I KNOW that there are people who are bigots and racists. Been there, met them.
At a gut level, I don’t understand how anyone can be that way.
I know there are people who will be voting for John McCain. Lots of them.
At a gut level, I don’t understand how anyone can vote that way.
I know there are people who feel that society has a right to have a say in who I can have sex with, have/adopt children with, set up a household with.
At a gut level, I don’t understand how anyone can believe that.
For me, gay sex isn’t one of those things, but I’ve got enough others to make up for it.
Yes, but penises are the most fun toy ever invented. I’m convinced they exist solely for my amusement (the guy attached to the penis is just a useful delivery mechanism).
I think what we’re discussing here is the difference between intellectual and emotional understanding of something. To an extent I feel the same way about heterosexuality - not that I disbelieve it, but that I have to remind myself that the majority of the people in the world don’t feel the same way as me. Watching two men have sex for me is completely natural, it just looks right. Women and penises? Why would you put those two things together?!?!? Of course for me its far more peculiar to feel this way because my sexuality is technically abnormal (in the non-loaded sense of the word), so what I feel when I see two men have sex is absolutely not normal for most people, and I know this for a fact but again have to remind myself of it sometimes. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it’s cognitive dissonance though, as I said I can believe it perfectly well, it just requires some conscious thought on my part.
That said I have far more of an issue looking at people I don’t find attractive and knowing that they have sex with other people, because in my universe they and sex don’t exist in the same place.
I’m like that with uptight-looking people. Sometimes when I walk into a church, I wonder how there are so many children running around. Not everyone in the church, mind you, but definitely some.
I don’t know about that–I heard similar complaints from the one bisexual male friend I’ve had. He said that when he dated straight women, they seemed to think that if he stayed with them long enough, he’d turn straight. When he dated gay men, they would tell him that he was really gay, and was just deluded into feeling attraction to women by the patriarchal culture, or something. And either of them would feel threatened by his sexuality, thinking that he could never be satisfied with a single lover–he’d have to have both a boyfriend and a girlfriend to really be ‘complete’.
“It’s ridiculous!” he’d say. “It’s like a straight man needing to have a blonde girlfriend and a brunette girlfriend to be fully satisfied, since he’s attracted to both types!”
“Make that a brunette and a redhead,” I’d reply, “and I’m totally in.”
I’m straight, but I really don’t like to think about what any of my couple friends do in the privacy of their bedrooms, whether they’re gay or straight. I know that they probably have sex with one another–just like I’ve done with my partner whenever I’ve been in a relationship–but I’d rather not think about it. The thought of them bumping uglies just creeps me out.
Kind of like what chacoguy420 said–it’s like thinking about your parents having sex.
Not personally fagnostic, but I get where you’re coming from. It’s similar to the phenomenon many people experience when they try to imagine their parents having sex. Hell, it’s kind of weird thinking about anyone specific having sex that you know in other contexts. I remember when my ex boss got married and had kids thinking ‘wow that means that those two people got all naked with each other’. It’s especially weird with other authority figures like say your teachers and… I was going to say public figures, but I guess our brains are wired to expect politicians to get into sexual scandals.
In addition to the whole ‘are they really doing it’ aspect, there’s the gaydar aspect. Men who have sex with men are not united by any other attribute. Sure there’s girly gay men but there’s plenty of butch blue collar gay men, preppie gay men, etc. There’s a kind of predominant gay culture that rubs off on some people, but there’s plenty of specialized subcommunities, and plenty of average Joes.
For myself, my gadyar is highly susceptible to false positives when it comes to customer service. When someone is just being a friendly waiter or cashier, it’s hard for me to tell the difference between that and flirting.
I’m probably more monoagnostic. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone not attracted to both sexes. Including myself. I’m much more sexually attracted to men, but I’m aesthetically and emotionally attracted to women. And chemistry wise, of course, gender doesn’t make a differnce. You can be attracted to the ‘vibe’ of someone regardless of their gender or other attributes. Hence the existence of hero figures and ‘mancrushes’ and ‘bromances’. I don’t date women anymore because I know that I would miss man sex, but if I dated a guy I wouldn’t feel like I was missing out on the women sex. I suspect things might be a little different if society was more bi-oriented.
Probably the only people I can really imagine having sex are people I’ve seen having sex. Like in porn or the sex scenes of regular movies.
BTW You might want to watch the movie Shortbus. It’s a good way to get over the cognitive dissonance of the mental segregation between people you know in regular contexts and people you know in a sexual context.
I think I can completely understand what the OP is getting at (although I don’t experience this myself, being a lesbian who’s a reformed heterosexual - I know exactly what both gay and straight people get up to behind closed doors).
I think one issue is that gay sex really is, for most people, an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ thing. We don’t go in for big PDA’s because we don’t like being stared at or abused, so if you meet me and my girlfriend in the street, we’re probably going to look more like friends than lovers. We also don’t talk much about our sex lives with our straight friends because it squicks them out - my (straight, female) best friend has made it quite clear she doesn’t want to know, even though she’s happy to go on about her sex life with her boyfriend.
So there’s ofetn a big divide between how a gay couple will behave in ‘public’ and how we behave in gay company, so it’s no wonder many people can’t imagine how we behave in private. It’s one of the reasons we like gay bars and hotels - they’re places where we can be ourselves, and be quite open about the fact that - ‘eek’ - we have sex!
There is nothing about use of the Palm OS that indicates homosexual inclinations.
Slippery slope, this. Some people’s gaydar is quite finely tuned and accurate. Other folks have nothing to go on but what their friends say to them- and sometimes, those friends are in serious denial or in the closet so deeply that they cannot even see the door.
