And another reason to not REALLY be enthused about continuing to write here:
I'm very very very against trying to "cure" people of being gay, but I suspect that some people who think they are gay are really attracted to people who have enough of something in common with them and they just aren't finding it in members of the opposite sex.
Some chick on probably Reddit remarked once that she was beginning to worry she liked bad guys and then realized all the bad guys in movies she liked were played by the same actor. She liked that actor in any role he played, bad guy or not.
During my divorce, I was involved with a man fourteen years older than me and about the time I was thinking "This is a shit show and I'm NEVER getting with an older man again." I met a guy sixteen years older than me and we really hit it off.
I have B.A.G.G.A.G.E about my tendency to like older men.
I thought a lot about it and eventually decided that these two men both had long marriages behind them and children similar in age to my children. They had relationship expectations similar to mine.
I'm the weirdo who got married at nineteen to another nineteen year old and was married more than half my life before the divorce was final in my early forties. I married young and had kids young and had been married a long time for my age. These two men were much more normal than I was in their relationship histories, but most people my age wouldn't be a match for me in terms of having a similar relationship history and similar expectations for a relationship.
There was nothing wrong with me getting involved with either of them. I just spent a lot of time thinking about it because I have baggage.
I met both under very prosaic circumstances. One was a friend of a friend. The other started a conversation with me because I had GIS listed in my online profile and he's a GIS guy.
GIS is a two thirds male field. I attended the world's foremost GIS program. I've talked about that in a couple of places:
I have had Ent Draught.
I have been repeatedly exposed to the idea that male IQs and performance go to extremes -- men are overrepresented in both "genius" populations and homeless populations -- and female intelligence and performance cluster more towards the middle of the spectrum. I am strongly convinced this is probably 99 percent shaped by social forces and, no, men and women are not simply born with such strong intellectual differences.
I'm pretty sure a lot of gay men are attracted to me because "She's practically a man, baby."
I'm equally sure that this implies some "gay men" aren't GAY at all.
They're men who drank Ent Draught and can't find women like them and are attracted to people "like them" in some more important way than what bits you have between your legs.
It's just that society pressures men and women to take different roles and the older you get, the harder it gets to find anyone "like you" in important ways who doesn't have the same bits between their legs as you.
I never really CARED all that much. I made out with girls as an adolescent because I could get girls alone. The adults didn't care if I went to a friend's house and it was another girl.
The first guy I was sexually active with wasn't anyone I found attractive. He was someone I could openly spend time alone with because our parents trusted me for stupid reasons.
I haven't met any women in a long time that turn my head.
And I appear to be the only woman to have ever made the leaderboard of Hacker News.
Accomplished men find me EXCITING. And it does NOTHING for my career aspirations.
They are desperate to get with a gal who isn't a talking blow up doll, someone they can talk with about something, anything and most women are air heads and know NOTHING about anything that interests me.
I was Director of Community Life for The TAG Project. Most people marry someone within 10 IQ points of themselves and most "geniuses" are male.
Trying to measure IQ is rife with problems.
It's not that I think "There's no such thing as innate intelligence differences!" I just think we have data that's so dirty it's filthy and you can't draw meaningful inferences about gender differences when we give men and women such extremely different life experiences and opportunities.
I play games like Master of Magic because my gamer sons told me "It's EXACTLY like your favorite: SimCity." and taught me to play it as a civilization building game. And when I was all "Ah! That spell is EVIL!" They were like "Nah, the whole human sacrifice thing is window dressing. It's basically birth control and suppresses population growth by a piddling ten percent."
They laugh about me defaulting to playing Death magic and call me a death eater. We've talked about if you REALLY want to be evil, you should play Life magic where they kill mortal troops repeatedly and resurrect them.
You would need so much therapy if you were a soldier in the nicey nice good guy army, you would never recover.
It's not that men and women are really so fundamentally different from birth. We set them on different paths and set it up such that it's nigh impossible for either of them to escape that pattern and defy that expectation.
And then we are so incredibly hung up about the cultural imperative about our gender roles, you can't really have a meaningful discussion about what floats anyone's boat.
If you could, I should be all kinds of popular instead of stuck in social cyberia and persona non grata all over the place.
And I'm not really feeling like trying to talk to you assholes anymore.
Accomplished men find me EXCITING. And PROMPTLY want to destroy me and make me the little wifey and imagine I should be eager to take the deal because I am poor and they have money.
I should have money in my own name. But gatekeepers are mostly male and they don't WANT to open doors for me career wise. They want to slam them shut, lock them, swallow the key and leer at me and go "Aren't you EXCITED by the prospect of being my prisoner?!!!"
No, I'm not. I'm so NOT.
And I am absolutely certain that if I let you successfully turn me into the little wifey, you would soon have a wandering dong. The thrill would be gone and you would have absolutely no idea why.
Let's just skip that part, thanks. I don't really get excited anymore at the prospect of some wealthy, accomplished man finding me EXCITING.
I have PTSD and I'm burned out on the nonstop parade of men excited as all hell that I'm not some vacuous little air head and HELLBENT on turning me into a carbon copy of the last stupid bimbo they resented.
If you are gay or think you are gay and too lazy to do the work I did to sort stuff out and you want someone else to spoon-feed you answers while you kick the shit out of them, I don't actually WANT to try to help you.
If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month.-- Theodore Roosevelt
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