Comment by stego-tech
1 year ago
For what it's worth, I'm also a single gay man and think similarly at times about the path not taken, and why I chose not to adopt as I had originally planned in my 20s. It sucks, but I'm content with being the cool Uncle to my niblings and providing external support to my siblings as needed. Society needs more than just parents in order for children to thrive, and I believe queer folk are ideally suited to fill in a lot of those roles.
As for my comments on sex specifically, I'll admit I'm speaking through the perspective of someone who A) doesn't have it in order to procreate, and B) has a healthier relationship with it than many of my own peers might. It's not solely an act of procreation or hedonism, but it can fill both roles - though I will only ever know it from the perspective of pleasure alone.
I appreciate you sharing your thoughts like that. Thank you.
Disclaimer: my thought process tends to be somewhat autistic, I don’t mean any offense. As a non gay man I am just curious to hear your perspective.
From a strictly biological perspective, I think it could be argued that gay “sex” isn’t actually sex. Like, what makes it sex? Is it sex for pleasure? Or is it something adjacent to sex? That has some commonalities with sex, but isn’t actually sex. Like there is a part of sex missing from the equation. Why do we still call it sex?
I kind of assume it’s the kind of thing hardly anyone thinks about and the notion of thinking about it will just make everyone angry. Sorry!
In society an affair is still an affair even if no PV intercourse occurred. Sex comes under the category of “I’ll know it when I see it” / “just understood” things most humans do not realize has very fuzzy edges. The narrow definition is, from the autism perspective, one of the many useless definitions. You will be better served by (yet another) exhaustive list of edge cases.
Not the person you're asking, but I'm of the impression that colloquially, the verb "sex" includes more than strictly the traditional historical definition. I'll refrain from getting into specific details here, but I think the answer to this question is that many people use words in a manner that diverges from literal definitions.
There's a concept in linguistics that language is constantly evolving. As someone on the spectrum myself, with a tendency towards systemizing the world around me, I understand how frustrating this can feel. A particularly excruciating example is the transition of the intended meaning of "literally" to increasingly mean "figuratively", particularly in social contexts. Makes me want to tear the skin off my face, lol.
While this isn't strictly relegated to social concepts, I understand how frustrating it can be to struggle to navigate this phenomenon in social contexts and be misinterpreted as a bad faith actor.
At the end of the day, I try to deal with it by accepting that not everyone else experiences the world the way I do, and that it's as unfair for me to expect everyone else to modify the way they perceive, process, and utilize information (including language) to accommodate my idiosyncrasies.
Thanks for the reply. I do have similar impedance mismatches with the social consensus in a lot of areas. In everyday life I basically do what you are suggesting, but internally I end up having thoughts like this that I typically only feel safe sharing non-anonymously with people who are close.
I do sometimes wonder whether mass education and extensive media exposure from childhood have essentially brainwashed all but the most stubborn-minded of us, who are then labeled “autistic”.
On the topic, if we did take a strict definition of sex, this seems like a fruitful angle of attack for traditionalists. Like, today gay men are regarded as having lots and lots of sex, which is awesome. But if you take this other perspective, most of them are virgins, which is lame. I wonder why the traditionalists/far right haven’t taken this propaganda approach…
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I assure you, your thoughts on this are not unique or something hardly anyone thinks about, they're just not well reasoned. People have sex for a lot of reasons, and having children is, proportionally, almost never the primary driver. Sex is not the act of fertilization of an ovum by a sperm. If it was, we would call IVR 'sex', which obviously nobody does.
I never said sex was the act of fertilization, you are putting words in my mouth. I also never said anything about recreational sex, I of course agree that exists and is sex. You seem to be disagreeing while saying a bunch of things I agree with.
> I'm content with being the cool Uncle to my niblings and providing external support to my siblings as needed.
For what is worth, I remember when being a kid such uncles were superimportant to me and I remember them fondly.