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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4011 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 27, 2023

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?

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Anecdata, but the experience gay men have reported to me has ranged from ‘I can recognize when a woman is pretty, but don’t feel attracted to her anymore than to a beautiful sunset’ to ‘I don’t understand what people mean when they refer to an attractive woman’. It has seemed like gay men have tastes in men reasonably close to heterosexual women.

But if so why are so many gays into the twink/femboy aesthethic?

I don’t think they are, actually- I think most gays prefer masculine seeming partners, although not necessarily lumberjacks.

The latter seems very strange to me considering how boy-ish some women can (and sometimes try) to look, and how attractive that boyish look seems to be to gay people.

Femboys get a lot of outsized attention in public awareness, but statistically gay men tend to prefer masculinity, and anecdote suggests that this applies even beyond sex roles (eg, a lot of tops still want a masculine bottom or verse). I think this contradiction arises because a lot of gay men want to themselves been seen as (weakly) feminine more than the general sex role disparity, but that's just a hunch.

On the flip side, even tomboyish women that intentionally bulk up on muscles are pretty fey compared even moderately in-shape men. Often much stronger! But even the bodybuilders are a lot

Beyond that, it's not just (or even mostly) visual appearance. Breasts tend to be a turn-off for gay men, to be fair. But there's differences in texture of skin, of how people sound, and of smell and even warmth. Men are almost always going to be more physically active, even when bottoming, and they're often more vocal. It's... not a small difference.

Femboys get a lot of outsized attention in public awareness, but statistically gay men tend to prefer masculinity

Sure, statistically, but I'm inclined to believe (based on the femboy meme etc.) that gay men are much more likely to be interested in very feminine men than women are.

I think this contradiction arises because a lot of gay men want to themselves been seen as (weakly) feminine more than the general sex role disparity, but that's just a hunch.

I'm not sure about that. In the study you linked, it was the more feminine guys who had a weaker preference for masculine men.

On the flip side, even tomboyish women that intentionally bulk up on muscles are pretty fey compared even moderately in-shape men. Often much stronger! But even the bodybuilders are a lot

Sure, but that's why I was talking about boy-ish women, not manly women. Boys don't have much muscle, they're just not feminine.

TBH your study goes against my expectations so I might have to revisit those.

It’s probably partly just that gay men are inherently a tail population while heterosexual women aren’t.

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