• TJA!@sh.itjust.works
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    10 months ago

    The question that now comes to my mind: What is gay exactly? Is this specifically just when you like dicks? Or are also looks coming into okay here?

    Are you also gay if you like people who look like women but have a penis? If yes, are you then straight if you prefer people that look like men but have a vagina?

    Afaik there are also people that have both. If you fall in love with them without having ever seen their genitals, are you then still automatically gay?

    Never thought about that before tbh.

      • hydrospanner@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Man, the more society progresses in open and honest conversations about sexuality, the more I’m sure that “spectrum” doesn’t even begin to do justice to the vast, bizarre complexity of human sexuality.

        It’s more like…that crazy 3 tier chess they play in Star Trek.

        • Leg@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Yeah, I even felt weird using the word spectrum. I’m visualizing a 3-dimensional gradient where each individual point in space reflects a unique sexuality. It’s about as unique to you as your fingerprint. It’s insane to me that we had such black and white categories for so much of our history.

        • Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          There are actually different models of talking about sexuallity. The one most common that you know where there’s stuff like gay, lesbian, bi… But when you have trans folks that doesn’t nessisarily give much credence to genital preferences. It’s more a reference to the cultural gender expectations. A cis man and a pre-medical trans man is still gay where a cis man and a trans woman in the same situation is straight… But when you are non-binary this model doesn’t serve because if I am culturally neither male or female is me liking a specific presentation gay or straight? If you’re defaulting to what my body type is then neither is correct. I am not pan or bi because I don’t like both and I am not straight or gay because those things frame relationships between physical sexes not fitting neatly into the changing cultural landscape of gender.

          The other less used model just describes what someone finds sexy. A gynophile is attracted to feminine presentation, androphiles like the masculine, Skoliophiles are into non-binary people and ambiphiles like all.

          It is a little 4D chess but it’s easier to pick up when you don’t have to account for old rules.

        • Cethin
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          10 months ago

          It’s an n-dimensional spectra, but I’m not really sure what n is in this case. It’s at least two, with one dimension being masculine/feminine and the other being penis/vagina, but there are way more things to sexual preference than that. We need one for dominant/submissive, multiple dimensions for hair color, maybe age, and all kinds of other factors. Every person will have a range of preference for all of these, and they aren’t just the far ends.

      • Dyskolos
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        10 months ago

        Spectrum is fine and all, but gay is gay. If gay would mean many things, the word would be useless. It already became useless for its original meaning, let’s not kill it again :-)

        • hydrospanner@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          If gay would mean many things, the word would be useless.

          Yeah, totally. I mean, that’s definitely why there aren’t any words at all in the entire English language that have more than one strictly defined meaning, and that meaning has never, ever changed.

          • Dyskolos
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            10 months ago

            Oh man. I should’ve used the word homosexual to be precise.

        • dvoraqs@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Love is multiple things and is still meaningful for us.

          Theoretically I can see somebody not being attracted to guys, as in masculine people, or just males, but still being turned on by penises as we see in OP’s example. That person might not call themselves gay since they wouldn’t want to be in a relationship with any guys, but might be interested in a hookup with a trans woman who still had their dick.

          Maybe their is some nuance in what being gay is or there is room for another descriptor for this phenomenon.

          Edit: reading below, this person might be hetero-romantic and homo-sexual.

          • Dyskolos
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            10 months ago

            Not judging or anything, i never cared who wanted to make love to whatever.

            But he really wanted dudes. Women were “disgusting”. whatever floats ones boat, but this is simply the definition of gay, if you like the term or not. It’s just a word describing a preference. A dude just liking cocks on a dude’s body and person and gender, then it’s plain gay.

            Guess in his case (my generation, we both being genx) it was just the typical upbringing that said gay=bad. Guess the shit stucks deeply, hence his cognitive dissonance and extreme adversity to gayness.

      • Asafum@feddit.nl
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        10 months ago

        I honestly have no idea what it is, if it’s society, if it’s internal, no idea, but I’m absolutely 100% not aroused by men at all, and just knowing a m2f transgender person once had the biological parts of a man is enough to kill any arousal that could have been.

        Not that it’s a common question, but my “answer” to “could I ever date/sleep with a transgender person” is “I’m not mature enough to be comfortable with that.” I blame myself in some way, but I am “repulsed” by the idea (not repulsed by the person, just the thought of intercourse)

        I hope it doesn’t need to be said, but just to be sure: I want everyone to be able to live their best life and to be happy and accepted, I have no hate for transgender people or anyone (except billlionares, private insurance companies and maybe some landlords)

    • TheFriar@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      Sucking a cock doesn’t make you gay. Only wanting to suck dicks and finding women unattractive and NBs unappealing? Yeah, you might be pretty gay. But if you just want to fuck with the occasional dick sometimes? You’re not gay. There are a million different variations that don’t make you gay. Some of them involve penises, sure.

    • Dyskolos
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      10 months ago

      Well in his case it wasn’t just the dick itself. Women were “disgusting”. So the dick needed to be attached to a manly man.

      What exactly is gay? To me it’s when a manly man likes manly men. If you’d fall in love with a woman and THEN see her male genitals, it wouldn’t be gay. She just was an ass to not tell you earlier 😁 If you’d see both genitals or none, it wouldn’t be either. And yes, there always have been those with both or none.