Interesting article, and I've enjoyed seeing your recent thought process unfold on this. Reading this one in particular, I can't help but feel that it's an excellent article from a conservative twenty years ago.
I realize many on the right aren't particularly wild about this, but the mundane reality of homosexuality in this day and age is that it is, in large chunks of society, vanilla—and it certainly feels that way to the median Pete Buttigieg gay dude. It doesn't turn heads, it doesn't feel like weird creepy sex pest behavior, it doesn't cause drama. In theory, I know some people have an issue when I say "my husband" (or, before, "my boyfriend") or hold hands in public. But it's a theoretical knowledge divorced from practical utility. It doesn't actually impact any part of my day-to-day experience in any measurable way. It's not something that comes up.
There has not been a single time in my personal life—in the military, in Utah, in Nebraska, anywhere—that it has caused the least stir or facially apparent awkwardness. Some right-wing sorts will attribute that purely to social pressure, and I'm sure that plays a role, but it plays a role in every sort of social nicety. In many ways, "things there is social pressure to act normal about" defines normality by definition.
In other words, I will actually have to play, in a way, the role of the Lisa Simpson–type straight woman you mention here. In an honest and a pragmatic way, I do think you're the weird one for making it sexual. The sexual elements are very (I would say obnoxiously) present in gay subculture! Those absolutely can and should be used as differentiators! But things like holding hands are not examples of it. "We're just in love~" might be annoying, but it's also simply true. As for sex? Nobody other than my husband knows or particularly should know the details of my sex life, because I'm a prude who does not care to discuss sex in public.
Sex norms are culturally malleable. It's an old canard, but showing ankles or unveiled heads can be unbearably sexual in some cultures. The project of deciding what is culturally appropriate and what is objectionable is a cultural one, with disputes between the sexual liberals and the sexual conservatives of each culture. In US/western culture as it stands, "normie-gay" activities like holding hands fall firmly on the "appropriate" side of the line, not as coincidence or as abrupt imposition but as the result of decades of cultural negotiation. There is neither a practical need nor a practical way for me to mask in mixed company, and it would be culturally Weird for me to do so.
I don't have any great love for mainstream culture nor any great disdain for alternatives. I can get along in a wide range of different cultures. If someone wants to make it more or less restrictive, in particular by demonstrating how their preferences can be turned towards prosocial or noble ends—by all means. I'll have my opinions, but I recognize the culture-forming process. But I'm not persuaded that short-circuiting the negotiation process with an obligation to aggressively advocate for anything and everything is prudent and, indeed, think it contributes to many of the trends you find distasteful.
For anyone unconventional: want respect? Be respectable. Make it easy to advocate for you and hard to advocate against you. Demonstrate your sanity and your prosociality; demonstrate that you can make your path work. This isn't special pleading—I aim to practice the same and encourage it in other gay men. But there is nothing prurient about holding hands or using the word "boyfriend" in public.
- I think you severely underestimate the extent to which right-leaning straight men privately resent having to go along with social niceties surrounding homosexuality because of pressure from wives / girlfriends. Most of us aren't overtly homophobic, but we will *absolutely* complain to each other about being forced to actively participate in "gay shit," especially if raised in an ethnic or working class family.
- This is of course moderated by most upper middle class guys having at least one TracingWoodgrains-esque friend or fam who makes it emotionally inconvenient to support anti gay stuff at the level of a tradcon. With someone like you or Rajeev I wouldn't dream of actively denouncing you or refusing to go to your wedding etc. But I also think of you as "one of the good ones," and I think most rightist straight guys (who are broadly aware of partner count statistics surrounding gay men) are *absolutely* are pretending to be okay with it more than we actually are.
- You aren't going to pick up on the above phenomenon because your A) your friend group is going to be self-selected to favor guys with an unusually high openness disposition, particularly because you also are open about being a furry; and B) your straight conservative male friends are all going to be *a lot* more pro-gay (both consciously and unconsciously) when talking to you. It is pretty likely that a lot of your right-leaning straight male friends have said things (not about you, but about gays in general) in other forums that you might find deeply hurtful. Because in these cases they are excluding you from the mental category of "gay."
- Bear with me here...but I think on some level your homosexuality is a lot like me still talking about white identity issues. I have told WNs on my pod that it's fine to talk about now, but a lot of them are incredulous and insist that the Overton Window has only shifted slightly. Liberals in the northeast insist it's still completely forbidden to discuss. Meanwhile for me the change has seemed HUGE. But I think that's because I am good at filtering out low openness normies before a serious convo starts, and am also good at talking about these things in a way that doesn't scare people and doesn't get me canceled. I also have lots of personality traits that endear me to liberals and make me non-threatening in a way MudSmasher1488 can never be. I think you are benefiting from something similar. Obviously the Overton Window has shifted massively on homosexuality, but you also make it incredibly easy for conservative straight guys to think of you as "one of the good ones." Serving in the military and arguing in an extremely masculine way make it feel loser-coded to resent you. But other gay guys might not have had the same experiences, especially in areas like the Deep South or Florida which are more overt about their prejudices than the Hobbiton you grew up in.
- You probably don't need to run in the sort of mixed company where you would benefit from masking. That is great, and a sign you are a successful and agentic person. I have done something very similar around my own eccentricities. But if you and your husband were taking a road trip and your car broke down in the wrong place I think reality would quickly disabuse you of the idea that this bubble extends far outside the country's urban centers.
- There are lots of circles I want to run in where I will need to expend political capital to maintain both my public association with you and my stature in that community. In the same way you sort of sanitized me to bigbrain centrists who listened to our two podcasts together, someone like me vouching for your moral rectitude actually does advance the case of gay surrogacy/adoption in a meaningful way. Lots of conservatives are INCREDIBLY wary of the gay adoption issue in particular and presently you're only going to convince them to support it for edge cases. You are a great example of an edge case that I practically use all the time as an example of a gay guy who should be permitted to have kids. But these are people you won't be able to reach yourself--to be maximally effective you kind of need a right wing straight guy to make the case on your behalf.
- If anything the Pete Buttigieg / TracingWoodgrains gay who uses his high verbal IQ and mastery of subtextual social mores to appear "more normal than straight people" is more annoying to conservative straight men than effeminate flamers. Lots of us (like Arcto and I believe Greene) will suspect that you are trying to manipulate us to get a cultural foot in the door and turn our women against us while hiding your true intentions. That isn't my own view, but I do think it's dishonest to act as though your own lifestyle is similar to that of the median gay man, and I can understand why guys like Arcto get so paranoid about this. Every Lisa Simpson straight woman wants to think that all gays are like you, and this has been a very bad thing for society. But I also don't want to turn against you or Rajeev or Jeff or any of my other gay collaborators. That puts me in a bind where I can very quickly become no one's friend...but of course I seem to have a knack for getting in these situations ;)
- Re: advocating for straight nonconformists...I think you are getting way too abstract here. Back in the 1970s especially you had a ton of straight "alpha male" types like Hugh Hefner who were huge supporters of gay rights. Publications like Playboy actually had currency with normie straight men (lots of people actually did read the articles!) and efforts by guys temperamentally similar to myself created a cultural infrastructure in which it was seen as sophisticated to support gay rights. It was largely because of this infrastructure that gays achieved the OPTION of going mainstream.
- This is where I get pissed off. During those "decades of cultural negotiation" you talk about, guys like me ALWAYS had your back. We supported our gay bros. But the *moment* Buttigieg types became more culturally influential than Hugh Hefner types by expertly lobbying straight women, they immediately threw us aside and embraced the Corporate Memphisization of society, stigmatizing male heterosexuality at every opportunity. Now even the most red-blooded guys feel ashamed talking about a chick's rack in public. It's disgraceful and I frankly resent gay guys for not pushing back against this trend on our behalf after all we did for you.
- At the end of the day, the primal centerpiece of my own moral intuition is reciprocity. To the extent gays are willing to support my interests as a straight guy who wants to enjoy the fruits of the sexual revolution, I will support the interests of gays. To the extent gays who have ingratiated themselves into the PMC mainstream want to impose Corporate Memphis values on me and mine, I will make overtures to people like Greene and explore building a coalition there.
First: I agree wholeheartedly that the Pete Buttigieg sort is uniquely enraging to people like Arcto and Greene. My lifestyle is not that of the median gay man and I don't pretend it is. But I can only be who I am, and "who I am" is a dude who was so amenable to Mormon culture around sexuality that I didn't even support gay marriage until I left Mormonism. I know how much right-leaning straight men resent having to go along with a lot of this stuff because I was approximately one of them, right there resenting. But you have to understand: I was right there Not Thrilled with everything to do with sexuality. I was the prudish kid all the other Mormon boys would go awkwardly silent around when they'd been joking about sex. Obviously I've softened up in all of those regards, but we're talking a gradual evolution well into adulthood and well after many of my high-level views had been established. I also agree that my Utah middle class (as opposed to eg Deep South working class) background made a huge difference in my experience.
Provocatively and self-servingly, I would argue that they find my type so enraging in part because I grew up with the values at least Greene became a convert to, I earnestly believed in them, and I departed in intentional, cautious, and principled ways without repudiating the system that led me there, leaving my values terrifyingly comprehensible to them while I explicitly and credibly reject things they've staked themselves to. It's less a trojan horse than an explicit threat, an Outgroup member saying "My values are sort of like theirs, but better." What's worse: me being a trojan horse for the sort they can find wide agreement in condemning unambiguously and wholeheartedly, or me actually being an open and principled proponent of a values system that condemns both them and their enemies in turn without being actively repellent to the squishy middle?
You misjudge the circles I travel in to some extent. More than anything, my online friend groups (that is: in many ways my closest circles) were selected as much for interesting disagreement as for anything else. Some of my right-leaning friends have said things about homosexuality in my presence that would almost make people here blush, and an acquaintance or two in those circles has said the same about me personally in the harshest possible terms. Even many of the gay furries I hang out with often have withering things to say about it. On the one hand, these are absolutely circles selected for openness, and they're all chill with eg being normal about weddings. But I do know that phenomenon. I know, too—and appreciate—the political capital expended not to throw me under the bus in many circles. You're right that it's very far from meaningless in spaces beyond my own reach, and I take that seriously.
Do people see me as "one of the good ones"? Yes, of course. And I see them in turn as "one of the good ones," depending on circumstance. I have never been interested in maintaining superficial good bonds with all in my own identity categories. Inasmuch as I'm even known in mainstream gay or mainstream furry culture (and in both cases, my reach is minimal), I'm inherently a subject of some suspicion. I recognize that not everyone will be able to interact with everyone; I can interact productively with more gay people than my right-wing friends and my parents can interact productively with more Mormons than I can. There's nothing wrong with someone recognizing the groups with which their own approach resonates and focusing on them, and while I'm not going to throw eg other gay people under the bus, I'm not going to pretend to more cultural commonality than I have.
I understand a transactional approach perfectly, of course. The logic proves too much, though, because more than "guys like [you]," the people who always had "my" back are the specific people who I have spent my entire life feuding with in one way or another: doctrinaire progressives. Taking the transactional approach logic to an extreme would see me offering full-throated support to the trans movement, polyamory, and much more beyond your own approach. Heck, it would see me offering support to the parts of the gay rights movement itself that you (and certainly Arcto/Greene) hate the most! I don't want to support people who had the back of broad movements I find narrow alignment with, even when that alignment comes on important goals. I want to support people who have my back in particular, and whose values seem poised to lead to a healthier culture on the whole.
Here, you personally face a problem: every gay dude who is likely to intersect with your circles at all is from the subset most likely to depart from full intersectional solidarity, as it were. More, the more support they give, the more others are likely to perceive them as representatives of the very values they often dread being mistaken for holding.
That's not about imposing Corporate Memphis values, but rather a reflection of the unique sets of cross-pressured values that leave people talking in weird corners online. The Pete Buttigieg gays are often uncomfortable and ill at ease with in-your-face sexuality in gay culture—it would be odd indeed for them to reflexively support it in settings they don't even experience attraction, like loud straight sexuality. Personally, I'd be more comfortable in Victorian times, in many ways, despite the incongruity of that statement, and I have to wrestle to see how even thoroughly mainstream aspects of sexuality fit in with my own instincts and ideals.
I don't know what the ideal role for sexuality is in a healthy society. No idea. I know many things it isn't, but what it is is much harder to feel out. Had I not seen and felt the downsides of the Greene approach so starkly, I would temperamentally lean into it. As is, I cautiously see ways some deviations can fit within an overall healthy pattern, and want to understand and apply the specifics of that, but a lot is left to map.
By choice, I am not "ingratiated into the PMC mainstream." I get along well enough with the same politeness norms and distaste for edginess that allow me to get along well enough with most people, but I have never stopped prodding against it and criticizing it in a way that makes me more comfortable and effective outside it than in. I also, by choice, make no attempts at pulling a Dave Rubin and grovelling to factions inclined to hate me. I take a let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may approach, less interested in representing an identity effectively than in carving out a path for my own very specific values and seeing who the path resonates with.
With all of that in mind, what can I offer transactionally, as you (not inappropriately) like to view this sort of thing? As a result of the same values that have landed me in a peculiar spot, I have the credibility to argue forcefully on this topic to unusually broad circles. I'm certainly the wrong guy to look to for full-throated support of things I have instinctively found distasteful my entire life (eg overt male sexuality), and I do not say things I do not mean. But I can offer a seat at the table, as it were—serious consideration of arguments about the ways your preferred norms can fit within a culture more aligned with my own vision, from a perspective where my own views on the topic face tremendous cross-pressures and are as a result rather less settled than they are elsewhere. A simplistic view of transactions where people must parrot uncritical support for your approach is beneath both you and those you hope to reach, and runs counter to the incentives they face. I suggest a more layered view of value here.
>With all of that in mind, what can I offer transactionally, as you (not inappropriately) like to view this sort of thing?
Very interesting question! I might write a longform article about this eventually. But here are some initial thoughts on what I personally want transactionally:
- Prodding other gay people to acknowledge the immense historic role that sex positive straight guys like Hugh Hefner played in mainstreaming homosexuality via publications like Playboy, despite their "problematic" attitudes toward women.
- Pushing back on radfems who are unfair to straight men in their attitudes towards age gaps etc. (especially in light of how common age gaps are among gays).
- I understand you are personally opposed to public expressions of sexuality, so I don't expect you to go to bat for frat boy behavior. But I would ask you to reproach people for treating expressions of male heterosexuality with a puritanical double standard in situations where women and gays are allowed to be sexually exuberant, and try to discourage people from overreacting to harmless things like guys talking about Sydney Sweeney's boobs.
- If you find yourself around a straight woman who expresses casual disgust about a straight man participating in some nonstandard sexual subculture, use your position to build sympathy for him by comparing his situation with homosexuality. This has a pretty decent chance of getting her to ease up.
Here are some other things you could do that would make it easier to defend gay interests to conservatives`:
- Pushing back much more aggressively than you are naturally inclined on Lisa Simpson straight women who want to view you or Mayor Pete as a "model minority" that should be seen as representative of gays as a whole. Use your position to explain to center left professional women things like the median partner count of the average American homosexual male, legitimately dangerous behavior like bugchasing seen at the tail end of the gay population, and the role that gay intransigence played in the spread of Monkeypox, etc. This will of course make some gay guys see you as an Uncle Tom and you will lose further credibility with progressives, but it will disarm Arcto and Greene's argument that you are a foot in the door for something genuinely terrible.
- Acknowledge in some public capacity that a higher standard should be applied to gay parents seeking to adopt or obtain a child through surrogacy than is applied to straight parents. Effectively pull the ladder up on gays under the 90th percentile of monogamy. Again, it might feel like cucking to other gays, but this will make it much easier for me to defend you.
- This one is tricky. But a lot of conservatives associate homosexuality with pedophilia and there are some concerning statistics around this. It would make it easier for me to defend you if you could help me deal with figures like this:
FWIW, I'm not sure it's always the case that the straight-laced fuddy duddy gays like Buttigieg are always the ones to win over conservative straight dudes by being so non threatening and normal. I know quite a lot of man's man tough-guy types bc they're my husband's unit members and friends, and the special ops guys are the most gorilla-like of all of them...and they don't have a problem with gay guys. These are all guys who primarily were raised in conservative, religious households and *absolutely* called them fags and basically thought they shouldn't exist and were perversions against nature, 30 years ago. Now plenty of them would be happy to get into a bar fight to defend a gay guy.
But there were two elements to this change, neither of which have much to do with them being nice boring married regular people.
The first was that men just used to have a fear that it could be contagious. Like if you let a gay guy near you he might somehow convince you to let him suck your dick, and then you might turn gay too. But around 2000ish they successfully convinced everyone that no, you're just born that way and can't help it and no one gets converted in or out of gayness, so that fear went away. If anything it's like hey, less competition for chicks.
But more importantly, especially for the military knuckle dragger types, was not just the contagion aspect but the feeling that they were pussies. Like, weak men who sort of didn't deserve to among other men bc if shit ever went down they'd be crying and hiding with the women. A guy who's viewed as a pussy is sort of the most revolting thing possible to a tough guy type and they just assumed gay guys were like that. But my husband told me that a single encounter turned around his thinking, which was NOT a normie little dork like Buttigieg but a complete flamer in New Orleans who completely sassed back to him and his military buddies when they were out drinking, and just fearlessly roasted them in the gayest possible way, and he thought it was so funny and he was so impressed the guy had the balls to do it that it made him realize there was no reason for him to hate guys like that. And then obviously once they got rid of don't ask don't tell and you had actual fully badass scary mofo gay guys serving in units while being out, the whole "gay men are inherently pussy half-men" thing went away.
For him, he definitely doesn't like to see ads on TV showing gay guys in a sexual context bc they're selling HIV prep or Hims Viagra or whatever, and almost no one who isn't an extremist wants to see people in bdsm gear at a gay pride parade. But he doesn't care at all about a gay guy or his boyfriend, so long as he's allowed to call them slurs and insults to their face just like he and all his friends always do to each other.
Also, I went to the zoo today bc family was visiting and...I don't know, maybe it's been a few years since I've been to a public venue that fully portrays the full spectrum of Americans that wasn't somewhat of a more upscale bubble. Because the specimens of humanity on display left me fully agog...I had no idea so many freakish new forms of white trash had evolved the past few years. I was just...speechless. The animals could not compete with the humanity on display...unbelievable obesity, freaks tattooed toe to eyebrow, 6'4" "women", clown like makeup and outfits, whole families that looked like they'd been smoking meth together and inbreeding for generations, and many, many, many people that just looked like barely functioning humans who could not have survived and remained in the gene pool in any other society at any other time in history. So compared to the total freak show on display among what I guess are now normal people (?!?), a regular old ordinary gay couple was about the most boring thing you could've seen.
This is one where I think the trads have a little something going. All PDA should be suppressed. Holding hands with anyone sucks and I don't really want to see anyone making out in public. People used to actually find each other appealing when there was a modicum of modesty.
There is something to what you are saying about how the West has a rather diseased relationship to the erotic at the moment. Either it is completely sanitized and snuffed out, or it is totally let loose without any limits. Both of these poles are not just unhealthy, but anti-healthy; sucks the vitality out of art and relationships.
A important aspect of Victorian morality – and Anglican culture more more broadly – is that it properly teaches (or at any rate, it used to) that holding the erotic naturally involves playing with tension, and deploying it in creative ways. When to make bring the private into the public? When to take the public back into the private? 'Civilized in the streets, animal in the sheets' is a genuinely important practice to cultivate.
About a decade ago, I went with my family on vacation to Egypt and every once in a while we would encounter a bunch of American/European tourists who were very uncomfortably touchy-feely and lovey-dovey. You don't need to be macking on your wife when taking a picture in front of the Pyramids. Meanwhile, my parents do not kiss in public, or even hold hands -- but I guarantee you their love is both more stable/deep and fiery/adventurous than the exhibitionists.
Our friend Arcto – though he has taken some unfair jabs at me up to now – must be lauded for his commitment to Aristotelianism: in particular, his emphasis on neither the vice of excess or deficiency, but the virtue of the golden mean.
I wonder how much of this bifurcation on sexuality is driven by social media. For at least 10 years, most platforms have heavily pushed for sanitisation in the name of brand friendliness, while other sites have every kind of porn imaginable. I think in the mind of zoomers, for whom the Internet is our third place, this translates as "there are sex areas where everything is about sex and clean areas where you can't even say fuck." The discourse on "unnecessary" sex scenes in films seems to reflect this.
also creates a vicious cycle feedback loop where girls feel it's creepy to be asked out IRL which means only creepy guys do that which drives everyone onto Tinder and Hinge which makes the incel problem worse etc.
"Either we all get to leave the closet together, or none of us should be allowed to."
I don't really see why this should be true. Whether someone is single, dating, or married is basic info that comes up early on. Most people know this about almost all of their acquaintances. Most people would also find it weird for someone to dodge questions about their spouse or avoid using gendered language about them or lie about them. If you're only meeting someone once it might be fine, but it's going to be weirder to find out after months of chatting with some coworker at the coffee maker that he has a husband from office gossip instead of from him. While a straight man who has weird sex with his wife could easily talk about her pretty much indefinitely without this ever coming up organically in conversation. Most people only know about a few close friends, if that. The gay man is going to get outed by basic participation in society in a way that the straight guy who likes weird sex just isn't.
Honestly I hadn't even considered that people would think of how I have sex if I were to introduce a boyfriend/partner until now, but I think your argument is sound for many normies who are "uninitiated." For those who have a certain incredulity at this, imagine how you felt and what you thought when you first got the "birds and the bees" talk. Did you at one point realize that your parents had to do this to produce you, recoiling in the process? If so, that's how I imagine (on a more subtle level because of politeness) an uninitiated normie would react. That said, in line with what Trace mentioned, there is a rapidly growing contingent of the population who are very much inured to this to the point that it truly doesn't come up for them unless they give it some thought because they just know people like this and so have had that initial shock and time to adjust.
Regarding reciprocity, I have your back Walt! I've actually become increasingly annoyed in the last few months about the suppression of (healthy!) male sexuality. The thought that keeps coming to mind is that the same guys who are objectifying women among their bros/homies/etc. are also more often than not the kinds of guys who would defend the honor of girls they personally know — whether that be as family, friends, or romantic/sexual partners. And they are definitely the ones who would put down any kind of predatory man going after women because these men who objectify women also have a strong instinct for chivalry and defense. Basically, they are good men when it counts, and that's what I care most about.
Before realizing that I fit better with the right, I held those types of beliefs just because that's what everyone around me believed; we all remember how vociferously people reacted to Trump regarding the "grab 'em by the pussy" clip. It was also easy for me to fall in line because those kinds of comments never came to mind naturally for me, so I falsely assumed that it didn't come naturally to most guys and that it was just engaged in to fit in. But being in things like Boy Scouts (as it should be), I was able to see that boys who were perfectly good people just felt the need to say something like that, just as I know will mention to friends nearby if I find a guy attractive. Sure it may have been a bit more juvenile/crude when they did it, but that doesn't make it all of a sudden an injustice.
But what's more annoying is how that's just a microcosm of a larger cultural shift favoring feminine ways of relating over masculine ways; plus it's so subtle people don't even realize it. You've already expounded upon this at great length, but being a masculine fag myself, it has become increasingly hard not to notice it. I'm reading this book called "The Constitution of Knowledge," and just a couple years ago I would've hailed it as an excellent explication of the principles, mechanisms, and structures which make our society function (in line with your "Jeb Bush was right" piece). Now I can't help but be annoyed at all the ways in which this bureaucratic mess is highly unnatural for men and the ways in which the elite of today are so woefully disconnected from more common knowledge — perhaps best represented by how facile the author's understanding of "gamergate" and the Russia collusion debacle was.
Though, I will say that I kinda understand the disgust reflex because when I think of unattractive (often because of fat) people fucking, I just try to avert my attention.
Only 12% of the population has any sort of problem with IVF (always wrong is 6%).
There isn't much of a difference by ideology, you've got to squint.
Amongst those that view abortion wrong in all cases, only 16% consider IVF wrong in all cases. For those that consider abortion wrong in *most* cases, that number falls to 4%. Majorities of even the most conservative religious people either consider IVF a non-issue or a positive.
Anecdotally, I've known weekly attending devout Catholics that have done IVF or other fertility treatments that are against church teaching.
This all makes sense. The pro-life movement is pro-life. IVF creates life. Hence its pro-life.
IVF is illegal in zero states, even ones that ban abortion.
The recent IVF case was brought by couples that had conceived via IVF because the clinic was grossly negligent and destroyed their embryos. If you know anyone that has gone through IVF, you know what a big deal losing their embryos is. The judge also raised some important issues, like how what the legal status of fetuses in artificial wombs is going to be (these are "outside of the womb" under current law). In any event this ended in IVF clinics receiving overwhelming legal protection (too much even, they are basically free to be negligent now).
So I would rate your concern as a big dud.
Bringing a child into the world with the express goal of it not having a mother is pretty evil. Personally I think the desire to molest these boys (its always boys) is a big part of it, but even under the best of circumstances its pretty wrong.
Gays got bored with gay marriage pretty quick. Few got married, those that did were open marriages, and many dissolved fairly quickly. It's a bit ridiculous they needed to sue people to make cakes for something they would get bored with in less than a decade, but at least they didn't have any children in the house.
Gay men buying babies is the new "LOOK AT ME!". How many years till they are bored of it. Five, maybe ten. I expect these kids to have some really troubled upbringings. You can't walk away from a kid because its boring, you gotta stick it out for life.
It's very easy to oppose in the abstract, but not when it's your friend or close collaborator. If you want to push back on this effectively you need to make it easier for guys like me to do the former and not the latter. Just be strategic and don't aim your artillery at people like Trace who are honorable and loyal friends to lots of cosmopolitan / urbanist right wingers. He is someone who very clearly has perfectly decent intentions and making him the focus is terrible for your cause among people like me who are ambivalent on the issue.
The entire article revolves around a single central take: "A gayman mentioning his boyfriend is no different from me mentioning my girlfriend. This take is obviously retarded." But you don't provide any evidence for this claim other than claiming that being gay in public is essentially exhibitionism. I submit it's precisely because you are a degenerate that you constantly imagine the people you meet having sex whereas the overwhelming majority of people do not, in fact, do this. They are able to meet old couples without imagining geriatric sex, which nobody wants to do, or meet disabled couples without imagining cripple sex, which nobody wants to do, or meet interracial couples without immediately imagining BBC, and so on.
You don't need to be a HR harridan to believe in the basic principles of social equality between straight people and gay people, or that they should be held to the same social standard when it's not immediately corrosive to society, and you sometimes thinking about things you don't like is not one of them. It differs from BDSM because it's considered an immutable trait, the same way people shouting "I'm discriminated against for being a Republican" - while often sometimes in fact true and bad - nevertheless still differs in a substantive way from being discriminated against for being black.
Of course, you are not actually a libertarian or classical liberal and probably don't care about equal treatment as a principle, and are courting an audience who think being gay is bad and unnatural and being forced on them by big globohomo, but that argument is frankly more convincing than yours.
I contend that exhibiting any kind of sexual nonconformity in public is exhibitionism because *you know it will turn heads*. When a gayman says "my boyfriend" he is provoking the same kind of outsized reaction that a straight guy would provoke by saying "my little," and he knows this.
Old/crippled people don't inspire these reactions because they aren't choosing to partake in an alternative sexual subculture. And interracial dating actually does produce exaggerated feelings of hostility (which are often sublimated into other weird ostensibly positive impulses).
Straights and gays are not and can never be "equal" because the basic biomechanics of homosexuality and heterosexuality are vastly different. Society obviously needs to treat them differently. I don't think they should be ostracized or oppressed, but the ruleset very obviously needs to be different from the ruleset applied to hetero dynamics. Only naive hetero women would disagree with this.
>It differs from BDSM because it's considered an immutable trait
horrible take. Everyone's sexual preferences are a nebulous combo of genes, early environment (oftentimes porn exposure or getting taken advantage of in early adolescence), and the specific sexual impulses you choose to indulge. Liking girls' feet or tying women up is no more under your control than liking men. The idea that any particular moral status is attached to gender preference is an odious and retarded delusion of modern liberalism that needs to be obliterated.
>I contend that exhibiting any kind of sexual nonconformity in public is exhibitionism because *you know it will turn heads*.
People who know some nontrivial number of gay persons in their professional life do not turn their heads to do a double take when they see a same-sex couple at the holiday office party. Where homosexuality remains completely taboo, sure, it'll turn heads, the same way that black people turn heads in parts of rural China where they've never seen a black person, but that's a sheer function of rarity. Nobody looks twice at the blacks in Atlanta or the gays in Seattle. If we use support for gay marriage as the litmus test as to whether gay people should "have the same ruleset" as straight people, it's at nearly 70% approval among men, not just some tiny minority of naive hetero women, to say nothing of what the approval of gay marriage among gays and lesbians is.
>horrible take. Everyone's sexual preferences are a nebulous combo of genes, early environment (oftentimes porn exposure or getting taken advantage of in early adolescence), and the specific sexual impulses you choose to indulge.
The nearly universal failure of conversion therapy is prima facie evidence that sexual orientation cannot be changed. It could be that the scientific establishment is simply lying to us, as it does, but the burden would be on you to demonstrate that it is what's happening. Disability is also a product of genes and environment, but we generally treat it as an immutable property even if we do find the occasional skydiver disabled wholly as a result of their own impulses. There is no "moral status" associated with disability. They just are.
Maybe you have absolutely no control over your preference for feet or tying women up. In this case you do in fact have a moral case that, as a sexual minority, that your freedom of self-expression should not be arbitrarily restricted, which in fact you make in this article. I don't think you're actually making it though, but instead using it as an toy argument to push gays back into the closet.
But the "retarded delusion" that constitutes nearly the entirety of modern liberalism rests on the idea that we should in fact try to treat people as equally as possible despite real differences, when it doesn't result in obvious absurdities or impose undue burdens on society (racial quotas for doctors, unisex bathrooms, so on). In that case the liberal approach - rather than its corrupted progressive cousin, which demands equality regardless of tradeoffs or harms - is to fall back on a balancing test of interests. Maybe the fact that you have to think about men having sex whenever you hear about a gay couple is entirely beyond your control and constitutes a genuine distress harm that society should attempt to accommodate. I think that it inflicts significantly more overall harm to homosexuals to essentially ban them from talking about their significant others in polite society.
Of course, if you simply don't buy into the concept of harms balancing in regards to equal protection, we're just wasting our time talking past each other. Lord knows Arcto and most of the right don't. I can't tell whether you think the balance of interests stack up in favor of recloseting the gays or you just don't care for the concept.
> Maybe the fact that you have to think about men having sex whenever you hear about a gay couple is entirely beyond your control and constitutes a genuine distress harm that society should attempt to accommodate. Of course, if you simply don't buy into the concept of harms balancing in regards to equal protection, we're just wasting our time talking past each other. I can't tell whether you think the balance of interests stack up in favor of recloseting the gays or you just don't care for the concept.
Most barstool conservative men do experience disgust at the sight or even the idea of gay men (though more for feminine or non-masculine gay men), and gay couples. In a way, there is a certain amount of involuntary – and largely unchangeable – amount of psychological discomfort or 'harm' caused to them.
However, notably, because they are conservative men, they are expected to suck it up, because that is expectation for how civilized men deal with such things, especially when it comes to 'psychological harm'. Some of this has to do with and inculcated level of chivalry, but a lot of it has to do with the fact that men recognize within themselves it is not of good masculine character to complain about harm.
Now, liberals, and especially liberal women have taken enormous advantage of this conservative/barstool stoicism to try to push all kinds of ridiculous s*** on to such men, including various forms of 'gay acceptance'. Most of this acceptance is based on a picture-perfect Pete Buttigieg/Tracing Woodgrains/Spencer Klavan image of gays. An exceedingly low percentage of gay men are well-behaved are like this; and most of the men I know or who I have dated will absolutely admit to that reality in private.
When barstool/conservative/straight men try to complain about how their instincts and psychology are being manipulated to usher in acceptance for this false image of homosexuality, women – and the liberal men they have managed to whip into behavioral compliance – have a whole set of tools to shame them into silence: calling them incels, asking them "bro, why do you care so much about things that don't affect you"?, associating them with other low-status groups.
How come these women/liberals don't come to the defense of such barstool/conservative men when they are psychologically harmed by thinking about or interacting with gay men? How come it is falling to gay men like me and @mathphysique to defend Walt's perspective? What are **you** willing to do to ingratiate Walt so that he doesn't have to fall to the level of discussing 'psychological harms to himself' in this debasing way?
Thus, dear Walt is just using the incentive landscape that you yourself are arguing for to raise his own interests. If you want to live in a world where properly policy is based on arguing for or against psychological harms (extremely feminine-coded way to handle things), then he's willing to bite the bullet and play that game. He is happy to argue how limiting the public expression of his exhibitionism 'causes him harm'. Or results in a 'disparate impact', if you want to use legal/civil rights language.
He – and may of his acolytes, including me, who is exceptionally normie/monogamous – would rather not do that, and just be honest about male sexuality – including all of its degenerate forms. And, yes, that will result in 'homosexuals being uncomfortable' about the way they are talked about in public. This is a much preferable outcome.
> I think that it inflicts significantly more overall harm to homosexuals to essentially ban them from talking about their significant others in polite society.
I can't tell whether to interpret this as noble or patronizing. If gay men want to be treated as Big Boys™, then they should be able to stand up for themselves without white-knighting in the political arena, especially when it comes to Big Boy™ debates.
>Maybe you have absolutely no control over your preference for feet or tying women up. In this case you do in fact have a moral case that, as a sexual minority, that your freedom of self-expression should not be arbitrarily restricted, which in fact you make in this article. I don't think you're actually making it though, but instead using it as an toy argument to push gays back into the closet.<
Do we have good evidence of "conversion therapy" being thoroughly tested on people who like BDSM and successfully "curing" them of their fetish preferences? I doubt it. I doubt whether we even have that kind of evidence when it comes to homosexuality, but I'm a lot more sure that it doesn't exist for other deviant sexual behaviors.
>But the "retarded delusion" that constitutes nearly the entirety of modern liberalism rests on the idea that we should in fact try to treat people as equally as possible despite real differences, when it doesn't result in obvious absurdities or impose undue burdens on society (racial quotas for doctors, unisex bathrooms, so on).<
No, liberalism means that everyone is equally free to discriminate. That is the way in which it "treats people equally." If I don't want to associate with you, you don't get to force yourself upon me. That is called freedom of association.
I suppose that when you specify "modern liberalism" we can distinguish that from actual classical liberalism, as it is true that in "modern liberalism" this no longer applies, now certain special classes (such as gays) have gained the ability to nullify freedom of association and force their association upon others.
>Of course, if you simply don't buy into the concept of harms balancing in regards to equal protection, we're just wasting our time talking past each other.<
How in the world would you propose to balance "harms" that exist purely in people's heads, such as having to see things that they don't like and don't want to see? At one time, a whole lot of people really would not have wanted to see an interracial couple. The number of people who opposed interracial marriage at that time was orders of magnitude larger than the number of people who actually ended up in interracial marriages. What sort of "balancing" could you possibly attempt between those two things? By what means could you measure people's abstract feelings on the matter and assign some sort of concrete, quantified value to them?
Where I live, it absolutely does not turn heads or shock anyone to hear a man mention that they have a boyfriend, and I don't believe my friends instinctively imagine me having weird sex with another man when I say it.
If I were in, e.g. a small rural town in Oklahoma, it would surely be a different set of cultural expectations.
But here, to hear a heterosexual person speaking flippantly about their BDSM fetish would certainly be WAY more shocking and "exhibitionist".
>The entire article revolves around a single central take: "A gayman mentioning his boyfriend is no different from me mentioning my girlfriend. This take is obviously retarded." But you don't provide any evidence for this claim other than claiming that being gay in public is essentially exhibitionism.<
I wouldn't call it "exhibitionism," as I also don't immediately imagine anal sex if another man says "my boyfriend." However it is definitely different from a man saying "my girlfriend." A man saying he has a girlfriend doesn't convey much about him besides maybe that he has some basic level of competence at interacting with the opposite sex. A man saying he has a boyfriend conveys a lot more specific information about him by placing him within that small minority sub-population with many distinguishing features. I know that he's much more likely to be liberal than conservative, likely to be an atheist or at least non-practicing of any religion, etc.
This can change the nature of an interaction immediately, and permanently color my interactions with the person from that point forward. If I'm deeply religious myself and consider homosexuality wrong on a moral level, for instance, that person is probably permanently at arm's length from me now. I might not display any overt hostility or impoliteness to them, but I'm never going to be close friends with them in the same way that I can be with people who don't possess such an alienating trait.
IMO, only gay alliance should be with gays that understand they are a dying breed. The epidemic of morbidly obese humans, trannies, dikes, and other degenerates is a fleeting phenomenon. Humans that survive this bottleneck/culling will be strong heterosexual males and their bisexual female concubines.😁 Gays must understand that their next reincarnation on Earth will be heterosexual, chisseled Chads.
This is sort of my viewpoint. I can "live and let live" with the gays if we can stop pretending that "gay marriage" is a thing. Marriage should be about kids and investment in families. "Gay marriage" attacks that norm on a fundamental level. Live with your buttsex partner if you want to, get a civil union to have the tax breaks or whatever. Just don't call it marriage. And maybe rein in some of those pride parades.
Gay men are a failure whether it be nurture or nature. Our environmental toxins and endocrine disruptors are a major factor. Our technocratic overlords that worship the demiurge are pushing for homosexuality through social means. This will change, the overlords will be massacred and the environment/dietary norms will be restored. Gays will fall back to historic levels and less. If Hermetic Principles and esoteric teachings are applied to Christianity, gay men could be less than 1 in 10,000.
It depends on the context. I want people to be open in some spaces (i.e. venues for alternative sex) , semi-open in others (i.e. my Substack or after hours in a city), and totally private in others (suburbs, churches, or anywhere in the proximity of kids).
Walt, you mostly mention gay men. What about lesbians?
There is a huge asymmetry in homophoby between gays and lesbians. As you pointed out, gay sexuality is universally repulsive, but lesbian sexuality is not, moreover it can be actually desirable or arousing. Think of girls kissing at parties in college or porn actresses. Many of them are not lesbian or even bisexual, but just ok with doing sexual things with another female due to no homophoby while driven by non-sexual incentives such as social desirability or money.
My question is: should lesbians also withhold from saying 'my girlfriend' since, like gays, they are part of a non-standard sexual subculture, or not, since what they are doing is not nearly as disgusting as gay sex or straight degenerate sex?
First of all, many girls already use the term 'girlfriend' to refer to their platonic friends, and this is widely known. Most men and women don't have a problem with this, though I am sure a certain subset of lesbians are upset by that norm. They are welcome to advocate on their behalf.
Second of all, female sexuality is a lot more fluid and contingent than male sexuality in general; in terms of who you are attracted to; I'm sure men are into a wider variety of nasty stuff. Thus, being exclusively lesbian outside of some weird feminist/political commitment is quite rare.
Third of all, neither gay men nor barstool conservative straights care that much about lesbians. Besides being turned on, occassionally, as you note; but even that is somewhat performative. The average trad isn't particularly into that, even if he claims to be in public to appear macho to his coworkers or at the bar or whatever.
The whole context around this debate and article is centered around male sexuality and it's healthy (or at least publicly appropriate) expression. Even most of the ire around trans stuff is centered on MtF, not FtM. No one cares that much about if a woman 'tries to become a man' because it's just not that threatening in a biological or social sense. Men who 'try to become women' pose a lot more danger in terms of infiltration, predation, etc.
Women in general have a pretty poor understanding of sexuality, including their own, but especially male sexuality. Thus, in a sociopolitical culture that is dominated by female discursive norms, it has become almost impossible to have an honest discussion of sexuality and how it ought to be viewed and regulated.
Could you please elaborate on: “This makes it incredibly annoying to encounter the type of gay who aggressively demands the right to leave the closet but never thinks to advocate for nonconformist straight men.”
Which advocacy would you like to see in exchange for “permitting” gays to be honest about who we are?
1) Acknowledging the historic importance of sex positive straight men like Hugh Hefner in advancing gay rights, despite the modern consensus that such men had "problematic" attitudes towards women; accepting as a corollary to this that some reciprocity is due.
2) Aggressively pushing back on radical feminists who say retarded things like it's rape for a 30 year old man to date a 23 year old girl--especially because age gaps are incredibly common in homosexual dating!
3) Pushing back on Lisa Simpson straight women who try to police healthy and normal expressions of exuberant male heterosexuality, i.e. men wanting to talk about Sydney Sweeney's boobs.
If you make these concessions then "Barstool Conservative" straight men are more likely to ally with you than with tradcons, and will see ourselves as socially progressive. If you refuse to make these concessions then we are likely to think of ourselves as socially conservative.
I don’t find any of these statements objectionable, but I fail to see why gay men have a responsibility intervene in heterosexual squabbles. We have enough problems of our own.
Interesting article, and I've enjoyed seeing your recent thought process unfold on this. Reading this one in particular, I can't help but feel that it's an excellent article from a conservative twenty years ago.
I realize many on the right aren't particularly wild about this, but the mundane reality of homosexuality in this day and age is that it is, in large chunks of society, vanilla—and it certainly feels that way to the median Pete Buttigieg gay dude. It doesn't turn heads, it doesn't feel like weird creepy sex pest behavior, it doesn't cause drama. In theory, I know some people have an issue when I say "my husband" (or, before, "my boyfriend") or hold hands in public. But it's a theoretical knowledge divorced from practical utility. It doesn't actually impact any part of my day-to-day experience in any measurable way. It's not something that comes up.
There has not been a single time in my personal life—in the military, in Utah, in Nebraska, anywhere—that it has caused the least stir or facially apparent awkwardness. Some right-wing sorts will attribute that purely to social pressure, and I'm sure that plays a role, but it plays a role in every sort of social nicety. In many ways, "things there is social pressure to act normal about" defines normality by definition.
In other words, I will actually have to play, in a way, the role of the Lisa Simpson–type straight woman you mention here. In an honest and a pragmatic way, I do think you're the weird one for making it sexual. The sexual elements are very (I would say obnoxiously) present in gay subculture! Those absolutely can and should be used as differentiators! But things like holding hands are not examples of it. "We're just in love~" might be annoying, but it's also simply true. As for sex? Nobody other than my husband knows or particularly should know the details of my sex life, because I'm a prude who does not care to discuss sex in public.
Sex norms are culturally malleable. It's an old canard, but showing ankles or unveiled heads can be unbearably sexual in some cultures. The project of deciding what is culturally appropriate and what is objectionable is a cultural one, with disputes between the sexual liberals and the sexual conservatives of each culture. In US/western culture as it stands, "normie-gay" activities like holding hands fall firmly on the "appropriate" side of the line, not as coincidence or as abrupt imposition but as the result of decades of cultural negotiation. There is neither a practical need nor a practical way for me to mask in mixed company, and it would be culturally Weird for me to do so.
I don't have any great love for mainstream culture nor any great disdain for alternatives. I can get along in a wide range of different cultures. If someone wants to make it more or less restrictive, in particular by demonstrating how their preferences can be turned towards prosocial or noble ends—by all means. I'll have my opinions, but I recognize the culture-forming process. But I'm not persuaded that short-circuiting the negotiation process with an obligation to aggressively advocate for anything and everything is prudent and, indeed, think it contributes to many of the trends you find distasteful.
For anyone unconventional: want respect? Be respectable. Make it easy to advocate for you and hard to advocate against you. Demonstrate your sanity and your prosociality; demonstrate that you can make your path work. This isn't special pleading—I aim to practice the same and encourage it in other gay men. But there is nothing prurient about holding hands or using the word "boyfriend" in public.
Interesting comment! A few initial thoughts:
- I think you severely underestimate the extent to which right-leaning straight men privately resent having to go along with social niceties surrounding homosexuality because of pressure from wives / girlfriends. Most of us aren't overtly homophobic, but we will *absolutely* complain to each other about being forced to actively participate in "gay shit," especially if raised in an ethnic or working class family.
- This is of course moderated by most upper middle class guys having at least one TracingWoodgrains-esque friend or fam who makes it emotionally inconvenient to support anti gay stuff at the level of a tradcon. With someone like you or Rajeev I wouldn't dream of actively denouncing you or refusing to go to your wedding etc. But I also think of you as "one of the good ones," and I think most rightist straight guys (who are broadly aware of partner count statistics surrounding gay men) are *absolutely* are pretending to be okay with it more than we actually are.
- You aren't going to pick up on the above phenomenon because your A) your friend group is going to be self-selected to favor guys with an unusually high openness disposition, particularly because you also are open about being a furry; and B) your straight conservative male friends are all going to be *a lot* more pro-gay (both consciously and unconsciously) when talking to you. It is pretty likely that a lot of your right-leaning straight male friends have said things (not about you, but about gays in general) in other forums that you might find deeply hurtful. Because in these cases they are excluding you from the mental category of "gay."
- Bear with me here...but I think on some level your homosexuality is a lot like me still talking about white identity issues. I have told WNs on my pod that it's fine to talk about now, but a lot of them are incredulous and insist that the Overton Window has only shifted slightly. Liberals in the northeast insist it's still completely forbidden to discuss. Meanwhile for me the change has seemed HUGE. But I think that's because I am good at filtering out low openness normies before a serious convo starts, and am also good at talking about these things in a way that doesn't scare people and doesn't get me canceled. I also have lots of personality traits that endear me to liberals and make me non-threatening in a way MudSmasher1488 can never be. I think you are benefiting from something similar. Obviously the Overton Window has shifted massively on homosexuality, but you also make it incredibly easy for conservative straight guys to think of you as "one of the good ones." Serving in the military and arguing in an extremely masculine way make it feel loser-coded to resent you. But other gay guys might not have had the same experiences, especially in areas like the Deep South or Florida which are more overt about their prejudices than the Hobbiton you grew up in.
- You probably don't need to run in the sort of mixed company where you would benefit from masking. That is great, and a sign you are a successful and agentic person. I have done something very similar around my own eccentricities. But if you and your husband were taking a road trip and your car broke down in the wrong place I think reality would quickly disabuse you of the idea that this bubble extends far outside the country's urban centers.
- There are lots of circles I want to run in where I will need to expend political capital to maintain both my public association with you and my stature in that community. In the same way you sort of sanitized me to bigbrain centrists who listened to our two podcasts together, someone like me vouching for your moral rectitude actually does advance the case of gay surrogacy/adoption in a meaningful way. Lots of conservatives are INCREDIBLY wary of the gay adoption issue in particular and presently you're only going to convince them to support it for edge cases. You are a great example of an edge case that I practically use all the time as an example of a gay guy who should be permitted to have kids. But these are people you won't be able to reach yourself--to be maximally effective you kind of need a right wing straight guy to make the case on your behalf.
- If anything the Pete Buttigieg / TracingWoodgrains gay who uses his high verbal IQ and mastery of subtextual social mores to appear "more normal than straight people" is more annoying to conservative straight men than effeminate flamers. Lots of us (like Arcto and I believe Greene) will suspect that you are trying to manipulate us to get a cultural foot in the door and turn our women against us while hiding your true intentions. That isn't my own view, but I do think it's dishonest to act as though your own lifestyle is similar to that of the median gay man, and I can understand why guys like Arcto get so paranoid about this. Every Lisa Simpson straight woman wants to think that all gays are like you, and this has been a very bad thing for society. But I also don't want to turn against you or Rajeev or Jeff or any of my other gay collaborators. That puts me in a bind where I can very quickly become no one's friend...but of course I seem to have a knack for getting in these situations ;)
- Re: advocating for straight nonconformists...I think you are getting way too abstract here. Back in the 1970s especially you had a ton of straight "alpha male" types like Hugh Hefner who were huge supporters of gay rights. Publications like Playboy actually had currency with normie straight men (lots of people actually did read the articles!) and efforts by guys temperamentally similar to myself created a cultural infrastructure in which it was seen as sophisticated to support gay rights. It was largely because of this infrastructure that gays achieved the OPTION of going mainstream.
- This is where I get pissed off. During those "decades of cultural negotiation" you talk about, guys like me ALWAYS had your back. We supported our gay bros. But the *moment* Buttigieg types became more culturally influential than Hugh Hefner types by expertly lobbying straight women, they immediately threw us aside and embraced the Corporate Memphisization of society, stigmatizing male heterosexuality at every opportunity. Now even the most red-blooded guys feel ashamed talking about a chick's rack in public. It's disgraceful and I frankly resent gay guys for not pushing back against this trend on our behalf after all we did for you.
- At the end of the day, the primal centerpiece of my own moral intuition is reciprocity. To the extent gays are willing to support my interests as a straight guy who wants to enjoy the fruits of the sexual revolution, I will support the interests of gays. To the extent gays who have ingratiated themselves into the PMC mainstream want to impose Corporate Memphis values on me and mine, I will make overtures to people like Greene and explore building a coalition there.
There's a lot worth touching on here.
First: I agree wholeheartedly that the Pete Buttigieg sort is uniquely enraging to people like Arcto and Greene. My lifestyle is not that of the median gay man and I don't pretend it is. But I can only be who I am, and "who I am" is a dude who was so amenable to Mormon culture around sexuality that I didn't even support gay marriage until I left Mormonism. I know how much right-leaning straight men resent having to go along with a lot of this stuff because I was approximately one of them, right there resenting. But you have to understand: I was right there Not Thrilled with everything to do with sexuality. I was the prudish kid all the other Mormon boys would go awkwardly silent around when they'd been joking about sex. Obviously I've softened up in all of those regards, but we're talking a gradual evolution well into adulthood and well after many of my high-level views had been established. I also agree that my Utah middle class (as opposed to eg Deep South working class) background made a huge difference in my experience.
Provocatively and self-servingly, I would argue that they find my type so enraging in part because I grew up with the values at least Greene became a convert to, I earnestly believed in them, and I departed in intentional, cautious, and principled ways without repudiating the system that led me there, leaving my values terrifyingly comprehensible to them while I explicitly and credibly reject things they've staked themselves to. It's less a trojan horse than an explicit threat, an Outgroup member saying "My values are sort of like theirs, but better." What's worse: me being a trojan horse for the sort they can find wide agreement in condemning unambiguously and wholeheartedly, or me actually being an open and principled proponent of a values system that condemns both them and their enemies in turn without being actively repellent to the squishy middle?
You misjudge the circles I travel in to some extent. More than anything, my online friend groups (that is: in many ways my closest circles) were selected as much for interesting disagreement as for anything else. Some of my right-leaning friends have said things about homosexuality in my presence that would almost make people here blush, and an acquaintance or two in those circles has said the same about me personally in the harshest possible terms. Even many of the gay furries I hang out with often have withering things to say about it. On the one hand, these are absolutely circles selected for openness, and they're all chill with eg being normal about weddings. But I do know that phenomenon. I know, too—and appreciate—the political capital expended not to throw me under the bus in many circles. You're right that it's very far from meaningless in spaces beyond my own reach, and I take that seriously.
Do people see me as "one of the good ones"? Yes, of course. And I see them in turn as "one of the good ones," depending on circumstance. I have never been interested in maintaining superficial good bonds with all in my own identity categories. Inasmuch as I'm even known in mainstream gay or mainstream furry culture (and in both cases, my reach is minimal), I'm inherently a subject of some suspicion. I recognize that not everyone will be able to interact with everyone; I can interact productively with more gay people than my right-wing friends and my parents can interact productively with more Mormons than I can. There's nothing wrong with someone recognizing the groups with which their own approach resonates and focusing on them, and while I'm not going to throw eg other gay people under the bus, I'm not going to pretend to more cultural commonality than I have.
I understand a transactional approach perfectly, of course. The logic proves too much, though, because more than "guys like [you]," the people who always had "my" back are the specific people who I have spent my entire life feuding with in one way or another: doctrinaire progressives. Taking the transactional approach logic to an extreme would see me offering full-throated support to the trans movement, polyamory, and much more beyond your own approach. Heck, it would see me offering support to the parts of the gay rights movement itself that you (and certainly Arcto/Greene) hate the most! I don't want to support people who had the back of broad movements I find narrow alignment with, even when that alignment comes on important goals. I want to support people who have my back in particular, and whose values seem poised to lead to a healthier culture on the whole.
Here, you personally face a problem: every gay dude who is likely to intersect with your circles at all is from the subset most likely to depart from full intersectional solidarity, as it were. More, the more support they give, the more others are likely to perceive them as representatives of the very values they often dread being mistaken for holding.
That's not about imposing Corporate Memphis values, but rather a reflection of the unique sets of cross-pressured values that leave people talking in weird corners online. The Pete Buttigieg gays are often uncomfortable and ill at ease with in-your-face sexuality in gay culture—it would be odd indeed for them to reflexively support it in settings they don't even experience attraction, like loud straight sexuality. Personally, I'd be more comfortable in Victorian times, in many ways, despite the incongruity of that statement, and I have to wrestle to see how even thoroughly mainstream aspects of sexuality fit in with my own instincts and ideals.
I don't know what the ideal role for sexuality is in a healthy society. No idea. I know many things it isn't, but what it is is much harder to feel out. Had I not seen and felt the downsides of the Greene approach so starkly, I would temperamentally lean into it. As is, I cautiously see ways some deviations can fit within an overall healthy pattern, and want to understand and apply the specifics of that, but a lot is left to map.
By choice, I am not "ingratiated into the PMC mainstream." I get along well enough with the same politeness norms and distaste for edginess that allow me to get along well enough with most people, but I have never stopped prodding against it and criticizing it in a way that makes me more comfortable and effective outside it than in. I also, by choice, make no attempts at pulling a Dave Rubin and grovelling to factions inclined to hate me. I take a let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may approach, less interested in representing an identity effectively than in carving out a path for my own very specific values and seeing who the path resonates with.
With all of that in mind, what can I offer transactionally, as you (not inappropriately) like to view this sort of thing? As a result of the same values that have landed me in a peculiar spot, I have the credibility to argue forcefully on this topic to unusually broad circles. I'm certainly the wrong guy to look to for full-throated support of things I have instinctively found distasteful my entire life (eg overt male sexuality), and I do not say things I do not mean. But I can offer a seat at the table, as it were—serious consideration of arguments about the ways your preferred norms can fit within a culture more aligned with my own vision, from a perspective where my own views on the topic face tremendous cross-pressures and are as a result rather less settled than they are elsewhere. A simplistic view of transactions where people must parrot uncritical support for your approach is beneath both you and those you hope to reach, and runs counter to the incentives they face. I suggest a more layered view of value here.
>With all of that in mind, what can I offer transactionally, as you (not inappropriately) like to view this sort of thing?
Very interesting question! I might write a longform article about this eventually. But here are some initial thoughts on what I personally want transactionally:
- Prodding other gay people to acknowledge the immense historic role that sex positive straight guys like Hugh Hefner played in mainstreaming homosexuality via publications like Playboy, despite their "problematic" attitudes toward women.
- Pushing back on radfems who are unfair to straight men in their attitudes towards age gaps etc. (especially in light of how common age gaps are among gays).
- I understand you are personally opposed to public expressions of sexuality, so I don't expect you to go to bat for frat boy behavior. But I would ask you to reproach people for treating expressions of male heterosexuality with a puritanical double standard in situations where women and gays are allowed to be sexually exuberant, and try to discourage people from overreacting to harmless things like guys talking about Sydney Sweeney's boobs.
- If you find yourself around a straight woman who expresses casual disgust about a straight man participating in some nonstandard sexual subculture, use your position to build sympathy for him by comparing his situation with homosexuality. This has a pretty decent chance of getting her to ease up.
Here are some other things you could do that would make it easier to defend gay interests to conservatives`:
- Pushing back much more aggressively than you are naturally inclined on Lisa Simpson straight women who want to view you or Mayor Pete as a "model minority" that should be seen as representative of gays as a whole. Use your position to explain to center left professional women things like the median partner count of the average American homosexual male, legitimately dangerous behavior like bugchasing seen at the tail end of the gay population, and the role that gay intransigence played in the spread of Monkeypox, etc. This will of course make some gay guys see you as an Uncle Tom and you will lose further credibility with progressives, but it will disarm Arcto and Greene's argument that you are a foot in the door for something genuinely terrible.
- Acknowledge in some public capacity that a higher standard should be applied to gay parents seeking to adopt or obtain a child through surrogacy than is applied to straight parents. Effectively pull the ladder up on gays under the 90th percentile of monogamy. Again, it might feel like cucking to other gays, but this will make it much easier for me to defend you.
- This one is tricky. But a lot of conservatives associate homosexuality with pedophilia and there are some concerning statistics around this. It would make it easier for me to defend you if you could help me deal with figures like this:
https://open.substack.com/pub/whitelivesmattermontana/p/perils-of-pride-facts-about-the-homosexual
Just give me personally a good argument, because it's something that I struggle with.
Agreed. A slit in the dress is so much sexier than seeing the whole thing. Tension is where it’s at.
FWIW, I'm not sure it's always the case that the straight-laced fuddy duddy gays like Buttigieg are always the ones to win over conservative straight dudes by being so non threatening and normal. I know quite a lot of man's man tough-guy types bc they're my husband's unit members and friends, and the special ops guys are the most gorilla-like of all of them...and they don't have a problem with gay guys. These are all guys who primarily were raised in conservative, religious households and *absolutely* called them fags and basically thought they shouldn't exist and were perversions against nature, 30 years ago. Now plenty of them would be happy to get into a bar fight to defend a gay guy.
But there were two elements to this change, neither of which have much to do with them being nice boring married regular people.
The first was that men just used to have a fear that it could be contagious. Like if you let a gay guy near you he might somehow convince you to let him suck your dick, and then you might turn gay too. But around 2000ish they successfully convinced everyone that no, you're just born that way and can't help it and no one gets converted in or out of gayness, so that fear went away. If anything it's like hey, less competition for chicks.
But more importantly, especially for the military knuckle dragger types, was not just the contagion aspect but the feeling that they were pussies. Like, weak men who sort of didn't deserve to among other men bc if shit ever went down they'd be crying and hiding with the women. A guy who's viewed as a pussy is sort of the most revolting thing possible to a tough guy type and they just assumed gay guys were like that. But my husband told me that a single encounter turned around his thinking, which was NOT a normie little dork like Buttigieg but a complete flamer in New Orleans who completely sassed back to him and his military buddies when they were out drinking, and just fearlessly roasted them in the gayest possible way, and he thought it was so funny and he was so impressed the guy had the balls to do it that it made him realize there was no reason for him to hate guys like that. And then obviously once they got rid of don't ask don't tell and you had actual fully badass scary mofo gay guys serving in units while being out, the whole "gay men are inherently pussy half-men" thing went away.
For him, he definitely doesn't like to see ads on TV showing gay guys in a sexual context bc they're selling HIV prep or Hims Viagra or whatever, and almost no one who isn't an extremist wants to see people in bdsm gear at a gay pride parade. But he doesn't care at all about a gay guy or his boyfriend, so long as he's allowed to call them slurs and insults to their face just like he and all his friends always do to each other.
Also, I went to the zoo today bc family was visiting and...I don't know, maybe it's been a few years since I've been to a public venue that fully portrays the full spectrum of Americans that wasn't somewhat of a more upscale bubble. Because the specimens of humanity on display left me fully agog...I had no idea so many freakish new forms of white trash had evolved the past few years. I was just...speechless. The animals could not compete with the humanity on display...unbelievable obesity, freaks tattooed toe to eyebrow, 6'4" "women", clown like makeup and outfits, whole families that looked like they'd been smoking meth together and inbreeding for generations, and many, many, many people that just looked like barely functioning humans who could not have survived and remained in the gene pool in any other society at any other time in history. So compared to the total freak show on display among what I guess are now normal people (?!?), a regular old ordinary gay couple was about the most boring thing you could've seen.
This is one where I think the trads have a little something going. All PDA should be suppressed. Holding hands with anyone sucks and I don't really want to see anyone making out in public. People used to actually find each other appealing when there was a modicum of modesty.
There is something to what you are saying about how the West has a rather diseased relationship to the erotic at the moment. Either it is completely sanitized and snuffed out, or it is totally let loose without any limits. Both of these poles are not just unhealthy, but anti-healthy; sucks the vitality out of art and relationships.
A important aspect of Victorian morality – and Anglican culture more more broadly – is that it properly teaches (or at any rate, it used to) that holding the erotic naturally involves playing with tension, and deploying it in creative ways. When to make bring the private into the public? When to take the public back into the private? 'Civilized in the streets, animal in the sheets' is a genuinely important practice to cultivate.
About a decade ago, I went with my family on vacation to Egypt and every once in a while we would encounter a bunch of American/European tourists who were very uncomfortably touchy-feely and lovey-dovey. You don't need to be macking on your wife when taking a picture in front of the Pyramids. Meanwhile, my parents do not kiss in public, or even hold hands -- but I guarantee you their love is both more stable/deep and fiery/adventurous than the exhibitionists.
Our friend Arcto – though he has taken some unfair jabs at me up to now – must be lauded for his commitment to Aristotelianism: in particular, his emphasis on neither the vice of excess or deficiency, but the virtue of the golden mean.
Make Plausibly Deniable Flirting Great Again.
I wonder how much of this bifurcation on sexuality is driven by social media. For at least 10 years, most platforms have heavily pushed for sanitisation in the name of brand friendliness, while other sites have every kind of porn imaginable. I think in the mind of zoomers, for whom the Internet is our third place, this translates as "there are sex areas where everything is about sex and clean areas where you can't even say fuck." The discourse on "unnecessary" sex scenes in films seems to reflect this.
also creates a vicious cycle feedback loop where girls feel it's creepy to be asked out IRL which means only creepy guys do that which drives everyone onto Tinder and Hinge which makes the incel problem worse etc.
"Either we all get to leave the closet together, or none of us should be allowed to."
I don't really see why this should be true. Whether someone is single, dating, or married is basic info that comes up early on. Most people know this about almost all of their acquaintances. Most people would also find it weird for someone to dodge questions about their spouse or avoid using gendered language about them or lie about them. If you're only meeting someone once it might be fine, but it's going to be weirder to find out after months of chatting with some coworker at the coffee maker that he has a husband from office gossip instead of from him. While a straight man who has weird sex with his wife could easily talk about her pretty much indefinitely without this ever coming up organically in conversation. Most people only know about a few close friends, if that. The gay man is going to get outed by basic participation in society in a way that the straight guy who likes weird sex just isn't.
Honestly I hadn't even considered that people would think of how I have sex if I were to introduce a boyfriend/partner until now, but I think your argument is sound for many normies who are "uninitiated." For those who have a certain incredulity at this, imagine how you felt and what you thought when you first got the "birds and the bees" talk. Did you at one point realize that your parents had to do this to produce you, recoiling in the process? If so, that's how I imagine (on a more subtle level because of politeness) an uninitiated normie would react. That said, in line with what Trace mentioned, there is a rapidly growing contingent of the population who are very much inured to this to the point that it truly doesn't come up for them unless they give it some thought because they just know people like this and so have had that initial shock and time to adjust.
Regarding reciprocity, I have your back Walt! I've actually become increasingly annoyed in the last few months about the suppression of (healthy!) male sexuality. The thought that keeps coming to mind is that the same guys who are objectifying women among their bros/homies/etc. are also more often than not the kinds of guys who would defend the honor of girls they personally know — whether that be as family, friends, or romantic/sexual partners. And they are definitely the ones who would put down any kind of predatory man going after women because these men who objectify women also have a strong instinct for chivalry and defense. Basically, they are good men when it counts, and that's what I care most about.
Before realizing that I fit better with the right, I held those types of beliefs just because that's what everyone around me believed; we all remember how vociferously people reacted to Trump regarding the "grab 'em by the pussy" clip. It was also easy for me to fall in line because those kinds of comments never came to mind naturally for me, so I falsely assumed that it didn't come naturally to most guys and that it was just engaged in to fit in. But being in things like Boy Scouts (as it should be), I was able to see that boys who were perfectly good people just felt the need to say something like that, just as I know will mention to friends nearby if I find a guy attractive. Sure it may have been a bit more juvenile/crude when they did it, but that doesn't make it all of a sudden an injustice.
But what's more annoying is how that's just a microcosm of a larger cultural shift favoring feminine ways of relating over masculine ways; plus it's so subtle people don't even realize it. You've already expounded upon this at great length, but being a masculine fag myself, it has become increasingly hard not to notice it. I'm reading this book called "The Constitution of Knowledge," and just a couple years ago I would've hailed it as an excellent explication of the principles, mechanisms, and structures which make our society function (in line with your "Jeb Bush was right" piece). Now I can't help but be annoyed at all the ways in which this bureaucratic mess is highly unnatural for men and the ways in which the elite of today are so woefully disconnected from more common knowledge — perhaps best represented by how facile the author's understanding of "gamergate" and the Russia collusion debacle was.
Though, I will say that I kinda understand the disgust reflex because when I think of unattractive (often because of fat) people fucking, I just try to avert my attention.
https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/how-do-americans-feel-about-in-vitro
Only 12% of the population has any sort of problem with IVF (always wrong is 6%).
There isn't much of a difference by ideology, you've got to squint.
Amongst those that view abortion wrong in all cases, only 16% consider IVF wrong in all cases. For those that consider abortion wrong in *most* cases, that number falls to 4%. Majorities of even the most conservative religious people either consider IVF a non-issue or a positive.
Anecdotally, I've known weekly attending devout Catholics that have done IVF or other fertility treatments that are against church teaching.
This all makes sense. The pro-life movement is pro-life. IVF creates life. Hence its pro-life.
IVF is illegal in zero states, even ones that ban abortion.
The recent IVF case was brought by couples that had conceived via IVF because the clinic was grossly negligent and destroyed their embryos. If you know anyone that has gone through IVF, you know what a big deal losing their embryos is. The judge also raised some important issues, like how what the legal status of fetuses in artificial wombs is going to be (these are "outside of the womb" under current law). In any event this ended in IVF clinics receiving overwhelming legal protection (too much even, they are basically free to be negligent now).
So I would rate your concern as a big dud.
Bringing a child into the world with the express goal of it not having a mother is pretty evil. Personally I think the desire to molest these boys (its always boys) is a big part of it, but even under the best of circumstances its pretty wrong.
Gays got bored with gay marriage pretty quick. Few got married, those that did were open marriages, and many dissolved fairly quickly. It's a bit ridiculous they needed to sue people to make cakes for something they would get bored with in less than a decade, but at least they didn't have any children in the house.
Gay men buying babies is the new "LOOK AT ME!". How many years till they are bored of it. Five, maybe ten. I expect these kids to have some really troubled upbringings. You can't walk away from a kid because its boring, you gotta stick it out for life.
It's very easy to oppose in the abstract, but not when it's your friend or close collaborator. If you want to push back on this effectively you need to make it easier for guys like me to do the former and not the latter. Just be strategic and don't aim your artillery at people like Trace who are honorable and loyal friends to lots of cosmopolitan / urbanist right wingers. He is someone who very clearly has perfectly decent intentions and making him the focus is terrible for your cause among people like me who are ambivalent on the issue.
Any data on outcomes for kids raised by gays?
Nothing one could trust. There is no one you could trust to collect and publish such data impartially given the nature of the topic.
The entire article revolves around a single central take: "A gayman mentioning his boyfriend is no different from me mentioning my girlfriend. This take is obviously retarded." But you don't provide any evidence for this claim other than claiming that being gay in public is essentially exhibitionism. I submit it's precisely because you are a degenerate that you constantly imagine the people you meet having sex whereas the overwhelming majority of people do not, in fact, do this. They are able to meet old couples without imagining geriatric sex, which nobody wants to do, or meet disabled couples without imagining cripple sex, which nobody wants to do, or meet interracial couples without immediately imagining BBC, and so on.
You don't need to be a HR harridan to believe in the basic principles of social equality between straight people and gay people, or that they should be held to the same social standard when it's not immediately corrosive to society, and you sometimes thinking about things you don't like is not one of them. It differs from BDSM because it's considered an immutable trait, the same way people shouting "I'm discriminated against for being a Republican" - while often sometimes in fact true and bad - nevertheless still differs in a substantive way from being discriminated against for being black.
Of course, you are not actually a libertarian or classical liberal and probably don't care about equal treatment as a principle, and are courting an audience who think being gay is bad and unnatural and being forced on them by big globohomo, but that argument is frankly more convincing than yours.
Wrong.
I contend that exhibiting any kind of sexual nonconformity in public is exhibitionism because *you know it will turn heads*. When a gayman says "my boyfriend" he is provoking the same kind of outsized reaction that a straight guy would provoke by saying "my little," and he knows this.
Old/crippled people don't inspire these reactions because they aren't choosing to partake in an alternative sexual subculture. And interracial dating actually does produce exaggerated feelings of hostility (which are often sublimated into other weird ostensibly positive impulses).
Straights and gays are not and can never be "equal" because the basic biomechanics of homosexuality and heterosexuality are vastly different. Society obviously needs to treat them differently. I don't think they should be ostracized or oppressed, but the ruleset very obviously needs to be different from the ruleset applied to hetero dynamics. Only naive hetero women would disagree with this.
>It differs from BDSM because it's considered an immutable trait
horrible take. Everyone's sexual preferences are a nebulous combo of genes, early environment (oftentimes porn exposure or getting taken advantage of in early adolescence), and the specific sexual impulses you choose to indulge. Liking girls' feet or tying women up is no more under your control than liking men. The idea that any particular moral status is attached to gender preference is an odious and retarded delusion of modern liberalism that needs to be obliterated.
>I contend that exhibiting any kind of sexual nonconformity in public is exhibitionism because *you know it will turn heads*.
People who know some nontrivial number of gay persons in their professional life do not turn their heads to do a double take when they see a same-sex couple at the holiday office party. Where homosexuality remains completely taboo, sure, it'll turn heads, the same way that black people turn heads in parts of rural China where they've never seen a black person, but that's a sheer function of rarity. Nobody looks twice at the blacks in Atlanta or the gays in Seattle. If we use support for gay marriage as the litmus test as to whether gay people should "have the same ruleset" as straight people, it's at nearly 70% approval among men, not just some tiny minority of naive hetero women, to say nothing of what the approval of gay marriage among gays and lesbians is.
>horrible take. Everyone's sexual preferences are a nebulous combo of genes, early environment (oftentimes porn exposure or getting taken advantage of in early adolescence), and the specific sexual impulses you choose to indulge.
The nearly universal failure of conversion therapy is prima facie evidence that sexual orientation cannot be changed. It could be that the scientific establishment is simply lying to us, as it does, but the burden would be on you to demonstrate that it is what's happening. Disability is also a product of genes and environment, but we generally treat it as an immutable property even if we do find the occasional skydiver disabled wholly as a result of their own impulses. There is no "moral status" associated with disability. They just are.
Maybe you have absolutely no control over your preference for feet or tying women up. In this case you do in fact have a moral case that, as a sexual minority, that your freedom of self-expression should not be arbitrarily restricted, which in fact you make in this article. I don't think you're actually making it though, but instead using it as an toy argument to push gays back into the closet.
But the "retarded delusion" that constitutes nearly the entirety of modern liberalism rests on the idea that we should in fact try to treat people as equally as possible despite real differences, when it doesn't result in obvious absurdities or impose undue burdens on society (racial quotas for doctors, unisex bathrooms, so on). In that case the liberal approach - rather than its corrupted progressive cousin, which demands equality regardless of tradeoffs or harms - is to fall back on a balancing test of interests. Maybe the fact that you have to think about men having sex whenever you hear about a gay couple is entirely beyond your control and constitutes a genuine distress harm that society should attempt to accommodate. I think that it inflicts significantly more overall harm to homosexuals to essentially ban them from talking about their significant others in polite society.
Of course, if you simply don't buy into the concept of harms balancing in regards to equal protection, we're just wasting our time talking past each other. Lord knows Arcto and most of the right don't. I can't tell whether you think the balance of interests stack up in favor of recloseting the gays or you just don't care for the concept.
> Maybe the fact that you have to think about men having sex whenever you hear about a gay couple is entirely beyond your control and constitutes a genuine distress harm that society should attempt to accommodate. Of course, if you simply don't buy into the concept of harms balancing in regards to equal protection, we're just wasting our time talking past each other. I can't tell whether you think the balance of interests stack up in favor of recloseting the gays or you just don't care for the concept.
Most barstool conservative men do experience disgust at the sight or even the idea of gay men (though more for feminine or non-masculine gay men), and gay couples. In a way, there is a certain amount of involuntary – and largely unchangeable – amount of psychological discomfort or 'harm' caused to them.
However, notably, because they are conservative men, they are expected to suck it up, because that is expectation for how civilized men deal with such things, especially when it comes to 'psychological harm'. Some of this has to do with and inculcated level of chivalry, but a lot of it has to do with the fact that men recognize within themselves it is not of good masculine character to complain about harm.
Now, liberals, and especially liberal women have taken enormous advantage of this conservative/barstool stoicism to try to push all kinds of ridiculous s*** on to such men, including various forms of 'gay acceptance'. Most of this acceptance is based on a picture-perfect Pete Buttigieg/Tracing Woodgrains/Spencer Klavan image of gays. An exceedingly low percentage of gay men are well-behaved are like this; and most of the men I know or who I have dated will absolutely admit to that reality in private.
When barstool/conservative/straight men try to complain about how their instincts and psychology are being manipulated to usher in acceptance for this false image of homosexuality, women – and the liberal men they have managed to whip into behavioral compliance – have a whole set of tools to shame them into silence: calling them incels, asking them "bro, why do you care so much about things that don't affect you"?, associating them with other low-status groups.
How come these women/liberals don't come to the defense of such barstool/conservative men when they are psychologically harmed by thinking about or interacting with gay men? How come it is falling to gay men like me and @mathphysique to defend Walt's perspective? What are **you** willing to do to ingratiate Walt so that he doesn't have to fall to the level of discussing 'psychological harms to himself' in this debasing way?
https://open.substack.com/pub/newaltright/p/gay-pride-is-asymmetric-exhibitionism?r=7y5fh&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=56744685
Thus, dear Walt is just using the incentive landscape that you yourself are arguing for to raise his own interests. If you want to live in a world where properly policy is based on arguing for or against psychological harms (extremely feminine-coded way to handle things), then he's willing to bite the bullet and play that game. He is happy to argue how limiting the public expression of his exhibitionism 'causes him harm'. Or results in a 'disparate impact', if you want to use legal/civil rights language.
He – and may of his acolytes, including me, who is exceptionally normie/monogamous – would rather not do that, and just be honest about male sexuality – including all of its degenerate forms. And, yes, that will result in 'homosexuals being uncomfortable' about the way they are talked about in public. This is a much preferable outcome.
> I think that it inflicts significantly more overall harm to homosexuals to essentially ban them from talking about their significant others in polite society.
I can't tell whether to interpret this as noble or patronizing. If gay men want to be treated as Big Boys™, then they should be able to stand up for themselves without white-knighting in the political arena, especially when it comes to Big Boy™ debates.
>Maybe you have absolutely no control over your preference for feet or tying women up. In this case you do in fact have a moral case that, as a sexual minority, that your freedom of self-expression should not be arbitrarily restricted, which in fact you make in this article. I don't think you're actually making it though, but instead using it as an toy argument to push gays back into the closet.<
Do we have good evidence of "conversion therapy" being thoroughly tested on people who like BDSM and successfully "curing" them of their fetish preferences? I doubt it. I doubt whether we even have that kind of evidence when it comes to homosexuality, but I'm a lot more sure that it doesn't exist for other deviant sexual behaviors.
>But the "retarded delusion" that constitutes nearly the entirety of modern liberalism rests on the idea that we should in fact try to treat people as equally as possible despite real differences, when it doesn't result in obvious absurdities or impose undue burdens on society (racial quotas for doctors, unisex bathrooms, so on).<
No, liberalism means that everyone is equally free to discriminate. That is the way in which it "treats people equally." If I don't want to associate with you, you don't get to force yourself upon me. That is called freedom of association.
I suppose that when you specify "modern liberalism" we can distinguish that from actual classical liberalism, as it is true that in "modern liberalism" this no longer applies, now certain special classes (such as gays) have gained the ability to nullify freedom of association and force their association upon others.
>Of course, if you simply don't buy into the concept of harms balancing in regards to equal protection, we're just wasting our time talking past each other.<
How in the world would you propose to balance "harms" that exist purely in people's heads, such as having to see things that they don't like and don't want to see? At one time, a whole lot of people really would not have wanted to see an interracial couple. The number of people who opposed interracial marriage at that time was orders of magnitude larger than the number of people who actually ended up in interracial marriages. What sort of "balancing" could you possibly attempt between those two things? By what means could you measure people's abstract feelings on the matter and assign some sort of concrete, quantified value to them?
Where I live, it absolutely does not turn heads or shock anyone to hear a man mention that they have a boyfriend, and I don't believe my friends instinctively imagine me having weird sex with another man when I say it.
If I were in, e.g. a small rural town in Oklahoma, it would surely be a different set of cultural expectations.
But here, to hear a heterosexual person speaking flippantly about their BDSM fetish would certainly be WAY more shocking and "exhibitionist".
>The entire article revolves around a single central take: "A gayman mentioning his boyfriend is no different from me mentioning my girlfriend. This take is obviously retarded." But you don't provide any evidence for this claim other than claiming that being gay in public is essentially exhibitionism.<
I wouldn't call it "exhibitionism," as I also don't immediately imagine anal sex if another man says "my boyfriend." However it is definitely different from a man saying "my girlfriend." A man saying he has a girlfriend doesn't convey much about him besides maybe that he has some basic level of competence at interacting with the opposite sex. A man saying he has a boyfriend conveys a lot more specific information about him by placing him within that small minority sub-population with many distinguishing features. I know that he's much more likely to be liberal than conservative, likely to be an atheist or at least non-practicing of any religion, etc.
This can change the nature of an interaction immediately, and permanently color my interactions with the person from that point forward. If I'm deeply religious myself and consider homosexuality wrong on a moral level, for instance, that person is probably permanently at arm's length from me now. I might not display any overt hostility or impoliteness to them, but I'm never going to be close friends with them in the same way that I can be with people who don't possess such an alienating trait.
IMO, only gay alliance should be with gays that understand they are a dying breed. The epidemic of morbidly obese humans, trannies, dikes, and other degenerates is a fleeting phenomenon. Humans that survive this bottleneck/culling will be strong heterosexual males and their bisexual female concubines.😁 Gays must understand that their next reincarnation on Earth will be heterosexual, chisseled Chads.
?
This is sort of my viewpoint. I can "live and let live" with the gays if we can stop pretending that "gay marriage" is a thing. Marriage should be about kids and investment in families. "Gay marriage" attacks that norm on a fundamental level. Live with your buttsex partner if you want to, get a civil union to have the tax breaks or whatever. Just don't call it marriage. And maybe rein in some of those pride parades.
Gay men are a failure whether it be nurture or nature. Our environmental toxins and endocrine disruptors are a major factor. Our technocratic overlords that worship the demiurge are pushing for homosexuality through social means. This will change, the overlords will be massacred and the environment/dietary norms will be restored. Gays will fall back to historic levels and less. If Hermetic Principles and esoteric teachings are applied to Christianity, gay men could be less than 1 in 10,000.
Interesting article, but I'm not sure I'd want people to be open about their sexual fetishes in public even if they are heterosexual.
I'm at least consistent when it comes to public vs private space.
It depends on the context. I want people to be open in some spaces (i.e. venues for alternative sex) , semi-open in others (i.e. my Substack or after hours in a city), and totally private in others (suburbs, churches, or anywhere in the proximity of kids).
Yes that sounds reasonable.
I'd be fine with gays talking about their 'partners', because that is a word they can use and it isn't a word we use.
partner is fine so long as we shame upper middle white women who use it talking about their boyfriend
Walt, you mostly mention gay men. What about lesbians?
There is a huge asymmetry in homophoby between gays and lesbians. As you pointed out, gay sexuality is universally repulsive, but lesbian sexuality is not, moreover it can be actually desirable or arousing. Think of girls kissing at parties in college or porn actresses. Many of them are not lesbian or even bisexual, but just ok with doing sexual things with another female due to no homophoby while driven by non-sexual incentives such as social desirability or money.
My question is: should lesbians also withhold from saying 'my girlfriend' since, like gays, they are part of a non-standard sexual subculture, or not, since what they are doing is not nearly as disgusting as gay sex or straight degenerate sex?
First of all, many girls already use the term 'girlfriend' to refer to their platonic friends, and this is widely known. Most men and women don't have a problem with this, though I am sure a certain subset of lesbians are upset by that norm. They are welcome to advocate on their behalf.
Second of all, female sexuality is a lot more fluid and contingent than male sexuality in general; in terms of who you are attracted to; I'm sure men are into a wider variety of nasty stuff. Thus, being exclusively lesbian outside of some weird feminist/political commitment is quite rare.
Third of all, neither gay men nor barstool conservative straights care that much about lesbians. Besides being turned on, occassionally, as you note; but even that is somewhat performative. The average trad isn't particularly into that, even if he claims to be in public to appear macho to his coworkers or at the bar or whatever.
The whole context around this debate and article is centered around male sexuality and it's healthy (or at least publicly appropriate) expression. Even most of the ire around trans stuff is centered on MtF, not FtM. No one cares that much about if a woman 'tries to become a man' because it's just not that threatening in a biological or social sense. Men who 'try to become women' pose a lot more danger in terms of infiltration, predation, etc.
Women in general have a pretty poor understanding of sexuality, including their own, but especially male sexuality. Thus, in a sociopolitical culture that is dominated by female discursive norms, it has become almost impossible to have an honest discussion of sexuality and how it ought to be viewed and regulated.
Could you please elaborate on: “This makes it incredibly annoying to encounter the type of gay who aggressively demands the right to leave the closet but never thinks to advocate for nonconformist straight men.”
Which advocacy would you like to see in exchange for “permitting” gays to be honest about who we are?
1) Acknowledging the historic importance of sex positive straight men like Hugh Hefner in advancing gay rights, despite the modern consensus that such men had "problematic" attitudes towards women; accepting as a corollary to this that some reciprocity is due.
2) Aggressively pushing back on radical feminists who say retarded things like it's rape for a 30 year old man to date a 23 year old girl--especially because age gaps are incredibly common in homosexual dating!
3) Pushing back on Lisa Simpson straight women who try to police healthy and normal expressions of exuberant male heterosexuality, i.e. men wanting to talk about Sydney Sweeney's boobs.
If you make these concessions then "Barstool Conservative" straight men are more likely to ally with you than with tradcons, and will see ourselves as socially progressive. If you refuse to make these concessions then we are likely to think of ourselves as socially conservative.
Simple as.
I don’t find any of these statements objectionable, but I fail to see why gay men have a responsibility intervene in heterosexual squabbles. We have enough problems of our own.
It's not a responsibility. It's transactional.
It's about whether you want me to side with you or people who see you as a cultural enemy.