I would say that what I have seen comes closer to the complete castration of people in fiction. It might just be the kind of genres that I read, but outside of books that specialise in Herms or some such, one of the big features in the science-fiction and fantasy that I tend to see is that no one has sex with anyone. They’re all busy living their lives as starship captains or archers or whatever and they never have sex with anyone at any time and hardly seem interested in it.
I see it too. But, I hate romance and sex in my novels so I'm just has happy without it. The one thing I have noticed is that many modern sci-fi have family groups. I'm thinking the Expanse and Murderbot series. No one is in a monogamous relationship. They're all in family groups of 5-10 with all of them contributing DNA for one baby.
A ploy to displace the nuclear family with "alternative" or "chosen" families; it started in the 90s (and was picked up by such pop-culture mainstays as Sex and the City and Friends) and is in full swing now. No pun intended.
"Friendsgiving" is exactly what I had in mind when writing the reply. "I ran away to NYC from my conservative parents and am now enjoying 'Friendsgiving'" has pretty much been the theme of TV shows for the past 25 years. @Josh, this is probably the most fundamental gay-ification of heterosexuality there is. And yes, I recognize the existence of truly homophobic and abusive families in real life.
I hadn't thought of this. I've always seen that used an back up option for people without family in the area so they don't get depressed, not as something chosen preferentially over family holidays. But I can see how it could easily be used that way too.
I so regret that I unwittingly allowed my daughter, as a pre-teen, to watch Friends, without having watched it myself. She has grown up to value her own social circles to the nearly total exclusion of her Dad and me from her life (she is an only child). Even though we home-schooled her from grades 1-6, the influence of that one t.v. show evidently over-rode all of her previous, positive concepts of what family was all about.
This was pretty much standard practice among young gays when I was a teen and in my 20s. Because many of us came from abusive families, we dived whole-hog into the "chosen family" narrative. We and many others went way too far, and now "normies" seem to think it's normal to go no-contact with your family for what seem to be bad reasons.
This was one reason (among many) I resisted cutting contact with my family for so long. Culturally, now it seems to often be a euphemism for Borderline discard, rather than a genuine last resort.
“Gay-ification” hmm. I’m hetero through & through.
I’m also a Bible believin’ Christian, so my expectations for marriage & a husband are for a man to love me as Christ loved the church - I don’t find whips or chains to be how Christ loves me.
That being said, I can say that there is a perverseness that used to be clocked, as you’ve pointed out, with the hedonism of the gays that has now crept into even the church (we had a shirtless male pole dancer at a “male Christian conference” this past weekend!!!). You expected to see raunchy behavior & hear obscene jokes if you were around hyper-sexual men like that.
Now, I’ve had a coworker give me unsolicited anal sex advice out of the blue. Another coworker (different job) informed me of her & fiancé’s trysts that weekend which included anal for both of them. I’ve had men say to me that if they were going to date me, I’d have to give at least a little something - usually anal (that has been the huge one I’ve seen normalized. It’s so normalized that some women are shocked when I say that I will never allow it.)
Bdsm is common conversation. I’m frequently having to explain concepts to my mother, who is shocked I know them. You’re “vanilla” which is now coded with “basic, white, straight” as “boring, loveless, sexless” unless you engage in at least a little something “edgy.” You see handcuffs & whips in tv programming all the time nowadays. Riverdale had a teen girl dressing up as bdsm dom for crying out loud.
It’s sick & depraved. Normal, healthy people in healthy sexual relationships don’t have to abuse each other. The stats on regular anal sex alone… my God, it’s horrific on the human body.
It's so odd to me that people are so open about sex talk and deviant sex like it's a normal topic. Back in the day, we understood what deviation was. The underground scenes were kept quiet. There were taboos .
Now, it's a free for all.
Thankfully there is the solution of Repentance and Life in Christ.
You'll be pleased to know that, in broader society, anal sex only plays a cameo role. It raises its head early on, is experimented with a handful of times and is then usually discarded as sub-optimal. It would probably then never be mentioned again but for the media (and the agenda) bringing it up incessantly. I don't think it does much for the girl and I can tell you for certain there are no men out there crying in anguish about their need to have anal sex - or even bemoaning its absence.
PS. If its about love, vanilla does it best. With a few chocolate sprinkles... 😜
There is a woman in my church who left the Catholic church when their stance on homosexuality began to soften. When I talked to her about it, she told me that as a nurse, she saw older male gay patients who had problems holding in bowel movements from decades of anal sex. She is the most practical person I know. Her expressions were not homophobic, they were her medical observations. I also see anal sex being pushed everywhere. My cousin (hetero) posts about his love for anal on FB all of the time. One of his latest entries: "let me bust a nut in your butt and I won't put a baby in your gut." Charming. I can't believe the ladies weren't banging down his door. My other observations on what is being pushed on TV shows, in movies, etc. : choking and three-ways. Young people are especially impressionable to suggestions that "everybody is doing it, what's the big deal?" Abigail Shrier in her recent book Irreversible Damage (about the transing of young girls) talks about how young people are engaging in choking behavior and anal sex, and said, why do we ask why young girls are turning away from womanhood?
I know girls who have engaged in choking and other bdsm acts on first dates. They later felt uncomfortable and violated. They complained that the guy took it too far and then accused them of rape. Well, wtf did you expect? Sex has become mechanical and transactional- “you press my button and I’ll press yours”. Women were not designed to have sex or bond in this manner, they need intimacy and trust. But they’re trying to have sex like men.
I agee. I didn’t mean to imply that men only want casual hookups or extreme sex. Porn has warped their expectations. The problem is that women are asking for or willing to participate in these acts with total strangers. They then realize they don’t like it afterwards. I don’t know if it’s because they want to seem more adventurous and in control. Or do they simply not know any better? Do they get into bed with someone and begin to tick off a list of acts that are supposed to bring pleasure?
What has happened is if one is not totally supportive of the urban gay scene-drug fueled parties, endless Grinder hookups, the look, the abs, the clothes etc. they’re now total homophobes. Now in my younger days I was totally “immersed” in the scene but knew it was not near the norm nor expected it ever would be. But Today if hetero Bill and Sue aren’t actively praising butt plugs and orgies, including to their seven year old well they’re just horrible homophobes, racists and bigots.
What happened to discretion? I was fairly exploratory in my university years but never went around talking about it openly, let alone boasting. What happened between me and a lover was between me and that lover, period.
Also, despite those wilder years, most of my true exploration has been with my long-term partner. Because we have trust and intimacy we have felt comfortable trying different things and it happened pretty organically. I think it's awful how it's precisely the types of things best reserved for someone you love and trust which are now promoted under "kink preferences" on dating apps. Horrific.
I think one thing that's very different now is how mainstreamed porn has become in our culture. It's almost now something you have to work to avoid seeing as opposed to working to seek it out. Even back in the 90s, there was some level of a veil around porn. You'd have to seek it out in a magazine, watch a scrambled cable channel or at least walk through a beaded curtain. Now, it's much more pervasive in genera life. And, not just traditional "sexiness" (which certainly has its place) but the way "sex" has invaded our culture in the last 5-10 years has a ...sinister? type feel. And a shaming and recruitment feel. It also now openly despises masculinity, be it gay or straight. There's an undercurrent of vengeful female dominance and degradation of men that seems to have been standardized within sex culture and not adhering to that makes one "problematic." More than anything, it now feels like it's fully tied to a political and social agenda.
The "queering" of childrens' education and entertainment appears to be a decades-long project. It began with indoctrinating my generation (Gen X) and we passed it along to our Millennial and Gen Z kids, creating fertile ground to introduce open "queering" to the masses. In fact, it's so ingrained at this point, that it wasn't even noticeable until the activists started flying too close to the sun.
I feel like it goes hand-in-hand with the whitewashing of kink and male gay culture for popular consumption.
Speaking of imperceptible shifts: have you noticed that all of a sudden, American society forgot, en masse, the difference between when "a" and "an" is used in a sentence??? Pay attention, especially on TV shows. You will now commonly hear people say "I bought *uh* umbrella", not "I bought *an* umbrella".
It's all some kind of social experiment and our brains are so easily manipulated that we don't even perceive the subtle shifts until sooo much later, if at all.
(The Queering of the American Child by Logan Lancing and James Lindsay was recently released and it explores this subject. )
Slightly off topic, but I’ve noticed the way the word “important” is pronounced and it grinds my brain. It’s like there is an apostrophe where the t goes…”impor’ant” giving it a somewhat British, cockney sound. Sometimes it applies to other words with t in the middle, “moun’ains” and sometimes it’s a grunting sound…”imporUNT”. I wonder if something has changed and I’m too old to keep up?
Yes 100%. I spent the late 80s into mid 90s immersed in the tattoo/piercing scene. I encountered many people who were into alternative aka deviant lifestyles. Various "scenes" came together in the tattoo world. I went right along with all of it. These people were my tribe. We were all varying degrees of crazy. Bad childhoods, drugs, antisocial behaviors, bdsm and every kind of sexual abnormality. I was surrounded by what I now understand to be personality pathology.
In the early 90s it was all still in the underground. Now, I see it everywhere out in the open.
I agree with you and I also believe the increase availability of pornography contributes heavily. Sex is like a drug - the more you are exposed to- the more you need.
I think we have gone beyond gay, kink, or anything normal in our culture. It looks more like total degradation of human relationships to a purely transactional exchange. I don't see how it benefits females at all as the young actual women seem resigned to accepting their status as the bearers of holes for the pleasure of others and not worthy of commitment or being treasured, all the while thinking they are "empowered" by allowing themselves to be run through. At first glance it seems like a hedonistic male's paradise when really the perversion and ugly aggression the sexual devolution has fostered in women hes left them demoralized and lacking purpose and the natural desire to have, hold, and protect a woman. Only the most perverse anti-human elements could possibly consider our current social state as good. The only way out that I can imagine is a Christian revival followed by a reasonable adjustment toward tolerance of gay love and stopping there before we go back off the precipice of perversion.
Your sentence about the whole thing's having killed the normal male desire to cherish and protect a woman seems true to me. I do not recognize the country I find myself in. At this point, I want to live as much in the past as possible, build my little life around books, music, and movies which I love, and most important, please God.
Living in the past has routinely been seen as the mark of a personality in deep crisis, but in this hour it seems to me only sane.
It's disheartening, but we must remember that God Incarnate was fully human, which means he had a longing for marriage. And he was destined to die frustrated in this.
Here's how bad things are. ( I mentioned this somewhere, and hope it wasn't here, but if it was, it bears to be repeated.
It sets the Zeitgeist more finely for us. )
It's no longer possible to get new copies of the books published by the Edward Stratemyer syndicate. That syndicate produced The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, and others, series.
Sure, you can buy new physical copies, but they've been made socially correct. I loved The Hardy Boys, and have not wanted to know the details, but I can imagine they wouldn't have been above making mother Laura, who always was a vague figure, a clinical depressive, Aunt Gertrude an unpartnered lesbian, and so on.
There is a Facebook group which probably is 95% male in membership. It exists solely for members to express their delight at having run down a pre - Wokeness copy of one of the books, and for members to offer tips about where others might be found.
LJ and Bobby Lime; I so resonate with your conversation here (I'm a 71-year-old 'survivor' of 2nd wave feminism and the sexual revolution). Particularly this sentence of LJ's:
"I don't see how it benefits females at all as the young actual women seem resigned to accepting their status as the bearers of holes for the pleasure of others and not worthy of commitment or being treasured, all the while thinking they are "empowered" by allowing themselves to be run through."
Joanie, crossword puzzles mystify me and always have. I feel as hopeless when faced with them as accident investigators may be tempted to feel when they start to reconstruct a passenger plane which has crashed. My big thrill with games is to be found at the Merriam Webster website. It's fun to get their daily newsletter, which is a portal to many, many games; spellings, meanings, all sorts of things to do with words.
If I'm up, I force myself to listen to The Puzzler, or whatever it's called, which is on NPR's Sunday Weekend Edition at approximately 8:43 AM EST. That's always fun. You can't "work" on the six or seven puzzles they throw at you. Either your subconscious hands you the answer within a few seconds or you are done!
I'm always grateful when I do well on it. I reassure myself that my good showing is evidence that I'm holding dementia at bay.
That link is to a jigsaw puzzle, not a crossword puzzle, which I have no time for whatsoever! It is relevant to the conversation, because it's a 1950s version of the family. Take a look and you'll see what I mean!
What strikes me is how quickly white middle class parents will put a homosexual label on their young child. My husband plays golf with a guy who is so sure his son, who is 10, is gay. I have really good gaydar because of my experience as an unwitting beard in the late 90’s and I have never detected an ounce of homo in this sweet little boy. I’ve had my gaydar go off with kids, very rarely. Only twice in 50 years in fact. Once this guy made the comment about his son, I started noticing it everywhere.
To answer the original question, yes, the behavior boundaries are gone.
I don't really consider myself straight as I have sexual relationships with women, tho my LTRs have all been with men. I suspect that bisexuality is incredibly common, and was normal in ancient times and pre-history. I think that the religious mandate against same sex couples were two fold: make more believers, but more importantly, heterosexual pair bonds give almost every man a woman, and keep society peaceful, as a glut of horny, wifeless, frustrated young men did destroy polygamous societies. If you relax these standards and embrace our common and likely innate drift towards bisexuality, you end up in a more libertine and often degenerate society. We have moved hard towards horny-brain-rolling-no-brakes, not *because* of homosexual behavior, but because we lightened waaay up on sexual restrictions, period. That's my theory, anyway. I'm not in favor of moving back to closeted lavender marriages AT ALL, but we need something other than this porn-soaked parade we find ourselves in now.
Nothing at all against bisexuality and all for recognizing it as a legitimate form of desire, but "incredibly common"? "Common and likely innate drift for bisexuality"? Is there evidence for this outside of Freudian psychoanalysis? Freud is a fave, but many of his case studies are n=1.
I find myself rolling my eyes at L B's comment because I find it, ironically, a sign of the times we are living in. People want to believe sexuality is a spectrum, and there is no such thing as a heterosexual, only a prudish person who can't or won't recognize their attraction to people of the same sex. Recently, there have been cases of teachers telling their heterosexual students, "how can you know you're not gay if you haven't had gay sex?" (I am willing to bet they don't say to their gay students, how do you know you're gay if you haven't had heterosexual sex.)
Worse than a sign of the times, I fear. It's the product of a huge agenda to depopulate "civilised" countries so they can be owned by the powerful and occupied by slaves. All the population wars are already lost. There are no equality or fairness issues involved; it's a transparent ruse! It is utterly tragic that people nowadays are too stupid and uneducated to see something even as obvious, and as serious, as this.
Yes, I agree that LB's response ironically provides evidence for Josh's assertion. LB also seems to confuse accepted or tolerated with "incredibly common." I'm wondering, too, how having a wife would have made the hypothetical glut of horny young men peaceful if, as innate bisexuals, they would still long for male company. In the West, the prohibition on same-sex (especially male) relationships has been largely legal (laws used religion for support). Legalizing same-sex relationships has not made them "incredibly common." I am not defending heterosexuality as morally superior, but, statistically, it is the norm. But that's probably enough time spent on a comment likely written by a young person with all the typical confidence of the young.
While I don't know about this theory of it being incredibly common, it's possible that same-sex experimentation was tolerated in the past up to certain ages or in specific contexts, where it did not pose a threat to the social order. It wasn't seen as a conduit to romance, love or marriage, and therefore was not given the same weight or status.
What changed is the acceptance not of private same-sex experiences in specific contexts or life stages, but the acceptance of it as a lifelong romantic orientation -- one that could be openly pursued.
I do think there's something to be explored in terms of whether this acceptance validated and "locked in", so to speak, same-sex desires in young people that in previous eras would have discarded or grown out of such desires (and I count myself potentially in this category, as a bisexual millennial woman who prefers long-term relationships with other women).
So-called "Boston marriages" were accepted/tolerated; Victorian women's close passionate friendships with other women were acceptable. Google "Michael Field." Virginia Woolf had a female lover while married to Leonard. None of it has to do with age. Victorians didn't say stupid shit like "a lesbian until graduation." Male queer sexuality, if caught, was brutally punished for centuries, with the exception of some Middle-Eastern cultures ,Greece, Rome, and Napoleonic France. Age had little to do with it. So there are various degrees of tolerance and punishment across cultures and time periods, but none of them--which is the bone of contention here--makes bisexuality/queer sexuality extremely common. Individual experiences are unique and don't always account for statistics. I am a Gen-Xer hetero woman, who has a sneaking, albeit politically incorrect suspicion that the social disconnect between men and women amongst Millennials
and GenZ-ers leads to a greater number of alternatives to heterosexuality. I will not be convinced otherwise and am, frankly, a little too busy for writing impromptu textbooks.
Yes you're right of course about tolerance of homosexual feelings within close friendships, or the taking of same-sex lovers among women of certain classes in certain contexts. I know about the Bloomsbury Group etc.
So it's not just about age. I was just throwing out some speculation. Certainly In a UK context there's an understanding, for example, that some men had same-sex experiences while at boarding school or the such, but this was not expected to be something they carried on doing.
I guess the point is there's been different levels of tolerance and acceptance of same-sex behaviour and even relationships at different points. And there was always some tolerance too of a certain percentage of men and women remaining unmarried. In societies where families were large, having one sibling out of, say, 7 remain unmarried was unremarkable.
Maybe you're on to something with the idea of social disconnect. Although that could be interpreted in different ways. For example, that feminism made women more likely to reject so-called heteronormative relationships. That the internet atomised people. That certain social trends emasculated men and created tension between the sexes. That marriage as an ideal was very much undermined. And so on
I'll be 46 in June. I'm not that young. When I say bisexuality, I'm referring to bisexual *behavior*. I'm uncertain about whether or not "people who have had sex with both men and women over the course of their life" is measurable. Ironically I'm not confident in anything that I have written here, it's purely speculative, and I don't even feel certain that there's a way to know any of this for sure.
"Ironically I'm not confident in anything that I have written here, it's purely speculative, and I don't even feel certain that there's a way to know any of this for sure." This sentence makes me hopeful, though "ironically" is misused. Thank you for your response.
And I suspect that's exactly what the agendas of the last 70 years have all wanted you to believe. Nor is comparing us to Greece and Rome much of a support for your argument; both those empires fell precisely because of their decadence. I reckon that if you were to wander the villages of 1000 years ago and were given a month's wages for every remotely homosexual person you came across, you'd be likely to starve.
Your question would also be viewed as absolute insanity. Everyone back then would have understood that the only reason anyone would think that a good idea would be because they wanted to own and occupy your land and houses.
Well, to be fair, a 1000 years ago "a remotely homosexual person" would not be open about it, even to receive wages. I agree with the rest, per my comment above.
As a bisexual woman myself, you may have a point (especially where women are concerned).
I consciously put the brakes on in my mid-20s as I started to realise that a libertine mindset was not doing me much good. But I very much spent ages 17-25 identifying quite strongly with ideas around sexual fluidity, non-monogamy, and other types of social transgression. I partook in online communities and sought out material that supported my view (books like "The Ethical Slut" or the Bust magazine feminist forum lol).
But there was something never quite convincing about it all. For a period I went to a lot of LGB club nights and had several gay male friends who were big partiers. As much as I sometimes envied their (in retrospect, often reckless) hedonism -- I even used to watch gay porn -- there was also something a little desperate about it. At a point I had to recognise that I didn't really want to aspire to that, and I began to feel a little pathetic about some of my own choices.
At 40 I am now a social conservative. I am libertarian in the sense that people should have the right to a private life and the state shouldn't criminalise behaviour that is simply immoral but not criminal. But I feel we need to uphold basic decency in society and protect kids from this onslaught of depravity. Pop music, Netflix shows (especially the "cutesy" ones like Emily in Paris, etc.), TV ads -- all of it is porn-soaked as you say and I hate it. It rots the mind and corrodes the spirit.
I certainly would not describe myself as a social conservative and I'm five or six years older than you. I've noticed a lot of the same stuff that you've noticed, though. I see the problems with a liberated sexual culture and I also see problems with the nuclear family. This is not an indictment of these things! I don't know what if anything should replace them, I'm just noticing. So I guess I'm not socially conservative, just puzzled.
I love how you are increasingly calling out antiwhiteism, the disease destroying Western Civilization. Antiwhites now control nearly all the nodes of power in America and throughout the once-West. If you'd like to defeat antiwhiteism and reclaim our destiny, the best resources are the book Go Free and the community you can can find via NoWhiteGuilt.org. I'm confident you would be a welcomed there, both as a guest and/or to have author Jason Köhne as a guest on your show.
Personally speaking, I recall a formative influence on me as I entered college over 20 years ago (hurts to type that) was picking up the local, weekly free "newspaper" that ran the Savage Love sex advice column written by Dan Savage.
Whether he was the zeitgeist or merely channeling it, it's hard to say. But that column had a large impact and Dan was on TV (and still is, I believe) frequently on venues such as Bill Maher.
And central to the ethos of the column was, basically kink-acceptance. Dan was writing from his experience as a gay man - and he took it as a given that to be a good lover you should question your own boundaries and try to be open to trying out what your partner desired - even if it was pretty out there. I know that radically changed my very parochial, Catholic-raised view of sex and what was "acceptable" in the bedroom.
I feel confident in saying Dan Savage played a part, but not confident in saying exactly how large. But, your question made me think of his column and how much it seemed to be taken as gospel among every liberal I knew at the time. As always, I think you're on to something.
Yes, Savage coined a phrase, something like you have to be game for doing new stuff with your partner. I think it was even an acronym; I'll have to see if I remember it.
He also famously said that he and his husband are "monogamish".
He was absolutely influential. I'm an older millennial too and although sometimes I bristled at how casually Savage would recommend some fairly far-out stuff, I also imbibed his sort of mentality that so long as there's consent and you discuss boundaries, there's no such thing as an unhealthy kink or an unethical approach to sex.
I'm in my 50s and have been friends with gay people since junior high in the 80s. Here's what I've noticed - gay people are getting more domestic and straight people are getting kinkier. So I myself would NOT call this "gay-ification". I know a lot more gay married 20-somethings with mortages than ever before and I know a lot more heteros screwing new people every weekend. I think if we actually looked at percentages we'd find that it's now equally matched. Kinky straight people are now free to be kinky and domestic gay people are now free to be domestic. We're just noticing what wasn't there before.
On the darker side, there's a lot more despair in the world, and in the 70s and 80s when gay men were in despair (the 70s from rejection from family and the 80s from the AIDS crisis) this despair could be expressed in BDSM eroticism, scenes, fantasies and power exchange relationships. Straight people also used this form of expression to manage despair, but it's acceptance and popularity have gone up so that it's gone from very underground, to more commonplace.
"Gay people are now free to be domestic and straight people are now free to be kinky" is such an astute observation. I've never really resonated with the hedonistic gay man stereotype just because I had a very close friend from 5th grade on who we all knew was gay and was our valedictorian. His dad was a cop and he had lovely supportive parents. He used to take the social conservative point of view in debates. I'm glad that he came of age in an era when he was free to be domestic because he was never going to be hanging out at a bath house.
What I observe in the big city I live in is that there is a stark divide between the Grindr gays and the domesticated ones. I don't actually believe that gays have become more domesticated, I think we notice the ones that are choosing that path more, because these days they can be more open.
In my wider network I see the divide quite clearly. Just to give a couple of examples: one of my friends has been with his partner since they were 21. They are now in their early 30s and are getting married later this year. They are monogamous, never go to clubs (they prefer to cook and watch films), and their social circle is almost entirely straight (I am one of the exceptions).
On the other end of the spectrum I have a friend who is 40 and ticks every single box for hedonism and recklessness. He's in the art world and probably two-thirds of his social circle is also gay men. During lockdowns he got into a habit of going cruising in parks and dabbling in meth (something he has now got out of, but he still has a massive drinking problem). He has only ever had one romantic relationship, which blew up spectacularly after he and his then-bf decided to open up the relationship.
Agree with everyone here. Another one who sees porn as a huge problem now for kids & families. And, I think the more you watch the more you need to go down the dark hole of deviant sex. Young teen boys are particularly susceptible and impressionable. They may start with straight sex but I doubt it's long before they're watching gay porn and then things that are darker and darker. All they have to do is open their phones and there it is... and of course, now it's even in the classroom lessons. Then they start to think maybe they're gay since that's the kind of sex they like to watch. I think their brains are being re-wired by porn. Not that there aren't people who have the propensity to be gay but I don't think it's as large a group as we're made to believe now.
Porn consumption can mould people's sexual habits, preferences and behaviours. It's creating a dissasociation and a lot of people are trying out all kinds of things that their natural instincts would never have leaned into. It is porn that is activating those desires and if you ever comb through Reddit communities devoted to porn genres, trans stuff, and kinks, you see a lot of people own up to this.
I would say that what I have seen comes closer to the complete castration of people in fiction. It might just be the kind of genres that I read, but outside of books that specialise in Herms or some such, one of the big features in the science-fiction and fantasy that I tend to see is that no one has sex with anyone. They’re all busy living their lives as starship captains or archers or whatever and they never have sex with anyone at any time and hardly seem interested in it.
I see it too. But, I hate romance and sex in my novels so I'm just has happy without it. The one thing I have noticed is that many modern sci-fi have family groups. I'm thinking the Expanse and Murderbot series. No one is in a monogamous relationship. They're all in family groups of 5-10 with all of them contributing DNA for one baby.
A ploy to displace the nuclear family with "alternative" or "chosen" families; it started in the 90s (and was picked up by such pop-culture mainstays as Sex and the City and Friends) and is in full swing now. No pun intended.
Exactly, and the whole "Friendsgiving" movement. I saw it for exactly what it is but to say otherwise is to be a grumpy killjoy.
"Friendsgiving" is exactly what I had in mind when writing the reply. "I ran away to NYC from my conservative parents and am now enjoying 'Friendsgiving'" has pretty much been the theme of TV shows for the past 25 years. @Josh, this is probably the most fundamental gay-ification of heterosexuality there is. And yes, I recognize the existence of truly homophobic and abusive families in real life.
I hadn't thought of this. I've always seen that used an back up option for people without family in the area so they don't get depressed, not as something chosen preferentially over family holidays. But I can see how it could easily be used that way too.
I so regret that I unwittingly allowed my daughter, as a pre-teen, to watch Friends, without having watched it myself. She has grown up to value her own social circles to the nearly total exclusion of her Dad and me from her life (she is an only child). Even though we home-schooled her from grades 1-6, the influence of that one t.v. show evidently over-rode all of her previous, positive concepts of what family was all about.
This was pretty much standard practice among young gays when I was a teen and in my 20s. Because many of us came from abusive families, we dived whole-hog into the "chosen family" narrative. We and many others went way too far, and now "normies" seem to think it's normal to go no-contact with your family for what seem to be bad reasons.
You said it, Josh.
😘
All true, but I doubt a silly show like Friends (which is now called racist and transphobic btw) could have been the only, or the decisive influence.
This was one reason (among many) I resisted cutting contact with my family for so long. Culturally, now it seems to often be a euphemism for Borderline discard, rather than a genuine last resort.
“Gay-ification” hmm. I’m hetero through & through.
I’m also a Bible believin’ Christian, so my expectations for marriage & a husband are for a man to love me as Christ loved the church - I don’t find whips or chains to be how Christ loves me.
That being said, I can say that there is a perverseness that used to be clocked, as you’ve pointed out, with the hedonism of the gays that has now crept into even the church (we had a shirtless male pole dancer at a “male Christian conference” this past weekend!!!). You expected to see raunchy behavior & hear obscene jokes if you were around hyper-sexual men like that.
Now, I’ve had a coworker give me unsolicited anal sex advice out of the blue. Another coworker (different job) informed me of her & fiancé’s trysts that weekend which included anal for both of them. I’ve had men say to me that if they were going to date me, I’d have to give at least a little something - usually anal (that has been the huge one I’ve seen normalized. It’s so normalized that some women are shocked when I say that I will never allow it.)
Bdsm is common conversation. I’m frequently having to explain concepts to my mother, who is shocked I know them. You’re “vanilla” which is now coded with “basic, white, straight” as “boring, loveless, sexless” unless you engage in at least a little something “edgy.” You see handcuffs & whips in tv programming all the time nowadays. Riverdale had a teen girl dressing up as bdsm dom for crying out loud.
It’s sick & depraved. Normal, healthy people in healthy sexual relationships don’t have to abuse each other. The stats on regular anal sex alone… my God, it’s horrific on the human body.
Excellent episode, by the way! I watched it earlier. I love starting my Mondays with you. (:
Me too. Appointment viewing on Monday mornings.
That's such a compliment. Thank you both.
It's so odd to me that people are so open about sex talk and deviant sex like it's a normal topic. Back in the day, we understood what deviation was. The underground scenes were kept quiet. There were taboos .
Now, it's a free for all.
Thankfully there is the solution of Repentance and Life in Christ.
Jesus even heals sexual problems. ♥️🙏
Christ gives us strength to bear our cross. All is given according to His will . 🙏
You'll be pleased to know that, in broader society, anal sex only plays a cameo role. It raises its head early on, is experimented with a handful of times and is then usually discarded as sub-optimal. It would probably then never be mentioned again but for the media (and the agenda) bringing it up incessantly. I don't think it does much for the girl and I can tell you for certain there are no men out there crying in anguish about their need to have anal sex - or even bemoaning its absence.
PS. If its about love, vanilla does it best. With a few chocolate sprinkles... 😜
There is a woman in my church who left the Catholic church when their stance on homosexuality began to soften. When I talked to her about it, she told me that as a nurse, she saw older male gay patients who had problems holding in bowel movements from decades of anal sex. She is the most practical person I know. Her expressions were not homophobic, they were her medical observations. I also see anal sex being pushed everywhere. My cousin (hetero) posts about his love for anal on FB all of the time. One of his latest entries: "let me bust a nut in your butt and I won't put a baby in your gut." Charming. I can't believe the ladies weren't banging down his door. My other observations on what is being pushed on TV shows, in movies, etc. : choking and three-ways. Young people are especially impressionable to suggestions that "everybody is doing it, what's the big deal?" Abigail Shrier in her recent book Irreversible Damage (about the transing of young girls) talks about how young people are engaging in choking behavior and anal sex, and said, why do we ask why young girls are turning away from womanhood?
Utterly. Vile.
I know girls who have engaged in choking and other bdsm acts on first dates. They later felt uncomfortable and violated. They complained that the guy took it too far and then accused them of rape. Well, wtf did you expect? Sex has become mechanical and transactional- “you press my button and I’ll press yours”. Women were not designed to have sex or bond in this manner, they need intimacy and trust. But they’re trying to have sex like men.
I am betting that many of the men don't really want to do those things, either. We are all being pressured to think it's normal behavior. It's icky.
I agee. I didn’t mean to imply that men only want casual hookups or extreme sex. Porn has warped their expectations. The problem is that women are asking for or willing to participate in these acts with total strangers. They then realize they don’t like it afterwards. I don’t know if it’s because they want to seem more adventurous and in control. Or do they simply not know any better? Do they get into bed with someone and begin to tick off a list of acts that are supposed to bring pleasure?
What has happened is if one is not totally supportive of the urban gay scene-drug fueled parties, endless Grinder hookups, the look, the abs, the clothes etc. they’re now total homophobes. Now in my younger days I was totally “immersed” in the scene but knew it was not near the norm nor expected it ever would be. But Today if hetero Bill and Sue aren’t actively praising butt plugs and orgies, including to their seven year old well they’re just horrible homophobes, racists and bigots.
YES!!! 👆👆👆
What used to be edgy and subversive is now the commonplace. Took all the fun out of everything I used to love!
What happened to discretion? I was fairly exploratory in my university years but never went around talking about it openly, let alone boasting. What happened between me and a lover was between me and that lover, period.
Also, despite those wilder years, most of my true exploration has been with my long-term partner. Because we have trust and intimacy we have felt comfortable trying different things and it happened pretty organically. I think it's awful how it's precisely the types of things best reserved for someone you love and trust which are now promoted under "kink preferences" on dating apps. Horrific.
I think one thing that's very different now is how mainstreamed porn has become in our culture. It's almost now something you have to work to avoid seeing as opposed to working to seek it out. Even back in the 90s, there was some level of a veil around porn. You'd have to seek it out in a magazine, watch a scrambled cable channel or at least walk through a beaded curtain. Now, it's much more pervasive in genera life. And, not just traditional "sexiness" (which certainly has its place) but the way "sex" has invaded our culture in the last 5-10 years has a ...sinister? type feel. And a shaming and recruitment feel. It also now openly despises masculinity, be it gay or straight. There's an undercurrent of vengeful female dominance and degradation of men that seems to have been standardized within sex culture and not adhering to that makes one "problematic." More than anything, it now feels like it's fully tied to a political and social agenda.
Love the snicker after reading Berliner's quote!!
The "queering" of childrens' education and entertainment appears to be a decades-long project. It began with indoctrinating my generation (Gen X) and we passed it along to our Millennial and Gen Z kids, creating fertile ground to introduce open "queering" to the masses. In fact, it's so ingrained at this point, that it wasn't even noticeable until the activists started flying too close to the sun.
I feel like it goes hand-in-hand with the whitewashing of kink and male gay culture for popular consumption.
Speaking of imperceptible shifts: have you noticed that all of a sudden, American society forgot, en masse, the difference between when "a" and "an" is used in a sentence??? Pay attention, especially on TV shows. You will now commonly hear people say "I bought *uh* umbrella", not "I bought *an* umbrella".
It's all some kind of social experiment and our brains are so easily manipulated that we don't even perceive the subtle shifts until sooo much later, if at all.
(The Queering of the American Child by Logan Lancing and James Lindsay was recently released and it explores this subject. )
I am currently reading this book. It is a must if one is studying this cultural phenomena.
Slightly off topic, but I’ve noticed the way the word “important” is pronounced and it grinds my brain. It’s like there is an apostrophe where the t goes…”impor’ant” giving it a somewhat British, cockney sound. Sometimes it applies to other words with t in the middle, “moun’ains” and sometimes it’s a grunting sound…”imporUNT”. I wonder if something has changed and I’m too old to keep up?
Yes. Isn't it horrible? It can almost change my whole view of someone. Still, it's in line with our general regression towards the apes.
Drives me crazy, too. I'm Canadian, and thought it was just an Americanism.
Yes 100%. I spent the late 80s into mid 90s immersed in the tattoo/piercing scene. I encountered many people who were into alternative aka deviant lifestyles. Various "scenes" came together in the tattoo world. I went right along with all of it. These people were my tribe. We were all varying degrees of crazy. Bad childhoods, drugs, antisocial behaviors, bdsm and every kind of sexual abnormality. I was surrounded by what I now understand to be personality pathology.
In the early 90s it was all still in the underground. Now, I see it everywhere out in the open.
I agree with you and I also believe the increase availability of pornography contributes heavily. Sex is like a drug - the more you are exposed to- the more you need.
I think we have gone beyond gay, kink, or anything normal in our culture. It looks more like total degradation of human relationships to a purely transactional exchange. I don't see how it benefits females at all as the young actual women seem resigned to accepting their status as the bearers of holes for the pleasure of others and not worthy of commitment or being treasured, all the while thinking they are "empowered" by allowing themselves to be run through. At first glance it seems like a hedonistic male's paradise when really the perversion and ugly aggression the sexual devolution has fostered in women hes left them demoralized and lacking purpose and the natural desire to have, hold, and protect a woman. Only the most perverse anti-human elements could possibly consider our current social state as good. The only way out that I can imagine is a Christian revival followed by a reasonable adjustment toward tolerance of gay love and stopping there before we go back off the precipice of perversion.
Your sentence about the whole thing's having killed the normal male desire to cherish and protect a woman seems true to me. I do not recognize the country I find myself in. At this point, I want to live as much in the past as possible, build my little life around books, music, and movies which I love, and most important, please God.
Living in the past has routinely been seen as the mark of a personality in deep crisis, but in this hour it seems to me only sane.
I do the same. God bless.
It's disheartening, but we must remember that God Incarnate was fully human, which means he had a longing for marriage. And he was destined to die frustrated in this.
God bless you, as well.
Here's how bad things are. ( I mentioned this somewhere, and hope it wasn't here, but if it was, it bears to be repeated.
It sets the Zeitgeist more finely for us. )
It's no longer possible to get new copies of the books published by the Edward Stratemyer syndicate. That syndicate produced The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, and others, series.
Sure, you can buy new physical copies, but they've been made socially correct. I loved The Hardy Boys, and have not wanted to know the details, but I can imagine they wouldn't have been above making mother Laura, who always was a vague figure, a clinical depressive, Aunt Gertrude an unpartnered lesbian, and so on.
There is a Facebook group which probably is 95% male in membership. It exists solely for members to express their delight at having run down a pre - Wokeness copy of one of the books, and for members to offer tips about where others might be found.
LJ and Bobby Lime; I so resonate with your conversation here (I'm a 71-year-old 'survivor' of 2nd wave feminism and the sexual revolution). Particularly this sentence of LJ's:
"I don't see how it benefits females at all as the young actual women seem resigned to accepting their status as the bearers of holes for the pleasure of others and not worthy of commitment or being treasured, all the while thinking they are "empowered" by allowing themselves to be run through."
My guilty pleasure these days, is doing online jigsaw puzzles like this one: https://thejigsawpuzzles.com/People/Daddy-is-Home-jigsaw-puzzle
Joanie, crossword puzzles mystify me and always have. I feel as hopeless when faced with them as accident investigators may be tempted to feel when they start to reconstruct a passenger plane which has crashed. My big thrill with games is to be found at the Merriam Webster website. It's fun to get their daily newsletter, which is a portal to many, many games; spellings, meanings, all sorts of things to do with words.
If I'm up, I force myself to listen to The Puzzler, or whatever it's called, which is on NPR's Sunday Weekend Edition at approximately 8:43 AM EST. That's always fun. You can't "work" on the six or seven puzzles they throw at you. Either your subconscious hands you the answer within a few seconds or you are done!
I'm always grateful when I do well on it. I reassure myself that my good showing is evidence that I'm holding dementia at bay.
That link is to a jigsaw puzzle, not a crossword puzzle, which I have no time for whatsoever! It is relevant to the conversation, because it's a 1950s version of the family. Take a look and you'll see what I mean!
What strikes me is how quickly white middle class parents will put a homosexual label on their young child. My husband plays golf with a guy who is so sure his son, who is 10, is gay. I have really good gaydar because of my experience as an unwitting beard in the late 90’s and I have never detected an ounce of homo in this sweet little boy. I’ve had my gaydar go off with kids, very rarely. Only twice in 50 years in fact. Once this guy made the comment about his son, I started noticing it everywhere.
To answer the original question, yes, the behavior boundaries are gone.
Yes. It's at least partly due to porn. Jonathan Van Maren would be a great guest for this topic. God bless you Josh!
I don't really consider myself straight as I have sexual relationships with women, tho my LTRs have all been with men. I suspect that bisexuality is incredibly common, and was normal in ancient times and pre-history. I think that the religious mandate against same sex couples were two fold: make more believers, but more importantly, heterosexual pair bonds give almost every man a woman, and keep society peaceful, as a glut of horny, wifeless, frustrated young men did destroy polygamous societies. If you relax these standards and embrace our common and likely innate drift towards bisexuality, you end up in a more libertine and often degenerate society. We have moved hard towards horny-brain-rolling-no-brakes, not *because* of homosexual behavior, but because we lightened waaay up on sexual restrictions, period. That's my theory, anyway. I'm not in favor of moving back to closeted lavender marriages AT ALL, but we need something other than this porn-soaked parade we find ourselves in now.
Nothing at all against bisexuality and all for recognizing it as a legitimate form of desire, but "incredibly common"? "Common and likely innate drift for bisexuality"? Is there evidence for this outside of Freudian psychoanalysis? Freud is a fave, but many of his case studies are n=1.
I find myself rolling my eyes at L B's comment because I find it, ironically, a sign of the times we are living in. People want to believe sexuality is a spectrum, and there is no such thing as a heterosexual, only a prudish person who can't or won't recognize their attraction to people of the same sex. Recently, there have been cases of teachers telling their heterosexual students, "how can you know you're not gay if you haven't had gay sex?" (I am willing to bet they don't say to their gay students, how do you know you're gay if you haven't had heterosexual sex.)
Worse than a sign of the times, I fear. It's the product of a huge agenda to depopulate "civilised" countries so they can be owned by the powerful and occupied by slaves. All the population wars are already lost. There are no equality or fairness issues involved; it's a transparent ruse! It is utterly tragic that people nowadays are too stupid and uneducated to see something even as obvious, and as serious, as this.
Yes, I agree that LB's response ironically provides evidence for Josh's assertion. LB also seems to confuse accepted or tolerated with "incredibly common." I'm wondering, too, how having a wife would have made the hypothetical glut of horny young men peaceful if, as innate bisexuals, they would still long for male company. In the West, the prohibition on same-sex (especially male) relationships has been largely legal (laws used religion for support). Legalizing same-sex relationships has not made them "incredibly common." I am not defending heterosexuality as morally superior, but, statistically, it is the norm. But that's probably enough time spent on a comment likely written by a young person with all the typical confidence of the young.
While I don't know about this theory of it being incredibly common, it's possible that same-sex experimentation was tolerated in the past up to certain ages or in specific contexts, where it did not pose a threat to the social order. It wasn't seen as a conduit to romance, love or marriage, and therefore was not given the same weight or status.
What changed is the acceptance not of private same-sex experiences in specific contexts or life stages, but the acceptance of it as a lifelong romantic orientation -- one that could be openly pursued.
I do think there's something to be explored in terms of whether this acceptance validated and "locked in", so to speak, same-sex desires in young people that in previous eras would have discarded or grown out of such desires (and I count myself potentially in this category, as a bisexual millennial woman who prefers long-term relationships with other women).
So-called "Boston marriages" were accepted/tolerated; Victorian women's close passionate friendships with other women were acceptable. Google "Michael Field." Virginia Woolf had a female lover while married to Leonard. None of it has to do with age. Victorians didn't say stupid shit like "a lesbian until graduation." Male queer sexuality, if caught, was brutally punished for centuries, with the exception of some Middle-Eastern cultures ,Greece, Rome, and Napoleonic France. Age had little to do with it. So there are various degrees of tolerance and punishment across cultures and time periods, but none of them--which is the bone of contention here--makes bisexuality/queer sexuality extremely common. Individual experiences are unique and don't always account for statistics. I am a Gen-Xer hetero woman, who has a sneaking, albeit politically incorrect suspicion that the social disconnect between men and women amongst Millennials
and GenZ-ers leads to a greater number of alternatives to heterosexuality. I will not be convinced otherwise and am, frankly, a little too busy for writing impromptu textbooks.
Yes you're right of course about tolerance of homosexual feelings within close friendships, or the taking of same-sex lovers among women of certain classes in certain contexts. I know about the Bloomsbury Group etc.
So it's not just about age. I was just throwing out some speculation. Certainly In a UK context there's an understanding, for example, that some men had same-sex experiences while at boarding school or the such, but this was not expected to be something they carried on doing.
I guess the point is there's been different levels of tolerance and acceptance of same-sex behaviour and even relationships at different points. And there was always some tolerance too of a certain percentage of men and women remaining unmarried. In societies where families were large, having one sibling out of, say, 7 remain unmarried was unremarkable.
Maybe you're on to something with the idea of social disconnect. Although that could be interpreted in different ways. For example, that feminism made women more likely to reject so-called heteronormative relationships. That the internet atomised people. That certain social trends emasculated men and created tension between the sexes. That marriage as an ideal was very much undermined. And so on
Interesting topic for sure.
I'll be 46 in June. I'm not that young. When I say bisexuality, I'm referring to bisexual *behavior*. I'm uncertain about whether or not "people who have had sex with both men and women over the course of their life" is measurable. Ironically I'm not confident in anything that I have written here, it's purely speculative, and I don't even feel certain that there's a way to know any of this for sure.
"Ironically I'm not confident in anything that I have written here, it's purely speculative, and I don't even feel certain that there's a way to know any of this for sure." This sentence makes me hopeful, though "ironically" is misused. Thank you for your response.
And I suspect that's exactly what the agendas of the last 70 years have all wanted you to believe. Nor is comparing us to Greece and Rome much of a support for your argument; both those empires fell precisely because of their decadence. I reckon that if you were to wander the villages of 1000 years ago and were given a month's wages for every remotely homosexual person you came across, you'd be likely to starve.
Your question would also be viewed as absolute insanity. Everyone back then would have understood that the only reason anyone would think that a good idea would be because they wanted to own and occupy your land and houses.
Well, to be fair, a 1000 years ago "a remotely homosexual person" would not be open about it, even to receive wages. I agree with the rest, per my comment above.
As a bisexual woman myself, you may have a point (especially where women are concerned).
I consciously put the brakes on in my mid-20s as I started to realise that a libertine mindset was not doing me much good. But I very much spent ages 17-25 identifying quite strongly with ideas around sexual fluidity, non-monogamy, and other types of social transgression. I partook in online communities and sought out material that supported my view (books like "The Ethical Slut" or the Bust magazine feminist forum lol).
But there was something never quite convincing about it all. For a period I went to a lot of LGB club nights and had several gay male friends who were big partiers. As much as I sometimes envied their (in retrospect, often reckless) hedonism -- I even used to watch gay porn -- there was also something a little desperate about it. At a point I had to recognise that I didn't really want to aspire to that, and I began to feel a little pathetic about some of my own choices.
At 40 I am now a social conservative. I am libertarian in the sense that people should have the right to a private life and the state shouldn't criminalise behaviour that is simply immoral but not criminal. But I feel we need to uphold basic decency in society and protect kids from this onslaught of depravity. Pop music, Netflix shows (especially the "cutesy" ones like Emily in Paris, etc.), TV ads -- all of it is porn-soaked as you say and I hate it. It rots the mind and corrodes the spirit.
I certainly would not describe myself as a social conservative and I'm five or six years older than you. I've noticed a lot of the same stuff that you've noticed, though. I see the problems with a liberated sexual culture and I also see problems with the nuclear family. This is not an indictment of these things! I don't know what if anything should replace them, I'm just noticing. So I guess I'm not socially conservative, just puzzled.
I love how you are increasingly calling out antiwhiteism, the disease destroying Western Civilization. Antiwhites now control nearly all the nodes of power in America and throughout the once-West. If you'd like to defeat antiwhiteism and reclaim our destiny, the best resources are the book Go Free and the community you can can find via NoWhiteGuilt.org. I'm confident you would be a welcomed there, both as a guest and/or to have author Jason Köhne as a guest on your show.
Personally speaking, I recall a formative influence on me as I entered college over 20 years ago (hurts to type that) was picking up the local, weekly free "newspaper" that ran the Savage Love sex advice column written by Dan Savage.
Whether he was the zeitgeist or merely channeling it, it's hard to say. But that column had a large impact and Dan was on TV (and still is, I believe) frequently on venues such as Bill Maher.
And central to the ethos of the column was, basically kink-acceptance. Dan was writing from his experience as a gay man - and he took it as a given that to be a good lover you should question your own boundaries and try to be open to trying out what your partner desired - even if it was pretty out there. I know that radically changed my very parochial, Catholic-raised view of sex and what was "acceptable" in the bedroom.
I feel confident in saying Dan Savage played a part, but not confident in saying exactly how large. But, your question made me think of his column and how much it seemed to be taken as gospel among every liberal I knew at the time. As always, I think you're on to something.
Yes, Savage coined a phrase, something like you have to be game for doing new stuff with your partner. I think it was even an acronym; I'll have to see if I remember it.
He also famously said that he and his husband are "monogamish".
He was absolutely influential. I'm an older millennial too and although sometimes I bristled at how casually Savage would recommend some fairly far-out stuff, I also imbibed his sort of mentality that so long as there's consent and you discuss boundaries, there's no such thing as an unhealthy kink or an unethical approach to sex.
I feel quite differently now.
"Good, giving and game." I read Dan Savage religiously for years, lol.
I'm in my 50s and have been friends with gay people since junior high in the 80s. Here's what I've noticed - gay people are getting more domestic and straight people are getting kinkier. So I myself would NOT call this "gay-ification". I know a lot more gay married 20-somethings with mortages than ever before and I know a lot more heteros screwing new people every weekend. I think if we actually looked at percentages we'd find that it's now equally matched. Kinky straight people are now free to be kinky and domestic gay people are now free to be domestic. We're just noticing what wasn't there before.
On the darker side, there's a lot more despair in the world, and in the 70s and 80s when gay men were in despair (the 70s from rejection from family and the 80s from the AIDS crisis) this despair could be expressed in BDSM eroticism, scenes, fantasies and power exchange relationships. Straight people also used this form of expression to manage despair, but it's acceptance and popularity have gone up so that it's gone from very underground, to more commonplace.
"Gay people are now free to be domestic and straight people are now free to be kinky" is such an astute observation. I've never really resonated with the hedonistic gay man stereotype just because I had a very close friend from 5th grade on who we all knew was gay and was our valedictorian. His dad was a cop and he had lovely supportive parents. He used to take the social conservative point of view in debates. I'm glad that he came of age in an era when he was free to be domestic because he was never going to be hanging out at a bath house.
What I observe in the big city I live in is that there is a stark divide between the Grindr gays and the domesticated ones. I don't actually believe that gays have become more domesticated, I think we notice the ones that are choosing that path more, because these days they can be more open.
In my wider network I see the divide quite clearly. Just to give a couple of examples: one of my friends has been with his partner since they were 21. They are now in their early 30s and are getting married later this year. They are monogamous, never go to clubs (they prefer to cook and watch films), and their social circle is almost entirely straight (I am one of the exceptions).
On the other end of the spectrum I have a friend who is 40 and ticks every single box for hedonism and recklessness. He's in the art world and probably two-thirds of his social circle is also gay men. During lockdowns he got into a habit of going cruising in parks and dabbling in meth (something he has now got out of, but he still has a massive drinking problem). He has only ever had one romantic relationship, which blew up spectacularly after he and his then-bf decided to open up the relationship.
Agree with everyone here. Another one who sees porn as a huge problem now for kids & families. And, I think the more you watch the more you need to go down the dark hole of deviant sex. Young teen boys are particularly susceptible and impressionable. They may start with straight sex but I doubt it's long before they're watching gay porn and then things that are darker and darker. All they have to do is open their phones and there it is... and of course, now it's even in the classroom lessons. Then they start to think maybe they're gay since that's the kind of sex they like to watch. I think their brains are being re-wired by porn. Not that there aren't people who have the propensity to be gay but I don't think it's as large a group as we're made to believe now.
Yes, this is the elephant in the room.
Porn consumption can mould people's sexual habits, preferences and behaviours. It's creating a dissasociation and a lot of people are trying out all kinds of things that their natural instincts would never have leaned into. It is porn that is activating those desires and if you ever comb through Reddit communities devoted to porn genres, trans stuff, and kinks, you see a lot of people own up to this.