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It’s a strange story that doesn’t make all that much sense. Why do we care? Why can’t we be close friends anyway? I mean, I’m not too worried about :
appearing gay even though I’m not
turning gay by closeness with a male friend, and
even if I could somehow turn gay like a frog, it wouldn’t be the worse thing in the world. It has few costs and some advantages.
Also, you would expect that in a society with open accepted homosexuality, there would be less people in the closet. So the straights are far more likely to actually be straights than they used to be, and there should be less need to prove straightness.
Random other theories to explain the relative lack of intimate male friendships:
general atomization and screentime making friendships more difficult
male-male friendships and all-male spaces being perceived as misogynistic and discouraged by modern society
female homophobia
This is all just bog-standard androphobia though. Though, a lot of this was also sacrificed on the altar of "homosexuality is something you are, not something you do"; what I'm not sure about is which came first.
The entire incentive-based argument against male homosexuality is that you must have a woman: much like diamonds, this drives up demand and keep society working around the drive for resources to afford them.
The concept that you can just say "no", or at least not have to suffer zero close contact outside of what you buy from a woman (and by extension, her father)? Not surprised everyone else would be opposed to that.
For all I might fault the gay/furries for at least they seem to have a healthier attitude towards this- maybe it's easier when you're in a costume. Probably explains the obsession with cute anime girl avatars in VR, too.
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I don't mean 'no homo bro' or turning gay, I mean not wanting to send signals to a friend that I don't want to send. Being physically touchy with a girl my age would signal interest, and would be read that way. Due to social change, it's now similar with men. If I don't want to send that message, I can't do that thing. It's not something you decide for yourself.
I have close male friends, of course, but I'm not physically touchy with them beyond a hug on meeting.
All may be relevant. Few things in social life have only one cause.
But you know your friends, you don't have to worry about ambigous signals, like with a girl you like. He knows you're not gay, you know he's not gay, "not that there's anything wrong with that", so what is this fear? It seems paranoid. And somehow, if we recriminalized homosexuality, and then we found ourselves in a situation that resembled homosexuality, so objectively our situation would be more dangerous, that's when we could relax? It's very strange, counter-intuitive reasoning.
Bisexuality/potential homoeroticism gigantically icks most heterosexual women when they sense it in men. Therefore even allowing a bit of potential overtures towards it is generally not a great idea socially.
Also permissible homosexuality creates this weird inverse bell curve matter with physical contact with fellow men in which most guys do not want to communicate any potential homoeroticism. Whilst societies in which homosexuality is just totally outside of the overton window permit a lot more physical affection between men, since there isn't the underlying. I've spent a bunch of time in the Middle East and homosexuality being literally illegal opens the door to a lot more 'queer behavior' between platonic male friends.
Great example of this is the Khabib Nurmagomedov bathtub photo that got bandied around a lot by Conor McGregor before their fight. https://preview.redd.it/g3d6ooc3ml4e1.jpeg?width=640&auto=webp&s=b966fe8b972399f327580b3f35bf60322079e68d
To Western eyes it's staggeringly homoerotic, to Dagestani eyes homosexuality is verboten so it's not 'sus'.
Homosexuality is legal in dagestan.
Anyway, I don’t see why women would be any less icked by a photo like that in some repressive country, than by two western male friends touching that they don’t know about. The respective legal situation determines the ick?
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People aren't so simple. And who said anything about fear? Doing X would convey signal Y, and I don't want to convey Y. The kind of physical intimacy that was de rigeur a couple of centuries ago (somebody linked this) is not ambiguous these days, that's the point.
I suppose I could sit my friends down and give them a sort of autistic manifesto along the lines of, 'I'm totally straight and I know you're totally straight but I don't think men touch each other enough now so let's cuddle (no homo)', but for the entire 90's we laughed at such behaviour exactly because it was regarded as a classic sign of closeted homosexuality.
It's like selling stocks: if a founder sells a big chunk of their stocks in their successful startup, it signals that they think it's peaked. It doesn't matter what signal they want to send, that's the signal it sends, and everyone including them knows that that's the signal it sends, so they can't sell without sending that signal.
In olden times, homosexuality ('sodomy') was something that was commonly agreed to take place far off and among degenerates like sailors. The average person didn't think about it from week to week. I'm not arguing for recriminalising homosexuality, I'm arguing for vastly reducing its visibility outside select subcultures. In the last 50 years, we made a decision to prioritise visible harm to small minorities over the potential for less visible harm to 95% of the population; that was understandable at the time but I don't think it's aging well.
Sure, but there's a difference between "being physically close would convey homosexuality, and I don't want to convey homosexuality" with "homosexuality would convey faggotry, and I don't want to convey faggotry".
It may indeed be the case that some people simply do not like homosexuality- that much is true- but there are far more for whom faggotry/bottom-bitchery is the real problem. Since the 1980s (and to a point, earlier) homosexuality and faggotry have been synonymous, partially due to tokenism and artificial elevation, and partially because some of them really are that way (and being the expendable gender yet channeling every single negative female stereotype you can think of is just... not generally a recipe for success among the average man).
"Look at how oppressed these faggots are!!1!" is very much an active attempt to shit on every man who doesn't do that, much like "look at how oppressed these eunuchs are!11!" is on every ex-man or ex-woman who's keeping it on the down-low. When you start mining the commons for offense, this hollowing out is the result.
The barbell-shaped distribution strikes again; you get hypernormalization on the "nope, definitely no hint of teh gayness here" side or the "I'm going to stick my desire to suck 5000 dicks tonight right in your face, hope you like paying for my AIDS drugs" side. Sure, at least you can be in the missing middle of the barbell (gay marriage was the right call), but that requires threading a needle that we were better off not needing to thread in the first place.
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I'm not accusing you of homophobia or any other phobia, it's just that I don't see more to this theory than correlation: yes, gay pride parades are correlated with a decline in male intimate friendships. Tornado damage also increased.
The mechanism making it a causal relationship doesn't work. why do I care that my friend could think that I'm a closeted homosexual when I'm clearly not ? A closeted homosexual can perfectly provide all the duties of a friend - he would be a bad husband, but that's not the friend's problem.
I don't want to weird out my friend. You could say "No true friend would care if you're a closeted homosexual and why would you want to be friendly to such a person", but the fact of the matter is that many friendships are conditional on one not giving somebody else the ick.
And the need to not signal homosexuality is infinitely stronger when it comes to women, if for different but much more obvious reasons.
The only people who could be confused by this are a very small minority of women and asexual aspies.
Bu the ick is a 5D figment of their imagination in this case; and you’re denying it adamantly. No one is getting kissed or propositioned. Indulging a friend’s false, irrational fear to the point of sacrificing intimate friendships is a massive society-wide overreaction, if that is what is happening. It's silly. What if he thinks I'm a crocodile, so I can't eat in his presence?
Really? It seems weaker. Criminally, lesbianism has always been far less punished, for example. Oh, you mean signaling male homosexuality to women? I can see why that would be worse. But again it's false in this case. Why indulge their unfounded accusations of dishonesty? Fuck'em if they can't take a joke.
"Fuck all y'all" is not a good life philosophy. People who try it tend to end up in unhappy places as their social credit runs out, especially if they move and no longer have the familiarity of many years to draw on. I've seen it happen, it's no joke.
Now, one should be discerning in one's friendships, and not farm one's brain out to the crowd, but that doesn't mean that paying no attention to the opinions of people you need or care about is a good idea.
Li Bai: A Beast or a God? is fun and more-or-less gets at this.
What good is niceness alone on an island? Social credit is scrip, only useful for doing social things. There is value outside of the social sphere. Within it, I fundamentally disagree that you should not tell fat stupid irrational friends that they’re fat stupid and irrational, ie I disagree that lies are necessary to live in society.
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Perhaps, but we can just say that "guys are generally real fucking ugly, so I find seeing them kissing to be at least twice as ugly" (contrast the universal cultural response to lesbianism, especially when they're attractive).
This isn't rocket science.
Ahhh, I always wondered about your name.
...I'm so tired, Steve.
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Are you a man?
Yes.
Huh, are you 25 or under then? I'm surprised because I kind of thought every man could feel it in his bones. Like, all the other things you mentioned play a part too for sure, but it seems indisputable to me that the tension and insecurity that accompanied the societal shift also played a part, because after the first gay friend I had propositioned me I changed my behaviour.
Sorry it took me so long to reply, I'm not well.
Also no. I'm sorry, what are you guys feeling in your bones? That pride parades have fundamentally changed how you relate to other heterosexual men?
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I certainly could feel it in my bones.
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Causation is impossible to prove for history or social effects, of course. You see correlation, I see causation. I think that the vast majority of people care deeply about their friends' opinions of them, and consciously or unconsciously modify their behaviour very carefully to send the signals they want to send and not to send the signals they don't want to send.
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