Delicious LiveJournal Links for 9-26-2010

[andrewducker]

• The tricks wildlife documentaries use to get amazing shots.
  (tags: wildlife documentaries nature)
• The Mathematics of Boneless Pork Rectums. (Mostly I just like saying "Boneless Pork Rectums")
  (tags: wtf meat food funny)
• Sony Ericsson and Samsung both abandoning Symbian.
  (tags: symbian nokia mobile_phones)
• ONS survey showed 1/3 the number of gay people in the UK than are members of Gaydar.com...
  (tags: gay lgbt statistics uk)
• Science Tarot Cards. These are awesome, but they're charging $20 to ship them to the UK!!!
  (tags: tarot art science)
• Researchers Map The Sexual Network Of An Entire High School. It's a different structure to a normal adult relationship map.
  (tags: sex research network social culture sociology relationships)

Comments

[celiaka.livejournal.com]

Ben's in the US for the next 2 weeks. Contact him. He might be able to bring the tarot card back for you.

[andrewducker]

Thanks - that's an awesome suggestion!

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

The numbers on Gaydar should be taken with some grain of salt (although the article does make a fair point.)

My gay porn client runs a number of gay dating sites and only about 60 percent of the people who sign up are what would be traditionally considered gay men.

Believe it or not a lot of women sign up looking for gay male best friends. Also there are a ton of heterosexual couples looking for MMF threesomes who sign up.

Then there are the bi curious guys who sign up for a one off experience to test the waters and then delete their accounts after one or two hook ups because they just aren't into it.

Then, there is the bane of all gay dating websites existence, assholes who sign up and post profiles of people they know who are not gay just to fuck with them. (Note to ex-wives who try to do this, we will notice if a credit card with a female name is used to set up a male profile account and we will check to make sure it's a real ad.)

Also male prostitutes will often sign up with many, many accounts with different pictures and profile descriptions in order to increase the chances of a potential customer finding their profile.

A corollary of this are police officers who put up gay profiles as bait for the male prostitutes in order to entrap them.

Finally you have the dudes who are mostly straight but every once in a while when their wife is out of town want to get a random gay blow job.

So, all in all it's a mixed bag.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

Finally you have the dudes who are mostly straight but every once in a while when their wife is out of town want to get a random gay blow job.

This is the example that demonstrates conclusively the fault with the ONS survey, which was a study of identity, not behaviour.

There's a reason sexual health organisations refer to "men who have sex with men" and not "gay and bisexual men", because this category do not identify as gay or bisexual (and will have lied to the survey and insisted they were straight). They make up the majority of men in cottages and cruising grounds, (and fundamentalist Christian preachers), as far as I can tell.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

[andrewducker]

Absolutely. It makes a lot more sense to talk about behaviour than identity if you actually want to get something concrete.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Indeed - they cover this near the beginning of Introductory Cottaging.

If you want to get off you do a lot better asking "Fancy it?" than "Are you gay?". Indeed, it's quite possible that the response to the latter would be a smack in the face, but the response to the former might be "I'm not gay or anything" immediately followed by an activity which, as the lovely Section 71 (?) puts it, a reasonable person would, in all the circumstances, consider to be sexual.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Also there are a ton of heterosexual couples looking for MMF threesomes who sign up.

There are? Really? I had no idea. A ton of them, you say? Well, well. *tappity tappity*

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

(later)

Good Lord. Certainly was no word of a lie.

How did I not know this? There are hundreds of MF couples nearby all desperately wanting me to pop round. Or at least, where the chap desperately wants it. Which is perhaps less surprising now I think about it.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Well, I guess it depends on your definition of a "ton."

Depending on the site between 2 and 5 percent of sign ups,

Still, higher than we expected when I wrote the sites since I did nothing in the copy to encourage that trade.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Do I really want to ask about the difference between crown opened and not....?

[innerbrat]

Wait, so not one (or two) people at that high school has ever had a homosexual experience?

[innerbrat]

Scratch that, I found one pair of girls who had a relationship with each other. I'm still very surprised.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

There's also an MM relationship in the main component (halfway up the long branch to the right of the ring).

[andrewducker]

That's a very good point!

[ladysisyphus.livejournal.com]

I'm wonderng how they're defining 'sex', because that would make a very big difference in my reporting.

[innerbrat]

That figure is just relationships.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

What with this and the ONS survey, there seems to be something of a pattern of people having same-sex relationships and then not telling researchers. If only there were some obvious reason why this might be.

[innerbrat]

Also the data was gathered in 1995.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

If you were to glance at the men-seeking-men personals section in a newspaper, you'll usually see that the bulk of the ads say "straight-acting man seeks..." Plenty of people don't want to identify as gay or bisexual since both of those labels have cultural and social connotations that they might not like. Also, why would people necessarily tell the truth to surveys like that?

I bet if you looked at a bunch of gaydar profiles, you'd find plenty of people who were pretty obviously attached but didn't want the wife/girlfriend to know. In those cases, why on earth would they sit there at the kitchen table, letting the wife see them tick the "I like men" box.