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As a non-straight, the notion that men and women are driven by slightly different interests, that result in different sexual and dating behaviours, is so obvious that I am amazed it would be a revelation to any straight person.

Just look at the relationship patterns of gay men vs. lesbian women. About 40% of gay men in America are in an open relationship. The practice is basically unknown among lesbians. Infidelity is reported as slightly more common among gay men than among heterosexuals. Nearly unknown for lesbians.

Pornography, sex clubs and hookup apps are close to ubiquitous among gay men. To the point some have sardonically argued these things are gay culture. They exist for lesbians too, but comparatively speaking they're niche; lesbian culture is, arguably, centred on poetry.

Left to their own devices without the other sex to mess things up, the pattern is clear enough.

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> Just look at the relationship patterns of gay men vs. lesbian women. About 40% of gay men in America are in an open relationship. The practice is basically unknown among lesbians. Infidelity is reported as slightly more common among gay men than among heterosexuals. Nearly unknown for lesbians.

On the flip side though, homosexual men tend to have the highest relationship satisfaction levels nationwide:

https://www.advocate.com/people/2020/2/13/study-gay-people-h...

While female homosexual relationships tend to have the lowest satisfaction and heterosexual relationships fall right in the middle for both sexes.

There’s probably a lot to do with that (biological imperatives, DINC, etc); but it’s telling that people always point to high incidents of open relationships or promiscuity despite the evidence of happiness.

* Also worth pointing out that this only focuses on binary relationships and not alternative situations (translesbian/transgay, fluid, poly, etc).

The feminist left is convinced that humans are PURE Tabula Rasa and that NOTHING is biological - everything is either a choice or it's a social construct.

Far too many straight people have bought into this nonsense - thinking that men and women are 100% identical, which is not based in science (at all) but in ideology via indoctrination and bullying.

You have to become "red-pilled" (which is primarily a rediscover that there are biological sex differences and they affect behavior) to realize this today as a straight male.

Women only have an incentive to think about it otherwise when they hit the fertility wall and it's (often) too late.

Is that really true or is it a "straw woman" argument? Can you recommend a feminist left person who can explain this position, because it seems outlandish to me that someone could think there weren't biological differences. What about testosterone and estrogen?

Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kathie Sarachild, Lierre Keith and Michele Wallace.

These are a few names of Radical Feminist thinkers who ascribe to the view that gender is a "fashionable concept" or the concept of femininity is "ritualized submission."

http://meetinggroundonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/GE...

Are a few 'Radical Feminist thinkers' the same thing as 'the feminist left'?

No, not really. If anything the opposite view (uncharitably, that men are all doomed by their biology) is not uncommon either.

And of course most feminists (FWIW I consider myself one) are not tabula rasa types. Very few people worth taking seriously believe that literally, these days. The evidence is overwhelmingly against the idea.

More often you'll hear something like that the slight male tendency towards asserting dominance and impulsive behaviour compared to women is just that, slight. And that it is greatly amplified by culture and socialization. (And well, this is probably true to some degree?)

One can, of course, believe the sexes are somewhat different on average, while believing in their equal value, ability and merit in all the things that are actually important.

I mean the labels "left" and "right" themselves are to describe binary leaning aka "radical". Normal people would "lean left" on some issues and "right" on some others, to varying degrees, hence would not be so easily identified as such.

Ok, great thx, I can begin to get a handle on it. I don't see it addressing biology, but I can start here.

Honestly this is like you asked a question about introductory reading about leftism and someone handed you the Little Red Book. This is among the most divisive, vocal minority, and inside baseball texts produced by leftist feminism in the past decade.

If you're genuinely interested in an introduction to the idea of femininity / the female as a social construction actually within the main leftist/feminist discourse I recommend Julia Serrano's Whipping Girl, or if you really want something controversial Andrea Long Chu's Females: A Concern. And yes, in those case you will find xyzzy21's and AndrewKemendo's claims are strawmen.

Get this TERF shit outta here, there's no alliance between them and the modern feminist left people associate with Twitter/Tumblr and love to complain about.

He's saying women don't have agency until they hear their clock going off. It's misogynist gibberish.

You can call it that.

But both data and research and confirm that.

Also there is plenty of anecdotal evidence especially in IT of highly successful career women that would drop everything just to have have children.

I don’t think very many people actually believe this in the real world. Even in my left-leaning bubble, just about everyone recognises that there are obvious flaws in much of the logic present by many internet feminists.

I want to believe you're right. There seems, however, to be a disconnect between what "most people think" and policies being enacted in Western cultures. The policies, especially in the education of children, seem to be aligning against such reality and in favor of the assertion of zero distinctions between biological gender. This disconnect is apparent in legislation and regulation as well.

While I agree on the gist of what you're saying, and I've found the same agreement among "normal women" - that is regular people IRL outside the Twitter echo chamber - there is a politicised left v right tone to your post which irks me the wrong way and is absolutely unnecessary.

The world is more complex than woke left vs redpilled right that most propaganda on the Internet would have you believe.

> The world is more complex than woke left vs redpilled right

As another gay man chiming in, it’s totally my experience that in the self-described queer/woke circles I traffic in it’s almost exclusively the lefties that have morphed into insufferable moral-binary authoritarians.

As a younger person, it seems like it used to be that LGBT people were on the margins of society and since they had a unique vantage and couldn’t care - they were able to say the things that couldn’t be said.

But now it’s the complete opposite, and queer people are precisely the first ones to tell you what can’t be said.

This is one of the best summaries of this thought process I have read.

To today's unlucky 1000: there used to be(at least the main one was shut down) a Reddit group /r/theredpill that basically argues that violence and exploitation are healthy parts of relationships, characterized by such phrases as "swallowing the (red)pill" or "instigate isolate escalate". Just so you know when to run.

The expression comes from “the matrix” movie, and to just about everyone outside a small Reddit circle, has a well established meaning that does not include violence or exploitation in any possible way.

Yes and no. "Take the red pill" comes from the Matrix, but the adjective "redpilled" is associated with a particular political and ideological fringe which started on Reddit's /r/TheRedPill, from which descended the various incel subreddits, MGTOW, etc. - to be fair, it wasn't that negative initially, just a bit questionable, but as it happens these days the place became more and more politicised, radical, hating women, and associated with the American far right and emotionally stunted angry teenagers.

> The feminist left

“The”.

Based on my experience — I know plenty of feminists and lefties, and my ex is a literal self-described “eat the rich” revolutionary communist — “The feminist left” is about a coherent a group as, say, Scorpios.

For example, I don’t know anyone who believes human minds are blank slates, and the last time I even discussed the topic was 20 years ago in my philosophy A-level.

Except when it comes to sexual orientation. Then its set in stone from conception.

> lesbian culture is, arguably, centred on poetry.

Pardon?

Sorry, I should not have left a half-baked half-joke idea hanging on a sensitive topic like that.

In the 1990s, back when we had physical bookstores, and when such things were even segregated sometimes, this was pretty in your face. If you went into a lesbian bookstore you would find a great preponderance of poetry. A gay men's bookstore would, by contrast, be relatively overloaded with how-to manuals and erotic novels of the more descriptively explicit kind. To this day, there are simply far more lesbian literature periodicals, especially poetry ones. This shouldn't be too surprising; straight women also read a lot more poetry than straight men in the USA today.

When I look at typical lists of prominent gay men and lesbians in the American arts, I see a pattern. The men tend towards film, photography, dance and musical theatre. The women towards poetry, modernist theatre, and perhaps in conflict with my hypothesis, comic novels.

There is no gay male equivalent of similar status to Audre Lorde. It's hard to imagine, really, what that might even be like. And there is no lesbian equivalent of John Waters. Even within their genres, I find the likes of Bechdal and Baldwin have different... natures? I admit it's a little hard to articulate without sounding like some sex-essentialist mouthbreather.

I figure one perspective is a bit more emotionally introspective than the other, and one perspective is a bit more embodied than the other. And it tends to be reflected in the kind of arts and the nature of the arts produced. If this is more than just an observation bias on my part it is of course only a slight tendency and it should not be taken too seriously; Alan Ginsberg was not a lesbian.

You read the most thoughtful things sometimes, thanks

> There is no gay male equivalent of similar status to Audre Lorde.

"Similar status" is frustratingly vague if someone wants to argue this. Fame? Whitman. Canonical? Wilde. Political? Gunn.

> And there is no lesbian equivalent of John Waters.

You're implying the difference must be something quite fundamental, but every time I read a statement like this I'm reminded of Gregory Corso's comments when someone asked him why there were so few women among the beat writers.

There were women, they were there, I knew them, their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock. In the 50s if you were male you could be a rebel, but if you were female your families had you locked up. There were cases, I knew them, someday someone will write about them.

Very, very few other mammals are monogamous. Most birds are monogamous, but even in birds, about half of them mate for life and the others mate seasonally, meaning they find a new mate even season. It would be truly bizarre if we were not only one of the only monogamous mammals, but also mate for life!

Monogamy is, more or less, a female fantasy. All women love the fact that birds mate for life. Meanwhile males fantasise about polygamy. That's why porn exists.

It's no surprise that the original "tinder" was Grindr, a gay app. It's perfect for gay men. Tinder, on the other hand, doesn't change the game at all. If anything it concentrates even more attention on the top men as men swipe right on about 80% of women and women swipe left on 80% of men.

> Monogamy is, more or less, a female fantasy. All women love the fact that birds mate for life. Meanwhile males fantasise about polygamy

Maybe there is a kernel of truth to it deep in our evolutionary/reproductive drive, but every guy I know, without exception, wants a monogamous relationship.

As a guy, can confirm.

Don't mistake mate guarding for monogamy. Mate guarding is completely compatible with polygamy and is seen in other great apes. When men say they want monogamy, what they mean is they want exclusive access to their female. That doesn't mean they don't want other females in addition. Monogamy is something males trade to get exclusivity. It doesn't mean this is what they want.

If you truly believe men want monogamy then how do you explain porn? It's a huge industry and more an accepted part of life than ever. Do you think it's all being consumed by a few guys you don't know?

No, every guy I know, including myself, consumes porn. But it's not because I or they want polygamy. I'm not even sure how you're making that connection, since that's quite the leap.

How is it a leap? You're literally feeding the part of your brain that wants sex with other women.

That says more about your circle of acquaintances than about guys in general. I've been around a fair number of non monogamish folks and plenty of guys are comfortable with their partners having other men and some explicitly encourage it or even find partners for them. r/Swingers and r/Cuckold and r/hotwife are huge communities.

>Monogamy is, more or less, a female fantasy.

This is such a grotesque oversimplification that it's basically wrong. Both men and women have each evolved optimal mating strategies involving a calculated balance between gene-seeking and mate-seeking. It's in a man's interest to find a partner with good/compatible genes and invest his energies into high-success-ratio children. It's also in his interest to "spread his wild oats" as far and wide as possible, since it costs him basically nothing. On the woman's side, children always come with heavy biological strings attached, which shifts the balance - men she sleeps with need to offset that cost with either exceptionally good genes or by committing to help, if not with raising the children then at least during the pregnancy (I imagine hunting for food is no picnic when you're 8 months in).

So men and women both engage in "casual sex", at different rates. Men and women both seek committed long-term relationships, at approximately similar rates. Men and women also cheat situationally within those relationships - men with whoever they can get, women with the exceptionally attractive. Men and women aren't the same, but they're fundamentally playing a similar game.

What I'm going to say will sound pop psychology. Maybe that's all it is.

As a gay man, it's been my experience that quite a few men are totally monogamous, and not for any particular reason. For all the usual ones you hear, even just that the idea seems unsettling or angering to them.

Many men are not. Some do not get much if any jealousy. Some can easily put up with monogamy if it means they get to keep their monogamous lover. Some cannot.

The non-monogamous still seem to do well with "monogamish" in many cases. It can be an open pairing of various kinds of arrangements. Sometimes it works as a well-defined polyamory-style group relationship. Sometimes a small group of best friends and lovers, long-term and even life-long, and a fuzzier shifting periphery of old and new friends and ongoing acquaintances.

And a few are simply not interested or capable of long-term romantic interest of any kind. Not much to say there. Some amount of casual sex in proportion to their sex drive.

> Very, very few other mammals are monogamous.

Very, very few other mammals have flown to the moon, or surf the internet, or eat BBQ. I’m not sure we should really base our expectations or behavior in what other mammals do, especially given how much animal behavior is unique to a single species.

> The practice is basically unknown among lesbians

You must be traveling in some weird circles, because more than half the lesbians I know are in open or poly relationships. (Me, my wife, and most of my social circles are wow, so it's not like I'm basing this off of knowing four lesbians.)

> lesbian culture is, arguably, centred on poetry.

Okay, yeah, I'm not sure you really have met any lesbians.

> You must be traveling in some weird circles

I was being too hyperbolic in my writing and it did a disservice to the ideas I was trying to communicate. I am sorry.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5958351/

> 32% of gay participants, 5% of lesbian participants, 22% of bisexual participants, and 14% of those who described their sexualities as “other” reported being in open relationships; approximately 8% of heterosexual participants, 14% of gay participants, 6% of lesbian participants, 18% of bisexual participants, and 6% of those who selected “other” for sexuality reported nonconsensual non-monogamy

Those numbers surprised me too, in many ways.

> Okay, yeah, I'm not sure you really have met any lesbians.

Again, I am sorry. I was being a bit tongue in cheek and failed to pull it off. Obviously sex clubs do not define gay male culture. either. I explained what I was thinking there elsewhere in a reply in this thread.

A sample size of 83 (open relationships) and 58 (gay/lesbian people) seems awfully low to draw any serious conclusions. It also does not break down sexuality by sex as far as I can see, so even if we take the data at face value it could say only that queer women are more likely to use a term other than "lesbian" than queer men are to use one other than "gay" (an effect that's also been noted on other studies). With that sample size I would also have expected at least a couple non-binary responses.

The NHSSB has its flaws; one being that, given it was sampled from the US population at large, when you try to look at small minorities (and minorities within minorities) the data starts to dry up. It does have the breakdown by sex data you mention, though.

There are other signs that point the same way. In 2019 a Canadian survey on open relationships (which did not look directly at sexual orientation) they found a remarkable gap between the % of men and women who report such a relationship would be ideal: 18% of men and 6% of women. -- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30932711/

The data on number of sex partners is telling too.

From a recent US population survey, the percent who report 3 or more sex partners in the last 12 months: 35% of gay/bisexual men, 15% of straight men, 6% of straight women, 17% of lesbians. -- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7293001/

A slightly older Australian study from the early 2000s is a bit more dramatic. Asking the number of partners in the previous five years, it found that for men who identified as homosexual, the mean was 32 and the median 7 partners, with the max capped at >2000 to stop skewing the numbers. For women identified as homosexual, it found a mean of 3 and a median of 1 partner with a maximum of 54. -- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14696706/

Unfortunately all such studies tend to suffer from at least some of the same flaws you mention, with either sample size, reliability of sampling, or issues of identity confusing the situation. (In the Australian study, it seems women who reported multiple same-sex partners identified as heterosexual relatively more often, for example, which follows the pattern of what you noted.)

The particular numbers vary from study to study, but this general pattern is almost always there. While the median number of partners among gay men tends to only be a bit higher than among straight men, the mean is always outright hilarious. A large minority of gay men are quite promiscuous, and there just is not an equivalently-sized phenomenon with women who have same-sex relationships.

This sure takes a left turn at the end, down a very questionable alley.

Care to elaborate?

Sorry, it was a half-baked idea that mostly just communicates my questionable sense of humour. I expanded on a bit on what I was thinking in another reply in this thread.

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