I’ve read that gay men are less likely to be racist than straight men, and rank higher in terms of empathy. Honestly, the vast majority of gay/bi men I’ve known have been extremely nice, with only one or two exceptions.
What do you think?
Since the OP is looking for opinions, let’s move this to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
How do you tell them apart?
Pink triangle on their shirts.
Based purely on my own experience and confirmation bias I would say no they are not nicer in general. I have known a lot of gay men who were very nice and I have known a lot of gay men who were mean and spiteful. I think straight men have a slight edge in the nice dept.
And really, don’t even bring up the “less racist” bit. There are huge debates going on in the US gay community right now about the racism of gay white men (and I speak as one such and it really is a problem).
Really, people are people, nice and not nice, and their sexual preference doesn’t really have anything to do with it.
An argument ‘could’ be mooted that when you are part of an abused minority, you may feel more empathy towards other abused minorities, and that will certainly be true of ‘some’ people. But it’s by no means a given.
Come to think of it, straight men never compliment my jeans or offer to blow me.
pretty much sums up what’s wrong with this thread.
And don’t get me started on lesbians.
I agree on the first and the second part isn’t necessarily about ‘nice’ even if true. One aspect of people’s attitudes toward stuff like group prejudice is awareness. A variety of life experiences might make you more or less aware what other people’s complaints are really about and what it would be like to be in their shoes (though that’s also a matter of personality). You can be a nice person who is oblivious to such things. You can be a not nice person who is more tuned into it.
I’ve seen too many people use issues like ‘race’, and their ‘superior’ attitudes about it to pillory other people and their ‘inferior’ views, which don’t actually have to do with wishing harm to others they just aren’t ‘correct’ views, to see much correlation between racial views and niceness. And some SJW’s would tell you outright that ‘ist/phobia’ needs to be addressed in an non-nice way if it’s ever to be addressed. They aren’t being hypocritical about it, though wrongheaded in my view.
Part of treating everyone equally is recognizing that a significant percentage of any group of people will be assholes.
I haven’t known a lot of gay men. But I knew of at least two who were very misogynistic.
I’ve always wondered how common that was.
Well, back in my gym rat days when I was younger and hotter, I noticed that gay men were significantly nicer to me than straight men … but now that I’m older and fatter, I don’t notice a huge difference.
The answer to the OP is ‘‘No.’’
I doubt it’s more common than misogyny among men in general. But misogynist straight men may have a little more incentive to keep it close to the vest.
Gay man, to date: ''Aren’t women the goddamn worst?"
Date: ‘‘Definitely. Let’s get drunk and screw.’’
Straight man, to date: ''Aren’t women the goddamn worst?"
Date: throws drink in face
The flip side of that is that much of the complaining about women that comes from men relates to the difficulty of dealing with them in the context of romantic relationships, which wouldn’t apply to gay men.
I would be very suspicious of such a broad statement.
Where did you read it?
What research backed it up?
There is a gay poster on this board who takes everything misogynist straight men say about women in relationships as gospel, complete with rants about how women control men through access to their pussies. I have no idea what else has informed his view of women, but it’s pretty nasty.
I’m not comfortable generalizing about anyone outside my own circle of friends. But just going by the gay men I know personally, their view of women is very much informed by popular media targeted at women. Which could be really good or really bad, depending on the popular media they are consuming. The person I’ve known the longest, a family friend, basically makes everything into an episode of Designing Women or the Golden Girls (being the young, naive one, I was always designated as Rose.) But surely there are gay men who get their TV fix with Desperate Housewives and Cougartown.
I’ve been rewatching Community, and there was an episode, Aerodynamics of Gender, which stuck in my craw. It was not an explict anti-woman message, but it implied that a tendency toward bitchy competitiveness and cruelty is nearly universal among us.) The episode sat wrongly with me precisely because I live in my own head and know it’s bullshit. I could see how a consistent diet of that sort of media in the absence of direct experience in romantic relationships with women could still facilitate sexist views of women.
Just a theory.
(Oh, it’s also worth mentioning that a lot of gay men have dated women, at some point in the process of figuring out their own sexuality.)
They hate men, right? I remember reading that somewhere once. Maybe on the internet.
I would say gay men are about as nice as jews or irishmen, give or take.