Categories don’t exist.
Your dick is just a bunch of quarks and strings.
Human compressions are not metaphysical primitives.
The ontological wall that persists in popular consciousness between a “fetish” and “orientation” is epistemic mush that exists solely for instrumental political purposes.
When you examine how such compressions work functionally instead of respecting some fake and gay prestige analytical inheritance the structure becomes clear.
“Sexual orientation” is not a category that persists because of useful discriminatory purchase, but rather a socio-adjudicative stopping rule that somatically codes gays and their coalition partners as off-limits from normal criticism while providing a texture of felt ontology that makes an idea like “protected status” tenable.
Before we start in earnest understand that I am NOT attempting to drench all human experience in relativist acid; it’s good and useful to maintain separate words for puddles, ponds, and lakes, even when trying to draw hard lines is every bit as absurd.
But also imagine your neighbor’s property has a pond on it.
He often calls that pond a lake in situations where it’s locally convenient to him—and sometimes also a pond, and sometimes a puddle. Each time he is internally sincere.
He also maintains in that pond an ancient-ass turtle named Stonewall many times older than any living human whose species is technically still endangered.
Operatively it’s not endangered at all—and both of you know that.
At the same time: humanity nearly managed to consume most of that turtle’s cousins just over a century ago, and he’s been a fixture of the locale forever, and in past epochs protecting the beast was a costly decision that gave your community real moral capital and history, and nowadays at townhall meetings he’s even become a bit of a mascot.
So when your neighbor somehow managed to convince the assembly to name the pond located in his own backyard “Lake Stonewall,” you didn’t think to say anything, even when several of the ponds on your own property aren’t just significantly larger but contain multiple endangered forms of regional marsh-life that might not be as immediately legible to the public but when you run the numbers are ackshully significantly more embattled than Stonewall’s species.
Then they build an access road. And then a paved path. Children start to visit.
Stonewall bites one.
Almost in concert the parents all nervously choose to ignore it
One day at a barbecue you and the neighbor both end up tipsy and get into what starts out as friendly banter when you lightly jab at the lake’s status as such.
He doesn’t find that funny.
He also doesn’t remember ever calling it a puddle.
You point out that your own ponds are technically bigger and have more ackshully endangered life, in response to which he sighs and makes a peculiar look of exhausted mischief in the general direction of some nearby attractive women.
You roll your eyes and propose instead that the two of you simply agree to disagree—he can keep on calling it a lake, but you’re likewise free to say that it’s a pond.
He grins darkly and points at a nearby placard that says “Lake Stonewall.”
To be as charitable as we can, we’ll now review the ways in which “sexual orientation” is putatively thicker or more causally overdetermined category than “fetish.”
“It’s about love!”
The normalfag maximalist answer.
Having been reared in an ecology where your guncle called his boyfriend a “friend” you somatically parse homoeroticism as sexually inert, victim-coded, vaguely cute, or fanfiction-adjacent, essentially having internalized the 90s / early aughts messaging to women about gays as something eternally meaningful about them.
It therefore seems preposterous to you to compare homosexuality and a fetish, because you sophomorically assume some kind of pre-conative “structure of desire” wherein a person receives a binding Romantic Preference Status from a metaphysical sorting hat that subsequently allows him to fall in love with a person of the same sex (and note for the Libtard it’s literally only in this one very specific context that gender-essence is real) within an ascetically chaste and procedurally hygienic Buttigiegian courtship straight out of a fifth grade fat girl’s Harry / Draco fanfic in which no one ever calls the other dude a whiny self-pitying faggot or cheats on him with someone hotter or cooler or more prestigious or wonders if he might ackshully be bisexual but never ever publicly because that would obliterate his coalitional standing or kind of just fucking wants to get his asshole rekt that night.
…though actually that bisexual thing is worth dwelling on:
In practice “bi guys” don’t seem to exist anymore in any consequential public capacity outside of weird heterodox art and spirituality scenes, and even at their peak among Elder Millennials in the late aughts / early 2010s it was always a super ironic metamodernish thing that even in those 100-openness communities where it didn’t instantly nuke your erotic standing with women men kept their options open to pivot out of it at any time.
The basic reason for this complex is game theoretic—if a bi dude can easily sleep with women then he gets more status as an ostensible straight guy who every now and again covertly gets his asshole ate in gas station bathrooms. Whereas if his woman-courting side faces scarcity or ever becomes incel-adjacent it’s way safer to be a protected gay coalition member than a weird thirsty bisexual arbitrageur.
Women erotically foreclose bisexual men who attempt to court them because of a precognitive contamination threat associated with open bisexuality. The bi ick is honestly pretty reasonable if we assess it fairly given that esoteric bi men were huge causes of women contracting STDs throughout history—that and because bisexuality inclines a man towards intense metacognition, model-shifting on the fly, overt status arbitrage, code switching, and an almost instinctive consultantese approach to discourse, which women find threatening because it damages their own capacity for moral innocence and adaptive sincerity. So what tends to happen is that a girl will be disgusted by a high status bi guy in a manner she can’t quite propositionalize or explain to herself with a good reason under shitlib prestige logic, and thus starts growing morally critical of him in weird and arbitrary ways.
The gays are even worse, because for most of them it’s just obvious and jejune background noise that everyone is a little bi—they’re looking at where one is ackshully drawing the stopping rule so as to form a coherent countercultural bloc, which means everyone benefits from ostracizing the excitable and ultra high openness dude who decides he’s Gaymo McCocklover whenever he has a bad girl experience only to once a chick notices him in a manner that could be mobilized toward broader status position starts conceiving himself as more virile than other gays because he kept a firm foot in the door with straight-guy masculinity culture instead of making it psychologically costly for himself to defect.
Both the gays and women are being rational to treat the bi dude like shit, and he’s being rational acting like lowkey kind of a sociopath at times—which he has to do ultimately if he wants the fruits of any status offices that he worked hard for to actually bear out instead of saying mmm yeah idk fam.
Thus the bisexual man has a very similar plight to the ascended incel: one day you align out, and the next you lean back in. One day you’re spouting grievance, and the next you’re calling someone else a fag for spouting grievance. One day you’re the weirdo shifty arbitrageur, and the next you’re someone’s moral compass.
More importantly: you can no longer parse anything purely in its native texture, and start to somatically experience propositions not just as True or False but in terms of proper resolution, scope, stopping rule, and operative criterion of consequence.
Because once you’ve scaled that liminal balcony—and especially begin to actively perceive yourself inside it—it starts to get real fucking hard to ever get off.
And that’s why the Bisexual Question is what disembowels Sexual Orientationism.
It’s different because it’s people!
This is another one of those libtard prestige grammar twentiethcenturiest bromides that makes you sound like a clueless incel if you ever try to disagree with it such that no one ever even bothers despite it being pretty patently retarded.
The idea is essentially that because sex-preference attaches to something causally thick and durable that’s baked into a trillion persistent feedback loops and is also the most useful load-bearing variable in social science when everyone stops acting gay that it holds a higher or more serious ontological office than that bih’s soles are smexy.
And I actually really empathize with the idea just on like a twentieth century Boomer truth regime we’re all still retarded and don’t know anything resolution. I can give the old man a pass for building Stonewall’s access road. It made sense at the time.
But also?
It’s REAL FUCKING CONVENIENT that once again it’s ONLY in this one hyper-specific and bespoke situation that sex essentialism on a platonic spook level helps gaypeepo prestige / institutional protection and so suddenly libtards find it super duper pooper intuitive to make a sexed ontological partition they elsewise spend 90% of their cognitive effort trying to eradicate from folk psychology and ordinary speech.
And they don’t even fucking realize they’re being dishonest is the thing. Just constant laundering of consequentialist epistemics into putative correspondence because in their bone marrow it feels like anything bad about blackpeepo must be False.
They’re children.
And I think this is prima facie evidence of an intractable Schmittian bind where an enemy convinced of its own righteousness will just have Binky’s Facts And Opinions Epistemics and shift the goalpoasts around like an Indian / Walt Bismarck and so at the end of the day you just need to impose a sovereign stopping rule somewhere and say yeah NO this inconsistency is disqualifying. You can’t muh social construct muh essentialism everything until the second we need to protect the gayboy’s special club.
Or at least that’s how my own system handles shit like this.
Taking off my philosopher’s cap and donning that of a polemicist, I feel rather more impelled to keep chasing the cat and try to force the libtard into concomitantly thick sexed claims outside of the bathhouse for once. But we also have loads of less spicy heterodox uncs around who already specialize in that sort of thing.
Also—did I or did I not just write a 260-page book about this sort of shit?
A good Orange Phenomenologist can’t just default to What Would Lex Friedman Do? He must follow the methodology: decompose, ascertain what hermeneutics still hold discriminatory or predictive purchase, and wherever they very conspicuously don’t jump on the fucking cracks.
So what are the ackshual operative offices held by the fetish-orientation distinction.
One is just power. You just get parsed somatically and precognitively as a weird retarded incel crank the moment you depart too far from prestige grammars, and gaypeepo are very good at capturing prestige grammars for their interests (I don’t mean that in a Jews run the media way except to the extent that’s ackshully good)—and per Waltine hermeneutics precisely any compression that can ackshully survive the Writ of Nature and operatively elbow out competition as effectively as the Stonewall Partition has should be taken seriously on ad baculum basis alone.
Another I see is habituated somatic interpretive reflex. Women and cognitively feminine men especially will instantly side eye you when you challenge Stonewall. Among right wing spergs though saying “homosexuality is a fetish” is honestly picking up decent steam in heterodox spaces because it doesn’t just perform an epistemic function but also is kind of an anti-spiraling rule since you’re agreeing effectively that the fetishist and sodomite are equals ontologically which is more of an extension than the fetishist would give normally in his spaces but buys access through left-coded exiles from the institutional world and so is worth it. And so this layer consists on both sides of the widest cultural feedback loop.
Narrower loops come from specific tribunals and adjudicative norms, but that all sounds very gay and boring to talk about right now.
Migrating to somewhere at least a little more epistemic: you could say there’s historically been a semiotic thickness and integration to GayWorld that serves as a quasi-parallel society with its own fairly orthogonal status markets, reputational norms, alternative dating conventions, mediation and adjudication mechanisms kept internal in kind of a blackpeopley / HarryPotterish way. BUT—that’s not really how gays today act at all. They’re more akin to a weird ethnicity or fanclub at this point and outside of elite white women aren’t nearly as venerated as they used to be as a morally elevated victim class, while a lot of their conative engine along such lines has been shaky for ages. Hell, in some respects GayWorld is now ecologically thinner than most straight fetish subcultures who in a post-Me Too world are quietly recreating a lot of the same parallel tribunal structures that Gay Elders once relied on during the Bad Days. So while I absolutely think that there was functional utility once in making the hard cleavage during AIDS and in the decades before gay marriage entered into the conceivable Overton Window that same cleavage strikes me at this point as increasingly flimsy
One minor point I just thought of and don’t want to miss: Everyone on the planet still somatically experiences the world as how it was when they were like 20, and you can talk about muh Bayesianism all day but there’s no way to propositionally recalibrate a precognitive salience structure. That means “orientation” holding a higher ontological office than “fetish” is just going to seem commonsensical to people who were born into a world where that office made a lot more sense.
Finally I think we need to address all the shit ChatGPT likes to sweep under the rug whenever I have it assess my essays.
First is the Harvey Milk factor. In the context of gay culture age gap romance as initiation into Hogwarts has always been a cultural office mostly illegible and groomer-coded to muggleworld because it’s CLEARLY BOTH THINGS. But there’s enough of both genuine predation and genuine mentoring that can’t be productively disentangled in the gay community without giving enemies ammo to make everyone a baby raping pederast the siege mentality creates opportunities for abuse, and that itself probs gets eroticized by both parties as well—honestly I can game out all this shit in my sleep at this point cause Zoomettes are kind of just less sentient twinks in a lot of ways. Point is though there’s a reason those cops let Dahmer eat those niggas. And there’s a need for a mythic compression to make all this make sense if you don’t have a 154 verbal and 100 openness and I think operatively that’s oft been Stonewall.
The second one, of course, is disease—because tbh AIDS was almost in the back window of history for a while and at least I had come to think of gays as now all docile Buttigieg types which frankly seemed a bit like a declension thing but then Monkey Pox shows up and says: ~nope. Same way the very worst Jews are so far outside the normie distribution that all Jews start to suffer for Shylockshit you get a very similar dynamic in the bathhouses. But I also kind of just admire that fuck u I wanna cum energy whereas all my gay dude friends on here are compared to me at least a bit Butticoded so I don’t know which direction is ackshully optimal per se. What I do know is that once you yeet the womynbreak from smex you virtually always create these pockets where epidemiology suddenly becomes super fucking important such that the very conditions of life start to change in an existentially valent way that probs was historically impacted also by nonprocreation etc. which my prior is will be a sticky dynamic even through increasing gay parenthood since the whole process of gay parenthood is itself super duper metacognitive… that creates a thick and phenomenologically non-fungible “gay experience” for sure.
But the most important aspect of this last note is that Gays have historically been given latitude for the Milkshit because that’s just what bohemian artist types on the edge of society have always done and gays were almost just more of that. And there was also the persistent Tragic Homo coding that just doesn’t cash out anymore in a post gay marriage post AIDS world.
Like to give you the narc example—I’m definitely super predisposed to support gays temperamentally hence me having done so quite aggressively in Middle School at great social cost to myself when peers were talking about hanging them and shit.
It doesn’t feel reciprocal.
Gay guys can now cheaply walk through a public park holding hands, say “my boyfriend,” or tell the break room some crazy dating story in a camp register.
Whereas if I date an adult coed over a decade younger than me, who perhaps also calls me “daddy” in public while casually mentioning that we met on Seeking before converting the dyad into a serious relationship?
Now I certainly don’t doubt that the likes of Jeff and Rajeev and TracingWoodgrains would have my back in such a situation. But they can’t be lavender Thomas Sowells for the entire GayWorld, who as a rule has shamelessly betrayed precisely the sort of weird cosmopolitan status-elastic reputationally fraught artistic straight dude who played a massive and ultra-visible causal role in their nineties and aughts-era liberation successes but these days doesn’t seem to get a crumb of gratitude.
Which again—I don’t mean any of the gheyguise reading this clearly. But also just consider that you’re still reading the piece at all instead of Perez Hilton or w/e and that itself says something about selection effects in the age of dopamine cummies.
And frankly I do just have a lot of inchoate and diffuse resentment in my bones toward all the gay dudes who stung the frog’s back at the very first opportunity.
It’s not something to hold a serious propositionalized grievance over.
I only do that with women.
But it does meaningfully reprice future coalitional possibilities and the chances of productively working with em outside of specifically the lavender sowells and—eh.
Rajeev told me in our first conversation and plenty of gay dudes on here echoed on him that gay guys are cognitively between men and women in all the most salient behavioral registers e.g. relational vs. mechanistic grammar, and that has tracked with my experiences overall.
Gays in general are less trustworthy than straight men in the same way that Jews and Women and Walt Bismarck are kind of untrustworthy, which also means you get some of the upside of that e.g. helping to reprice you without the same automatic status conflict you get with your fellow straight bros. So it makes for great friendship but you kind of just need grugs to run anything big and don’t fucking trust Gay Grugs.
That said I’ve been spitfiring so let’s rein this in.
What I wanted to end this on is point out that despite being straight as an arrow in WHO I’ve personally fucked my lifestyle texture during the Orlando years was essentially that of a narcy and charismatic but deeply unstable bear churning through twinks: wholly sincere romanticism and affect in the moment; rapid status repricing metabolized as moral revelation and conjoined to flamboyant sudden betrayals; theatricality in essentially every register of the relationship in a way we’re both aware of and doesn’t make anyone inside the wider apparatus experience us as insincere; extremely casual mixing of transaction, networking, romance, and friendship.
I was never anything close to a Chad Chad on normalfag straight terms, but for a few years I was absolutely living precisely like a Gay Chad who just couldn’t stop fucking bellyflopping repeatedly onto distaff- twinky Zoomette caltrops ad nauseam.
Also: I write showtunes and my father had a brief gay phase when I was a young kid which was this whole big fucking thing I had to deal with. “Does Walt know?” STFU
Which I say all this not to establish like “Gay Cred” per se but because I think a lot of the phenomenological offices and Muh Gay Experience things certain gheyguise like to invoke as proof of some ontological victim status literally apply MORE ACUTELY to an artistic status elastic spergy bipolar straight guy who dates subculturally and can’t just say look at this little faggot twink lying about me but will have to deal with e.g. girls’ fat friends and clueless Gen X girldads and so won’t just fall into a lot of the exact same relationship patterns and loops and misunderstanding ratchets as similar neurotype gay dudes but will have to pretend that all the little sluts he’s running through ackshully weren’t ever accountable for anything.
Don’t take that as more of a whine than it is; obviously I chose to live in a certain way and have had to deal with consequences same as anyone else. The point is merely that despite being very hetero in the correspondent little black book / Waltine Chickipedia sense I think my ascended incel status and enormous plasticity of standing do make me Operatively Bisexual in a way, kind in the same basic vein of how I initially got called mischling so much that the branding itself made me operatively mischling.
…and that’s precisely where I derive all my authority to inform you, Mister Gayman, that you don’t ackshully have some metaphysical sorting hat “orientation” that binds to your essence like a Platonic soul because that ontology is what sold in 2006.
What you have is a Fetish For Cock.
>THAT’S REDUCTIVE!
Yeah that’s literally the whole fucking point genius—because that’s how it ALWAYS feels without benefiting from obligate compelled legibility. Like clearly every solitary weird thing that I’m into myself feels a lot more dignified and special from the inside of the experience hence me writing at this point two fairly extensive essays about the phenomenology of foot fetishes and a handful of other such disquisitions on sugaring.
Moreover most of the gay dudes who feel Unseen by that are probs the only gay guys who’d ever get exposed to someone willing to say all that in the first place.
If society can turn my fucking beloved girlfriends into hookers because I met them on SeekingArrangement then we can talk about the ackshual shit that goes on in gay relationships and the HR lady never has to worry her pretty little head about.
Or you can accept you have—at least in the mythic sense—a giant fucking Cock Fetish
Like literally just admit you want Cock—it’s fine.
I’m giving you permission to.
I think about girlypops’ soles and like rapin their assholes out probs 40% of my day or more, and I would expect you to think about cock at least as much.
idk like at the very least please don’t keep acting like that same fucking fifth grade fat girl fanfic character from twenty years after that strategy even made sense in the broader discursive environment.
Because the truth is: you’ve got a great, big, fat, huge, enormous, Fetish For Cock.
And that’s literally fine—but you don’t get any more special protections.
That was a quarrel from the last century, and it was once a good one. Today it sucks.
…and also I know for sure I couldn’t be happy with a woman who didn’t ever let me fuck her asshole or tie her to the headboard or suck her toesies or take pictures during sex, etc. etc. whereas you wouldn’t be happy if your own spouse didn’t have a wiener.
So past that point we’re either the Tradwife treating sex as hard and total ontology of man OR we’re arguing about the provisional functional purchase of needing a cock vs. needing all the assorted things Sir Walter Bismarck expects from a womyn, in which case you definitely oughtn’t expect an easy time at the Oppression Olympics.
Either way this doesn’t close out with gaypeepo getting their special club validated by some source code discovered in the cosmos—because all categories are compressions.
So here’s a nifty little Sovereign Stopping Rule I invented for us, Mister Gayman:
The Waltine Thesis on homosexuality vs. heterosexual fetishism is that the historical American prestige grammar underwriting the Stonewall Complex—which accords sex taste a higher ontological office than ordinary male bodily fixation, scenario-fixation, or sadomasochistc power-grammar—has been substantially undermined due to the historic constituents of Gay Male Identity in its more heroic or agentic forms being hollowed out by Buttigiegian managerial proceduralism, such that most of the prior AIDS-era vitality has ackshully been passed down to what we might call “operatively queer” straight male subculturalists who adore fuckin pusspuss but also can’t really do so in a way that’s instantly legible to the likes of Regan and Bentham’s Bulldog and so functionally speaking have become the Bathhouse Bugchasers of the 2020s.
Like the Bathhousemen of yore such fellers now combine persistent Girardian scapegoat status, deep subcultural enmeshment that at times can escalate into maladaptive subcultural capture and notes of paranoid schizophrenia, an internally opaque and affectively high-voltage shared dialect that makes status conflict both more salient and easier to metabolize through theatricality and recursion, systemic exclusion from procreative skin in the game of civilization that fosters architectural cynicism at the conative level generally compensated for through the willful and deliberate autonarrativized inhabitance of niche interpretive-aristocratic roles.
Essentially he’s gotten much better at being a gay guy than most actual gay guys, who nowadays act less like the creative aristocracy of Western Civ than a sclerotic roller suitcase slide deck deliverables caste a lot better optimized for PwC than Broadway which is why Right-Zoomers have such a deep homophobic current you never really saw in Right-Millennials to the same extent. My cohort was loyal to the mythmakers, and we saw gays as mythmakers. Meanwhile Zoomers see the Buttis of the world as their almost archetypal oppressor class, and idk I’m not gonna dispute that myself.
What I WILL do is use whatever purchase I might have as a Barstool Right-type public thought leader to dampen the kind of all gay parents are child molesters maximalism type sentiment we’re starting to see pop up more frequently, which seems like something I orta be doing either way.
But beyond that I think gays really need to take a good hard look at themselves and what the big ticket failure modes have been.
And call me an incel for it all you want, but sorry: a lot of you fine fellers have been pathetically deferential to women because they were an easier coalition partner. You played a huge role in making AWFLs so annoying by giving them high-value moral validation so you didn’t have to deal with more aggressive straight male hierarchies, and now our civilization’s epistemics are in the toilet.
That wasn’t specifically your fault, of course.
But gay men DID kind of just unseriously abdicate their cultural-aristocratic role in western civ in Sondheim capacities to instead go be like Pete Buttigieg which is like
Anyway I think if we can land on anything solid here it’s that late modern ecological change has plainly altered the lavender niche in a substantive way that at minimum gives us reason to reconsider the Stonewall Complex and its real-world offices.
And then Mister Gayman has a choice to make:
You can choose to self-identify as Dude With A Cock Fetish—which note can be a weighty fetish, with real dignity and community grounding and centuries of culture and important neurotype correlations and whatever else you want. What you lose is the ontologically privileged vantage that says Wally B tying girls up / sucking they toesies is categorically less durably enmeshed with source code of the cosmos in some way— because the painful truth is that in Buttiworld you’re not really any more semiotically supercharged anymore like you used to be compared to e.g. BDSM or furries.
You can also choose to keep the Hogwarts Sorting Hat metaphysics while accepting that such a move is little more than naive realism and interpretive mysticism invoked toward instrumental ends in an environment where nobody is seriously debating Stonewall Complex and at least at the moment I’m more public-legibly schizo than you. In that case though I feel like you need to give proper consideration to my own move in the Orange Book to make black people a different subspecies, which it seems to me is basically analogous being a partially-motivated compression that serves the needs of a particular actor-class very well, and it’s actually kind of a good analogue because in this day and age elevating gays to their own ontological subset is kind of like a world map that has BELGIUM in giant text over Europe.
That’s you, Gayman—Belgium.
The furries are in another one, the feetsies in another, the Goreans another, and the musclemummies another still.
And if you object to any of that shit, fine—but first tell me why my own experiences deserve any less ontological elevation than yours, and while you’re at it maybe lmk where the partition even comes from, and whether you’re mb just backsolving around keeping gays as an eternally protected class that can never stop being gay bashed because Sam Altman’s gay homosexual butthole wrote it into the source code.
And if you just reduce it to cold sex realism that’s even better—but then make sure from now on you fucking remember how fucking salient that gap was at that moment within your own adjudicative theater. Consider whether other men have a different phenomenology than yourself under which their own partitions are every bit as Valid unless we have some kind of Sovereign Stopping Rule both of us can agree on.
I’ll leave you fellers with a handful of nifty fun-facts.
Gay men make up approximately 3% of the American population.
Blacks constitute roughly 13.5%.
Straight guys with a foot fetish are 18%.
Honestly, you’re 100% on the mark here, as an AGP mtf the difference between a sexual orientation and paraphilia is that the former is socially acceptable. Ray Blanchard said as much.
This is the weirdest way to defend foot fetishism lol