What were the feminist bloggers, the Nice Guys, and the PUAs of the 2000s reacting to but the realization that our latest ideal of heterosexuality – emerging spontaneously from the tension of an egalitarian, gender-integrated public sphere, the Star Trek: TNG vision – was not actually on offer, doing that did not yield a satisfying life and satisfied people were not doing that?

You see, sub rosa, a “reenchantment of heterosexuality” about, in things like amateur erotica, which is exactly where you’d expect to see a shift in popular sexuality. The rise of the “Paper Rings” model where distinct, gendered roles with severe power gradients between them — daddy, kitten, emotional supporter, cumdump, The Bad Man – are highlighted but in a self-aware way as roles that are ultimately being played to satisfy emotional needs.

This is kind of like the 80s where we went through Alan Alda softboy and Brett Kavanaugh youth house parties and Andrea Dworkin and the Boomers growing up Big Sleep-style and queers academics and Madonna getting into BDSM and the weird Brooke Shields pubescent sex object thing and what was retrospectively an honest-to-god bimbofication TF thing with breast implants and “TPM” 24/7 D/S relationships were a thing, this one philosophy professor wrote a series of pulp novels where men kept women as slaves and there was this subculture where men and women lived it out…

And by the mid-90s it shook out and we had Baywatch, and the expectation you would recognize the leather-clad “dominatrix” as a trope, and Friends, and the understanding that we finally figured heterosexuality out. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

And I had actually been ready to do was drop out and grab on to the next cycle of that going up, you know, find some 22yos in community college that aren’t long-term things and just try to be the thing they needed and leave them better than I found them.

But then the personality change blindsided me. And I talk about guys cause it’s all new and novel but honestly on net the changes probably benefit straight stuff. Maybe even the bisexuality. I assure you, the ability to sense and draw pleasure from the male body and a sense of how it can be presented for erotic purpose has M/F uses.

Also with guys I’m essentially a middle-aged virgin with no experience or sense of things like body language, the obvious solution is to combine this with my femdom thing to find a couple where she’ll instruct me in servicing him

Some things – the greater chattiness, expressiveness, ability to evoke feelings in others but both more vulnerable and completely immune to any feeling of shame – are stereotypical traits of people - men and women alike - attracted to men, I’m wondering if there might be something real going on upstream there.