This divide stems from a common understanding of human sexuality: The female variety of it is more malleable, more inherently open to experimentation and variety, than the male variety. In doing so, she shows that homosexual contact has been a regular feature of heterosexual life ever since the concepts of homo- and heterosexuality were first created — not just in prisons and frat houses and the military, but in biker gangs and even conservative suburban neighborhoods. And what I argue in the book is that even that research is situated within some long-held beliefs about the fundamental difference between men and women that are not accurate from a feminist perspective. You take readers on sort of a 20 th -century American tour of heterosexual dabbling in homosexual behavior, and there was never a lack of evidence that such dabbling took place. So that was one of the guiding questions through the book: What happens when we pull all of this evidence together? Right, right, right. I talk about that as the logic of homosexual necessity in the book and that comes up a lot, this claim that, well, men have to do this for X or Y reason. The photographic evidence of an elephant walk in the book is really important, I think. You view it as a way of performing heterosexuality, even if the content looks gay from the outside?
Sexuality is one of the few areas where women are afforded more leniency than men
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We hear a lot about the Big Three Sexualities — straight, bisexual and gay. Most of us assume that these three orientations encompass the universe of sexual identities. But there is a new kid on the block: The mostly straight male. To the uninitiated, mostly straight may seem paradoxical. How can a man be mostly heterosexual? Yet the evidence suggests that more young men identify or describe themselves as mostly straight than identify as either bisexual or gay combined.
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Men who have sex with men MSM , also known as males who have sex with males , are male persons who engage in sexual activity with members of the same sex, regardless of how they identify themselves. The term MSM was created in the s by epidemiologists to study the spread of disease among men who have sex with men, regardless of identity. It does not describe any specific sexual activity, and which activities are covered by the term depends on context. First, it was pursued by epidemiologists seeking behavioral categories that would offer better analytical concepts for the study of disease-risk than identity-based categories such as "gay", " bisexual ", or "straight" , because a man who self-identifies as gay or bisexual is not necessarily sexually active with men, and someone who identifies as straight might be sexually active with men. Second, its usage is tied to criticism of sexual identity terms prevalent in social construction literature which typically rejected the use of identity-based concepts across cultural and historical contexts. MSM are not limited to small, self-identified, and visible sub-populations. MSM and gay refer to different things: behaviors and social identities. MSM refers to sexual activities between men, regardless of how they identify, whereas gay can include those activities but is more broadly seen as a cultural identity. Gay is a social identity and is generally the preferred social term, whereas homosexual is used in formal contexts, though the terms are not entirely interchangeable.
This article originally appeared on AlterNet. At this point, lesbian sex the porny kind is practically considered vanilla. But when it comes to two self-identified straight guys getting together, we tend to stiffen up, and not in the fun way. The phenomenon was recently explored by Dr. In all different cultures. Block explained to AlterNet that sexual activity between self-identifying straight males is one of the most common topics introduced during her therapy sessions with men. Of course, identity politics is a messy game. And while arousal makes up just one piece of the very complex puzzle that is sexual orientation, it is a major player. As Block explains, sexual orientation goes a lot further than the sexual activities we engage in.
