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Doesn't matter. As long as the impulse remains, they're still gay, even if they deny it.
Like yeah, you can repress, and live a thoroughly miserable existence attached to someone who you don't really love or feel attracted to -- imagine how you'd feel trying to carve a life out with a morbidly obese 3/10 munter to try and "cure" your attraction to fit, attractive people.
This is rank exaggeration. Ugly people do get married and by all accounts live happy lives. Just like them, I expect nearly all people, absent powerful cultural narratives to the contrary, can learn to love whoever they end up married to. I believe this of all gender combinations.
Shrug. Love and attraction are completely different things, as well you should know, assuming you have parents or siblings. Missing out on an entire massive chunk of the human experience, or mutual attraction between partners, is probably not healthy for people. See: incels.
By all accounts ugly people are attracted to each other too. Given all the weird stuff people are into, I find it very unlikely that human sexuality is so static as to be incapable of attraction towards the person with whom you share all sexual experiences.
what do you mean by that?
@Astranagant compared marrying outside of your sexuality to marrying a very ugly person. I agree with that comparison but add that very ugly people still often have great relationships with each other which seem to include genuine attraction and romance.
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And this is a problem why exactly? They expect me to similarly repress myself if I'm to live and participate in society, so why should I care if other people expect it of them?
Who's expecting you to get into a gay relationship against your sexuality, exactly?
I'm pretty confident most people expect me to avoid relationships, if not interactions altogether, with people I'm attracted to.
Yeah that's not even remotely the same thing, sorry.
It feels like you're both missing or ignoring the other's points here?
I read @Astranagant as having revulsion because pedophilia is terrible. Fair. And there are ways that pedophilia is terrible that don't extend to being homosexual—acting out of pedophilic desires tends to involve power dynamics and large differences in maturity and judgment that wouldn't necessarily be present in a homosexual relationship.
I read @thrownaway24e89172's point as that having to live with having to repress attractions is actually a reasonable thing to expect in some cases. It's also possible to read his comments as saying that he would prefer no such thing, in which case I have a lot less sympathy with his argument.
In any case, @thrownaway24e89172 hasn't addressed the point that there might actually be some rather relevant differences between the two, and @Astranagant hasn't addressed the point that some repression is good, and so the relevant part is where should the lines be drawn.
At least, so I read it.
None of the people who sexually abused me when I was younger were sexually attracted to me. None of them saw me as a sexual partner, and in some cases probably didn't even see what they were doing as sexual. I was just a doll they could poke and prod and tease to get funny reactions out of. There's a widespread misconception that not being motivated by sexual attraction makes behavior okay, or at least not sexual, while being motivated by sexual attraction makes behavior not okay, and the LGBT movement (and they are by far not the only ones, EDIT: but they are the topic of this chain) can burn for all I care for their contributions toward reinforcing that misconception in an effort to push all the blame for the harms they cause solely onto my demographic rather than facing their own contributions to harming kids.
I don't think prefer is the best word to use here. I'm sexually attracted to children, so by definition I'd prefer to be able to act on that. I'm also extremely risk-averse and terrified of inadvertently hurting them (or less sympathetically, terrified of them hating me for it) to the point I'd rather avoid getting involved in such relationships at all than risk having to experience that, so I have few qualms with some level of repression. I resent repression that just amounts to hiding who I am attracted to because people are disgusted by it rather than because it risks harming kids (eg, banning pedophilic fiction, discrimination in activities that don't involve interacting with children). And I have very little patience for other groups openly engaging in more risky behavior that I avoid, while claiming it's okay specifically because they aren't pedophiles and ignoring, downplaying, and/or blaming pedophiles for the fallout when that risk plays out.
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No, it is exactly the same thing. You just don't want to admit it because doing so would require either admitting that such repression can be expected of some groups in a tolerant society (and thus it is on the table for gays) or admitting that the LGBT community is not actually a tolerant one (and thus must cede the moral high ground).
It really fucking isn't. I'm perfectly fine with being intolerant of you, thanks. Being seen anywhere near your group is not something we can afford.
I don't begrudge you that position. But similarly, I see no reason to care about people being intolerant of you--supporting your group is not something I can afford. Hence my original comment.
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This seems a particularly worse case outcome.
Men with same sex attraction seem especially prone to drug, chemical, alcohol and parphillia induced or adjacent sexual activity. This seems throughly miserable to me. I guess they're fortunate that in current year there's an abundance of degeneracy to allow them to live their inner truths publicly.
'Straight' people sublimate all sorts of impulses and desires into more traditionally socially acceptable directions.
This is a subculture problem more than anything else. You might as well complain that people who choose to wear birkenstocks also engage in this behaviour. Obviously we need to discourage wearing of birkenstocks!
There are plenty of us who opt out of that sort of thing. Unfortunately, the stereotype is, to a degree, self reinforcing; people see this kind of thing touted as how "all gays" are, and so fledgling gays, newly discovering their sexuality, think that's "how to be gay" -- because it's a confusing time, and any kind of guidance is manna from heaven if you don't have a really well developed sense of personal identity at that point (and most teens don't).
I despair and despise every day that Drag Race and circuit parties have become the mainstream representation of being gay in the anglosphere.
and gay cruises, gay resorts, gay pride, gay...
The 'other' gay orthodox path in current year is 'marriage' and sometimes gaybies. Though this does not preclude drag, circuit parties, drugs and parphillias.
Calling it a subculture problem seems a little dismissive, especially when any move against it is met with accusations of bigotry or homophobia. Would the Birkenstocked claim bigotry against their sensible shoes?
Largely because there's so much more of it, and it's so accepted by segments of society. Is there any counter messaging that there are other ways to be gay, or you might not even be gay just a confused horny teenager without a regular non-gay outlet for your libido?
Same subculture. This is the problem when you co-opt the name of the entire sexuality for your club...
Yes, but we're suppressed just as much as hetero opponents are. We're accused of being "not real" gays, of being traitors, handmaidens, internalised homophobia, all that good stuff. There's nothing leftists hate more than a traitor, remember.
There used to be a lot of messaging around "it's okay to experiment, it doesn't mean you're necessarily gay" when I was a teen, but that seems to have faded over the years with the rise of the cult-like aspect.
I'm not sure if we were teens at the same time, I was a teen in the 90's. I heard this messaging then too. We would object to being 'labeled'.
Are there enough of you to rebrand this gay lifestyle?
Probably not without outside help or signal boosting, no. The loud, queeny, irritating gays are hegemonic, partially because of the factor I mentioned before, which is that being one of them is seen as THE way to be gay for younger gays just coming out. There's a reason a load of people suddenly adopt the faggy lisp and mannerisms when they come out -- because that's how the TV told them being gay is. Monkey see, monkey do to try and fit in.
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