"Stuff" that makes you angry, sad, whatever

[Prak]

I'm sure people here have seen little yellow tags like this:


And that one's likely the least offensive on that site. So they get around, so what.

There are five of those plastered in a restroom on campus, likely more in others, and that's not counting the two that were mostly peeled off (they're the kind of stickers that are very difficult to fully remove).

Others cite rate of AIDS in gay men compared to the general population (does anyone else see the problem inherent in this? because the person that wrote it seems to not have picked up on it), average length of gay marriages (likely artificially short because people keep taking the right away from gays causing the marriages to legally end, as far as I know), the average number of partners per year in addition to their significant other (6 apparently. Hmm.... lets see... if you're saying they have more than 100 partners in their lifetime, and their marriages last two years on average... and you're looking at average number of partners "in addition to their significant other"... hm, honestly I'm surprised you came up with such a low number.)

Obviously they're insulting. But more insidious than that, they likely self perpetuate. They site statistics for incidence of major depression, disorders and attempted suicide, and lets face it, those are likely very much due to the abuse and assault they face for being gay, which is an atmosphere that is undeniably perpetuated by these stickers and their assertion that being gay is some how inferior or wrong. Hell, I'm not even gay, and these stickers have provoked a major response from me (ok, that may be because they imply the same attitude towards bisexuals, but still...)

This shit just made me kind of... sad, very angry, and... fuck, I already didn't want to deal with the rest of the day...

[Juton]

That statistic reeks of bullshit.

[Kaelik]

More than 25% of gay men are under 30.

Either:

A) They are extrapolating based on current rate (Fail, because what if you settle down, or you know, stop being a horny teen/20 something.)
B) They are only counting people at the end of their lives (Fail, all those people are different than people now, partially because they grew up in a time when it wasn't really possible to settle down with one partner, because it was illegal)
C) 23 year old gay guys get way more sex than straight guys, like way way way more. (Fail, because if you can have sex 100 times period by the age of 23, you are doing better for yourself than any Fundy Christian ever has. Much less 100 different partners. How many gay males do you know in your area, if this is true, literally every single one has had sex with every other one.)
D) Making shit up.

I'm going to go with D.

[Username17]

That statistic reeks of bullshit.

It's one of those things that wouldn't even matter if it was true. Void of context, it doesn't mean anything. The context of course is that only 29% of men have had more than 15 sexual partners. Meaning that if that statistic were true, being gay gets you laid. Like, a lot.

Of course, it isn't actually true. The statistic comes from a pre-AIDS study that asked non-monogamous homosexual men in 1978 how many people they had slept with. So the selection for high numbers is pretty obvious. And even then, it's cherry picked data by the family research council, so I can't even tell what the raw data even looked like.

The stuff about homosexual relationships being brief is again bullshit from the Family Research Council. Here's the deal: couples (that is, people who are dating) break up all the time. The FRC took a study that kept track of how long people stayed in a relationship before breaking up in Holland. And the average was apparently 1.5 years. Then they try to say that because people break up with their boyfriend on a fairly regular basis, that people should not be allowed to marry their boyfriend if they decide to get more serious. It would be like if we lumped all the middle school dating into the marriages and found an "average" time for a heterosexual relationship to last.

Looking at actual data from like The Kinsey Institute or the CDC or other reputable organizations, and of course you don't see anything exciting at all. Roughly 6% of men are sexually attracted to men. And they really don't stand out much in the statistics other than that.

-Username17

[Wesley Street]

Actually, I haven't seen those tags. But it's been 10+ years since my school days and I haven't seen them in public... yet.

[Prak]

Actually, I haven't seen those tags. But it's been 10+ years since my school days and I haven't seen them in public... yet.

Well, I mean people in general. Maybe not you specifically, but someone other than me has likely seen them, but whatever.

Glad to know my simple understanding actually pans out, though.

[Neurosis]

apparently self-identified gay men are fucking pimps

[Maj]

apparently self-identified gay men are fucking pimps

Do you mean that's who they're having sex with or that's what they are?

[Josh_Kablack]

Frank, your First link says several very exciting things - chief among them the strong implication that men somehow manage to have more heterosexual intercourse than women do.

Either respondents are lying to the CASI set-up or researchers are carefully choosing where to draw distinctions to make a point for their funder(s). I'm very curious why "15 or more lifetime partners" is the promiscuity line. Why isn't it 12 or 20 or 200 or "an average of more than N per year since first sexual experience"

[cthulhu]

Frank, your First link says several very exciting things - chief among them the strong implication that men somehow manage to have more heterosexual intercourse than women do.

This is a well known fact - both parties are lying about their sexual histories.

Men are socially encouraged to lie about their exploits to big them up, and women are encouraged to under report by a different set of social pressures.

Basically it boils down to you being a big man if you get laid, but a woman is a slut if she sleeps around.

[CatharzGodfoot]

apparently self-identified gay men are fucking pimps

Do you mean that's who they're having sex with or that's what they are?

That took me a second.

[erik]

It is not impossible that there could be a gender disparity for amount of heterosexual couplings.

Depending upon how the average is taken and how thorough the sample sizes are, then men could well have more heterosexual couplings than women if there were a minority of women who were participating in a disproportionately larger amount of couplings. Especially if their profession were to have sex with different men, that throws things all out of whack right there.

Of course there is bias in sampling because both genders will lie to themselves and to surveyors.

[Koumei]

Men are socially encouraged to lie about their exploits to big them up, and women are encouraged to under report by a different set of social pressures.

Basically it boils down to you being a big man if you get laid, but a woman is a slut if she sleeps around.

Sadly true. Though I have seen more instances of people realising "If she has sex with lots of guys, my chances are pretty good. AWESOME!" and that is seriously a step up from the Master Key theory*.

And yeah, if the 100 partners thing was true, then all it would mean is "Gay men get heaps of sex. Consider being a gay man."

And besides, a good number of straight couples (indeed, marriages) are the result of being drunk and meeting at the bar. You wouldn't buy a toaster when drunk, that requires too much careful thought, but a partner for "life", sure.

Anyway, random sadness not related to being gay: I am such a soft touch. The dog really wants to be an inside dog (he used to be, but the lease agreement states that animals are to remain outside). And the weather is cold and shitty. I feel really bad whenever he whimpers outside.

*"If a key can open any lock, it's a master key. If a lock can be opened by any key, it's a shitty lock." I'm sure I could think up some perfectly good metaphor that reverses the Good/Bad, but I feel that if lots of people are having lots of sex, the world is probably in a better state.

[Username17]

Frank, your First link says several very exciting things - chief among them the strong implication that men somehow manage to have more heterosexual intercourse than women do.

Either respondents are lying to the CASI set-up or researchers are carefully choosing where to draw distinctions to make a point for their funder(s). I'm very curious why "15 or more lifetime partners" is the promiscuity line. Why isn't it 12 or 20 or 200 or "an average of more than N per year since first sexual experience"

I thought that at first too. But it doesn't say mean values, it says median values. For men, the median value is higher, which means that the sex which is being had is more evenly distributed among men than it is among women.

So 29% of men had sex with 15 or more women, while only 9% of women had sex with 15 or more men. Which just means that the women in that 9% are getting more action than the men in that 29%. Certainly, a woman can take men 3 at a time, a feat that I don't think I could even structurally manage to match.

What this points to is a gross disparity in sluttiness. We're like the opposite of deer. Apparently small minorities of the female population have sex with almost the entire male population.

-Username17

[cthulhu]

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m ... _61487449/\

Overview of the topic.

[Prak]

today was a completely shit day, until just very recently when I actually got a chance to decompress. But in some of that shit apatheism came up, and I seriously cannot think about it without my mind immediately thinking of Appatheism, as in, the worship of Appa from Avatar the Last Airbender, and I just cannot help but fucking smile when I think about worshipping a giant flying bison with six legs. Maybe that's all religion needs to be about, though.

[PoliteNewb]

And yeah, if the 100 partners thing was true, then all it would mean is "Gay men get heaps of sex. Consider being a gay man."

Only if you enjoy gay sex (or, I suppose, are really hard up). If someone offered me a lifetime supply of dark roast coffee, it would not seem like a great deal, because I don't enjoy coffee, even though some people love it.

(that said, I don't know why so many people are so weird about the gender of who they're fucking, when it's more about the acts involved...a bj is pretty much a bj, no matter who's giving it.)

*"If a key can open any lock, it's a master key. If a lock can be opened by any key, it's a shitty lock." I'm sure I could think up some perfectly good metaphor that reverses the Good/Bad, but I feel that if lots of people are having lots of sex, the world is probably in a better state.

You don't need a reversed metaphor; people just need to realize the original metaphor is flawed, in that it assumes that women are supposed to deny men sex, and men are supposed to try to get as much of it as possible. Those are just bullshit social memes, so they can be safely ignored if you can just bear admitting that women enjoy sex too.

[Username17]

(that said, I don't know why so many people are so weird about the gender of who they're fucking, when it's more about the acts involved...a bj is pretty much a bj, no matter who's giving it.)

Disagree.



-Username17

[RobbyPants]

I think the problem with Big Bird isn't his gender

[Vnonymous]

Gay men do get laid more than straight men. This is pretty obvious. Women generally want to have sex less often than guys do, and are more discriminating. Remove that, and you get a whole lot of sex happening. This isn't a bad thing though, so I don't see why they're bringing it up. I'd say that their statistics are probably bunk as well, but the "gay men have lots of sex" stereotype is true, even if they do stay in committed relationships and are never promiscuous.

[Josh_Kablack]

So 29% of men had sex with 15 or more women, while only 9% of women had sex with 15 or more men. Which just means that the women in that 9% are getting more action than the men in that 29%. Certainly, a woman can take men 3 at a time, a feat that I don't think I could even structurally manage to match.

What this points to is a gross disparity in sluttiness. We're like the opposite of deer. Apparently small minorities of the female population have sex with almost the entire male population.

And if that is the case, why is the article lead "Men are more likely to play the field than women" because that is not what your possible explanation of the vague data summary provided in the article suggests.

I'm still curious why they drew the line at "15 or more partners" and would like to see data for other numbers - because that would better indicate if people are lying or if it is a case where men tend to have several partners, most women have just a few partners, but a few women have an incrediably large number of partners.

Of course from the woefully incomplete info in that article, it's also potentially valid to conclude that "apparently women with more than 15 sexual partners are notably less likely to participate in research studies" - they could be unavailable for the sample due to being busy caring for their heaps of kids, dead from STDs, unavailable due to the demands of Porn shoots, or kidnapped by space aliens.

Also interesting is cthulu's link's assertion that number of hetero prior year partners reported seems to be equivalent for both genders but lifetime partners diverges. To me, that further suggests that people are misrepresenting reality in their responses.

[Koumei]

Of course from the woefully incomplete info in that article, it's also potentially valid to conclude that "apparently women with more than 15 sexual partners are notably less likely to participate in research studies" - they could be unavailable for the sample due to being busy caring for their heaps of kids, dead from STDs, unavailable due to the demands of Porn shoots, or kidnapped by space aliens.

If I was an alien abducting humans, I would definitely choose women who were more inclined to have sex with a lot of people.

[Username17]

I'm still curious why they drew the line at "15 or more partners" and would like to see data for other numbers

Isn't the mean value 7? 15 would be "more than double the average" which seems as good a cutoff point as any.

Of course, if you aren't monogamous hitting 100 isn't particularly hard. It means going out and trying to score and succeeding once a week for two years. Even less if you ever get laid at any other point in your life.

-Username17

[Wesley Street]

Women generally want to have sex less often than guys do, and are more discriminating.

Not true: http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/sexsurv.htm.

[Lago PARANOIA]

From a strict logical perspective (which has no place in discussion of evolutionary behavior I know, but bear with me) it makes more sense for women to physically desire sex more often than men--because human pregnancy is incredibly dangerous, especially back when our ancestors where prying open bones in the savannas of Africa. A time when you'd honestly be more safe playing Russian Roulette than bringing a child to term.

Obviously evolution would need to have some pretty big incentive to go past the 'holy shit, having sex is very likely to kill me' fear. YMMV though.

Certainly, a woman can take men 3 at a time, a feat that I don't think I could even structurally manage to match.

You expect to become a doctor with such a negative, can't-do attitude like that?