maker(one of your mistress/sluts, Walt), and some characters who demonstrate how bad the current state of things are man-hater-HR manager type who can't get laid even though she's hot, etc etc
yes this is a fantastic idea, early twenties girls would def start aping the characters' behavior if executed well just like with SatC and Girls
need to get my job stacking nibbas to crowdfund this at some point
I’m imagining being slapped in a public setting as opposed to being deluged with HR lady talk and the former is definitely worse. I can bog her down with verbal diarrhea too, but being slapped makes you look like a turd.
I can imagine Nina saying something powerful, like: You can have my pen when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
Really good episode. This is the first time I've ever listened to Walt's podcast, and I made a point of listening to this one specifically because I was familiar with Nina from the Compact podcast. I'll definitely be returning here to listen in the future, and I applaud you for treating Nina as the opposite of radioactive in the immediate wake of her attempted cancelation. It was nice, too, hearing Nina more fully expatiate on her beliefs in their own context instead of only incidentally as they relate to a topical news story as she did in her regular role at the Compact podcast.
That being said, I don't understand how anyone as unwedded as you are to traditional religion or Dark-Enlightenment-type ideology can say that for a man to tacitly admit his homosexuality by starting a sentence "My boyfriend and I..." is on the same spectrum of sexual offense as a man in a trenchcoat flashing children on a playground. In saying so you sound as deluded and word-obsessed as a left-winger claiming that Robert Downey, Jr. doing blackface in Tropic Thunder is at an extreme end of a spectrum of racism at the other end of which sit the Middle Passage and KKK lynchings. Ask a mother whether she'd rather her son come home from kindergarten telling her two fully dressed adult men casually walked past the playground hand in hand on their way to the store or telling her that a man showed up with a laptop and played them porn or flashed his penis at them. She knows the difference and so does anyone else who prioritizes the wisdom of experience.
I don't particularly know why, but just like every JFK conspiracy-theorist prefers his own unique account of how the assassination took place with its own unique strengths and weaknesses, so too it seems that every e-right thinker feels obliged to put forward his own bespoke theory about the optimal necessary level of political and social repression for gay men, each of which inevitably leads us to be treated as rapacious biohazards at worst or pitiful, second-rate people at best, and I'm not sure why you sink to that level. You're putting forth the notion that there's a scale of public sexuality, from verbal acknowledgment of a significant other by name or by neutral terminology like "boyfriend" all the way up to public sex or rape, where a given homosexual act is always escalated one level above the otherwise identical heterosexual act, and for what? I can't imagine you think your heterosexuality or anyone else's is teetering on a knife's edge and will collapse completely if exposed to the idea that a gay man is alive and unafraid for people to know that he's in a relationship with another man. You're making an attempt to reimpose a decades-dead taboo even without a constituency for that taboo's reimposition, and it's odd.
As a gay man with a boyfriend myself, I can tell you with total certainty that there is no gratifying twinge of transgression I get from informing someone that, e.g., "My boyfriend usually enjoys horror video games but he didn't really like that one." It's a statement of reality, not a fetishistic attempt to provoke revulsion or unease. Nor do I think virtually anybody hears that two men are dating and immediately imagines the two of them having bareback sex. I'm presumably even better than you are at imagining men having sex, and I have never met another gay couple and involuntarily imagined them in the act. This seems like a problem for a certain type who can't get sex off his or her mind, and it's patently unfair for me to bear their burden in any respect. Your concern smacks of the Victorians renaming chicken breasts and thighs "white meat" and "dark meat" because the mention of a dead animal's breast or thigh was enough to conjure a living human's equivalents in the hearer's mind and thereby incite sexual frenzy.
also to offer some context my best friend is gay and I don't rly have any disgust impulse towards gay shit myself, I grew up on 4chan and became desensitized to ppl spamming gay porn all day
It's more that I am very annoyed by how women and most gay men have stigmatized male heterosexuality in lots of onerous ways (age gap discourse, shaming guys for asking out their waitress, moralism about the male gaze etc.) because Lisa Simpson straight women have a mental image of gay men as all being Pete Buttigieg types even though the median one has hundreds of sexual partners
You’re onto something with the discussion of the shaming of heterosexual dating traditions.
you misunderstood what I was saying, I don't think homosex is comparable to pedophilia.
my position is that homosexuality is morally and socially comparable to something like being into BDSM or having a foot fetish and absolutely doesn't deserve any exalted status as a protected class that people need to "tolerate" any more than other fetishes do
a guy saying "my boyfriend..." is to my mind equivalent to a guy saying "my kitten" or "my sugar baby" or a girl calling her boyfriend "daddy" in public... it advertises sexual nonconformity in an exhibitionist way
and if nonconformist straight people aren't allowed to advertise their nonconformity in certain situations gay people shouldn't be arbitrarily granted that protection either
Yes, it is the opposite case—there is no distinction made between a straight man having a consensual relationship with a coworker 5 years younger than him and him dating his 16 yo step daughter. This is the point.
(Replying to this and your subsequent message)
I've read your previous essays that touch on how you think sexuality should be handled and I think you're correct about Lisa Simpson-esque women imposing onerous limits on male heterosexuality that do very little to protect women from predation. I think you're especially perspicacious for realizing that the taboo against age gaps is way stronger *now* than ever before and that the impending victory of the "MAPs" (a term that only exists on right-wing Twitter) is not in the offing. But you detract from those points by saying that gay men should be socially sanctioned for using "my boyfriend" in a sentence in public.
As for homosexuality as a fetish, all I can say is that if you think homosexuality is like being into redheads or tattoos or feet, then your mental model of homosexuality is poor and wanting.
I don't have any particular horse in the race as to whether they should be socially sanctioned. Though I have personally expended significant political capital to ensure Based Gays are accepted in spaces I personally control, so there's that.
On a wider cultural level, until gay guys stop siding with Lisa Simpsons and start going to bat for sexually nonconformist straight men I am not going to take their side on a difficult wedge issue like surrogacy, nor will I shed a single solitary tear if the Trads ever seize power and force gays back in the closet.
If I'm able to remain in the closet without telling strangers how I deviate from the norm then gays can do the same. If gays are permitted to broadcast their practices to all and sundry and hold hands in public (let alone walk around in assless chaps) then my girlfriend should be able to call me daddy at Publix. There is nothing more obnoxious than someone who insists *his* particular brand of deviance deserves special social protection while mine is worthy of ostracism.
Anyway yes, I reject wholesale the modern notion of "sexuality" (in terms of a same sex preference) as being meaningfully distinct from any other type of prohibitive and nonprocreative sexual preference. There is zero moral difference between a guy who can only get hard for men and a guy who can only get hard if the girl has cute feet or if he ties her up. In either case it's a *non-procreative sexual compulsion*.
Hell, I could very easily make the argument that the latter deserves a lot more charity because it's actually adjacent to procreative sexuality and doesn't obstruct it in the way homosexuality does. But I don't take that position, both to be charitable to my gay friends and because I'm not a fan of naturalistic thinking in general.
But I am nonetheless quite rustled that modern society has actually *turned this on its head* and tried to sanitize homosexuality in this Corporate Memphis longhoused way while aggressively stigmatizing any display of heterosexual male thirst, let alone public displays of nonconformity. And the vast majority of gay men have completely gone along with this.
Anyway if you want to insist gay stuff is 100% normal and in no way distinct from heterosexuality and simply be triumphalist about your current cultural supremacy among Lisa Simpson straight women then go ahead. But you should understand that a ton of straight guys deeply resent you beneath the surface and just don't say anything bc it would incur shaming from women. You should likewise recall that popular culture can change incredibly quickly and that fanatical religious revivals happen all the time.
There's going to be a point when you'll need Barstsool straight guys standing up for you to Trads, and we're not about to forget how we were treated in the Bad Times. Just something to consider.
Regarding the overarching point about the nature of sexual orientation, we’re going to have to agree to disagree, but I can’t help but say that reducing sex and sexuality to “getting hard” completely ignores the obvious and important romantic and personal dimension to sexual orientation. Maybe relationships and sex are all about getting hard for you, but they’re not for me. I have a feeling your gay friends would agree with me.
You also don’t seem to realize that something you think is normative and acceptable—you entirely chastely holding hands with your girlfriend in a Home Depot, for instance—WAS CONSIDERED DEVIANT once upon a time. There’s no way you would have had social approval to do that in, e.g., 1850. That you’re willing to state that as the baseline case of totally acceptable normative male sexuality reveals that you in fact are willing to advocate for your preferred form of deviancy against a historical backdrop of nonacceptance.
As for the tyrannous reign of the Lisa Simpsons, I actually don’t think gay men have had any role to play in this (as I said, very baleful) development. You say that gay men are in league with women in policing straight male sexuality. This strikes me as completely and patently false. We don’t, as a rule, take any interest in what you guys do with women, certainly nowhere near as much as taken in our sexuality historically. You and I are both on Twitter, and I’d be shocked if you ever saw gays policing age-gaps or the like whenever Leonardo DiCaprio is in the news; I certainly haven’t. You talked to Nina about the stigma against cold-approaching women; we don’t have a term for that and we certainly aren’t conspiring with women to make cold-approaching impossible. Now: if you mean that we contribute to that by voting for Democrats, then fair enough, although there’s the obvious historical contingency that they were more doggedly willing to fight for us when others wouldn’t. I’ve wished that weren’t the case even more than you do, especially when I was single and looking to date: it would have made my life a lot easier. Either way, all I can tell you is that I’ve stuck up for my straight friends and for the straight men who have been stigmatized by HR types when the situations have arisen, and I plan to continue to do so because it’s the right thing to do, not because I fear that they harbor some deep hatred of me that they’ll vent by voting for the nonexistent integralist movement that stands no chance of coming to power.
Walt - if a guy is living with, is emotionally bonded to and fucking another man and he’s trying to refer to that man, then what should he call him? Partner? Pool boy? … boyfriend?
he can say boyfriend all he wants! I am no puritan
but if he then objects to my girlfriend calling me daddy in public he is an enormous hypocrite and becomes my adversary
gay relationships are not equivalent to hetero relationships and society should obviously treat them differently in some circumstances
when you pursue a homosexual relationship you are choosing to be a sexual nonconformist and this means accepting that in certain contexts (esp around religious/old people and particularly children) you aren't going to be tolerated and have a social obligation to be more circumspect
same principle as lifestyle BDSM or swinging or sex work or polyamory or sugaring or being a furry etc. All of these things are a huge part of your identity and will color the nature of your relationships in a way that sometimes feels very burdensome to repress in public.
But on some level that is a necessary part of civilized existence and if you don't accept that you must accept that you will occasionally be hated by lower openness people who perceive you as a weird exhibitionist.
This analogy feels weak to me. I think the issue is the promiscuity (and by extension, the increasing prevalence/normalization/celebration of kink, which is always reflective of emotional issues) not the homosexuality. Like, Aella is just as gross as bathhouse culture or the 50 dude gay train, but Aella is an exception, not the rule.
This is why gay marriage enjoys wide support, but tolerance of egregious displays of gay sex practices (eg Pride) is minimal at best and enforced only through fear of being labeled homophobic. Gay marriage proposes to norm/contain the excesses of gay male sexuality through commitment to monogamy (though it often doesn’t work like that in practice).
Wow, an appreciater of Ivan illich who thinks men and women should get along w recognition of their differences? Coming from the left and being against pharma and for clean food and living?! Glad to make your acquaintance!
Thanks for following me so glad I saw you. We are kindred spirits I would say, being called a biological determinist in women’s studies classes in 2006 at Dartmouth while studying mainly geography I would say historical materialism and being a mushroom witch. Discovering Ivan illich and Alf Hornborg, The Power of the Machine. I think I’m a little younger than you but not much. Ended up marrying into a big Mexican family gut drove me to have my kids somewhere sane for little kids, multigenerational gendered family space that knew how to take care of babies (which I def did not be born into). Now my 13 year old daughter thinks I want to set society ‘back 30 years’ cause I tried to offer some nuance to the project 2025 hysteria and also point to that I am not for ‘gender affirming care.’ Meanwhile my 14 year old son who is into guns and mma used to confuse me for an ecosnowflake because I’d go to holy war for wild spaces if I could find one and assumed being kind of right-vitalist would be the opposite of mom, which might protect him from being a drug addict tho it def makes him a ‘dick’ currently, but I’ll take it. lol. Loved the interview.
This was an excellent philosophical and topical discussion. Cheers!
Fascinating conversation. I just ordered your box off Amazon. Thank you for putting yourself out there on some really complex and frankly dangerous topics.
Thank you, Peter!
Great talk
Glad she’s ok 🙂
Walt, I think you underestimate women's sexual desire in a marriage and why. Asymmetrical polyamory isn't going to work for many elite couples, especially when they include high body count women who have a storied sexual past before marrying an elite guy who doesn't care, because those women are going to want extramarital sex, too. They don't desire their husbands less because they desire *sex* less, they simply desire *him* less. They get bored, too, and a more effective way to go about something like that would simply be mutual discretion rather than simply *his.*
The only guy I ever responded to on OKCupid (I'm old) was one with a very, very, obnoxiously long profile page. Just throwing that out there. Get your female friend to write a bio.
Can't understand how an Atheist could have such a gay ass mindset/worldview lol
Walt - lmk when you want to traverse the 🍄realms
You are a guy on speed who thinks being smart means everything that comes out of his mind is worth hearing, but your guest is pretty interesting.
Great work!
Host assumption that china wants to conquer ‘us’ so we have to take amphetamines is kind of nuts… china lived parallel and separate and doing its thing for millennia
On the teensex stuff, aren't kids today having way less sex? Doesn't ubiquitous porn lead to fewer sexual relationships entirely? I was a bit surprised to hear it discussed as porn culture translating to early frequent sexual encounters. The data suggest the opposite.