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Notes -
All right, reading this feels like you're kind of pointing to some interesting observations but have come to different conclusions than I have. As a gay man I have complicated feelings about the matter but let me try to unpack some of your points from my perspective. This is going to be really long and informed by a ton of personal anecdotes combined with pop psychology that I literally just made up from my own experiences, so if anyone objects they can feel free to share their experiences instead, but otherwise here goes:
First of all I want premise this with a certain framing that I don't think many people are privy to, even among gay men and certainly not more broadly understood outside of gay circles*. That is to illuminate the dynamic of being a "top" or "bottom." Now, I was misled by this premise for years, believing it only referred to the sexual position of each partner during anal sex: The top puts his penis in the bottom's rectum. This is the broadly accepted and understood meaning in American mainstream society today. And according to your shiny mainstream LGBTQIA image, the top/bottom dynamic basically ends there.** But outside of that narrow American perspective on homosexuality, these terms are more loosely interpreted: In many languages, the terms for top and bottom are more translatable to "active" vs "passive," (aktiv vs passiv in German) for example. And indeed, at the end of the day, what determines who is the top and who is the bottom in a homosexual relationship has literally nothing to do with self identification as a top or a bottom: this sorts itself out naturally. There will always be one partner who is more dominant and one who is less dominant. Any third party can see this. It is strange and disorienting to see a bigger, stronger, taller guy be bottom to a smaller, weaker, shorter guy. It happens but it is weird. It is basically against the way of nature. Homosexual relationships that last are nearly always ones where the top has legitimate, physical, material claims to being the top over his partner. Gay relationships always fail when the bottom is sick of being the bottom, or he believes the top isn't worthy of being the top anymore, or the top starts doubting his ability to be the top.
From my experience, what I've outlined above is exactly how things play out, constantly, even though no one parses it into plain english the way I have. Basically, all gay men exist on some hierarchy or spectrum, that is sort of opaque to each of us at first, but that always sorts itself out in the realm of sexual play. The more dominant man will always become the top to the more submissive man, regardless of who's trying to put what body part where. Bad gay sex is when a submissive man tries to top a more dominant man. You can put up with being a bottom for a man who deserves it, but to be made a bottom of a man who doesn't deserve it, is horrible and degrading beyond the regular degredation of bottoming for a man who you do respect.
I'm rambling a bit so let me get on to some direct responses to what you've written now that I've gotten my own framing out of the way.
Here I get to talk about my observations of straight men, which have really enlightened me greatly about myself and about other gay men. Straight men are motivated to reproduce. But evolution has complicated things: It wants the most fit males to reproduce. So straight men must compete for the right to reproduce with women. It is not that straight men "LOVE" to engage in competition, it is that straight men WANT to engage in the competition, and believe themselves worthy of doing so. Now, an anecdote. When I was about 8 or 9 years old, I saw a pornographic film of a man having sex with a woman for the first time, and this video really shocked me. I saw how huge his penis was, compared to my 8 or 9 year old penis, and how his body was so much more mature and fit than mine, and at that moment I was sort of "cucked" out of ever wanting to compete in the sexual arena with women. I thought, there's no way, this dude is obviously way more fit than I am to reproduce so I better just not even try. Having sexual energy in abundance, and mortified that I'd never be able to compete in sexual competition, I began rather to see myself as an object of sexual desire and tried to repress my masculine urges as I was so unconfident with my own ability to compete with them that my ego couldn't bear being rejected as a male. So I was drawn to conceiving of myself as a bottom, to be used as the sexual gratification of other men- because at least then my ego wouldn't be damaged when I tried to compete with other men.
Near the end of my 20s this role began to really grate on me. I was frustrated in love and sex; I would date many older men, who I was drawn to because it was easier for me to respect someone with more experience than my peers. But I didn't respect them particularly at the end of the day because I didn't see them as good enough to satisfyingly top me. So none of those relationships ever went anywhere. But I also dated a handful of men who were my age or a bit younger, and I always dragged them out, never going anywhere with them, and I never understood why until I realized that at the end of the day I wanted to be a top but was worried about rejection from these guys. In these relationships I was basically their top but too scared to actually make a pass at them because I was afraid of being rejected by them. I spent a few years at the end of my 20s not dating anyone, because I was tired of playing the bottom role and hadn't yet realized my desire to play the top role. Finally I did some self reflection and came to the realization that what I wanted was to be respected and play a top role in a relationship and once I got over my fear of being rejected, and accepted that I'm actually valuable and worthy of being someone's top, I've had much much more fulfilling relationships with men and dating is much more gratifying.
In summary, I'm trying to say that straight men perceive themselves as being a good fit for reproduction. They are driven to compete with other men to reproduce. In a way, my ego was too fragile to risk the rejection of women so I decided not to compete with other men for sex with women. It's as though part of my brain thought I should instead, seek the role of the female, and become the object of men's desires.
More directly:
Gay men are afraid of losing more than straight men. Our egos can't bear to be rejected by women so we create a new game within our own minds where we can become the object of affection of other men, who we know are horny so it seems impossible to lose.
Actually, the most gratifying gay sex you can have, in my experience, is when the bottom is trying to do his best to be the top but the top is always secure in his position and brings up the bottom to his level but they both know who's in charge. Which echoes the back and forth you are describing here. But is this type of gay sex super common? Not really, in my experience. Usually it's the sort of safe sex where the top and bottom agree beforehand which position they're taking, and then they just do that, without any play or experimentation. It's better when the bottom can try to push the limits of the top, and the top is secure enough to be like, yeah dude you like that and play into it, while maintaining his status as a top. If a bottom tries to top the top and wins, it's gross and bad because the top has been degraded and the bottom feels bad about it too.
The point I'm trying to make here is that gay men probably aren't really predisposed to this sort of back and forth competition, but it is very gratifying when it happens in a good way where both partners are secure and enjoying themselves. Does straight sex have a similar dynamic? I'm curious to know.
I have a degree in fashion design and I don’t know what you mean by this. The fashion industry is extremely competitive.
At the end of the day, the barrier for gay sex is so insanely low that any “competition” that happens is purely elective. Like, as long as you aren’t aiming to top a guy way above you on the totem pole, i.e. your expectations aren’t totally unrealistic, you can get laid with little to no pushback from your partner. So if you’re competing as a gay man, it’s either because you’ve realized that it can be fun, or it’s because you’re a loser trying to top someone way out of your league. So I can see where Peter Thiel is coming from with that book title, but the underlying logic isn’t the same for straight men.
*Though sometimes I wonder if some Ayn Randian type cynical old women could sus out the top-bottom dynamic as I've laid it out in this post. I'd love to hear more straight people's takes on homosexuality as the echo chamber of gays talking about gays can really leave me feeling insane.
**I believe this is meant to empower people who play the bottom role in homosexual relationships. I personally find this role degrading for long term situations but pointing that out is extremely unpopular politically and risks the entire scheme of homosexuality imploding on itself, if every bottom decided to see their role as degrading, so I guess it's really best if all the tops just shut up and act like it's not degrading to be playing second fiddle to a fellow full grown man, but I digress.
For anyone arriving here from the Quality Contributions thread, please know that a lot of this post is wrong.
The writer has distilled three different concepts into just two, and incorrectly described those two. The three concepts are:
Position (top/bottom/vers/side)
Activeness/Passiveness
Dom/Sub
Position describes only the non-literal position when having sex: the insertive partner, the receptive partner, either, or neither. Note that it does not describe who is physically on top or physically on the bottom. I acknowledge that this is an American-centric view; I will address this below.
Activeness/Passiveness describes who is really doing the work when having sex. It's almost definitely the person who is physically on top just due to physical constraints.
Dom/Sub describes power play. This is a kink which is not particularly abnormal but still not common in gay sex, just like straight sex. Dom/Sub play may not involve actual sex but rather other acts.
There is some shorthand lingo that you have probably heard that hits more than one of these categories. "Power bottom" is one such word: a bottom who likes being the active partner.
The three categories described above are separate for a reason. Power bottoms exist (and are common!). Subby tops exist. The reality is that some people just really like or really dislike receiving anal sex and that is apparently very separate from how active they like to be in the bedroom. It is also different from how much control they like to have in a dom/sub scenario.
Specific things that the parent commenter got wrong:
The fact that some languages do not have enough nuance to accurately describe sexual relations does not imply that sexual relations lack that nuance. It is inevitable that those languages will eventually develop that nuance if they haven't already.
The disorientation described here is not universal. In countries where gay people are well accepted like the United States, Canada, and the U.K., big masculine bottoms are very common as are tiny twinky tops. There is almost no correlation between sex position and body type. As a result, no one assumes position based on the size of the person. You have to ask. This is why "position" is a field most people fill in on Grindr and a defacto behavior has developed on Hinge where many men set their gender on Hinge to (for example) "Man↗️" to let people know they're a vers/top (in this example).
This sentence alone should pique everyone's BS-meter.
This is absurd. Gay relationships succeed or fail for the same reasons as straight relationships: communication, trust, mutual respect, mutual interests, ect. Tops don't get to be tops because they are "worthy", they get to be tops because they enjoy topping, the same as for straight people. The rare case of two tops dating is trivially solved by having an open relationship.
Ultimately this sentence is the perfect encapsulation of the problem with the post. The writer feels that bottoming is degrading. In gay-accepting society, it isn't degrading at all. A person with the mindset that bottoming is degrading is not going to have an open mind toward accepting that people fall outside of this framing. If we want to have a discussion about culture in predominantly Muslim countries then we can do that but it is inevitable that gay relations there will trend toward using the nuance with the three categories I described above. People used to not know that homosexuality was a separate concept from transgenderism. But now we do. Societies tend toward more nuance.
We're teetering on the edge of an impolite discussion about mental health so I'm just going to stop here; I don't think it would be necessary or helpful to keep piling on.
Please just be careful about who you trust and what you believe on the Internet. The parent post sounds insightful but it's really just deep insecurity colored by experiences specific to one moment in time in one geographic region. I hope that the pseudo-insight isn't what led to this being listed as a Quality Contribution.
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Since this has gotten AAQC'd, I'd caution that while it's a very fun kink, it's not universal, and even for the people with the kink it's not constant. There definitely are people who see top/bottom solely through dominance hierarchies (and, I'll admit that 'dude who wins bet/wrestling/game/has a bigger dick tops today' has an appeal personally), but there's also vers pairs where people trade off who 'has' to top this time, and power bottoms, and ultra masc tops with role reversal kinks, and other kinks that don't really fit into it (eg, I've also got a liking the punchline 'this ain't a rollercoaster), and I know of some of those sets who are pretty happy with their relationships and sex lives. And there's other people who just prefer frottage, exchanging oral, whatever.
((And then there's people who'd prefer to sub but can't bottom for anal over medical reasons or just don't get as much stimulus from it; prostate and anal stimulation doesn't work the same for everybody.))
It's certainly common, and in some demographics and environments a wide majority. And there's some physical reasons (not that dissimilar from the straight version!) that make it more tiring and more difficult to do all the moving while bottoming. But at the same time, it's not so universal a law of nature that you should be surprised by examples outside of its case.
I think your later comments go into this a bit, but
It's probably the majority take among fujoshi; I don't think it takes a lot of cynicism or age.
In the furry fandom, Maririn's probably the best-known (out, cis) female artist that focuses on M/M stuff and has a lot of comics available, but Rukis Croax does a lot of (good) writing, both porny and otherwise, and it's not accidental there. In fandom circles, it's common enough that when tvtropes talks about modifying character heights to fit the stereotypes, they're really not exaggerating. For more 'conventional' gay-porn-by-women, Iron Spike's Smut Peddler stuff favors it at length, though I don't think exclusively. Sometimes that reflects the sorta gay guys that they're working with (or selling to), but there's a not-entirely-unfair criticism that it's often a way for the bottom to feel more resonant to a lady who's reading or writing along with Mr. Hitachi.
Which probably says a bit about what extent het relationships have some overlap. The "girl looks for guy at least six inches taller than her, who's a breadwinner and physically strong and sexually forward and who she feels is worth letting dominate her" is absolutely a trope. I'd give the same caveats -- it's not the only approach -- but it's very much the mass market fantasy.
To an extent, but "submissive and breedable" as an joking-not-joking insult is pretty common, and 'everyone' knows what it's implying. There's nothing about losing a fair competition that has to be degrading. And there's a lot of people find being pleasantly beaten as part of the point, in ways where 'bottom-as-breedable' would be a lot more fun than... uh, a lot of the prep work.
I think it's more that it is useful to distinguish between someone that wants to get dominated, and those who want a 'free prostate example', even if in practice there's a pretty wide amount of overlap. But there's a lot of reasons to not want to air that laundry in front of the hets.
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What do you think of this article?
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/05/the-kingdom-in-the-closet/305774/
tl;dr "All" gay people in Saudi Arabia are bottoms and act effeminately, and they pick up straight men to penetrate them in hook ups. And from other research I've done, outside of the modern west and outside of situations where there are just absolutely no women around anywhere for extended periods, most homosexual relations are like this. Bottoms don't want to be tops, and tops are only doing it because it's harder to find a woman to hook up with.
Do you have any sexual desire for women? Does seeing a conventional attractive naked woman do anything for you?
That's a great article, thanks for linking to it. Actually, homosexuality in the Middle East and Islamic cultures (and Greece) has been really interesting to me and something that I've been trying to demystify for myself and that has informed a lot of my viewpoint above.
For context, I'm a white American but I've spent a small amount of time in Greece, Turkey and the UAE. So by no means am I an expert, but during my travels I have dated and interacted with men and have had some really interesting experiences. The messaging we hear in the west, over and over, is that the Middle East is extremely homophobic, that they stone gays, throw them off buildings etc.. But in my experience, men in Islamic cultures are even more predisposed to homosexual behaviors than men in America or Europe are. I believe it's a combination of men from the Middle East being more egoic and drawn to gratifying their ego in a more shameless way than we are raised to do in the West*, and the natural consequences of a highly gender segregated society where the rules around heterosexual sex are very strict. As you've gestured at, it seems that a sort of makeshift "prison sexuality" abounds in the Middle East. And it is overt: in one instance, my cab driver was hitting on me, he was not shy at all; I refused his come ons because it was weird even though I did find him hot. I went to a restaurant and the guy I sat next to gave me his number and halfway through our meal his friend showed up who was definitely a homosexual, and there are entire areas of Dubai where 95% of the people you see on the street are men. Indeed, I've been all over the world and never experienced more men hitting on me randomly than in the Middle East. I can only imagine that homosexual behavior abounds in these areas, but to identify as homosexual is where people in the ME/Islamic cultures draw the line.
That's not exactly how I would characterize the gist of the article. The conclusion I drew was that basically, gay identity is a western/globalist import, and the identification of an individual as a homosexual, itself, is what people object to in these cultures: whereas the pre-globalist position in the Middle East is that you're just a regular person like everybody else who happens to have same sex habits sometimes. And frankly I think this position is so much more relatable to my experience. I'm not gay because I was just born this way, I'm gay because I looked at straight sex, and couldn't conceive myself as having sex with a woman, but I can't escape the allure of sex so I am drawn to performing sex in a way that is unaligned with straight sex: basically I want to do the same thing that straight people are doing, but I'm a man attracted to men so it's going to look different. This is all a bad, rambling version of the point Foucault is trying to make when he pointed out that homosexuality changed in Western society from being a thing people did to something that people are, and that Islamic societies are still operating on the earlier "thing people did" version of the concept, and the "thing people are" version was helpful for gays in the west but has unintended consequences for people when they get imported into other cultures.
So: It's not that all gay people in Saudi Arabia are bottoms, and act effeminately, it's that there are certain people in SA who are adopting western/globalist concepts of what homosexuality "is" and "looks like," interacting with the "straight men" who are really just the old school pre-globalist guys who sometimes have homosexual relationships, but that don't identify with a "gay" label.
Yes, precisely. But actually, it also operates like this in "situations [with] absolutely no women around." (not sure if that's what you meant to say?) Indeed, I think the situation is even more pronounced in "prison gay" situations.
I suspect that many bottoms do want to be tops but are afraid to try. But it's more complicated than that. I think most guys aren't total tops or total bottoms, I for example prefer being a top especially in LTR situations but at the same time if there's a guy who I think is really hot I really don't mind if he tops me if he's confident and really able to do it well. Tops topping men because they can't find a woman seems plausible as I've stated above.
No. When I was very young I would masturbate to images of naked women but I rather quickly realized my attraction was really only to men. Recently I have gotten in the habit of watching straight porn occasionally, but only when it's bisexual or cuck porn where the male is the focus. I like to see beautiful women for aesthetic reasons outside of porn but I have no desire to pursue them. I could imagine having sex with a woman if I really believed she liked me, but I can only ever see this happening realistically in a desert island situation where there were no men for me to sleep with instead.
*and also, perhaps, a predisposition to homosexuality/pederasty: See Richard Burton's concept of the sotadic zone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton#Sotadic_Zone
Fascinating stuff. A lot of what informs me was reading Different by Frans de Waal, which is a biological look into sexuality/gender and compares the human experience with chimps and bonobos, as well as this excellent page about the science of gender and sexuality. Quoting one part:
All of the homosexuals already being effeminate in childhood strongly makes me think men being exclusively attracted to other men is caused by some early biological process, possibly genetic but likely because of low testosterone during certain stages of pregnancy. There is also research into domestic sheep showing that about 8% of males will exclusively mount other males, they aren't interested in females, and that this may also be caused by a certain brain region not developing properly because of lack of testosterone during a certain stage of pregnancy.
But what you've said has given me a lot to think about. I think it's obvious the full reality of human sexuality is very complex and far from solved.
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Power dynamics are weird. Or at least they are to me.
For the longest time I'd assumed that gay men engaged in a pragmatic and egalitarian division of the passive and active roles so that both people get a fair turn. Because in my mind a kind of intuitive equalising game-theoretical situation would develop where neither would be content to get the short end of the stick over and over and would simply leave. I was surprised to find out that the model is wrong, and that, as you confirm, the active and passive roles rarely swap over. I was more surprised to learn that apparently the passive role is predominant among gays. They're not struggling to find someone to fuck, if anything there's a surplus of those, they're struggling to find someone who'll fuck them. (Apparently a similar situation is common in BDSM communities). As a straight man this is an unfamiliar dynamic. The active and passive roles tend to play out naturally in straight sex. I'm often left wondering why a partner is out of breath afterwards when she's put in about 80% less exertion. If I was holding out for a woman who took a physically dynamic role in sex I'd be setting myself up for disappointment. Women's sexual passivity is such a commonly shared assumption that they frequently criticise men for not knowing where the clitoris is while also neglecting that they've got both hands free should they care to look for it themselves. Men however have to be reminded not to touch themselves in situations that aren't even sexual.
I'm not sure that I expected it to be greatly different on account of the inherently active-passive roles but it's still a disappointment when you grow up fantasising about something vaguely "lady in the streets, freak between the sheets" where the woman can match your sexual dynamism and you find out it's more like "passive in the streets and between the sheets". (And then you look around and notice women pathologically attributing their passivity to men, and that this itself is a manifestation of passivity....)
To formative childhood experiences, even when I was very young there was an intuitive specialness to attractive women. Men were background noise. Big powerful man? I suppose it would be good to be someone like that. Small wimpy man? I suppose it would be worse - unless he has an attractive wife. Image of a woman in a flattering outfit? Entrancing. A naked woman? That felt like discovering magic. If I'd seen a full on porno I would have thought the male lead was incredibly enviable rather than psychologically threatening, you know, if I'd thought of him at all. Reframing the social dynamic as one where you give up and compete with the woman to win the man is incomprehensibly gay. Horny straight men know that horny gay men exist. We know that Grindr exists. Some of us even know that the gay men who exist are keener to get dicked than do the dicking, and that there's a common gay fantasy for seducing straight men. We prefer getting rejected by women.
Getting back to competition informing orientation, the flip side of competition isn't limited to withdrawal. There's also cooperation. I lost 90% of interest in competition just as I hit puberty because that age was when sports stopped being a cooperative activity to generate the most fun and became a narrow contest solely to make number go higher than opponent, which as I saw it sucked all the fun out. And to be clear this wasn't a rationalisation to deal with being bad at sport, I was consistently among the first picks for any team sports and chose to drop out of playing for the school team. While I lost interest in conscious competition I still developed a typical pubescent boy's interest in women. I went and found the fun in drugs and music instead, and the sexual interest was (un?)satisfied with porn. I would have been better served if I'd had it explained to me that I could have competed against myself to achieve objective improvements and crucially that those improvements would in turn have afforded me better opportunities in the realm of sex and dating. Sadly/gladly I was in my late 20s when PUA evo-psych gave me a model that explained the world in a way that better mapped to reality than the blend of romantic stories and latent cultural feminism I'd been brought up with (women don't like arseholes, The One exists, be a modern man, it will happen if it's meant to be, etc).
There are gay relationships where they trade roles sometimes, but it's kind of just a nice thing for the top to do, or something to add excitement to the relationship, but you have to maintain the power dynamic at the end of the day or the relationship is going to fall apart.
I would say it depends on who you are and where you are. If you're 6'2 and 300 lb of muscle, everyone's going to look like a bottom to you, and you're going to look like a top to them. It would be degrading to you to be topped by 95% of the guys you meet. But if you're 5'2 120 lb and fem, trying to top, 95% of the guys you meet will be unwilling to be topped by you. Most guys fall in the middle, and younger guys tend to be more bottom and older guys tend to be more top. I don't think it's true that there are always more bottoms than tops, but it may be true that there are more men who see themselves as bottoms or are afraid to top.
This made me laugh. Yeah, I know, I guess I'm trying to elucidate the more base situation that informs my homosexuality versus any straight man, and the best I can do is point to the fact that I'm afraid to compete with men for female attention so I want to compete with women for male attention instead
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Don't worry, all sex is gay sex. (There was a post making this point for marriage a while ago; I can't find it, but I assert the same dynamics are at play here- there's nothing inherently valuable about roles aside from the fact they solve the 90% case and paper over certain kinds of badness in relationships per the below.)
Every straight sex-haver whose personal values lend themselves to having good sex say it is; I'm pretty sure this is universal across not only any and all types of sex, but all relationships in general. (Interestingly, all of the "I'm glad I lost my virginity at 12-14 to someone much older" that comes from certain gay celebrities appear to be pointing at this; I very much doubt they'd be singing the same tune if the sex was bad. People are usually too distracted by object-level details to notice this, though.)
In my experience it also takes a certain kind of person to be able to do this in the first place: either you have it, and any sex you have is going to be good... or you don't, and it's bad (and you have to paper over its badness with drugs, kinks?, money, social/personal obligation, etc.). "Lie back and think of England" and "give seldom, and above all, give grudgingly" are memes for a reason... of course, the one that good people tend to have good sex is also such a meme and it's still possible to have bad sex if you're either bad at it, or your whole... person thing falls apart as soon as you see the hole of goals.
It's probably also the case that not all people that can trigger the relationship-glue behaviors; you have to actually manage to inherently like them rather than just wanting them for their whatever-it-is.
I once met an older man who didn't quite have it right: he really wanted to be this in talk, but he just wasn't in action. That relationship developed the same fault lines that you can see in some straight relationships; the girl/bottom really doesn't want to commit but doesn't communicate that clearly, the guy/top pours more material into the relationship and ends up resenting the girl/bottom for it, the girl/bottom feels obligated to put out and the sex is bad, and the cycle continues until something permanently breaks it. Of course, it wasn't a relationship I went into with that goal, but maybe the fact I'm capable of tolerating that suggests I'm not straight enough to properly answer this question.
(As an aside, it's weird that nobody actually talks about relationship failure modes... maybe they do, and I just don't notice it, but most people don't think about this either because it came naturally to them in an environment that wasn't "top bad"- most people 40+ had this, but anyone younger very much did not, because they can benefit from it, or just don't/can't think about it as hard in general.)
This also mimics straight-top (male) personal progress. This takes longer when the social conditions are literally just "top bad".
Yes; you're absolutely right- it would destroy the entire scheme of homosexuality in the exact same way, and for the same reasons, that feminism-as-expression-of-"man-bad" destroyed heterosexuality.
Great post, it's interesting to hear many of my observations validated from a heterosexual perspective. I've been trying to unpick the dynamics of straight relationships and how it mimicks or differs from gay ones so your post has given me much to consider.
True but I think it's a skill you can learn and develop over time. I definitely have it a lot more now than I did 10 years ago. I'd say it's on a scale, and some people have it a lot and others have it a little, and the more of it there is in a relationship the better it will be.
FWIW I encountered tons of "masc bad" messaging from fellow gays (especially on tumblr from around 2010 to 2016) that was really toxic and a similar impediment to straight-top personal progress as feminism is to them, I would imagine
This is a really interesting point that I hadn't considered before you mentioned it!
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Straight men generally have a 'natural' and strong desire to have sex with women that's omnipresent. An attractive, clothed woman on the street draws your gaze - so does a beach pic on instagram. If a 'straight' 8 or 9 year old had that experience - taking most of what you wrote as true, even if it made them bi, and even if it made them afraid of approaching women, I can't see that eliminating the base attraction to women. She jogs by in 'workout clothes', your head turns. But the gay men I know don't report any such desires, and their heads turn at cute guys instead.
Yeah. Before I saw that pornographic film I'm referring to, I had looked at Playboy magazine and other softcore porn of nude women and masturbated to them, and did not imagine myself attracted to men in a sexual way. But after seeing that film, and seeing other films with nude men, I knew the feeling I had toward men was much stronger than the feelings I had toward women previously. In another universe, where I wasn't exposed to grown men in porn at such a young age, would I have grown up to be straight? I'm not sure, maybe. But at the same time, I remember I was infatuated with a boy in my first grade class who I would talk about so often that my dad got sick of hearing about him, so maybe I was just always wired to be gay from the beginning and my experiences just revealed my homosexuality to me, rather than causing a homosexual attraction to begin. I have no idea.
This is what I'm trying to elucidate somehow (though it remains mostly opaque to me): the mechanism by which I as a gay man do not feel desire toward women. It seems like it's a matter of personal ego: that I can't imagine them liking me, so to imagine me trying to get them to like me back bruises my ego in such a bad way that I have no desire to pursue them. My brain seems to think of men as more receptive to love and able to reciprocate my feelings so while I do get worried about rejection from men, the thought of being rejected by men doesn't keep me from still trying to pursue them.
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