It's (still) not OK to be gay
Decoupling homosexuality from homophobia
In this post, I would like to respond to
’s claim that being gay is a choice:
WBE claims that male homosexuality can be somewhat of an acquired preference, such as coffee drinking. I would like to challenge both this claim, and the corresponding mainstream claim that sexual orientation is fixed and/or genetic.
We will discuss the prevalence of non-heterosexuality, the relationship between homosexuality and homophobia and the incentives that would help young men and women to marry and have children in order to mitigate the fertility crisis.
The Kinsey Scale
Famous sexologist Alfred Kinsey is probably best known for introducing the idea of sexual orientation as a continuous spectrum. In order to simplify the research, analysis and discussion, he managed to stratify the sexual orientation spectrum into what became known as the Kinsey Scale:
Sexuality research based on the Kinsey Scale provides interesting and more comprehensive insight, compared to standardized categories like hetero/homo/bisexual.
For a more-or-less up to date picture of worldwide demographics of sexual orientation, we can look at the 27-country 2021 IPSOS survey data, based on a simplified (5-point vs 7-point) Kinsey scale:
On average, 30% people are something other than completely heterosexual (0 on the Kinsey Scale).
Men and women are more or less equally likely to be non-heterosexual (29% vs 32%).
Zoomers are by far the least heterosexual generation (45% non-heterosexual). The trend is clear, so we can expect Gen Alpha that will follow after Gen Z to be even less heterosexual.
The sexual orientation people identify themselves with does not always match reported sexual preferences - 40% people who identify as lesbian/gay are non-homosexual, and 20% people who identify as straight are non-heterosexual.
Actual sexual behaviors can differ from sexual preferences self-reported in research surveys. Wildlife biologists can follow animals to observe and document their sexual behaviors in the wild, but due to cultural norms of sexual privacy, it’s not possible to investigate human sexual behavior this way.
A team of researchers from Queensland found a clever way to circumvent this limitation by analyzing dating app activity vs sexual preferences reported on the Kinsey Scale:
Women apparently are less sexually honest than men - 67% “exclusively homosexual women” also contact men, while 46% “exclusively heterosexual” women also contact women.
From all non-bisexual groups, gay men are the only ones fully sexually honest.
21% “exclusively heterosexual” men still contact other men.
I remember how perplexed I was the moment I learned about the existence of a separate category of “men who have sex with men”. Men who have sex with men? - I thought - That’s just gay men! This is so stupid!
But apparently, based on the mismatches between reported sexual orientation and sexual preferences, and between reported sexual preferences and actual dating app behavior, “men who have sex with men” and yet not identify themselves as gay or even bisexual are indeed a thing.
Homophobia to the rescue
Eventually, as we add up the estimated percentages of men who are gay, bisexual, “prefer not to say”/”don’t know” and “men who have sex with men”, we find that up to 50% men in the youngest Zoomer cohort might actually be non-heterosexual.
So, was Worst Boyfriend Ever at least 50% right? Is being gay a real choice for 50% of young men?
Thankfully, no.
For thousands of years, the society developed and maintained social norms to discourage men and women from homosexual activity and lifestyle, ranging from denying homosexual people all of the privileges of a heterosexual marriage to codes of laws that punished homosexuals by torture or death. All of them are described by one word: homophobia.
Personally, I consider two types, or building blocks of homophobia:
Social homophobia - Considering homosexual people inferior, or in worst case, less or not human. This leads to denying privileges, social exclusion and other forms of punishment.
Sexual homophobia - Considering homosexual activity disgusting.
Both types are distinct, but correlated: typically, we consider people who do disgusting stuff inferior, and probably vice versa.
Here, it’s worth to distinguish sexual homophobia from the default sexual disgust. Sex, like any social interaction involving an exchange of bodily fluids, is disgusting by default, due to increased risk of infection. This is part of both our nature and nurture - our cultural norms reinforce our natural instincts.
Think of how prepubescent kids (who don’t have functional sex drives yet) react to learning about the reality of sexual intercourse after being exposed to porn, having The Talk with their parents or in a sex education class - “Yuck, it’s gross!”
However, in case of sexually attractive individuals, the opportunity for sexual reproduction greatly outweighs the risk of infection. Hence, sexual arousal cancels the default sexual disgust.
If you’re a man, there are probably many interesting things you would happily do with your spouse (or, say, a hot social media influencer you have a crush on), but would never do any of this with that old lady that lives down the street, her adult son, his little daughter or her dog.
That being said, sexual homophobia is more than that. Most likely you will find the thought of having sex with a man way more disgusting than with an unattractive (i.e. old or fat) woman. If yes, that’s sexual homophobia.
To put it differently, total sexual disgust is the sum of default (natural) sexual disgust and any other applicable (socially constructed) sexual phobias like homophobia, pedophobia1 and such.
Social homophobia used to be an overarching social norm in most pre-modern societies and cultures (with notable exceptions of the high-functioning societies of ancient Greece, Rome and India). However, since mid-20th century, the LGBT movement successfully managed to largely abolish social homophobia in Western developed countries and make it unacceptable anywhere except the far right and traditional institutions (i.e. the Catholic Church), subcultures and political parties.
Due to the rapid shift of the Overton window during our lifetime, some of us who were raised in traditional cultures with social homophobia norms might find themselves unable to express it within the mainstream discourse and culture.
It seems like there is no significant difference between social homophobia towards gays and lesbians. But when it comes to sexual homophobia, the difference is huge.
In order to combat sexual homophobia by exposure therapy, the LGBT movement managed to increase the frequency of depicting homosexual acts like kissing in the mainstream culture. But as far as I see, these efforts barely moved the needle in terms of gay sexual homophobia - it seems that for most straight people, gay sex is still disgusting.
On the other hand, it seems like lesbian sexual homophobia doesn’t exist at all - it’s perfectly fine for women to touch and kiss in public. In some circumstances, these behaviors are in fact desirable - homophilia instead of homophobia.
For example, think of Katy Perry’s 2008 hit single “I kissed a girl”, or Madonna, Britney and Christina Aguilera famously kissing at the end of their 2003 VMA performance:
Now imagine that instead of them, we had Justin Timberlake, Sean Paul and Eminem trying to pull off the same trick. Or, if any of these guys tried to score a hit with a song entitled “I kissed a boy”2.
In a “girls gone wild” type of situation in a club or a college party, lesbian sexual activity can be used as a clever way to signal sexual openness and availability without triggering jealousy and slut shaming responses. It also provides an option for plausible deniability for rejecting unwanted sexual advances - instead of “You’re a great guy”, “Just bee urself” or “It’s not you, it’s me” a girl can simply say “Actually I’m more into girls now”.
The current state of gay and lesbian sexual homophobia is clearly reflected in mainstream porn3. In threesome and group sex scenes, women almost always engage sexually with each other, but men almost never engage with other men. The porn sites are organized such that lesbian porn is normally available, but gay porn is hidden behind a “gaywall” in a separate section of the site to avoid accidental indecent exposure of disgusting gay stuff4.
Coming back to our original question: The 50% of young non-heterosexual men CAN choose gay sex and lifestyle. But for the vast majority of them, gay sex is disgusting, and for some, a gay lifestyle might be something unacceptable as well. So, it’s just way harder to choose gay sex or lifestyle, and it’s way easier not to.
The homophobic homosexuals
At this point, some of you might say: “This doesn’t make sense: if a non-heterosexual man has some level of attraction to other men, he should not be homophobic: gay sex is probably not (as) disgusting for him, and he probably also doesn’t consider gay people bad”.
For most of the time, I also thought that homosexuality and homophobia are two opposite ends of the same continuum:
If you like gay sex, you don’t find it disgusting and/or don’t consider gays inferior.
If you don’t like gay sex, you find it disgusting and/or consider gays inferior.
But recently, I realized that homophobia and homosexuality are more like orthogonal dimensions, and it’s possible to be both homosexual and homophobic, or non-homosexual and non-homophobic. Thus, we can lay out the homosexuality-homophobia continuum as a 2D matrix like the political compass:
The above spectrum can be considered for both sexual and social homophobia5. I will try to address both. Here, we have to remember that:
Both sexual and social homophobia are social constructs.
Total sexual disgust is the sum of default natural sexual disgust and sexual homophobia (and other sexual phobias, if applicable)
(Homo)sexual arousal can cancel out the default sexual disgust, but it can’t cancel out the sexual homophobia - because it’s a social construct.
1. Happy homosexual
This is the “normie gay” quadrant. It includes men who are both aroused by gay sex and experience no sexual and/or social homophobia - they exist in a society, community (i.e. the wider gay community) or micro-community (family, friend group) that doesn’t impose and enforce the norms of social and sexual homophobia.
2. Self-loathing homosexual
Men who are both aroused by gay sex and also experience sexual and/or social homophobia - they exist in conservative societies and communities that enforce the norms of homophobia.
This is a tough and bizzare position to be in. From the sexual perspective, their homosexuality cancels out the default sexual disgust, but the sexual homophobia part still remains. This can either result in withholding from homosexual activity and sexual frustration, or engaging in it while temporarily surpressing sexual homophobia (by the spur of the moment, or using alcohol/drugs), only to find themselves disgusted and disappointed afterwards. From the social perspective, they hate gay people and they also find themselves gay, so they may end up hating themselves.
I remember that for some of the most vicious anti-gay alt-right politicians, their leftist adversaries would spin up conspiracy theories stating that they are in fact closeted, self-loathing gays, and with their vivid manifestations of gay hate they are just trying to strongly deny their hidden homosexual tendencies.
3. Straight homophobe
From the sexual perspective, this is the “normie straight man” quadrant - not aroused by gay sex and also finds it disgusting.
From the social perspective, it’s the “trad/right wing gay-hater” quadrant - people, who, despite the social norms of the broader modern liberal society, still hate gays and consider them inferior.
4. Straight non-homophobe
This is the weird place with men who are not aroused by gay sex, but also don’t find it disgusting and/or don’t find gays inferior. Here, we can find the elusive “men who have sex with men” - straight men who somehow see nothing wrong with homosexuality and are prone to explore it whenever a proper occasion and incentives line up.
From the social perspective, it’s the “normie” quadrant - straight people who conform to the mainstream liberal gay rights equality policy.
Also, from the female sexual perspective, this is the “normie straight woman” quadrant. Due to lack of female sexual homophobia, straight women are prone to homosexual behavior if incentivized to do so. For example, many porn actresses are straight, yet also OK with having lesbian and bisexual sex on camera, simply because they are paid for it and don’t find it disgusting. This corroborates the common, but false6 belief that “all women are bisexual”.
Jailhouse rock
In our search of men for whom gay sex can be, as WBE suggests, an “acquired preference”, we have now narrowed down to a small group of men in the 4th quadrant of the homosexuality-homophobia continuum.
This requires an existence of a society, subculture or community of straight men who, unlike most of the society, don’t find gay sex disgusting.
One good example of that is prison: a facility where a large group of (mostly) straight men live together for long periods of time, without access to women.
What I think that happens in prisons is a vicious cycle of homosexual activity, exposure and dissolution of the common norm of sexual homophobia. A straight man sent to prison may find himself in a closed community of men, where gay sex is “the normal thing to do”. With no possibility to engage sexually with women and no access to porn and a private space for masturbation, he might find homosexual activity his only possibility of sexual release and avoiding sexual frustration.
How does the “men who have sex with men” thing work then? Obviously, I have no such experiences7, but I imagine it could be somewhat similar to masturbation - having sex with your own hand. A hand is a hand - it’s neither arousing, nor disgusting. In such case, an external source of sexual arousal might be required, such as porn or invoking an imaginary image or idea of a sexually arousing person or situation. But in a scenario of prolonged involuntary celibate and elevated levels of testosterone, the autogenous sexual arousal and physical stimulation might be enough for gay sex to become a viable substitute of heterosexual activity.
All hands on deck
The fertility crisis in Western developed countries seems to be significantly driven by the falling marriage rates and rising age of first marriage. With Millenials slowly aging out of fertility and Gen Alpha not mature yet, Zoomers are the only fully fertile generation out there. And if 1 in 2 Zoomer men might consider gay sex and lifestyle as an alternative to heterosexual marriage and having children, it’s a big, big problem for future fertility.
Judging by the popularity of non-heterosexuality among Zoomers, I don’t think that prisons are the only type of community where male sexual homophobia is being abolished and “men (are) having sex with men”. Most probably, there are many other social micro-bubbles - friend groups, clubs, high schools, college fraternities - where the “men having sex with men” has somehow become “the normal thing to do”.
We shouldn’t allow this to become mainstream - if having gay sex becomes “the normal thing to do” for everyone, it will be a disaster.
I don’t think it’s possible to fix fertility without creating strong incentives that would encourage the non-heterosexual half of young men to form long term relationships with women, marry them and have children. One of them should be to uphold and maintain the traditional social norms of sexual and social homophobia:
Straight “men who have sex with men” should be incentivized to stop doing it and have sex with women instead. Otherwise, some of them might realize they’re actually bisexual and then decide follow the gay lifestyle route.
Bisexual men, the only ones who actually have a choice, should be incentivized to choose women.
And gay men should also be incentivized to marry women and have children. However, given that they can only get sexual satisfaction from men, they should be allowed to use loopholes that would allow them to meet and have sex with men outside of marriage.
Back when I considered homosexuality and homophobia the opposite ends of the same spectrum, I used to be amazed and also horrified by the stories of men who were married with children, and were either cheating on her wife with men or came out as gay and left their families to pursue the gay lifestyle.
“Straight sex must be disgusting for a gay man, just like gay sex is disgusting for straight men!” - I thought. However, I no longer think this is the case, since apparently there is no such thing as sexual heterophobia. Straight sex can be a little disgusting for a gay man due to the default sexual disgust, but as shown by both history and the examples we discussed before, it can be easily overcome given proper incentives.
All of the above is pretty much how things have been for most of history, before the LGBT rights movement and long before the fertility crisis.
Pro-gay policies and cultural incentives are simply a population control device that should not be deployed during a deep fertility crisis. Conversely, it would be a very smart and good idea to deploy them in poor, overpopulated high fertility countries such as Sub-Saharan Africa.
Here, I need to clarify that, even though, as probably most men I am sexually homophobic (I find gay sex disgusting), I am not socially homophobic. I don’t think that gay people are inferior. I am just very deeply concerned with fertility8. And with fertility in mind, a gay man is morally equivalent to an incel, bachelor, fuckboy, “forever boyfriend”, deliberately childless husband and any other man who doesn’t want to have children.
The LGBT rights and equality are a great achievement of social progress achieved by the Western culture. However, eventually we learned that it’s a luxury our society cannot afford. Maybe if heterosexual men could offset low gay fertility with their high fertility, we could have still afforded it. But we no longer can.
At this point, we need to max out on all incentives that could help more young men and women marry and have children.
This is really an “all hands on deck” situation.
Or rather, “all dicks on deck9”.
The literal meaning of pedophobia is “fear of children”. However, I believe that there is also a related social construct similar to sexual homophobia - the idea that sexual activity with children is disgusting.
TBH, I think Eminem could actually have done it, but obviously in a sarcastic and socially homophobic way.
I am aware that that the mainstream porn only reflects male sexual preferences - most women will probably find many acts depicted in mainstream porn more disgusting than gay sex. However, this post is actually about male sexual preferences, so referring to porn makes sense in this context.
Notably, there is a recent trend of allowing the “bisexual” category porn (threesome/group sex with men engaging with both women and other men) to emerge from behind the gaywall and serving it to regular users. I guess that someone thought that maybe seeing heterosexual activity is sexually arousing and it somehow sanitizes and makes concurrent homosexual activity less disgusting. Newsflash: it’s not very effective.
We could fit both in the chart, but that would create a three-dimensional, 8-box spectrum that would be way too hard to comprehend and analyze.
See the research results in the first part of the post.
Obviously - even if I had, I probably wouldn’t tell, due to social and sexual homophobia.
For context: I live in Poland, a country with a TFR of 1.1 - probably the lowest of all Western countries. East Asian countries will be the ones where the shit will hit the fan first, but then we will be next.
“All hands on dick” would be an even better pun, however it would also entirely miss the point.
Really need to factor in the availability and normalisation of porn in Gen Z, sure they’re the least Heterosexual, but they’re also the least sexually active too (excluding Alpha obviously). Another thing I’ve been considering is based off the rat utopia experiment that eventually resulted in hyper masculine males and females, as well as hyper feminine males and females, but overall a complete collapse in reproduction, leading to the extinction of colony. Much the same thing is happening now in human populations, and I think it’s going to take a lot more than just cultural encouragement to mitigate the disastrous consequences.
This is just based on a sample size of two guys I've known, but there are men in the straight-but-not-disgusted-by-gay-sex category who really in all instances would prefer to be with a woman, but occasionally have sex with men just because it's so unbelievably easy and cost free. Like all you need for this is just the fact that men are way more horny, and it becomes a fall-back option, especially once you have apps that allow you to just order it up instantly on command. In those cases it's more like they're really horny, right then, and after not getting any takers trying to message women for an hour or two, they can easily turn to messaging a guy and someone will be over sucking him off in 15 minutes for free. Quite literally. If this has exploded among Zoomers that's probably mostly why. That and also maybe some are being paid for it (like WBE indicated he was thinking of doing). This kind of guy is not going to put off forming a family or choose a boyfriend over a girlfriend though...it's just something they do now and then based on an immediate urge.