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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.
Tact and sensitivity are not mealy-mouthed 'niceness' and nor are they lying, although sometimes they can disguise for cowardice.
Humans are social animals - the vast majority of what we achieve and what brings us pleasure is done in the company of others. There are few things more valuable than friends, colleagues and acquaintances who you respect, and to obtain and keep such people, you have to care about their perspective. You do not need to shout out every whim and snap judgement lest you become a creature of lies.
Consider this: if your friends are fat, stupid and irrational, why are they your friends? If they have other, redeeming qualities, why focus on the negative ones? How are they going to react to you telling them that they're fat, stupid and irrational, in those words, whenever you feel like it, because anything else would be lying? Do you really, truly think it'll turn their life around? Or are you really doing it just for yourself, because saying it makes you feel good?
To a degree. To what degree, largely up to us. Like our mating behaviours are somewhere between the lifelong monogamy of some birds and the 50-women harem season of elephant seals.
Lying is acceptable if the liee wants to be lied to, but I don’t think most people agree to be lied to. Do you ? I certainly don’t. They, like me, believe their model of the world is sound, tested, and that the truth flows into it without obstruction. They trust that their belief that they are smart and thin is actually true, instead of being artificially maintained and protected by social lies. Far from getting pleasure from ‘insulting’ them, I think I’m doing them a favour at personal cost, because some will shoot the messenger.
Hmm, how about some scissor questions?
I don't believe this about mine. Any model of the world more complex than "something exists that is thinking this thought" is capable of being swept away by sufficiently stringent devotion to truth. My worldview is like most people's: is a mixture of empirical observations seen through a subjective lens, moralisms, and lovingly constructed delusions. It is a house in which I can survive and it is like a living thing in that it is improved by some stress but destroyed by too much.
For example, I believe that this is largely a lie lonely people tell themselves, as I did once upon a time. To quote Ripptoe on a different subject:
I believe the same is true of our social lives.
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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?
Corvos laid it out pretty succinctly. Societal embrace of homosexuality has negatively affected male relationships. I am less intimate with my male friends than I used to be, I can only be as intimate with them as I would a woman, because I don't want to send the wrong signals. Partly to society, to my family, to my girlfriend and other friends, but mostly to them, I don't want to lead them on any more than I would want to lead on a female friend.
The last big decriminalization push was in the 80’s, so I presume you’re old. You’ve monitored your male friendships for intimacy and noticed a statistically significant change, based on a cutoff point like this, bearing in mind that friendships in later life are often less intense?
Excuse my skepticism. It’s just that until a few years ago, no one had heard of this theory, and now it’s seemingly so obvious it has seeped into people’s bones.
To me this argument looks like a recent product of cross-pollination between anti-woke strands, in this case manosphere + trad. Until the 2010s, imo it would have been shameful and somewhat ‘gay’ to even care about male intimacy. By that I don’t mean to say that the argument is wrong, just that it was not and still is not obvious .
The true analogy would be leading on, a gay friend. There is no ‘leading on’ a straight man.
No, it is men. I don't want to lead my friends on full stop. Before the normalisation of homosexuality (decriminalisation means nothing for this argument as the issue is societal stigma that didn't decrease prior to normalisation) the only friends I could lead on were female. Not literally of course, but in my head I put women into one bucket labelled 'people I should only get physical with if I'm trying to woo them' and men into a bucket called 'people I will never romance, so it doesn't matter'. After the normalisation, believing the media's lies, I maintained those buckets until I hurt my first gay friend by not reciprocating their affections and leading them on, and I put everyone into the first bucket.
And yeah I'm not surprised this argument is fairly new. The normalisation of homosexuality is fairly new. The red tribe gents who might have made this argument in the first place had no need, because they didn't go near those queers and homos in the first place, and like you say it would be gay to care about male intimacy. Meanwhile the blue tribers couldn't even ask the question, after all they aren't homophobes. So it only emerges amongst us freaks who don't fit neatly into a tribe. Add on top the fact that the establishment cares more about its message than the truth, and I doubt we'll ever see a study on this. I guess if you phrased it as somehow men's fault, like male homophobia has decreased male intimacy you might.
Huh I tried that and these don't exactly line up with what I'm saying, but I think they gesture in its direction.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10591-013-9249-3
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-014-0358-8
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Two straight men can play 'gay chicken', even while being fully aware of each others hetero credentials. It's still called 'gay chicken' for a reason.
That's the lab environment. Most straight men have little patience for 'gay behavior' sprung on them in the wild, even from a friend. I feel quite sure this is something innate albeit socially mediated depending on culture and/or subculture.
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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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