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Thank you for such a detailed reply! Do I understand correctly that the main point is that you expect number of same-sex relationships to grow faster than linearly with proportion of bisexuals? And I feel bad to ask for even more elaboration after such a reply, but I was most interested in something you only just touched on: “a massive potential for changes in a lot of norms, both in single-sex and mixed-sex environments,” what have such changes been in the communities you know?
Yeah, pretty much, modulo perhaps some time offset with some hysteresis.
It's... kinda tricky to summarize, and I'm not sure how much each change will generalize.
As a trivial example of the limits of trying to extrapolate, all three of the furry fandom and FFXIV and pre-porn ban tumblr, for example, have developed a pretty wide tolerance for 'mild' 'queer' or 'feminine' sexuality, as have some other smaller communities, not just in the mainstream sense of not being offended by its existence, but actively accepting its presence in a lot of more semi-public adult-specific spaces. That's not (just) sex or porn or lewd jokes, but the sort of conversations that pop up, even for het couples in the sphere, and how they're acceptable to make pretty public. It's not universal, but it's a very noticeable contrast from post-1990s conventions through a number of cultures that really strongly discourage even the het variants.
Some of this is probably just the possibility of male-male, female-female, or other romance, but another probably a more complicated bit where social opprobrium has driven a lot of contested behavior and a lot of bad actors out from public awareness so the normal social norms against being too flirty haven't (or don't) apply. I think in the longer term a lot of this doesn't end up surviving in its current form into day-to-day life, especially workplaces -- when it comes to queer-as-in-gay versus the administrative class, the HR sphere probably wins, even and maybe especially when it restricts subaltern groups -- but there's probably going to be some variant around.
Or... so, the expectations that gay-area gyms are rolling orgies isn't right, but I don't think it's realistic (or even possible!) to expect androphillic attraction to completely disappear as soon as someone steps into the public sphere. In practice, most areas I've seen with a lot of gay or bisexual guys always end up having a lot more romantic overtures happening in spaces that aren't gay bars or online dating, both because it stops being a minefield with only mines, and because getting an incompatible overture stops meaning anything other than a complement. This dynamic something I've seen pop up in as small groups as college clubs.
Okay, well, changes in sexuality affect sexual behavior and dating norms, that's not a huge surprise. But there's a lot of things downstream of that.
Some gay or lesbian couples adopt kids or make other arrangements, but it's not as common as straight couples doing making kids and even when it does happen it has a pretty different set of pathways -- not always later, but often later. I'm kinda hoping this trend doesn't continue or even reverses, but a lot of very-gay and very-lesbian spaces are extremely DINK, in a pretty wide variety of ways. That impacts everything from scheduling (late nights suck a lot more when you've got to get kids to the bus stop by 7am) to expectations around non-sobriety (hangovers are a lot rougher when the kids are waking you up at 7am) to availability of large time blocks (it's a lot harder to support a five-day event, even a completely kid-focused one, if you have your own kids to work around). These aren't always or even often bad; my own nature has made it a lot more possible to support a number of STEM outreach programs that have needed a lot of manpower on short notice. But it's a difference.
And more controversially... for most people, relationships are the single biggest way that they let another person into their lives after leaving home. Yes, there are the people who are actually roommates and deal with 99% of the same stuff that couples who were oh my good roommates might, but most of that is a lot closer to 'tolerate' at best. You pick up norms and expectations, and in turn so does your partner. And to some extent, there are a lot of gendered norms and expectations that get tempered in our society by being forced to deal with their counterparts. A lot of gay guys historically have had other IRL exposures to women that a lot of straight men didn't, hence a lot of the flouncy stereotypes, but that's going to be less and less present.
I don't know. There are a few 'artists' that are collaborative works, either openly (Blotch, MrSafetyLion) or less so, but I've not seen any evidence of it for ruaidri specifically. He presents as a single person in a way that would take a lot of effort to fake, at least, but I don't think he has a major presence in convention circuits.
He's far from the only multi-disciplinary furry artist, including a number that are pretty good at what they do: compare ToykoZilla (dragons in 2d digital media, does a lot of VRchat avatars, sfw), pre-burnout Fek (bi trending gay, some mild bdsm, drawing, 3d models, and did programming for the solo projects RACK/RACK2), accelo (about as gay as it can get for media sometimes involving women, mostly digital art, some 3d modeling for resin-scale printing, /very/ NSFW). Even for the list of straight furries, Eddiew's not particularly happy about his artwork or writing, but he does both reasonably well by my standards and has been at a good pace for over a decade. And there's a lot of other people with stranger focuses in skillsets or content focuses: see SixthLeafClover for a (mostly SFW) artist that's branched out to collectables, and there's a handful of artists that are also general aviation pilots. Not every furry creator is a Renaissance man (or woman, or whatever), but there are a lot.
But ruaidri does have an amazing tempo; I could see that, combined with the lack of other social media presence, as a plausible explanation. But it's very weak evidence if so.
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