Gay guy top
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Ask any gay man, and he’ll tell you that the world is full of bottoms. “Bottom, bottom, bottom, bottom, bottom,” my comrade Chris said to peels of laughter in reference to everyone at a recent (and very gay) dinner party. They’ll say you that “New York is a bottom town,” as claimed one subject of a New York Magazine piece from 2003, or that “maybe there are like five tops in the universe,” as the author of a Thought Catalogpost about the perils of bottoming had it. Similaranecdotesabound, which prompts the question: How are gay men getting any D in the B if everyone throws their ankles up in the air as soon as they get within three feet of the nearest mattress? Are there really more bottoms than tops in the world? And just how many bottoms and tops are out there, really?
Statistics, at least, don’t seem to bear these assumptions out. Grindr added the option to list one’s preferred position in their profile for the first age this September. Since then, 6 percent of daily users have identified themselves as tops and only four percent as bottoms, according to a stand for
A lot of people think that homosexuality is a basic matter of genetics—if you have the so-called “gay gene,” well, you realize the rest. In other words, gays and lesbians are just “born that way” and that’s that.
While this explanation is intuitively appealing, the reality is that things are far more complex. Increasingly, scientific investigate suggests there are multiple factors that might contribute to homosexual orientation—and they’re very different from one person to the next. The end result of all this variability is that diverse “kinds” or “types” of homosexuality probably exist. In other words, being same-sex attracted isn’t just one thing, and not everyone who is gay is homosexual for the similar reasons.
A fascinating novel study supporting this idea was recently published in the journal PLoS ONE. This examine focused specifically on exploring the potential origins of male homosexuality, but did so in a way that was very different from almost all previous studies on this topic. Whereas most research in this area has treated gay men as a homogeneous organization, the researchers head this study instead looked at subgroups of gay men w
Gaymenare constantly referring to and defining themselves as "tops" or "bottoms." When they consider dating or simply hooking up, gay men typically ask the other guy whether he's a top, a bottom or "versatile." It's important to find this out as soon as possible, because if you are planning to date or get into a relationship, it's vitally important that you and he be sexually compatible with each other.
The whole issue of tops and bottoms came up recently with the emit of a novel study that looked at whether or not people can determine whether a gay man is a top or a bottom just by looking at facial cues. The study revealed that judgments made about whether an individual is a superior or a bottom are based on perceived masculine and feminine traits.
There's so much chat and discussion about who gives and who receives. I've had straight people tell me that they assumed that most gay guys simply take turns. Yes, some complete, but most don't. But what if a guy isn't a top, a bottom or even versatile? What about gay men who have never engaged in anal sex and never will, ever?
I believe they deserve a name of their own. I dial them "sides."
Defining a Side
Sides prefer to k
Rise of the sides: how Grindr finally recognized gay men who aren’t tops or bottoms
Every month, nearly 11 million gay men around the world go on the Grindr app to peer for sex with other men. Once there, they can scroll through an endless stream of guys, from handsome to homely, bear to twink. Yet when it comes to choosing positions for sex – a vital criterion for most gay men – the possibilities have elongated been simply top and bottom. The only other choice accessible toggles between those roles: verse (for versatile).
“Not fitting those roles has made it really tough to find someone,” said Jeremiah Hein, 38, of Long Beach, California. “There’s no category to choose from.”
“Whenever I’d look at those choices I’d think, ‘I’m none of those things,’” said Shai Davidi, 51, of Tel Aviv, Israel. “I felt there must be something wrong with me.”
Last month, however, that finally changed. In mid-May, Grindr added a position called side, a designation that upends the binary that has historically dominated queer male culture. Sides are men who find fulfillment in every kind of sexual act except anal penetration. Instead, a broad range of oral, manual and frictional body techniques provide