Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
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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